It should be raining. Days like today call for overcast skies and wet pavements. Yet the sun is shining, and I’m eating eggs Benedict topped with avocado.
Why are there so many mothers in this cafe? Moms work these days, right? Why are so many moms trudging around with their luggage with a pulse during the day? I rarely ever see a dad imploding in a chair while his three-year-old pours hot chocolate onto a stack of magazines. Are my thoughts appropriate? I feel like I’m emoting incorrectly.
Today feels like any other day.
Oop, I think this is it. That’s the hospital’s number. As I received the news, I actually ate the crust of my hollandaise-soaked English muffin. As sad as this is, I just hear words at this point. The majority of my focus is on Eggs Benedict.
“Yes, thank you. I’ll be there shortly.”
I check the temperature of my coffee before I put my phone down. It’ll still be warm after I finish my eggs. Also, my dad just died.
He looks dead.
The last time I saw him, he shivered with a breathing tube crammed down his throat. I like to think he recognized me, but his eyes were full of desperation and confusion. Being forced alive must be horrifying. They always seem so at peace at funerals. Not here.
He looks like an ‘it’ now. It is just an inanimate mass that resembles my father. Huh, I’m actually an orphan now. I’ve felt like an orphan for a long time. I always wondered if he loved me.
“Mrs. Sandra Shore?”
Jesus, I didn’t even see him come in.
“Hey, hello, Doctor. Um, how are you?”
I’m trying to look sad, but I probably look insane.
“Well, I’m well. How are you?”
I guess he took my mumbling as sorrow.
“I’m okay. I’m just, you know, taking it in.”
“Of course. A nurse was with him when he died. There were no apparent complications, so he left us peacefully.”
That sounded rehearsed. I’m assuming I’m not the first person to hear the spiel. I’ve also only ever seen this doctor read things off of a chart. His full head of salt and pepper hair and baritone voice are soothing. It’s like talking to a cup of chamomile. I wonder if the hospital hired this guy solely to coddle bad news. He might not even be a doctor.
“That’s good to hear. He always had a pull-the-plug mentality.”
I almost got a smirk out of him.
“For his condition, it seemed best. I also have the medical certificate for his registration of death. Do you feel comfortable with the certificate, or should we contact someone else?”
“I’ll take care of it. Thank you.”
Before I finish my sentence, he hands me the manilla envelope. He wants out of here. Same.
“Let me know if we can assist you in any way,” he says as he turns to leave.
“Oh, um, he was an organ donor.”
“He was?”
“Yes, sir.”
The doctor’s brow perks up at the news. I hear “alright,” after he’s left my line of sight.
I should start making some calls. I should also grab his wallet to get his license out of the hospital. Dad hated the idea of donating organs.
Jesus, look at this fridge. “Organic Dark Chocolate English Ale.” Did he have these imported? How does a person with such a decadent beer collection limit actual food to frozen junk? They’re not even meals, just appetizer platters like mozzarella sticks and quesadillas. So it looks like expensive beer and nuked trash tonight. Or the oven? Baked garbage tastes better than nuked trash.
A drunken junk food send-off to dad in my childhood home. It already feels cathartic.
I wish there were more articles of childhood nostalgia here. There isn’t even a corner of scratchy pen scrapes marking my ascending height. This little bungalow never really had an identity. Dad was constantly replacing and redesigning everything, I never knew for what. Then again, it wasn’t given a chance to imprint on me. I left when I was thirteen, returned sparingly after my twenties, and stayed no more than a weekend when I did. Well, I didn’t leave, one day my dad said, “you’re living with your grandparents.” At least they attempted to bond. Hence them being visited on Christmas day, and dad getting a phone call. My infrequent returns were mainly to ensure my dad wasn’t dead or dying.
Why did he have so few friends? Even the planet’s most cantankerous assholes have drinking buddies. And family? Some left the state. The geographically adjacent ones left emotionally. Uncle Jesse lives eight miles away from here, and I probably wouldn’t recognize him at a family reunion. I always wondered what came first: Dad’s anti-social demeanor or Mom pilling herself to death. It’s weird that I still consciously consider her a “mom.” I only have a handful of smileless photos of her. I have no idea what she looks like in motion.
How did he go on so unloved?
I remember trying to smoke my first cigarette on this brick stoop. I didn’t realize how pungent cigarette smoke was. Add nine minutes of coughing and ash stains to the brick, and I was guilty well beyond a reasonable doubt. Let’s see how I fare on this stoop now with thirty years of cigarette experience.
I keep hearing how warm this winter’s been, but holy shit, I can feel my snot crystallizing.
Everything my dad is now is in this manila envelope. I’ve never seen a death certificate. Actually, this is a medical certificate of death. The most famous mystery in life is pretty dull on paper. With some ancillary details and a few signatures, my dad has been reduced to a blip on a census report.
Other than being velcro, his wallet isn’t any more riveting. I can’t imagine anyone’s wallet not having a punch card for a coffee shop, sub stop, or something along those lines. Same with his keychain. There’s a total of four keys, and two of them are the same. I’m assuming that’s the front door and the third’s the back, but I’m unsure of the fourth. It’s small and tarnished compared to the other three.
“Sandra?”
Holy hell! Who?
“Sandra?”
Oh God, Charlie, the neighbor that’s a year younger than me. When you’re eight, a seven-year-old might as well have Ebola.
“Charlie?”
I know it’s him, but it just seems appropriate.
“Wow, Sandra, how’s it going? Welcome back,” he says with open arms.
I guess we’re hugging, and I have to stand up.
“Thank you. Look at you.”
Even though I told myself I wouldn’t do it, I put my cigarette out on the stoop. The hug’s not as creepy as I would have assumed. Hugs from men feel like a ploy to press boobs against them. I don’t know how he did it, but he kept it platonic.
“So, visiting for the weekend or staying ‘til the holiday,” Charlie asks as we separate.
“Oh, um, I’m sorry to say this, but dad passed away this morning.”
My words melt that warm smile off his face.
“No,” he says as he looks toward the house. “Jim died? What happened? I saw him just the other day right here.”
“He had surgery for his cataracts but then got a staph infection while in recovery. That was enough for him to go south.”
“Oh no, staph?” Charlie asks with a twinge of confusion.
It is a rare way to go. Well, today. Colonials couldn’t go a day without hearing about a cousin dying from an ingrown toenail.
“Well, MRSA. It’s similar to Staph and hard to treat with antibiotics.”
“Wow.”
“It hits hard and fast. Especially at his age.”
“Yeah, that’s wild. My condolences.”
“Thank you.” He doesn’t know what else to say, so I kill the awkward silence with, “But, how are you these days? You’re looking good.”
“I’m well, thank you. Still a record clerk for the police department. Still hosting weekly trivia at The Whale and Ale. Still living with mom. She’s well. Can barely hear, but what she pretends to hear is always good news. ”
“That is good to hear.”
It’s more ‘indifferent to hear,’ but what else can you say?
“Um, is there anything I can do for you?” he asks.
“Ah, thank you, but I’m okay. Thanks.”
“Okay. Well, let me know. I’m just next door.”
“Of course. Thank you again,” I say as he walks off.
He does look good. Is that from drinking water? Even when soda was available, he went for water. What six-year-old wanted water?
“And don’t get stuck in the basement again, huh?”
“…okay.”
Stuck in the basement?’ What the fuck is he talking abo–
–oh. That’s right. I couldn’t have been more than five, but I caught my left arm in some pipes in the basement. The fire department had to come, and dad was livid. He’s never been a warm guy, but neither his heart rate nor the volume of his voice ever really rose. He was disturbingly even-keeled. The day the fire department took apart his plumbing showed me a new dad. I think he made the fire chief cry. That was the talk of the town for years to come.
I’m still terrified of the basement. It’s the only place in the house that stayed the same. As wallpaper and countertops cycled through, the basement sustained its whitewashed corroded brick, stained tiled floor, and support beams that gave you tetanus on sight.
I used to play this game where I would go down to the basement, turn the lights off, and see how long my nerves held out before I bolted upstairs. None of the other nightmare fuel did it. It was always the sump pump that made me turn the lights back on. It lived in the corner behind a padlocked wooden Bilco door encased in chipped concrete. The echoing gurgle cut through the darkness and pulverized my prepubescent courage.
My mozzarella sticks are probably done. As I open the door, I see Charlie give me a wave. Why does childhood disdain linger around into adulthood? Charlie’s a perfectly fine gentleman, but my intuition still calls him lame. This nature and nurture bullshit really narrows down your options.
Huh. I was hoping for a blast of heat from the oven, but my hotly anticipated dinner isn’t hot at all. What happened? The microwave clock is blank and the hallway lights are dead. I blew a fuse. I guess the house couldn’t handle such a lavish smorgasbord. Time to test my resolve in the basement. I’m not taking my jacket off. My bones are still cold, and I remember seeing my breath down there in June. I literally have memories of that. Kind of like how you remember mall Santas with rosy red cheeks and a bushy white beard. Then you find that old picture and realize he had a five o’clock shadow under the plastic wig.
These steps have to be an insurance liability. Each step is made of frictionless tile that curves at the edge. I can’t believe I never cracked my skull trying to run up them. What design flaw was my dad trying to fix? The stairs were probably perfected on the first try. I also had two too many dark chocolate ales, so this endeavor is way more treacherous than it has any right to be.
The stacks of boxes haven’t moved an inch. Thirty years of stains are piled on top of each other. It’s not as ominous as I remember. There could be a dangling lightbulb that flickers sending hard shadows across the floor, but it’s just some generic fluorescent tubes.
After some standard fuse fiddling, I lose interest in my cheese-injected hedonism. Labor-intensive stairs sober me away from such a crappy dinner. I didn’t think I would find comfort down here, but there are flutters of sentimentality. I wonder how I would react if I turned the lights off. What childhood fears would that conjure up? I always feel tough when I flip a breaker.
Complete darkness falls. All I can hear is the air flowing through my nostrils. They’re still moist from the cold, so there’s a slight sputter of mucus. I’m not as afraid as I thought I would be. I would actually probably like to sleep in an environment like this. I bet I would start having psychedelic lucid dreams–
–AGH SHIT!!! Breaker! Switch on the breaker!
I went from pure serenity to extreme heart palpitations in less than half a second. All because of that fucking gurgle from that fucking sump pump. There it is, in the corner with the same damn padlock. Looking at it now, it doesn’t make much sense. Why does a sump pump need a padlock? I reach into my pocket and retrieve my dad’s key ring. That fourth key looks old. Every other lock in the house has been replaced. Should I look? Will there be a sense of closure and personal growth if I face a childhood fear?
Probably not, but I’m still curious.
The key turns relatively easily, and the wooden latch is lighter than it looks.
I freeze. There isn’t a sump pump but a concrete-lined crawl space with a small step ladder next to a light switch on the rim of some kind of hatch. Was this sub-basement here the whole time? Is the pump down here? What the hell else is down there? I flick the switch, and a light shines from a bulb I can’t see. What could that possibly be illuminating?
Well, there’s the sump pump. I can see the fairly conventional pump in the corner of the room before I even reach the bottom. It’s not quite tall enough to stand, but dad left a chair on wheels to maneuver around. A wooden shelving unit hugs one of the walls. I think those are bags of fertilizer, but the one light is too dim to be sure. I sit in the chair and slowly inch my way with my feet toward the back of this–what do I call this, secret passageway? It may not even be that secret. It may have just been too banal to bring up in conversation.
There’s a suspicious lone duffel bag against the wall.
Holy shit, it’s too heavy to lift. As I unzip it, I look over my shoulder. For some reason, I assume my dead father will peek his head in through the hatch and scold me for going through his things. I’m expecting plumbing supplies or gardening equipment, but who the fuck knows what you’ll find in a spooky secret room.
You could have given me a thousand guesses, and I wouldn’t have guessed zip-tied plastic bags of what looks like salt. I pick one up. I don’t think it’s cocaine. Then again, I wouldn’t know how to spot bags of raw and uncut cocaine.
I spot a light switch against the wall and wheel myself over. I have an approximately five-pound bag of what might be my father’s secret narcotics in my lap as I reach for it. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the white fluorescent light. Those bags on the shelf are not fertilizer but twenty-five-pound bags of salt. There goes my drug-smuggling dad fantasy.
So what the hell are these bags?
As I look down at the plastic bag, the bag looks up at me.
I only start breathing again to stop myself from fainting. How much time just passed?
It’s on the floor. I don’t remember dropping it, but it’s on the floor. I accidentally nudged it with my foot.
Do I have to look at it? Can I just go upstairs? I can go upstairs, organize the funeral, and never look back. As I run through my hypothetical escape plans, I realize it’s too late. I’m looking down at the plastic bag, and there’s no denying it. That’s a human head.
It can’t be the entire head, but maybe just the face. The image of Dillinger’s death mask crowbars its way into my mind once I regain some composure. Perhaps that’s what he was doing? Maybe my dad had an odd compulsion for sculpting masks out of–no, that’s, somebody’s head. As some of the salt runs off the ridge of their nose, some of the details of the mummified skin show themselves.
I’m assuming it’s a girl because of the glimpses of wavy blond hair and delicate features. My knowledge of corpses comes from television. My first dead body was my father’s a few hours ago. Her skin looks like petrified wood, her eyes are shriveled and foggy. Her pristine teeth lurk in a wide open mouth. The dried meat of her jaw can be seen under her taught skin where the face has been sawed off. I’m assuming it was sawed as the skull splintered at the edges. Where’s her brain? How long have I been holding this bag? When did I pick it up?
I’m putting this back into the duffel bag. It will pummel my mind if it’s in my field of vision. I have no idea how I’m going to manage this emotionally. Paranoia about what this means is creeping in at the edges, too taxing to keep out. I feel cold, but my hands are sweaty. I have to keep this small and focus on the immediate. Oh Christ, is the rest of her body in this duffel bag?
The plastic and salt clatter and crinkle as I dig. I can’t exactly tell how many potential parts there are. I pick up one of the many sacs at random. Finger fucking nails. Without moisture, the skin has withered past her cuticle. The mummification makes her fingernails look grotesquely long. All right, that’s enough. This is a body. I toss the hand back in and glimpse something that’s not an appendage or salt. There’s a separate plastic bag with an envelope inside.
I use the plastic bag as a glove to inspect the envelope. For some reason, I think fingerprints can’t transfer onto plastic. I’m pretty sure I’m wrong. It’s not glued shut, and there’s a folded printout inside. I’m not sure what to expect. I delude myself that it will justify everything, and life will go back to normal. When I see ‘FBI.GOV,’ I immediately assume the next line is “most wanted.” Was this the ‘midwife demon,’ and my dad was a vengeful killer of killers? That fantasy is squashed by the next line; ‘kidnappings and missing persons.’ This is the profile of thirteen-year-old Abigail Wellington. She went missing in 2007, was last seen in a fast food salad place, and was described as being ‘timid.’
If there were food in my stomach, it would be on the floor. I swallowed half a cup of ale that regurgitated into my mouth. Every muscle in my body is tense, every joint is locked, and every sense is numb. I know it’s there, but I can’t taste the sting of the bile. My life’s ruined. Today will be a part of my day, every day, until I die.
The crippling dread is washed away with apathy when I look behind me. For whatever reason, I relax at the sight of a massive pile of duffel bags.
Fourteen. I count fourteen envelopes from fourteen duffel bags. I lay them out on the kitchen table. The stench of burnt mozzarella sticks fills the room. I would typically devour them anyway, but I’m probably not going to eat for a while. They’re not all printouts from the FBI website. This goes back to the early sixties. There are two color printouts from the internet, three black and white ones, and then nine cut-outs from newspapers. They were all thirteen-year-old girls.
My father was a monster. It’s a fact. The worst humanity can produce.
I’m so numb, I don’t even flinch when there’s a knock at the door. I get up to answer it with my father’s Rolodex of evil on the table.
“Hey, Sandra. Sorry if it’s a little late,” Charlie says with kindness that doesn’t sink in.
“Hi, Charlie,” I manage.
He has a fucking bread loaf in his hand.
“So, I was making some zucchini bread because ma likes zucchini bread and thought you would enjoy some zucchini bread.”
“Thank you,” I say as I take it.
Charlie must take my dead eyes and lacks warmth as grieving because he doubles down on kindness.
“Sure thing. Of course. Please, let me know if you need anything. And I hope you have a good night.”
He starts to turn, but a moment of clarity makes me stop him.
“Hey, um, would you like something to drink? And thank you. Seriously. This is very nice.”
It had to claw its way out of my mouth, but sincerity does that sometimes.
“Uh, sure, sure. It’s been a while since I’ve been in here.”
I make space for him to pass me.
“Ah, looks immaculate in here. Your dad was constantly redesigning the place, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s just the way he was. You okay with a dark chocolate ale?”
Charlie’s eyes light up. He wasn’t ready for pleasantries. For him, this must be like a grown-up forty-year-old Lucy offering a thirty-nine-year-old Charlie Brown a drink.
“Whoa, yeah. Exotic. Thank you.”
He had to break the record for blinking in the second it took me to hand him a beer.
I’m an enormous asshole for sugarcoating the pile of bodies I’m about to show him.
“You’re still with the police department, right?”
“Yup. Not the most exhilarating positions, though. Someone could rob a bank with a tank, and it’s still a dull day for a record clerk.”
Charlie’s proud of that joke.
“Well, I want to run something by you.”
“Sure, what’s up?” Charlie asks.
All the photos are looking at me as I swig the last of my beer. I open the next one before I finish swallowing.
“Well, um…” Oh god, how do I ask this? “Hold on a second.”
I have to flip these photos over. They can’t look at me. Charlie says something, but it’s just white noise when I find writing on the back of one of the newspaper clippings. My dad circled “3/25/85” in black marker and wrote “NEVER” under my birthday.
“Sandra?” Charlie’s words finally slithered their way into my mind.
“Ah, sorry?”
“Was it that flower wallpaper when you moved out?” Charlie asks as he looks down the hallway.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah. Kind of miss it.”
I don’t.
“You must have been, what, thirteen?”
“Yeah.”
I was. I was thirteen. March twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-five, and I would have been thirteen. I moved out a week later. All these girls were thirteen, all of them. What does this mean? What did “NEVER” mean? What did my dad mean by “NEVER?” I always wondered if he loved me.
“Hey.” Charlie shocked me.
“Yeah?”
I’m barely conscious from the swirling confusion. Did he love me?
“Was there something you wanted to run by me?” Charlie asks.
Maybe that was the only way he could.
“Ah, no, nothing. Never mind.”