Father Figure

by Kichuku Neko, TogaQ

  “It’s too late,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m only calling you to let you know that I understand the situation.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, his voice rising. “You’re a good cop, confused by a lot of shit that’s thrown you just now. You’re better than this. Come home. Bring your father with you, and we’ll work this out. Whatever he did to wrong you —”

  “I don’t think you understand, Detective Conners,” I cut him off again. “He didn’t wrong me. In fact, I love him. I love him very much. That’s why....”

  I trailed off. I could feel my throat tighten. I had to stop talking before I lost my composure. I rubbed my eyes before the tears came. I could feel them sting. I couldn’t lose it in a public place. I stopped speaking until I was calmer and had my thoughts collected again.

  “I know you’re tracking the cell phone towers to triangulate where I could be. I am in a town far from where my father and I have been. I’m leaving now.”

  “Gabriel! Listen to me! You’re a goddamn cop! You can’t be doing this shit! Think of your career! Think of your future! You going to throw all that away because you found a father?!”

  Conners was shouting so loud over the phone that it hurt my ear. I found myself smiling and wanting to tell him that he’d make a terrible negotiator.

  “I have no future without my father,” I said. “Thank you for your concern, Detective.”

  I turned off my cell phone in midst of another bout of screaming. I pocketed it and noticed the waitress looking at me. I gave her a smile, pulled out a ten dollar bill from my wallet and left it with my untouched cup of coffee. She said nothing as she watched me leave. She was still staring at me through the window, even as I climbed into my SUV and drove off.

  I’d retrieved the small bottle from the trunk, where it had been locked in a small black cashbox. I left it rattling and rolling in the cup holder as I drove. My mind contemplated different scenarios, each with a dramatic flair. I was relatively calm in the two hour drive back to the cabin, trying to decide if I had it in me to go through with what I’d thought about.

  When I finally got back and parked in the small shallow spot where I’d dug out a parking space for the SUV, the full reality struck me. There could be no more illusions or fantasies. There would never be the kind of happiness I had envisioned since the day I’d discovered the name of my father. It was never going to be.

  The sun had already gone down and I could barely see the black shape of the cabin against the pale mounds of snow. I sat there in the dark, killed the engine and stared at the small building in total silence. There was soothing knowledge that my father was still alive and in there, waiting for me. But my heart was broken. It hurt so much that the pain in my chest was overwhelming.

  “I love you so much...." was all I could say as I cried. The silence in the car was now filled with sobs that I couldn't stop. Soon, I couldn't even form words, there were only howls of anguish — the sounds even startling for me to hear. The pain in my chest only grew. I sat there and cried, letting the terrible pain devour me.

  CHAPTER 7

  He was still in bed when I finally came in, lying where I’d left him. He was awake and only looked up to acknowledge me as I stepped through the door.

  “Something happen?” he asked, as I removed my coat and left it draped over the back of the chair. “You look —“

  I took off my boots and went to him, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He touched my face with his good hand.

  “You look as bad as I feel,” he said. “And cold.”

  “Can I get in bed with you?” I asked him.

  “You never asked before,” he said.

  “Can I?”

  He gave a slight nod and I crept into bed with him. I could feel him shiver as his body absorbed the cold from mine, but he didn’t complain. I curled up against him, the blanket drawn over us. For a long time, we didn’t speak. It might have been an hour that passed, before I told him what I had learned earlier in the day.

  I told him about the conversation I’d had with the nurse and about my partner’s call, then Conner’s. I also told him about the cyanide that I’d had with me for a while —the vial that was in my coat pocket, slung over the chair a few feet away. After I finished, there was no change in him. He was calm, unaffected by everything I had said.

  “So you planned for this ending even before you brought me here.”

  “No,” I said. “It was an out, not an end.”

  “And now, it is an end?”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I think I stopped being afraid two days ago,” he said. “It makes it easier to accept this as it is.”

  “And that is?”

  He put a hand on my head and stroked my hair. There was a sad smile on his face. “Phillip had me for 22 years of his life,” he said. “Now, I suppose the rest of my life is yours.”

  I finally got to my feet and he watched me pour orange juice from a bottle into a tall glass. His demeanor didn’t change, even as I added the cyanide. Specks disappeared, blending into the drink. Wayward tears flowed down as I prepared it.

  “This will give us a little bit of time,” I said, walking to him with the glass and holding it out to him. “The dosage is low. However, it will be painful.”

  He looked at the drink. Still expressionless, he reached out for it, and it was only after he was holding it in his hands that I could tell he was shaking. The juice in the glass rippled.

  “Will this finally make you whole?” he asked.

  I wiped at my wet cheeks with the heel of my hand. “No,” I told him.

  He looked down at the juice. “So you will settle for me not to be able to love anyone else.”

  “If they find us...we’ll never be together again,” I told him. “I won’t be able to endure the fact that you’ve been taken away from me....”

  There was a period of silence, the kind of stillness that is tangible, the kind that was the culmination of what we were, what I had become.

  “I do love you, Gabriel,” he said softly and drank. He tipped the glass back, swallowing the juice in one long drink. I was sobbing, my body shaking by the time he set the glass down on the floor.

  “Why does it have to be like this?” I asked between sobs.

  He let out a sigh, his sad smile remaining. “Will you do one thing for me?” he asked. I looked up at him. I had to blink to clear my vision.

  “Will you get my ring?”

  For a while, I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know how to feel. But eventually, I nodded. I went out to the SUV and went through the toolbox in the trunk. I pulled a wrench and a file from it. Father remained sitting on the bed as I had left him, even as I worked noisily under the sink to disconnect the pipe.

  It took awhile to loosen the pipe and remove the curved section, where I knew the ring would be. And it was there, rattling at the bottom when I disconnected it. A tip, and it tumbled out. The silver band still shone as it sat in the palm of my hand. I curled my fingers over it, trying to calm the storm that was gathering inside me. I held in my hand the sum of my father’s past, the past that I didn’t want him to have. Even at the end of everything...even as he told me for the first time he loved me, he wanted his past.

  I scrubbed at my damp face with a hand towel and took in several deep breaths, clearing my mind. I went back to him, his ring clenched tightly in my hand.

  Father was lying down with his eyes closed. His face was ashen and I could hear his breaths — short and shallow. He opened his eyes when I sat down on the edge of the bed. His eyes were red rimmed and watery.

  “Are you in pain?” I asked him and ran a hand along his face. It was cold.

  “Pain is trivial now,” he said and looked as if he wanted to smile, but nothing but pain showed on his porcelain-like face.

  I bent down and gave him a kiss on his lips.

  “I want to go with you,” I said. “I am a coward...I would lose my only memories of you if I died....
”

  I started to cry again. He watched me quietly. I pressed the ring I had fetched from the pipe into his hand. He closed it in his fist and held it.

  “You are still so young,” he said. “You shouldn’t think of dying, no matter what.” He took my left hand, then slipped the ring on my ring finger. It fit comfortably.

  “I want you to be a good person...understand? Your father has just bought your soul with this ring,” he said. His voice was faltering, straining as he struggled to speak. “I forgive you...I hope someday you will find a way to forgive me.”

  I had so much to say then, but nothing came. I sat there, holding his hand and listened to him gasping for breath. His heart was failing. I could feel the trembles that racked his body as his heart worked harder and harder to keep him alive. Then he finally slipped into unconsciousness. It is the worst memory I have...the moment when his hand no longer held mine and dropped. He hadn’t died yet, but he was about to. His pulse was weak and he was barely drawing breath.

  I lay in bed with him, gathered him to me, and gradually felt life and warmth leave him. At some point, I knew he had died. I still held to him...although he was no longer with me, I no longer felt alone.

  Over the years, I had seen deaths in different phases. Some had been fresh with their blood still warm when I arrived. Some had been dead for some time, their bodies eaten away by insects that had swarmed over what was left of them. I hadn’t considered death itself to be attractive, nor should it be, but there is a beauty in it. And I saw it in Father’s body, frozen in rigor. He looked peaceful, asleep.

  I watched him for hours, sitting at the small table while I traced the smooth shape of the ring he had given me with an index finger — over and over again, as if I could find some kind of answers to the questions that came. New questions. I had traded one pain for another and I couldn’t decide if the new pain that gripped my chest hurt more than before, or if there had been any meaning in finding a man that didn’t want me, but had been forced to love me at the end of his life.

  It was night again by the time his body had become pliant enough to be moved. I dressed him in a pair of slacks and a shirt I had packed for him, and slipped him back into his black wool coat. I didn’t pack anything — there was no point. I pulled my coat on and put Father in the passenger seat of the SUV. His head rolled toward one side of his shoulder, his slumped figure barely held up by the seat belt.

  It was snowing when we pulled away from the cabin. The flurry came down strong, thick, white against the beams of the headlights. I drove slow and on instinct, until the SUV finally climbed onto the paved highway. We drove for miles on the desolate road, passing by perhaps three or four semis in the opposite lane as they made their way toward the city.

  It was after perhaps an hour of driving, maybe longer, when I reached for his hand, his left hand with the damaged ring finger. It was cold. I held it as I started to tell him about the scant memories of my childhood that I could pull from my mind, the moments that I wished he were there, although back then, I didn’t know to wish for him.

  “It was an older boy next door that taught me how to ride a bike,” I told him. “I think he’d always pitied me, although he was only five years older. He came to my ball games and sat in the bleachers with the parents. Ted Caufield.”

  I squeezed his hand.

  “He got a girl pregnant in high school and dropped out to join the Army so he could support them. He wrote to me from wherever he was. Then one day, the letters no longer came.”

  I felt a tear trickle down my cheek, but I didn’t want to let go of Father’s hand to wipe it away. “Months passed and then a year. His family lived next door all that time and didn’t tell me. He wasn’t my family,” I said. “’Teddy’s dead,’ his mother finally told me one day, after I’d asked her again what happened to Ted. She looked angry, like I had reminded her of something terrible that she had taken a long time to forget and now she was remembering all over again. A year and a half after Ted died in some stupid shit bar fight that got him shot dead...that was the beginning of the mourning for me. A year and a half after he was dead and buried was when I first cried for him.”

  My hand left the steering wheel for a moment so I could dry my cheek with the cuff of my jacket. “Looking back, he was probably my first father figure. I didn’t love him the way I loved you, but being with him made me feel wanted. Even if it was just a fantasy from a kid that really didn’t know what it was like to be wanted.”

  I lifted his hand up and kissed it. I was quiet for a while.

  “I think you would’ve been proud of me, watching me pitch. I made it into the minors, you know,” I told him.

  And as I spoke, one trace memory followed another. I was crying but somehow, those memories were happy now. I told the recollections in detail to my father. Memories of something that weren’t important then. Trivial things that had no meaning when I was a child. But I was happy again, so many years later, because in my mind I lived through them again with Father smiling next to me, telling me how good I was as he tousled my hair.

  “I am very proud of you!” I heard him say in my mind.

  All those times when I looked over my shoulder, he had been there with me. I remembered it all now. He had been there with me, all those times.

  I barely remember how I drove back to the city. I was numb. I didn’t know I had come back until I was suddenly aware that I was driving to my apartment, and I stopped at the Estate gate. I stared numbly at the closed gate until I realized where I was.

  It was early morning and dawn had just broken over the apartment complex full of residents readying for their early commute, busy scrubbing the frost that had iced over their car windows. I went back into my apartment, moving on memory alone. My mind was blank and I was half blind from hours of driving and fatigue. It was almost a programmed routine that I’d go to my bedroom window and look into Father’s apartment. It still looked the same. The couches in the living room were arranged in the same way. It was the same as it always was, whenever I looked into that panoramic window with its curtains drawn back to the sides.

  I stood there staring, even as the sun came up. I could see his Lexus in the lot below, left where he had parked it only a week ago. I had started to turn away when I saw a figure move through his darkened living room. I leaned in and forced my tired eyes to open wider and watch. Moments later, the same figure moved from the kitchen through the living room and back to the bedroom again.

  I was already half-crazed, running down the stairs toward Father’s building. Although I knew Father had died and I had buried him only hours earlier — my hands still hurt from the bruises the shovel and pick made as I dug into the frozen earth. I didn’t care. Perhaps, I told myself, there was a small chance that the past week had been a lie. A terrible nightmare. Father hadn’t died....

  I pounded on the door. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to bring the key. When I got impatient, I kicked the door. The woman that lived across the hall opened her door slightly and peeked through. With her hair still in rollers and rest of her clad in a yellow bathrobe, she asked me if I knew what time it was and slammed her door without my answer.

  Then the door opened. The man that stood before me looked angry and annoyed. The man that looked like Father, but it wasn’t him.

  “What the hell is your problem?” he asked me.

  I pushed past him and rushed into the apartment. “Hey!”

  I ignored him, going into the bedroom and seeing the made bed but I didn’t see Father. I went into the bathroom. I went into the spare room and saw the unmade bed there — slept in, rumpled. I was crushed in that moment with the reality of it all coming down on me. The strength left my legs then and I sank down to my knees.

  “You’re the one who took him,” the man — Father’s other son — stood in front of me. He had a cellphone in one hand.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Why?!”

  I looked down at my hand and looked at the
silver band.

  “I just wanted to be my father’s son.”

  FATHER FIGURE: POST SCRIPT

  10 Days Later

  “You’re the doctor who won’t let him go to trial,” Phillip said, as soon as Katsuya Asano offered his name and an extended hand. There was a hesitation before Phillip took it, shaking it quickly as a token greeting.

  “Yes, I was one of the doctors who performed the 730 exam.”

  Katsuya gestured to a seat, a chair that had already been pulled out from a small desk with a lamp that was bolted down in one corner. The desk faced a panel of windows that looked into a room where Gabriel was confined. He was asleep, tucked under a white sheet, his wrists wrapped in padded cuffs and tethered to the metal railings on the sides of the gurney-like bed. It was a suicide-watch room.