His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Although she and Lydia had never met face-to-face, they had written weekly letters for the past twelve years, and they had called each other on special occasions. They had also kept up with each other’s physical maturation through a series of exchanged photographs. It was amazing how alike both of them were physically, emotionally, intellectually. Zelda had once wondered, jokingly, whether the two of them were twins who had been separated at birth; they had so much in common.

  Now Zelda wrote of her father, his minor faults as well as his major attributes. Before, she’d told her friend only his bad points, dwelling on his shortcomings. Now she told Lydia of his great love of animals, of his infatuation with photographs and artifacts of the Old West, of his unconditional love for her. It was a catharsis, writing about her father this way, and she felt emotionally drained as she sealed the ten-page letter in a manila envelope.

  That night, alone in the empty house, she thought she heard her father’s footsteps on the kitchen floor.

  But she knew it had to be her imagination.

  After my father died, we became the best of friends. It sounds like such a strange thing to say, but we became much closer after his death. No longer did I seek hidden motives for his actions or place my own interpretations on his words. I finally, unequivocally understood him, and for the first time in my life I not only loved him, I liked him.

  Zelda read through Lydia’s letter one more time, again focusing her attention on the paragraph concerning her friendship with her father. It was true, she realized. What Lydia said was absolutely true. Zelda still thought she heard her father’s footsteps on the tile every so often. She still sometimes smelled his manly odor in the bathroom in the morning. The house still contained unexplainable traces of his existence, though he had been dead for nearly a month.

  She wondered if she was going crazy.

  But no. Lydia understood what she meant. Lydia knew exactly how she felt.

  Maybe they were both crazy.

  Now, there was a possibility. Zelda smiled to herself and folded up Lydia’s letter, placing it back in the opened envelope. From downstairs, she thought she heard the sound of the refrigerator door opening and closing, the way it had each night at this time as her father poured himself some orange juice in order to wash down his battery of pills and vitamins.

  Zelda listened, unmoving, but the sound did not repeat and there were no other noises from downstairs. She put the letter into her desk drawer. She knew she should have been frightened by the noise. She was alone in the house with a ghost. Her father’s ghost. But, strangely, she felt comforted by the sound. It was nice to know that, alive or dead, her father was looking after her.

  Crazy.

  She began to write Lydia a response. On the TV, the local news ended and an old horror movie came on.

  Zelda changed the channel.

  She did not like horror movies. They scared her.

  Three letters and one disastrous first date later, Zelda received her annual two weeks’ vacation. The prospect frightened her. Father had always planned trips for them to take, and with him gone she really had no place to go. She could stay with her cousin Carrie for a few days, but Carrie had only recently had a baby and wasn’t exactly in the best position to be entertaining guests. She could stay at home, fix up the house, clean the place up, but that was even less appealing. She had not only been hearing, smelling and obliquely sensing the presence of her father lately—she had thought several times that she had seen him out of the corner of her eye.

  And she was afraid that, left alone in the house for two weeks straight, she might meet him face-to-face.

  Zelda knew that her feelings and thoughts had long ago passed the problem point. Something inside her, for some reason or another, simply could not accept the fact that her father was dead. Her mind constantly registered stimuli that were not there in order to maintain the illusion that he was still with her, still in the house.

  And anyone who could not accept the reality of a loved one’s death had something seriously wrong with her.

  Crazy.

  So Zelda called Lydia. There were other friends, geographically closer, whom she could have gone to visit, but she wanted to see Lydia.

  The arrangements were made simply and unbelievably quickly. Lydia was just as excited by the prospect of Zelda coming to visit as Zelda was herself. She gave precisely detailed instructions on how to get to her house from the airport, and she promised Zelda that she could stay as long as she liked.

  Zelda packed her bags, arranged with Mrs. DeCamp next door for the care and feeding of her cat, and took a taxi to the airport. She was tempted, before heading out, to leave her father a note, explaining where she was going and what she was doing, but she knew that was not rational.

  The taxi dropped her off right in front of the terminal, and Zelda had her bags checked at the counter. Going through the X-ray machine, her small valise caused it to beep, setting off some type of security alarm, and a burly guard asked her to please step aside. Her belongings were searched, and she was horrified to see that she had unwittingly packed several of her father’s shirts and pants in the valise.

  She did not remember putting any of that in there.

  She had even packed some of his underwear.

  Beneath the underwear was a kitchen knife.

  Sweating, her voice halting and inarticulate as she lied, she told the security personnel that she was bringing the knife and clothes to her father in New York. The burly guard informed her that she would not be allowed to take the knife on the plane and that, unless she wanted it confiscated, it would have to be stored with other potentially lethal items in the cargo section of the plane.

  Zelda had no objections.

  New York was even darker and dirtier than she had been led to expect from the gritty detective shows she’d seen on television. After retrieving her luggage from the baggage claim area, she called Lydia. Her friend had said that she would not be able to pick her up at the airport, since she couldn’t drive, but she had given Zelda precisely detailed directions.

  Which Zelda had lost.

  Now, writing the directions on the crumpled back of her flight ticket envelope, Zelda thanked her friend and said she’d arrive as soon as a taxi could take her there. Lydia giggled excitedly and said she couldn’t wait to finally meet in person.

  Zelda thought of her father’s clothes and the knife in her valise.

  Crazy.

  The trip took much less time than Zelda had expected, given the slow flow of heavy traffic on the road. In a little over an hour, the taxi was pulling in front of a green-and-white wood house in a calm residential neighborhood. She paid the cabdriver and took out her bags. Her palms were sweaty, her heart pounding, and her mouth was dry. Walking up the short cement path and up the porch steps, she hesitantly rang the doorbell.

  From inside the house came the sound of chimes.

  An elderly woman, iron gray hair tied back in a bun, answered the door wearing a brightly colored muumuu. She peered out at Zelda through thick spectacles. “Yes?” she said.

  Zelda smiled. “I’m here to see Lydia.”

  “Lydia? There must be some mistake.”

  “No. I’m her pen pal, Zelda.”

  The old woman’s voice grew hard. “If this is a joke, it isn’t a very funny one.”

  Zelda was puzzled. “She knows I’m coming. I called her. We talked about it.”

  “Lydia’s dead,” the old woman said.

  Zelda felt her grip starting to slip. She’d just called Lydia, hadn’t she? From the airport. She’d talked to her not more than an hour ago.

  Zelda swallowed hard. She recognized the old woman now. It was Lydia’s mother. Lydia had sent her a picture last year of the two of them together in Atlantic City.

  “But I just called her,” she found herself saying.

  “Lydia died at birth,” the old woman said. “I don’t know where you dug her name up from, but if you don’t get out of here, I’m go
ing to call the police.”

  Zelda felt like screaming. She thought she was screaming, but she realized, as she bent down to zip open the valise and take out what lay beneath the underwear, that she was not making a sound, that suddenly, for some reason, she was very, very calm.

  Twenty-three

  The new secretary was not at her desk, and there were huddled bands of employees, three or four to a group, talking together in low tones throughout the floor. Steve knew what they were discussing the second he stepped off the elevator, and he braced himself, wiping all trace of expression off his face as he walked up to Ron Zindel and Bob Mattacks. The two PR reps were talking to one of the accountants.

  “I heard it on the news,” Steve said. “I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to come in today.”

  “It’s freaky,” the accountant said nervously. “Who knows? Maybe there’s someone stalking people from our company. Maybe one of us is next.”

  “This isn’t a slasher film,” Ron said. “There’s no deranged alumnus on a killing spree.”

  Mattacks was nodding. “They think it was some sort of murder-suicide pact. Everyone knows Mark and Gina were having a thing.”

  “They were?” Steve said.

  “Oh, yeah. You didn’t know?”

  “No one knew,” Ron said. “Because I think you made it up.”

  Mattacks raised his hands. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “There could be someone stalking us,” the accountant said defensively. “Maybe it’s someone who used to work here.” He wandered off to talk to someone else.

  Things were on the right track, Steve thought. Everyone was thinking along the lines he’d hoped they would, and as the employees began drifting back to their cubicles and workstations, he excused himself and went to his own desk, where he busied himself with work.

  By midmorning, the subject had worn itself out, and it was almost possible to pretend that nothing had happened.

  Steve’s mother called in the afternoon.

  The last time she’d called him at work it had been to tell him about his father’s stroke and the unprovoked attack upon her. This time, she announced that she was selling the house. She sprang it on him just like that: “I’m selling the house.”

  He didn’t know how to respond, wasn’t sure his mother expected him to respond. It was obvious from her tone of voice that this was a decision she had made, a decision that had nothing to do with him, and that she was informing him only out of courtesy. On a superficial level, it occurred to him that this would relieve him of all those house-maintenance duties he had reluctantly inherited. But he also thought that, financially, it would be a mistake for her to pull up stakes, considering the fact that the place was paid off.

  Strangely, he had no emotional reaction to the news. Despite spending his teenage years within those walls, he had no attachment to the house. It was not a home to him. It was merely the place where his mother lived.

  “Where are you going to go?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But I want someplace smaller. An apartment maybe. The neighborhood’s not what it was, but even in this market I’ll still get out of it more than we put into it. I was thinking of going to one of those senior communities.”

  “Have you thought this through?” he started to say.

  “I won’t have you telling me what to do!” she shouted. “You’re just like your father!”

  She hung up the phone.

  Steve sat there, listening to a dial tone. Slowly, he put down the receiver. He hoped she’d move far away so he wouldn’t have to deal with that shit anymore. Northern California. Another state. Someplace where he wouldn’t be obligated to see her.

  He recalled how she’d waited to phone him until the day after she’d been treated for her injuries and his father had been taken by the police to Anaheim Memorial and then transferred to the VA hospital. How far along was she on this selling-the-house-and-moving plan? Was she already packed and ready to go? Had she talked to a real estate agent? Did she already have a new place picked out? He wouldn’t put anything past her, and part of him thought that the best thing that could happen would be for her to just disappear, to take off one day and not tell him where she was going and never come back.

  But what if there were something of his father’s still in the house? Something in the crawl space beneath the floors, or in the low storage attic between the ceiling and roof? What if there was incriminating evidence?

  Or worse?

  There would have to be an inspection if the house was sold. And his mother would pack up everything first, no doubt finding a lot of small, forgotten or never-seen items that she had missed while purging the house of his father’s belongings. Which meant there was a good chance that some type of damning article could turn up.

  He would not allow that to happen.

  After work, Steve drove to his mother’s house. He didn’t call ahead of time, didn’t tell her that he was coming. He just showed up. She seemed annoyed by that, and he wondered how many other mothers would be put out by a surprise visit from their only son. Not too many, probably.

  He didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t know what to do, so he told her that if she really was going to move, he would help her pack. She neither accepted nor declined his offer but said that she was thinking of moving to Leisure World.

  “I don’t think it’s called Leisure World anymore, Mom. It’s Laguna Hills or Laguna Niguel or something.”

  “Do you always have to contradict me?” she demanded.

  “That’s not what I was doing.”

  “Don’t you talk back to me!”

  Steve sighed and walked away, out of the kitchen. He headed over to the room that had once been his. He looked around but felt no nostalgia, felt nothing really, only noted objectively where his bed and desk had been, where his movie and rock posters had hung. He’d spent a lot of time in this room—too much time, probably—but when he’d been a teenager the neighborhood had consisted mostly of older couples and there hadn’t been any other kids his own age. Untold hours had been occupied reading and writing, and if it had not been for that, who knew what might have become of him; who knew how he might have turned out?

  He definitely would have been a different person, although whether that would have been better or worse he couldn’t say.

  Last night, he’d finally finished Don Quixote. The first half, at least. If he recalled correctly, the second half had been written some years later and for money. Cervantes had not wanted to go back to the knight’s story, but had been broke and in desperate need of cash. So Steve felt no guilt at all for stopping where he did. The first portion of the work was the real story. The second was Godfather III.

  He was not a sentimental guy, he had learned. He felt no emotional attachment to any object or place from the past, and he was willing to bet that his father hadn’t either. It was how he’d been able to move around so much, to drag his wife and son from New Mexico to Utah to Arizona to California.

  Steve was starting to wonder if maybe it was time for him to move on. The idea appealed to him, and he imagined how his father must have felt, lighting out for new territories, each city or town a blank canvas on which he could do his work. But that was a pipe dream. The economy was in the toilet, and it would be very difficult for him to find a new job if he moved somewhere else. Besides, as his parents had never tired of pointing out, he wasn’t really qualified for anything; he should be happy to have the job he did.

  Not to mention the fact that Sherry was here.

  And she had a stable job too.

  He walked out to the garage behind the house. The sun was going down, and the shadows in the backyard were long. He saw movement in one of the bushes near the fence, a dark, low shape that faded back into the branches. He hoped it was a cat and not an opossum. Opossums creeped him out.

  After opening the big garage door, he pulled the string that turned on the light. After a hesitant flicker, the fluorescent bar
his father had installed winked into existence, illuminating the right half of the room but leaving the left in semidarkness. As he’d remembered, the garage was a mess, filled with a jumble of yard tools, paint cans, boxes and old furniture. Through the grime-covered window above a workbench piled high with mason jars and magazines, orange sunlight cut a slanting swath through the center of the space, highlighting areas usually not exposed.

  Steve stepped forward, noticing something he hadn’t before: a piece of frayed rope tied to the garage’s middle beam. Frowning, he reached up, tried to touch it. Even with him standing on tiptoe, his fingers couldn’t quite stretch that far, and he sank back down. He had no idea why it was there, and as he sifted through memories of the last decade and a half he could think of no reason that a rope would ever have been needed at that spot.

  It looked to him like part of a noose.

  He hadn’t wanted his mind to go there, but the thought was unavoidable. Steve stood beneath the frazzled rope end, looking up. The portion that remained was wrapped around the beam and tied tightly, as though it had been meant to hold a lot of weight.

  But whom had the noose been for? Had his father planned to kill his mother? Or had he intended to hang himself?

  Or kill his only son?

  Or use it on other kids from the neighborhood, or their parents?

  Or strangers?

  The possibilities were endless, and the frustrating thing was that Steve would probably never know. Still glancing upward, he saw that a large square of plywood had been placed across the beams at the back of the garage. From this angle, he could see that there were boxes piled atop the wood, sealed boxes that for some reason had been segregated from those that lay stacked on the floor.

  He pulled the stepladder from its spot against the side wall and set it up just in front of the plywood shelf. Climbing up, he grabbed the closest box and carefully brought it down, placing it on the cement floor and crouching to open the duct-taped top. Inside were dozens of small blue boxes containing hundreds and hundreds of toothpicks, more toothpicks than any family could use in a lifetime.