“Cancer?” I said stupidly. “He has all the money in the world. He can be cured.”
“It’s too late for that,” Mother said.
I wanted to be sad, but I really wasn’t. Still, some defensive urge engulfed me. My father was dying, and these two, his very own brother and wife, were deceiving him. Were they going to take all his money and then dance on his grave? What had he ever done to them?
“You two are disgusting,” I said.
“It’s not how it seems,” Uncle Richard said. “We love each other.”
“Ugh. Please. That’s pitiful,” I said. “I don’t care if you do it for money or love. Either way, it’s sickening. Sickening! I don’t know how I can stay in the same house with you. What would your country club friends think? Hmm? Mrs. Perfect Lyla Branch is nothing but a vulgar adulterer.”
Lyla stood up and reached for me. She suddenly looked shameful and repentant. “Please, let’s talk about it. There’s more you must know.”
I didn’t want her desperate hand, a hand that had never supplicated to me before. “Don’t touch me, you repulsive woman!” My voice in anger came out as a man’s voice. I glared down at her with such rage that she stumbled backward into Richard. I raised my purple swollen fist and towered over her. You’re of afraid of me, huh? Mommy? I thought. Well, you should be!
She trembled against Uncle Richard, who stood behind her bracing her shoulders and was also stunned into silence. I must have been quite an imposing sight, towering over them with my tight, youthful body on the cusp of manhood, covered with scars and bruises, coiled with the power of wrath. My yelling even roared in my own ears, and I felt a thrill at this power of being feared.
But I restrained myself. This was barbaric, and I preferred to fight with my intellect. I caught my breath and lowered my fist. Lyla and Richard relaxed from their frozen state. We all stood in silence, breathing. Finally Richard broke the silence. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said. “Why don’t we all sleep on this and talk about it in the morning.”
I wanted to spit in his handsome, competent face. I imagined telling my father about what I saw him doing to Mother. The thought of seeing my father in pain, making him pay for leaving us alone here, and ruining my mother’s happily ever after with my parasite uncle, gave me a rush of pleasure. My defensiveness morphed into twisted hatred. I knew what I would do.
I smiled cruelly as I massaged my palm. “All right,” I said. “All right.” I gave them a wild, exaggerated smile. “Good night, Mother.”
She shuddered as I approached and kissed her cheek with my bloody lips. “Good night, Uncle Richard.” I gripped his hand with my swollen one, glorying in the pressure. Then I pivoted on my socks and strode out of the room, putting two swollen fingers into my mouth and sucking on their delicious, metallic taste as I ascended the grand staircase.
*
Once in my room, I replayed the entire confrontation over again. I wondered about my mother and father when they met. How did it begin? And how did it come to this? Why was it so hard for them to get along? Are the wealthy doomed to be unhappy? It seemed so.
I lay on my back in bed, shirtless with my jeans on. I rubbed my crushed hand as I tried to weave it all together. Uncle Richard. My brain turned over in relentless circles, and disgusting scenes played before me—Mother’s hard lips softening for his kiss, my uncle’s hand on her breast. At the end of each repetition, I thought, I have to go see my father, I have to go see my father. All this would be resolved as soon as I spoke to him.
Sleep didn’t come till the small hours of the morning, and I was wide-awake again before sunrise. The sky was pitch black, but I knew dawn was coming because the first few birds were singing to coax its arrival.
My hand was swollen and stiff. The soreness had settled in, and the pain had tempered into something quieter. I showered, shaved, and slipped on a casual Armani suit that I’d never had a reason to wear before. This was the perfect occasion.
I planned to drill Greta for my father’s whereabouts and drive to see him. If I discovered he was getting treatment in some other state or country, I was prepared to go directly to the airport and fly to meet him and tell him what Mother and Uncle Richard were up to.
I also planned to tell him he was a horrible parent, but how I also knew that was what had made me strong. Branches were at the top of the food chain. Unfit offspring would not survive. I was a survivor, and I knew somewhere in my heart that he loved me because I remembered the way he used to sit my room in the middle of the night.
When I got downstairs, I gave Greta my exquisite Piaget watch, another luxury gift from my father, in exchange for the information. She was always a pragmatic sort and planned to sell it to fund her son’s college tuition. She said my father was being treated somewhere in Berlin.
I crept out into the misty morning before Mother and Uncle Richard woke up and slipped into the cool leather of a new Audi sent from Father on my sixteenth birthday. It was a black, shiny bullet of a vehicle, and I hurtled down the turnpike and arrived at the airport just before the morning rush hour.
I had been to Europe several times for boarding school, to which Mother had succeeded in sending me on several occasions, so traveling on my own didn’t dissuade me at all. I purchased two first class airline tickets, the second seat to prevent anyone from being assigned next to me.
The flight was interminable, and I ached inside. Why did my parents hate each other so much? Why didn’t they love me?
I wanted to cry, sob loudly, but the strong could not indulge in self-pity. I fought to keep the tears from erupting. I grabbed my dinner knife and jabbed it repeatedly into my calf underneath my tray table, but although I was sitting alone, it was impossible to generate enough force to wound myself without attracting attention.
I took the knife to the bathroom and finished myself off in there, but I did not enjoy it. There was only pleasure when I was doing it on my terms. Doing it to drown out my emotions made me feel empty and sick inside. I managed to hold myself together, and with my height, composure, and obvious wealth, the flight attendant didn’t hesitate to serve me champagne, which I downed tiny bottle after tiny bottle until I was able to let exhaustion take over, and I fell into a black sleep.
I excelled at many languages, and though German was not my favorite, my pronunciation was exceptional. I effortlessly got myself from the airport to the Intercontinental in Berlin. I inquired at the concierge about the best clinic for cancer treatment and was given the definitive hospital for such cases. I didn’t want to dwell on what I was going to say, or what he was going to say, or what it would feel like to see him dying. I dropped off my small carry-on bag and went directly back downstairs to hail a cab to the hospital.
As soon as I stepped into the sterile confines of the hospital lobby, I felt more at ease, much like a person feels when coming home after a long day’s work. I took in a deep breath of antiseptic air and longed to invent someway to be interned. The wounds I’d made on my calf with the airliner’s dull cutlery would not be enough. Fake a seizure? Piss my pants? Request a bed next to my father and share the stand for the IV bags? How sweet. He wouldn’t be able to avoid me then.
Even for me, these were crazy fantasies. I nodded to the starkly dressed doctors who strolled the halls. Nurses in scrubs, one of my weaknesses, rushed to and fro in soundless orthopedic shoes. I just wished to be enveloped in a harem of them. The German voices lent this hospital a surreal feel for me, but in any language, the medical arena was my domain, my stage, and although I wasn’t there to perform, I already felt myself rising to this occasion on a whole new level.
I approached the desk where a smart-looking nurse with red-rimmed square glasses and a small, tight smile looked up at me in her sober German way. I told her I was to see John Branch III. She checked her records. “Let me ring upstairs,” she said. I became nervous. Would he refuse me?
As she waited for an answer she asked, “May I ask who is visiting?”
&
nbsp; “John Branch,” I said. “The fourth.”
“No one is picking up the phone.”
I pulled out my passport. “I’m his only son,” I said.
She looked at my photo, then at me. “You’re only sixteen?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m mature for my age.” I smiled, sweet and flirtatious. “I flew all the way here last night to see my father. I was told he doesn’t have much time.”
“Just go up then,” she said, the slightest blush reddening her cheeks. “Fourth floor, room 425.”
I winked at her, jogged away, and caught the elevator before it went up. I took a deep breath and prepared to destroy everyone’s lives.
*
The door was cracked open, and I could see two nurses and a doctor standing over the patient, my father. One nurse was drawing blood from the crook of his arm while the nurse at the head of the bed was programming a machine behind him, one with clear tubes that were connected to his frail body.
He whispered hoarsely behind his mask. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but the nurses and doctors nodded, accustomed to listening to people speak through the plastic. I hovered outside the room for a few moments, taking in the scene. Absorbing the smells, the sounds, the sight of my father. I envied him. Yes, envied him, with poisonous chemotherapy drugs dripping into one vein and morphine into the other, as he faced the great, black death. I wondered if he would fight the pain or embrace it. Did it make him bitter? Or did it make him feel more alive than ever, like me?
The staff members stepped outside the room and mumbled with grave, pitying faces. They respected him, it seemed. He was an admirable old man. Self-serving, ambitious, avaricious, but with a manner so cultivated, it was impossible to hold his faults against him. He was entitled to be who he was and get what he wanted (and get what you had, and what everyone else had, without any explanation other than he was John Branch).
Once the nurses and doctors moved from the door, I saw my father looking at me. It was as if he expected me to be there. Had he sensed my presence? Did they call to tell him I would come? His tired yellow eyes struggled to see from under heavy, drugged eyelids. No words were necessary to beckon me. His look said it all. He had wanted to see me.
I hesitated, but then my apprehension vanished. Upon entering that room, I felt like I was about to pass some momentous rite of passage. Deathbeds do that. They force you to honor the person and the moment, and the fact that you will remain behind on earth and must bear the torch of the dead one’s memory.
The room was large enough to hold four beds, but my father had it all to himself. On the walls hung what looked like genuine oil paintings illuminated by muted track lighting. Fresh-cut flowers in crystal vases were placed on small lacquered tables in the corners, and a soft piece by Liszt, I believe, was playing from some hidden source in the ceiling or wall. If it weren’t for the ugly, utilitarian hospital bed with its steel railings and shelves of noisy monitors, I would have felt I was in any ordinary foyer.
John Branch III’s long frame occupied the entire length of the bed; his gaunt arms rested at his sides like bald birch limbs. His skin was like wax paper, thin and translucent. There was something saintly about its sheen, the sour smell of his poisoned and decaying body, and the white robes and sheets draped over him.
“Father,” I said. I was surprised at my calm confidence and then realized, looking down at him, that in his weakness, I would now become the strong one.
He blinked and lifted his chin slightly, a cue to remove his oxygen mask. I reached over and lifted it from his face and set it around his neck. It was the most intimate thing I could remember ever doing for my father, and in being given the chance to help him in his vulnerable state, all my old grudges—why he never paid attention to me, why never took care of me in my illness, why he never was a father at all except in the role of a provider—were forgiven. I could feel the weight of them lift from me, and, like an exhalation of breath, disperse into the air and evaporate.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I’m very tired.”
Something about the way he looked at me, the way he grabbed my hand and yanked it, insisting I sit down in the chair beside him, told me that he had been preparing for this moment for some time.
“I want you to be quiet and just listen. I’ve waited too long to tell you this.”
I was too impatient for any cryptic rambling. “Mother,” I stammered, I couldn’t hold it in any longer, “she’s sleeping with Uncle Richard.”
“I know that, Johnny. Now shut up!” he snapped.
He knew. Of course, he knew everything that happened under his roofs. I should’ve known Mother couldn’t fool him. I regretted having angered him. The old Father came out, but then he coughed, and the anger seemed to dissipate with it. He settled down. “We’ll get to that affair. First, you must know this.”
I watched his face, twitching with the effort to form expressions, nature’s other language, the communication beneath words that lacks their potential to deceive. By reading his countenance, I could tell there was no pretense. Forgive the pun, but he was dead serious.
“Lyla is not your birth mother.”
The words struck me. But as unbelievable as they were, I knew at that instant that they were true. My whole life made sense now around this simple fact. This is why I never felt like I belonged, this is why I was always alone. This was why it always seemed like she hated me. Because she did. This is what she didn’t want me to find out. I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but my father lifted his hand as I opened my mouth to speak.
“Wait, son,” he said. “Let me tell you everything. Then you can ask questions, if I’ve anything left.”
I heard phlegm rattling in his chest. He took a few breaths to recover and then continued. “I’m sorry I’ve waited till now. I abandoned you. I left you to her, and I regret that. I thought it was my pride, but now I know it was total fear. I’ve been afraid all my life, of my feelings, of loving someone. I couldn’t risk losing again.”
His candor puzzled me, but I didn’t dare interrupt him.
“Now, our family is Norman by way of England,” he said. “I don’t keep in touch with any of our distant relatives there, but I was in London to meet with a bank and took a weekend trip to Scotland to get out of the city. Those were the days when I was younger and used to enjoy traveling alone.
“I was in a pub in the small coastal town of Dunbar drinking a pint of bitter ale, when in walked the most extraordinary woman.
I saw an emotion in his face that I had never seen before. A wistful, yearning expression that made him ageless for a moment. He sighed.
“She had great waves of auburn hair. She was tall, fair, and pretty, so very pretty. I couldn’t stop looking at her, and she knew it.
“It was she who came to me, striding toward me with a knowing smile on her face. ‘You look familiar, but you’re not from here, are you?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m American.’ ‘Oh,’ she said as if that confirmed some fact about me in her mind. She reached out a slender white hand that gripped me tightly despite its delicate look. Her fingers where mottled with colorful paint. ‘I’m Sorcha Branch,’ she said.
“‘Branch?’ I repeated. I guessed it was common enough in the British Isles, but I was still surprised and filled with a nervous magic when, having this name in common, she felt comfortable enough to sit on the stool beside me. I didn’t think she could be scared of anyone, though. In fact, her self-assured air, her wild hair, the way she drank straight liquor, and her brusque way of speaking with her Scottish accent intimidated me. We discussed our relatives and laughed at the possibility of being related. A few drinks later, we determined we were second cousins, six times removed, descendants of our great, great, great-grandfather John Hamish Branch.
“I felt I had become a different person with this woman, and I liked this person. He was happy and carefree, not brooding and calculating. Until then, I might allow myself to
be amused by something, or enjoy this or that, but not without a constant processing in my mind about what to do to make my empire bigger, stronger, more indestructible.
“The sun had set, and we became quite drunk. She asked me to come home with her. I was taken aback by her boldness, and didn’t want anything more in my life that this night should not end. ‘We’re family, right? It would be rude for me not to invite you as my guest,’ she said.
“That night led to another night, led to a week, led to me canceling scores of appointments and flights and meetings. I called Richard, my little brother to whom I confessed everything back then, and told him about this woman, that I was happy for the first time in my life. How she was a fiery spirit that inflamed me back to life. Richard’s voice was strange when he commented on this. I thought perhaps he envied me, and I was too wrapped up in my passions to worry about anything except Sorcha.
“She was a painter of nature. Her rustic little house was filled with canvases swirling with the landscapes of her homeland. When looking at her paintings, one could feel the wind barreling down the hills, the chill of the spray from the black sea, and hear the reeds of grass rustling on the barren meadow. We would make love, and then I’d lie in bed and watch her paint, naked beneath my button-down shirt, moving her brush over the canvas, swaying in large, graceful arches. She was the first person who never bowed down to me. She was superior to me because all that I was to others, the money, the power, the family name, were irrelevant to her. I was just a man, and she was just a woman. And we did what men and women were created to do.
“I never told her I was married. I didn’t expect the infatuation to go on very long, but it did.
SICKER: Psychological Thriller Series Novella 2 Page 6
