Neon Burn

by Kasia Fox

  Neon Burn

  By Kasia Fox

  My Confessional

  How is it that we can feel someone’s eyes on us? I lifted my gaze from the hymnal. Among the assembled faces at morning mass, I found the stranger watching me. Hard to miss a man with dark, brutish good looks who stood a full head taller than the rest of the congregation.

  “By name I have called you, by name I will save you,” the man sang to me. “By name you are mine, you are precious to me.”

  Every morning that week I was certain he wouldn’t show up, yet there he was, staring across church pews. Blasphemy even to notice. Shameful to crave a stranger’s eyes on you during morning mass. Through lowered lashes and pious folded hands, I chanced looks up at my pursuer, heart thumping against my blouse.

  The dark parishioner never spoke to me. By week’s end, I thought I would stop breathing if I didn’t hear his voice. On Sunday, there was a social at the church hall after mass. The stranger stepped in line behind me. He gave me his hand, asked for my name. I told him. “So you’re the little flower,” he said. A joke – the name of the sanctuary was St. Therese Church of the Little Flower.

  I’d been re-baptized. I was his little flower. Delicate. Tiny. Feminine. Easy to crush under a boot heel. Even if he didn’t look it, the dark parishioner was smart. Evil men often are.

  1.

  Darkness arrived during the night class. A prairie wind whipped about Tessa’s dark hair. As she glanced over her shoulder, strands of hair bisected her view. The loosened end of her knitted green scarf fluttered in the cold air. Yes, she confirmed, the footsteps following her since she left her night class exam belonged to a man. A stranger. Facing forward, she quickened her step and crossed the campus lawn toward the parking lot, her arms wrapped about herself, her body bent against the cold and the weight of her backpack. An unseasonably cool April in Minot, North Dakota. A week ago, the weather forecast predicated snow. Winter lingered, a stick raised over her head.

  Classmates waited for her at a nearby bar so they could all celebrate the last exam of graduate school together. Leaving the lecture hall, she’d expected to feel relieved, exhilarated. Now, fear had found a crack in the door and slithered in.

  The campus green ended and Tessa crossed the street to the parking lot. She could hear the footsteps following her closing the distance between them. Up ahead, the cold white floodlights above the parked cars were a beacon of security. As she turned to check over her shoulder one last time, her green scarf uncoiled. She reached out as it unfurled and blew off, the fringed yarn ends slipping through her fingers. Tessa halted. So did her pursuer. The scarf landed on the street separating them.

  “Don’t worry,” the man said. “You can trust me, Mary-Therese.”

  Mary-Therese was the name of her baptismal certificate, the name school teachers used on her first day before she corrected them. Why would this stranger know it? Standing under the streetlight, she could see the man’s dirty jeans, his shoes creased and worn, his lined face, his matted gray hair, how the shadows turned his eyes into black caves.

  Run, echoed the fearful voice of her mom inside her head. Yes, she could outrun him. Tessa was a runner. Running was the only sport she ever enjoyed because she could do it alone, never have to worry about letting anyone down. Her heart thudded in her throat, but she didn’t run. The scarf now crumpled on the road had been knitted by her mom. Cancer had left Lily Paul bedridden. Wasted as she was by illness, she’d managed to finish the scarf and give it to Tessa for her birthday in December. It was the last birthday gift she’d ever receive from her mother and she wasn’t about to leave it.

  “How do you know my name?” Tessa demanded.

  “I’m a friend of your father’s.”

  Run.

  Tessa bolted for the scarf. The man ran toward her. As she reached down, the weight of her backpack tipped her off balance and she fell, clutching the soft yarn of the scarf to her chest. The stranger loomed above.

  “Stop!” she shouted. “What do you want?”

  “I want to help you up is what I want, g-g-g-girl.” The man held out his hand. Tessa crab-walked backward, never taking her eyes from him. He laughed. “Just like Lily. Just like her momma. A little fraidy bird.”

  Tessa blinked at the sound of her mom’s name. The stranger stayed where he stood and put his hands in the air as if in surrender. She stood.

  “I’m not scared of you,” she said, even as she took several steps back from him.

  “G-g-g-good.”

  “You knew my mom?” She wrapped the scarf around her neck, tamping down her long hair. The wind blew free small strands that flew about her eyes.

  “Her and Ron.”

  “Who’s Ron?”

  A stuttered noise of surprise came out of him. “Well,” he cleared his throat, “Ron’s your dad, Mary-Therese.”

  “My name is Tessa. Just Tessa.”

  “If you say so, Tessa.”

  “I don’t know my dad. And I don’t want to know him. If he sent you here–”

  “He can’t send me nowhere. He’s dead.”

  Dead. Her whole life she’d been told that she had no father. When Tessa was old enough to tell her mother that this was impossible, her mother had said that looking for her father would only bring a world of hurt. Lily Paul wore her love for her daughter like a too-strong perfume, overcompensating for the deficit of fatherly love in Tessa’s life. Curled on her hospice bed, a husk of her physical self, her mother had made Tessa promise that she’d never look for him. Of course she promised. Her mom had turned her life over to God and her daughter, and Tessa owed her. And yet when, after two years of constant sickness and struggle, Lily Paul died, Tessa experienced the briefest flicker of relief at no longer having to live in constant fear of disappointing her. In the four months since her mother’s death, Tessa had allowed herself to daydream about looking for her father. Now, learning that he was dead, she realized those daydreams were more than fantasy; they were the first steps of plan. The shocking news left Tessa feeling newly orphaned. Her eyes began to sting. A lump caught in her throat.

  “He died Sunday,” the man said. “Day before he went, Ron phoned me up personal, and t-t-t-t-told me I had to find you, t-t-t…” he shook his head, “break the news.”

  A wave of dizziness. Tessa put her fingertips to her forehead. “It’s a lot to take in,” she said.

  “You gonna be sick?”

  Drawing in several breaths of cool air, she straightened and regarded the man. He looked weak and cold, his jacket was too light for the weather. What would her mother do? On one hand, Lily Paul had trained her daughter too well to trust any male stranger. On the other, Tessa’s mom had devoted her life to the service of the poor and downtrodden through the church. This man looked like he needed food, a warm drink. Tessa mentioned a coffee shop near campus, one that was well-lit and would be filled with students who, like her up until tonight, were studying for their final exams this time of year. The man agreed to meet her there.

  The coffee shop was decorated with granny-like coziness, its wood-paneled walls hung with hung with handmade quilts. Tessa arrived first and worried that her father’s friend would feel out of place. Judging by his appearance, he’d be more at home loitering around a bus depot. What did this say about her father? Her mother had hinted at his badness. Before his mind was lost in the maze of dementia, her grandfather had never spoken of her father. Was he a drug addict? Some sort of scam artist? Had she handed him a dollar on a street corner without knowing it was him?

  Tessa ordered an apple cinnamon tea and impulse purchased an enormous banana chocolate chip muffin. Times of stress were the best times to eat. She found an empty table for two near the floor-to ceiling front windows. The table, she realized, was free because
it was a cold near the window.

  The outside world was dark and the big panes of glass reflected back the warm lights of the coffee shop and Tessa’s own reflection. Her skin was pale from a long winter spent studying indoors, completing her final year of graduate school. Her hair was nearly black, hanging in waves down her back and tangled from being blown about by the wind. Her eyes were a mossy green – the reason her mother had chosen the color of the scarf. The choice had surprised Tessa when she’d opened it. “You look so beautiful in green,” her mother used say when she wore the shade, though when she spoke the words, it sounded less like a compliment and more like fear. Lily Paul could find something to fear in everything related to her daughter.

  After fifteen minutes of waiting, Tessa saw her father’s friend ambling up the street toward the coffee shop. He’d walked; probably he didn’t own a car. She felt guilty. As soon as he stepped inside, Tessa leapt up to ask what he’d like. He requested hot chocolate. Caffeine kept him up all night, he said, though he looked like a man who’d had his share of all-nighters. When she brought back the drink he thanked her and gathered his hands around the large mug to collect its warmth. Her knee jogged up and down as she waited for him to finish blowing on his hot drink.

  “My name is Bert,” he began. “Ronnie Doucette, your dad, I met him when he came to town to work on the rigs. I grew up here, but Ronnie – he was from southern California. Wasn’t cut out for the weather. Winters are long here. But I guess you know that. Then he met your mom and, well.” Bert ventured a cautious sip of the hot chocolate. He eyed her carefully. “How much has your mom told you –”

  “Nothing,” she interrupted.

  “Well, I mostly lost touch with Ronnie after him and Lily moved to Vegas, but you know how it is with good friends you –”

  “Las Vegas?” Tessa interrupted. “My mom never left North Dakota.”

  At this, Bert started coughing and couldn’t stop. It was a wet cough from deep in his chest. When he finished he said, “I don’t know what to t-tell you, girl, except I knowed she lived in Vegas and you did too, ‘cause one time Ronnie paid me to drive the two of youse back there.”

  “I lived in Las Vegas? No, that’s wrong.”

  He held the palm of his rough hand up to her to stop her. “You’ll have to ask – well, you’ll have to find somebody to ask if you want more details. Not this guy.”

  Bert then launched into the story of how he’d found her. He’d gone to the old house where Tessa had grown up – the same house that her mother had grown up in. The new owner told him that the old owner had died and that her daughter had sold the house to pay for her college courses over at the state university. From there he’d done some asking around, lurking about the campus, until he found her. Tessa barely listened. She stared into her cup, and wishing for a gypsy to read the flecks of tea leaves at its bottom. When she looked up, she saw Bert eyeing her untouched banana muffin. She pushed the plate toward him and urged him to eat.

  “Supposebly they’re holding off on a funeral in Vegas until you can g-g-get there,” Bert said through a mouthful of muffin. “Will you?”

  Her father’s funeral. Las Vegas. It was more than she could commit to. “Will you be there?” she asked.

  “I’m on dialysis. I don’t travel no more.” A soggy piece of muffin fell from his mouth to the table. Tessa looked away.

  “I’m not sure that it’s appropriate for me to show up out of the blue,” she said carefully.

  “It would mean a lot to Ronnie to know you was there. Meant a lot.” Bert sniffed. Was he about to cry? Tessa offered him a napkin; Bert shook his head. “I know he promised Lily he’d leave the two of youse alone all these years and he honored that promise to her. He never had a bad word to say about your mother, I’ll testify to that.”

  “It’s comforting to know he had a friend like you,” she said.

  Digging around his pocket for something, Bert looked up to the overhead lights, the cords of his neck strained. Eventually he withdrew a piece of paper, squeezing it tight in his hand.

  “You have to go to the funeral.” He wore a pleading look. “When my kid needed an operation on his eye years back, I didn’t have no insurance and the only person I knew with money was your dad. I called him up, he sent me the money and he said, ‘Bert, don’t ever mention this again.’ So whatever you come to know about him, remember that. He weren’t all bad.”

  He held out the piece of paper from his pocket. Tessa accepted the damp scrap. There was a name – Harbach – and a phone number on it. Bert said it was for her father’s attorney. She held it for a moment before setting it on the table and pushing it toward him.

  “Please.” He looked worried. “If you just c-c-c-consider –”

  “It’s okay,” she reassured him as she unzipped the front pocket of her backpack and withdrew a pen. “I’m going to call.” She clicked the pen and held it out to him. “I need you to write down my father’s name. I’m sorry but I’ve already forgotten it.”

  2.

  After scribbling her father’s name and making Tessa promise she’d at least call the lawyer, Bert abruptly announced that he had to go meet with a man downtown concerning “business affairs.” He rose from the table, thanked her for the muffin and hot chocolate and left. What business affairs might a man like Bert have? Tessa couldn’t imagine anything beyond the buying or selling of drugs.

  Around her, students from the university were bent over text books, ear buds plugged in, eyes glazed. It took a second to realize that this part of her life – holed up in coffee shops and highlighting text books – was over. For six long years, life had been on hold while she was in school. Now she was free to do as she please.

  Remembering her friends, Tessa checked her phone and found a couple of texts asking where she was. She replied that something had come up and to have fun without her. There was no way she could go to the bar now. Not that her classmates would truly miss her. For years she’d skipped out on social engagements, heeding her mom’s advice to put school before parties and boyfriends. She left the coffee shop, got in her car and headed home.

  Home for Tessa was currently an apartment two miles from the coffee shop, a two-story brown-brick building called The Dakota Breezes. She’d lived in a studio there since January. In November, the doctors had told Tessa that her mom needed hospice care. There was no money for hospice, no money to pay for the expenses at her grandfather’s memory care nursing home, let alone have enough left over to pay tuition for Tessa’s final semester of school. The only real option was to sell the family house on Jack Pine Street, the one her mom had grown up in and where Lily, in turn, had raised Tessa.

  In those days, her mom was in and out of consciousness. On her good days, she told Tessa she was forbidden from selling the house.

  “There’s security there,” she’d murmur. “History is in the house. Our family.”

  In the days before her death, her mom had made Tessa promise not to sell the house on Jack Pine Street. “The house will protect you. Our special place,” she’d murmured. “It’s kept us safe.” Just as she’d sworn not to find her father, Tessa promised. She would’ve said anything to ease her mother’s suffering. The truth was, she’d already sold it.

  It turned out her mom was wrong anyway. During Lily’s funeral service vandals broke into the house and ransacked the place, stealing only the few items they could grab quickly. Finding the house trashed, Tessa had crawled into her special place. The special place was nothing more than a storage cubby under the stairs, but to Tessa as a girl the cubby had been a refuge, a private haven in a tiny house where solitude was scarce. After the funeral she’d curled up in a ball in the the special place and wept. Lily would never know that the house that had made her feel so secure was just as vulnerable as anywhere else.

  Tessa turned her key in the lock and stepped into her apartment. It was cold. Her hands trembled turning up the thermostat. No matter how many things she’d brought over from the house
– her grandfather’s big wing-backed chair, her mother’s rosary – the apartment felt nothing like a home. Shivering, she wrapped herself in one of her grandma’s quilts, parted the heavy curtains covering the balcony doors and sat in her grandpa’s chair. This was her favorite spot to read in the sun on Sunday afternoons. At night she liked to sit there and zone out watching traffic while reflecting on the day’s events.

  If what Bert had said was true, Ron Doucette’s name would be on her birth certificate. Was it possible she’d never actually seen her birth certificate? It was. Lily had been the sort of mom who’d anticipated her daughter’s needs before Tessa had a chance to – filling out school forms, making doctor’s appointments, offering to pick her up from college classes.

  Tessa toyed with the scrap of paper Bert had given her, reading the two men’s names. Calling the lawyer, not calling him – either decision would be catastrophic. Normally, when faced with a tough decision she asked herself what her mother would do. Her mother had the purest heart, was the most moral person Tessa knew. This time, that wouldn’t work. She knew exactly what her mother would do. But Lily Paul hadn’t lived her life wondering who her father was.

  A truck motored by on the street below her window, its taillights blurring into smears of red as tears filled her eyes. A fist banged on the door. Tessa jumped, clutching the quilt.

  “Tessa?” The voice belonged to her neighbor and classmate, Devashish. To be sure, she looked through the peep hole and there he was: lanky Dev, with his carefully blown out hair and perfectly groomed eyebrows, holding a plate with a brownie on it. “I know you’re in there so open the door. We’re supposed to be partying.”

  Undocking the deadbolt, Tessa swung the door open. “I don’t want to party,” she said.

  “I don’t want to party,” Dev imitated in a whiny voice as he pushed past her into the apartment. “Suck it up. It’s our last night of school forever.” He sat on her bed with the brownie plate on his lap. When she turned to face him, he cocked his head at her and narrowed his eyes. “You look upset.”