Frank would cast timid glances in Cindy’s direction and see the gentle sweep of Jake’s beauty in her nose and cheekbones. She forced him to remember everything. How she walked him to school in his uniform, Jake walking with such solemnity Frank had rarely been able to watch them go without a goofy smile spreading across his face. How she had taken him shopping and slid him into the seat of the cart with the kind of ease at which Frank could only marvel. How she had made him toast with melted chocolate on top, each crust removed to such exacting standards it was like watching a surgeon removing a heart.
For Cindy it was even worse; Jake looked so like his father in appearance it was as much as she could do to look upon Frank for anything but a few seconds at a time. The likeness was almost unnatural. They used to fool around that Jake wasn’t Frank’s son at all; he was a pod person who would grow up to make all the same mistakes that Frank had made, a joke that now seemed in the worst possible taste. When Cindy looked at Frank, she was reminded of Jake’s smile, of how strangely blue his eyes were; of how much she had loved them, and now, with hope rotting and her marriage on the rocks, how much she missed them both, the smaller one following the larger one like a shadow, leaping into his giant footprints, fascinated by where the next step might lead.
* * *
Frank was in the study, staring at a picture of Cindy and Jake. He was drinking Jack Daniel’s and letting the slow burn of the liquor clear his mind. The photograph had been taken over a year ago, when they had still been a family; both Cindy and Jake were staring into the camera, their hair scarecrowing behind them in the wind, squealing their delight as Frank played the fool on the other side of the lens. He couldn’t remember where the photo had been taken, only that his wife and son looked happy; purely and unequivocally happy.
He took another long sip of the bourbon, seeking clarity, and squinted at the photograph. Had they really been happy? Or were they just mugging for the camera, a momentary burst of artificial happiness to cement in the mind a memory of what was expected of them, of what they’d hoped the outing to be? He looked closer, but still couldn’t determine whether the pleasure was genuine. It looked real, but that was exactly the point: it was designed to. It was a posed image of frozen time, the smiles held in place for no more than a fraction of a second, before being whipped away by the wind. This is what haunted him. Not that the image was contrived; but that somewhere along the way his family’s happiness had been reduced to something flat and insincere, fabricated smiles that looked obscenely wide, as though they had been painted on for the photograph and then immediately washed away.
The photo of his wife and son was a fake. They hadn’t been happy. Not then; not ever. The more he stared at the image the more appalled he became. They looked hysterical, even mildly insane.
Smile, please! Smile… Just fucking smile, okay…
He tried desperately to remember the day the photograph was taken, but, like so much of his past, he had taken it for granted and failed to preserve it intact. How long had they held their smiles for? How long had he kept them waiting?
He sipped at the bourbon. It was hard to remember why it mattered, but he knew there had been a reason why he’d picked this picture above the others. Was it because it was so beautiful? Because when he looked at it, he wanted to break down and cry till the heartache and the hurt disappeared?
He shook his head and flung back the remainder of the drink. He was misremembering things, constructing something that never was, based on a single disingenuous image. What about the soggy weather and the endless rows about where to go next? Wasn’t that a more real memory? A more empowering reminder of how it had been? The smiles were fake; they had been a deception of his own making. He had set up the whole fucking shot, forcing them to grin like loons, desperate to have a keepsake of something that existed only in the cooling dust in his head.
He took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair. He held the picture tightly in his hand. He looked down at his family and felt a stirring around his mouth. He touched his lips. There was a looseness to the flesh that he liked. He plunged into himself unknowingly. Felt the broad shadow of something tease itself from the dark. He yearned to bring a smile to its face.
* * *
Frank hadn’t spoken to Cindy in nearly two months, but the urge to do so overwhelmed him almost every night. Depending on how much he’d had to drink, how maudlin he felt, and when last he’d heard the sound of his own voice, he would weigh the phone in his hand and consider his options. The last time they’d spoken had been calamitous. Long stretches of silence mutating into simmering disapproval. It had been ghastly and neither of them had been in any hurry to do it again. Jake’s absence felt more definitive than his presence ever had, and neither Frank nor Cindy was sufficiently stable to confront the consequences of this in terms of their relationship. But late at night, when the drink had frazzled his brain and Frank remembered what it had been like to have a wife to lie next to in bed, and a son to cradle in his arms, that’s when the impulse to call became too much.
He sat on the floor with his back to the sofa and stared at the phone. He missed her so much; almost as much as Jake. He scrolled through the menu, found her name and hit the dial button. When she answered, he felt sick and knew instantly that he’d made a mistake.
“Hello?”
Frank paused. He had no idea what it was he wanted to say. So many options unravelled in his brain, but not one of them seemed appropriate.
“Frank?”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “I just thought I’d call. You know, to see how you’re doing? I worry about you.”
He could hear Cindy turning over any number of possible replies. She settled for something neutral, something bland: “I worry too,” she said.
“What about?”
“How you’re coping with things. Jerry tells me you’re drinking heavily. Says he’s seen you wandering the streets late at night.”
Jerry was a neighbor a few doors down; Cindy used to listen to him gossip about people in the community. He’d have to remember to take a piss on the nosy little cunt’s door next time he was walking the streets.
“It’s nothing,” Frank said. “It just helps me think. Clears the head a little.”
“The drinking or the walking?”
“One usually leads to the other, so I guess both.”
“Have you been drinking tonight, Frank?”
He didn’t like the sour note of censure in her voice and felt a suitably churlish response echo inside his head, which he just about managed to suppress.
“A little,” he said. “Probably not enough to make a difference.”
“It’s late,” Cindy said. “Perhaps we could do this another time.”
Frank closed his eyes; followed the thread of her voice down the last ten months to the day when Jake disappeared. She sounded impossibly small and remote.
“I miss him,” Frank said, breathing heavily. “I miss him so much.”
“Frank…”
“Every time I blink I wonder if I’ve missed something, if there’s something more we could have done…”
“Frank, please…” Cindy whispered. “I can’t do this anymore…”
“We don’t have a choice,” Frank said, the phone trembling in his hand. “This is all we have left. Don’t you see that? Haven’t you fucking realized yet what we’ve become?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone as Frank wept into the handset. He was mildly surprised that she hadn’t already hung up; was curious to know what was keeping her on the line. When he’d recovered his composure, he said: “You still there?”
He heard her sigh and detected a tremor in her throat, the prelude to something more direct, more difficult to articulate over the phone.
“You have to stop this,” she said, talking slowly, enunciating the words as if to a child. “I haven’t the energy for it, Frank. Neither of us have. We’ve got to try and move forward, even if it’s only small steps,
one day at a time. That doesn’t mean we have to stop loving him. We just have to try harder. That’s all. Otherwise, Jake’s abduction will be the only thing any of us have left.”
Cindy was crying now, long, drawn-out sobs that punctuated her speech. After a while the tears began to overwhelm her and she wept freely down the phone, serving only to remind Frank of the distance between them.
“I don’t think I can do it alone,” he said softly, admitting something that terrified him beyond measure.
He heard Cindy blow her nose and collect herself. He remembered how strong she could be, how tenaciously she navigated whatever adversity was thrown in her path.
“We don’t have a choice,” she said, quietly returning to him his own judgement. “Good-bye, Frank.”
She hung up. He listened to the phone flatline in his ear.
* * *
Ten months, ten days and seventeen hours after Jake was abducted, Frank saw his son walking along the side of the road. He felt a depth charge detonate deep inside his head. His hands on the steering wheel were still. He heard the rainwater on the roof of the car. He saw the lights of the bright town in the distance, flickering in the fading light.
He closed his eyes and smiled. Something within him stirred. He knew instantly what had to be done.
CHAPTER 6: I SEE MY DADDY, MY DADDY SEES ME
Mack sat in his room watching the birds in the garden swoop across the graying sky. He envied them their freedom sometimes; watched them with covetous eyes, imagining himself towering high above the world, gliding effortlessly from tree to tree. He watched a cloud of blackbirds sweep across the sky and wondered where they were heading. They all looked exactly the same, jet-black with oily eyes and deadly yellow beaks. They reminded him of Dark Daddy, and he pictured something made of feathers and brown earth crawling towards him up the stairs.
There was a gentle knock at the door and one of the daddies in white coats entered. His face quivered in the evening light as Mack’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. For a moment Daddy’s face looked like a Polaroid being slowly seduced from the darkness, reacting with the chemicals in the air. Then—almost without being aware of it—the features were fixed, and Daddy placed his tray of food on the bed.
“Hope you’re hungry,” Daddy said. He reached behind Mack’s head and unclamped the silicone mask that protected the lower half of his face. Daddy placed it in a clear, gelid solution in a bowl on the nightstand. This was to keep it clean, Mack had been told; he was supposed to store the mask in the solution every night, but he sometimes forgot and would wake up with it still clamped to his face. His dreams always seemed to be sweeter with the mask in place, though when he explained this to one of his daddies, they looked irritated and scolded him for keeping it on.
“Is it pizza?” Mack said, allowing Daddy to tuck a napkin into the top of his shirt.
“Not even close,” Daddy said. It was a question Mack asked regularly, but the concentrated aperture of his mouth restricted him to a very particular diet, one that consisted mostly of mashed-up potato and veg. Mack complained about it to his daddies every day, but ate it anyway, sucking up the compound through a straw.
“I’ve been watching the birds,” he said, letting Daddy wipe the slop from the pink tissue around his mouth. “I like how they fly without crashing into one another. They go so fast it makes my head spin.”
Daddy glanced out the window and shrugged. “Birds are stupid,” he said, which didn’t sound like something Daddy would say. Mack watched him closely and, for a brief moment, his skin seemed to slide backwards, showing the mottled bulge of a heavily made-up face underneath. He saw dark, mistrustful eyes full of disdain and bright red lips. He tried hard to hold the image in place.
“All done?” the lips asked, and the features recalibrated, Daddy’s familiar face displacing the tired outline of the nurse.
“For now,” Mack said. “Thank you.”
Daddy, dressed all in white like a dove, removed the napkin, lifted the tray and left the room.
* * *
Much later, after Mack had taken a nap, he glanced across at the nightstand and saw a white envelope propped against the upright of his lamp. Written on the front in black ink was his own name: Mack. When he reached for it and held it in his hand, he frowned. Too light for currency; even a letter would have sat heavier in his hand. He tore it open and reached inside. He pulled out a 6x4 photograph of a man and a single sheet of paper, roughly the same size but folded neatly in half.
Mack stared at the photograph and tried to determine its significance. The man was about thirty years old, agreeable in his way, if a little plain, with sideburns as dark as anvils and a pinched, unsmiling mouth. His eyes stared into the camera with a look of open defiance, challenging the photographer to tease anything of note from such an unresponsive pose.
Mack continued to stare at the picture for several seconds, trying to work out why such a thing might have been entrusted to him. If he’d ever seen the man before, he had no recollection of it. Mack often had a tenuous grasp of the past, but this man, forever fixed in faded emulsion, was either someone he’d never met or else someone he’d emphatically forgot.
He placed the photograph on the bed and picked up the folded sheet of paper. He opened it and saw Dr. Faber’s idiosyncratic handwriting. The note read: Mack, bring the photo to our session this evening. It might help. The clipped signature simply read: Dr F.
Mack put the paper to one side and took another look at the photograph. It rested in his hand, but the man’s features remained alien to him, floating in and out of focus like smoke. If there had been anything to remember, he felt unusually confident that it would have come back to him. Seeing the blackbirds wheeling beyond the trees had been like staring into Daddy’s face, the profile never settling, never fully inhabiting its own configuration, as though it had long decided it would take a multitude for its true form to be disclosed.
Mack replaced the picture and the note in the envelope and watched three of his daddies through the window smile at him as they tidied the yard.
SESSION #F001/625
Wednesday 7th September, 17:30PM
Attending Physicians: Dr. Kincaid, Dr. Faber.
Faber: Ah, Mack! It’s good to see you. Please. Take a seat.
Mack: I’ve never been in this room. It’s different. The walls are painted blue.
Faber: Does that bother you?
Mack: Not really. It’s like we’re floating in the sky.
Faber: Nicely put. I see you found my little note. Thank you for bringing it with you this evening.
Mack: You made it sound like it was important.
Faber: Don’t you think it is?
Mack: I have no idea. You must have sent it for a reason, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Kincaid: Would you take out the photograph, Mack?
Mack: You can have it if you want. It looks old.
Kincaid: No, you keep it. We thought you might find it interesting.
Mack: The man looks angry. Like he doesn’t want the picture to be taken.
Kincaid: What else do you see?
Mack: He’s holding something. It looks like a spade. Maybe he’s been digging.
Kincaid: Do you recognize him, Mack?
Mack: I don’t think so. Should I?
Kincaid: It’s a picture of your father. We found it in storage among your personal belongings.
Mack: [Smiling] That can’t be true.
Kincaid: Why not?
Mack: Because you’re my daddy, silly. You’ve always been my daddy.
Faber: You don’t recognize this man at all? Look closely, Mack.
Mack: I have. I’ve never seen him before. Perhaps he’s somebody else’s daddy and you’ve made a mistake.
Faber: Can you describe your daddy for me?
Mack: Course I can. He has black hair and blue eyes. His face is sometimes dark and stubbly.
Faber: Can you describe the man in the picture?
&
nbsp; [Pause]
Mack: He has black hair.
Faber: What else?
[Pause]
Mack: Lots of people look like Daddy. Sometimes I get confused.
Kincaid: That’s alright, Mack. We all get a little confused sometimes. What we want to do is show you how to deal with that more effectively.
Mack: What do you mean?
Kincaid: Well, sometimes, after an accident or a long illness, the processing speed of the brain can be damaged. This can lead to memory malfunction and deficiencies in visual identification. Remember? We talked about it last time you were here.
Mack: Does that mean I don’t remember my daddy?
Faber: No. If anything, you remember him a little too well. It means when you see him, he isn’t really there. It’s just your brain playing tricks, receiving the wrong message. Does that make sense?
Mack: But Daddy’s always there. He has to be. Without him I’d be all alone.
Kincaid: [Holding up the photograph] The man in the picture is your daddy, Mack. Nobody else. This is what he looks like. Remember?
[Pause]
Mack: Is he in disguise?
Kincaid: No. You just don’t recognize him because your memories are being filtered incorrectly. Your delusion is keeping your daddy alive because that’s what you need. It’s controlling a very selective part of what you see.
Dark Father Page 6
