Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

  He returned to the house. The two women looked toward him as he hovered near the front door, his hand in his right pocket, curled around the Prius’ key. “Look, he said, “I know I said I’d help with this stuff, but there’s something I have to check out.”

  He could see the disappointment in Shawna’s face; the concern on Cynthia’s. “I thought …” Shawna began, then stopped. She looked toward Cynthia.

  “This is important?” Cynthia asked him. Tom nodded. “Then go on,” she told him with the hint of a smile. “I’ll stay here and help Shawna.”

  Tom glanced at Shawna; she nodded. “Thanks,” he told them both. He kissed Cynthia, hugged Shawna, and left.

  oOo

  The shabby TEMPORALLY FULL sign was still up at the garage when he arrived. He eased the Prius into the garage, took the ticket that was spat out at him at the gate, and entered. He circled up the ramp, watching the cars. Yes, as before, they seemed to become older as he rose. When he saw the red Corvette still snuggled in its space, he felt his vision shimmer, as if with a sudden dizziness.

  251 GHU. The license seemed to shout to him. Tom stopped the Prius just behind the Corvette, unbuckling and getting out to crouch at the back bumper. The decal in the lower right corner was dated 1992. Tom shook his head. Looking around—there was no sign of anyone about—he went to the driver’s door. “Never leave anything in your car worth stealing, boy, not unless you want trouble.” His father’s words. “Then you needn’t bother locking it either—that means no one’s going to smash your window or ruin the door trying to get in.”

  Tom tried the door; it opened. He slid behind the seat, inhaling the familiar scent of leather, polish, and the unfiltered Camel cigarettes his father always smoked, putting one hand on the four-speed stick shift and the other on the leather-wrapped steering wheel. It all felt as he remembered it, down to the fact the seat was slightly too far forward for him, set for a smaller man.

  A man like his father.

  Tom reached over to the map slot—there was no glove compartment—pulled out the registration card for the vehicle and scanned the name and address typed with a faded ribbon on the lines there: Roger Finnigan, 121 Nansen St. … His father’s name; his address. For a moment, the interior of the car swirled around him, fluid, and he had to close his eyes, pressing the card stock of the registration hard between his thumb and forefinger. This isn’t possible. This can’t be. He caught his upper lip in his teeth until the vertigo passed, and opened his eyes again. The name stubbornly remained. He tossed the card back into the map slot.

  His father had always been a man of habits; that was one of the minor traits that had driven a wedge between them. Tom was habitually late; his father was punctual to a fault, kept to his routines meticulously, and would become unfathomably (to Tom, anyway) enraged if those routines somehow fell apart. He left work every day at 5:30. He was always home by 6:00, as long as traffic didn’t interfere. Tom glanced at his phone: it was 5:10 now. He slid out of the Corvette’s seat and went back to the Prius. He’d wait. If this was somehow, miraculously, his father’s car, if this wasn’t an indication of a psychotic break on his part or a terrible prank by someone, then his father would be coming here in a few minutes.

  Tom didn’t know what would happen then, what he could possibly say in that impossible moment, in such an impossible second chance. He only knew that he had to stay, had to be here to find out.

  He waited until 5:30.

  5:45.

  6:00.

  In all that time, there was no activity in the garage at all. No one came to any of the cars. No other cars moved on the ramps. He was alone.

  At 6:10, Tom heaved a sigh. He reached into the bottom glove compartment of the Prius and found the notebook and pen Cynthia had shoved in there. With the notebook propped against the steering wheel, he wrote a letter to his father.

  Dad, it began simply, but once he started, everything came tumbling out from under the pen: his anger and resentment, all the pent-up emotions from their estrangement, the regret that they’d never reconciled, that he hadn’t been able to be there at the end, the wish that sometime, somehow, they might have reached out to each other and worked their way through the pain to some understanding.

  Dad—I wish you could have known how I felt, how much all this hurt me as much as it might have hurt you. I wish you knew how much I regret all that wasted time.

  It was 6:35 as he finished. Wiping at his eyes, he tore the pages from the notebook and folded them. Going back to the Corvette, he opened the driver’s door again and put the folded note on the leather passenger seat. He stood there for several minutes, just looking down at the car, at the letter. This is stupid. This isn’t his car, can’t be his car. This is a delusion. You’re on the edge of cracking up, and the longer you stay here, the worse it’s getting.

  Back in the Prius, he stared again at the Corvette, which stubbornly refused to vanish. Then he put his foot on the brake, pressed the power button, and put the car in gear.

  He drove away.

  oOo

  The next day was interminable. At the funeral home, he stood with Shawna and Cynthia as a shuffling line of his father’s friends, old neighbors, and former co-workers shook their hands and muttered meaningless platitudes about how much they were going to miss Roger.

  Miss him? I ran away from him. That’s what he wanted to tell them through the forced smile.

  At the cemetery, with Cynthia’s arm linked tightly through his and Shawna standing at his other side, they watched as the priest spoke a few words about someone who was a stranger to Tom, then intoned a blessing over the casket. Tom looked more at the headstone at the head of his father’s open grave, the family name Finnigan carved on a ribbon with roses at either end; on one side: Camille G, Feb. 12, 1951 - Sept. 9, 1984, on the other Roger A., June 1949 - with the death date still blank. Centered beneath both panels: Married June 15, 1974. Shriveled flowers drooped in the vase below his mother’s name; Tom wondered who’d put them there, and when.

  Afterward, the funeral director dismissed the onlookers to allow the workers to place the casket in the waiting hole. “You okay, Tom?” Cynthia asked him.

  “Not really,” he said, honestly. “Look, I feel like I’d like to be alone for a bit. Shawna, could you give Cynthia a ride back to the house? You guys go on. Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll come out and help you guys finish sorting through things.”

  Cynthia’s hand stroked the shoulder of his suit coat. “Are you sure, darling? I could stay with you, and we could just sit quietly if that’s what you want. Here or wherever.”

  He took her hand and brought her to him, hugging her hard and kissing the top of her head. “Thanks,” he husked out, “but no. I just … I just want to have some private time. I’ll be okay, I promise.”

  Her green-blue eyes lifted to regard him, searching his face. Then she rose up on her toes and kissed him. “If that’s what you need,” she said. “We’ll be waiting for you. Got your cell?”

  He nodded. “I do, and it’s on. See you soon …”

  He watched Cynthia and Shawna walk away with the rest of the small knot of well-wishers. He leaned against a tree on a small rise above the grave, staring without really seeing as the funeral home staff gathered up the flowers and wheeled the now empty casket carrier back to the hearse. They drove away as the cemetery workers winched the casket slowly down into the grave, removed their equipment, and directed the backhoe operator to move the earth back into the grave from the mound alongside. They began dismantling the temporary tent over the site.

  It was all so ordinary for them. They weren’t disrespectful at all, but this was just a job to which they had no personal connection. Twenty minutes later, they too left. Tom walked back down the slope to the new grave, to the raw earth flattened and marked with the backhoe’s tracks. He sniffed, looking down at his father’s last resting place, but there were no tears. There hadn’t been any tears, not when he’d been told about his fa
ther’s impending death over the phone, not when he’d hugged Shawna after they first arrived, not when he saw his father in the casket, looking like a waxen stranger on the satin cushions, not during the funeral ceremony. Yes, the grief had threatened a few times, but he’d been able to hold it back. All he had to do was remember the bad times, the arguments, the fights, and any sorrow was flayed to shreds.

  He found himself dry-eyed entirely, staring at the grave, and he wondered why.

  He was my father. There should be grief. There should be sorrow. It’s bothering me enough underneath that I somehow imagined seeing that goddamn old car of his.

  No. … There was only the simmering, diffuse anger.

  That last night, when he came at me and hit me and I realized that I was this close to letting go and beating him in return, that if there’d been a knife or a baseball bat at hand for him or for me, something worse could happen. … I knew I had to leave.

  “The problem was, Dad, that we were too much alike, at least in some ways. At least that’s the conclusion I’ve come to: both of us were too stubborn and too convinced we were right to ever apologize, to try to get past the arguments and fights.” The words sounded odd, spoken into the hush of the cemetery. He almost laughed. “God, that sounds maudlin, and you always made fun of people who got all sentimental—which is why I always thought it was so strange that you’d go out and buy that damn Corvette and fix it up.” Tom shook his head. “I never understood you. You should have come up to Chicago to visit us; I should have come back to Cincinnati when I first heard you were sick. Now it’s too late, and I’m sorry for that, Dad. I really am.”

  He looked up. The Prius waited for him on the winding blacktop road up the slope. “Goodbye, Dad. Wherever you are, I hope you’re finally happy, because I have no memories of you ever being that way.”

  There were still no tears. His eyes remained stubbornly dry. Tom shook his head and walked up the hill toward the car.

  oOo

  Cynthia glanced up from the box she was filling as Tom entered, brushing back her hair behind her ear. She’d changed from the dress she’d worn at the funeral to jeans and T-shirt. “Hey,” she said softly. “You look exhausted.”

  “It’s been a tough day all around,” he answered. He could hear Shawna working in the next room. All the useless kipple we collect in life. … He wanted to say more, to tell Cynthia about watching the final burial and his thoughts at the gravesite, about going back to the garage and writing the note that was undoubtedly sitting in some stranger’s car. But he couldn’t find a way to start. He just stood there, his hands in his pockets.

  Cynthia closed the top of the box she was packing and ran the tape gun over the flaps, the tape tearing away from the roll with a sound like ripping fabric. She laid the tape gun on top and uncapped a permanent marker. He could smell its astringent odor as she scribbled on the lid. “I brought a change of clothes for you, love,” she told him. “They’re up in your dad’s bedroom. I thought you’d want to get out of the suit before you started helping us. Goodwill’s coming tomorrow to pick up most of this stuff, and Shawna’s taking some of your mother’s old china.” She handed him an empty box. “Here. While you’re up there, you should put anything you want to keep in this.”

  He nodded. He watched her for a few more seconds, then turned and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  The bedroom was as cluttered and dirty as the rest of the house. The dresser on one side of the room had two drawers open, with clothing and underwear half pulled out as if his father had left it that way after finding what he wanted to wear. The bed was unmade, the pillowcase stained and old, though Cynthia had straightened the covers at the foot of the bed and laid out his jeans, a shirt, and sneakers there. As he changed his clothes, he glanced around. Pill bottles—some open, some not—lined the nightstand. A desk sat across from the bed, piled with papers and bills; Tom could see his father’s checkbook on top of one of the piles.

  He knew that Shawna had power of attorney for his father; she’d be the one to have to deal with the bills and his checking account.

  After changing, he sat on the desk chair, spinning around once lazily. He wondered what Cynthia had thought he might want to take back with them from the room. Certainly not clothing; his father had been shorter and significantly more stout that Tom. The furniture here dated back several decades. None of it had ever belonged to him.

  The chair stopped with Tom facing the desk again. He opened the middle drawer; it was stuffed full with old pencils, pens, rulers, scissors, staples, ancient checking account statements, and the like. He tried one of the pens on a piece of paper—it didn’t write. The staples were rusted; the scissors dull with the tips broken off.

  Junk. Shabby and decrepit, like the rest of his father’s life. He opened the side drawers: papers, bills, folders with scribbled hints as to their contents on top. Then, in the bottom left drawer …

  The envelope had “Tom Finnigan” scrawled in pencil, along with his Chicago address, as if his father had intended to mail it to him, but there was no stamp on the envelope. He reached down and plucked it from the pile of old medical receipts on which it rested, turning it in his hand, a plain, undistinguished #10 business envelope. He could feel pages inside. Tearing open a corner of the flap, he ran his finger along the seam to open it. He pulled out the papers inside, held together with a bent paperclip. The paper itself was from a cheap notebook: brown along the edges, brittle, and foxed here and there with splotches, while another thin strip of different and newer paper was folded on top of the main sheets. Tom opened the pages and glanced at the handwriting there.

  Stopped.

  His own handwriting stared back at him: the note he’d written yesterday. Dad — I wish you could have known how I felt …

  The paper rattled in his hand as he put it down on the desk. He flipped through the two pages of scribbling to the paper at the back. A different hand had written the words there, dating it at the top: June 15, 2013—last year, when his father had finally junked the wrecked Corvette.

  I found this while going through the car one last time. Don’t worry, Tom. I knew before you told me.

  He sat there for several minutes, just breathing and staring at the typically brief note, before pushing away from the desk and rushing back downstairs. Cynthia looked up at him wide-eyed as he half-ran toward the door. “I’ll be back soon,” he told her. “Don’t worry.”

  oOo

  He headed south. Toward downtown.

  Toward the garage.

  He found himself squinting as he approached the edifice and turned into the entrance. The sign was gone. The wooden barrier of the entrance gate was broken, most of it missing. A grimy temporary booth sat alongside the useless gate, the glass smeared and filthy. A bored-looking teenager sporting dreadlocks leaned out from the booth, setting down his smartphone next to the cash register. “Five bucks,” he said, holding out his hand. Ahead of him, the stalls Tom could see were all vacant.

  Tom reached for his wallet. “What happened to all the cars?” he asked the kid as he fished out a bill. “The auto show over or something?” The only response was a puzzled shaking of the kid’s head. “Yesterday, you were all full,” Tom continued in explanation. “Lots of old cars.”

  The kid stared at Tom as if he’d suddenly grown horns. He didn’t touch the bill Tom was holding out toward him. “Mister, this place ain’t never been anywhere near full in the two months I’ve worked here.” He waved at the empty spaces beyond the gate. “It looks just like this every damn day. Hell, they’re tearing the place down next month for some new office building—which is fine by me. I don’t know where you think you were at yesterday, but it weren’t here.” He glanced at the fiver Tom was still holding out toward him. “You sure you still wanna park here, buddy?”

  He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. “Take it,” he told the kid, who shrugged and hit the register, handing Tom a receipt.

  “Par
k where you want—you pretty much got your pick.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Just put the receipt on the dash.”

  Tom tossed the receipt onto the dashboard and touched the accelerator. There were a few cars on the lowest level, but the vast majority of the spaces were open. He took the ramp up to the next level, the level where the Corvette had been. The garage echoed to the sound of his tires and whine of the engine that kicked in as the car climbed. That level was entirely empty, as was the next one.

  He stopped the car, putting it in park in the middle of the lane and hitting the power button to turn off the car. He slumped back into his seat.

  The cars were here. We saw them. Cynthia saw them, too, the first time. It was this place, the place where Dad always parked. It had to be.

  Except that this place was empty: of cars, of memories. The garage was vacant of life.

  There was nothing here. He wasn’t even sure why he’d wanted to come here again, what he’d expected to gain even if the red Corvette had still been sitting there. Another cryptic note? Another whisper? A pathway to communicate with his father?

  His letter, impossibly aged, and his father’s note sat accusingly on the passenger seat.

  The Corvette had been there. It had been.

  Tom jabbed angrily at the blue power button, watching as the dash lights came on in response. He went to toggle the car into drive, but stopped. The garage outside the window was swimming in his vision, and he sobbed once, hard.

  Clenching the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, leaning back against the headrest, Tom allowed the tears to finally come.

  NOTES AND QUERIES

  by Juliet E. McKenna

  “Thank you.” As the last chord of their song echoed around the medieval masonry, Ellie smiled at the mum dropping coins into her guitar case.