A Father At Last (16 page)

As the years passed, he’d grown taller and broader, and by Year Thirteen, their last year at high school, he was a full head taller than her. A man, not a boy anymore. And still the resemblance to Dylan was there for anyone to see who looked.

She slammed the album shut. All the class photos would have to go. God, why did life have to be so complicated?

She must have been deep in thought, because she didn’t hear Tamara arriving until her friend was calling out at the open back door and walking into the kitchen. Quickly, she pulled several sections of yesterday’s
Herald
over the old newspaper clippings.

“Thought you might be lonely with Dylan being away so I got us some muffins to have with a nice cup of tea,” Tamara said. “Then maybe we could go for a walk on the Julie Mac

beach?”

“Great idea.” Kelly pushed back her chair and headed for the kitchen bench. “I’ll make the tea. Go and sit on the deck where it’s cool and I’ll bring it out.”

But Tamara sat herself at the kitchen table and while Kelly prepared two mugs of tea, they chatted. Then Kelly heard newspapers being moved around and Tamara went silent.

“What’s all this, Kelly?” she asked, in an odd voice. “This man in these old clippings, this Gerry Atkinson, he has the same name as you.”

Kelly bowed her head, then turned to face Tamara, one of her closest friends. They’d chummed up at university in Dunedin on the very first day at the student hostel—Kelly had come down from Auckland, Tamara from a remote farming community on the West Coast.

Neither knew anyone else there, both were enrolled to study law. They became firm friends and had remained that way, even after graduation, when Tamara’s first job took her to Christchurch, and Kelly moved back to Auckland. She’d been over the moon last year when her friend took a job as a corporate lawyer in Auckland.

But she’d never told her the truth about her father.

She took a deep breath and moved toward the table with the two mugs of tea.

“He’s my dad. Gerry Atkinson, that man in the old newspaper clippings, he’s my father.”

She expected Tamara to look shocked, but she merely nodded, said, “Okay…” and started reading the clippings.

Kelly sat down and waited. Her old school friends, of course, knew all about her father, but there were only a few she kept in touch with these days, and they never mentioned him. She’d never told anyone at uni. Neither had she told the new friends she’d made since. Not the truth anyway.

“I’m so sorry, Tamara.” She reached out and touched her friend’s hand.

“What for?” asked Tamara softly.

“I lied to you all those years ago, and kept on lying. Dad did these things—” she waved her hand in the direction of the clippings, “—but I was ashamed and embarrassed, so I lied about it.”

Tamara watched her, her brown eyes steady, her expression calm. She said nothing.

Kelly asked, “Do you remember the conversation we had about our backgrounds, our families and stuff, that very first night at the student hostel?”

“Yes, I do,” said Tamara. “Very clearly.”

“I said I’d lost both my parents,” continued Kelly. “You asked how, and I said my mother had died of cancer and my father had died in a car crash. That was the first time I’d A Father at Last

said that, but I found afterwards that it was a good answer if people probed, because they very rarely asked for more details.”

“And do you remember what I said?”

“You said you knew what that felt like because you’d also lost a parent in a car accident.”

“I lied, too.”

“What?” Kelly was shocked.

“My mum, she was an alcoholic,” said Tamara, very matter‐of‐factly. “She tried to give up, but on her own, and it was too hard. She felt like a failure. It was true that she died in a car. But it wasn’t an accident—the car wasn’t moving. She committed suicide.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Tam. That’s awful. I’m so, so, sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Tamara smiled sadly. “Back then, when we’d just met? You’d just told me you’d lost both parents, one through illness, one through accident. How could I tell you I’d lost a parent through her own deliberate act of self‐destruction? It happened when I was fifteen, and I was still angry with her when I started university. It seemed like such a selfish thing to do, hurting so many people around her.”

“Then later,” said Kelly slowly, “later, you probably did what I did, and found it easier to go on letting people believe the lie.”

Tamara nodded. “Exactly.”

“Maybe it’s time for us both to tell the truth,” said Kelly.

It was a hot summer’s day, with a pesky nor’‐easterly blowing across the cemetery, setting the leaves clacking and rustling in the big old poplars in the bottom corner.

Kelly spread a rug on the grass and sat down by her mother’s grave. It was Monday and she was in her work clothes—beige linen textured pants and short‐sleeved turquoise cotton top with tiny pleats down the front. Normally, if her mother’s birthday fell on a weekday, she made this pilgrimage to the cemetery after work, accompanied by Dylan. But this time, Dylan was away in Australia. Besides, she had a client to see at five, so she’d taken a long lunch break instead to make the forty‐minute drive out to the little country cemetery north of the city.

She sat with her legs out‐stretched on the rug, resting her weight on her arms, her face upturned to the sun and her eyes closed. It was easy to hear Mum’s voice when she was here in the cemetery, with no other living soul near, and the only sounds, the wind and the occasional contented murmur from the cattle grazing in the paddock next door.

Established on top of a hill by the farming pioneers who settled this area from the Julie Mac

middle of the nineteenth century, the cemetery was plain and sparse, some of the headstones dilapidated and crumbling away, with little in the way of the fancy gardens, white picket fences and memorial walls a more sophisticated city cemetery might boast.

But there was a serenity about the place that Kelly liked. Her ancestors—her mother’s ancestors—were here, the brave pioneers who came from Ireland a hundred and fifty years ago to forge a new life in a young land. And after them, the two generations of progeny who’d kept the family name alive in the district until Kelly’s grandfather, an only son, had left to find work in the South Island during the Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties and founded his own dynasty at the other end of the country.

The graves of her forebears were here, close to Mum’s, and Kelly found comfort in that fact every time she left the graveyard.

She opened her eyes and watched a butterfly dipping and swooping around the pretty little posy of flowers she’d picked from her garden this morning and placed in a small vase on the gravestone. In a few days, she’d return to take away the blooms before they withered and died.
A grave adorned with dead flowers looked terribly bleak.

Sometimes when she visited the cemetery on her mother’s birthday, there’d be a single red rosebud on the grave. “From one of her old friends,” she’d tell Dylan. The rosebud wasn’t there this time, and in a way, she was glad. Invariably, the sight of that perfect bloom, her mother’s favourite, the choice for her wedding bouquet, made her feel sad beyond words, but angry at the same time.

She heard a vehicle pull up in the car park on the other side of the cemetery, car doors opening and closing, and loud voices. She turned and raised her hand in a friendly wave. She didn’t know the family—parents and a collection of children—but they gave her a wave as they headed for a grave up in the top corner.

It was obviously a quick visit, because soon she heard the family loading up into their car again, and driving off down the road.

“Just you and me, Mum.” She breathed in deeply and let her mind drift. Funny how it seemed able to empty of extraneous thoughts when she was here, to be replaced with the clearest memories.

Some stirred sorrow like a restless tide, but others made her smile, like the one flooding her brain now: Mum working in her vegetable garden, singing, Dad working beside her, singing too. Both had good voices—that’s how they met, singing in a high school band.

Often, they’d sing along to a cassette tape blaring from the player in the kitchen.

Mum’s all‐time favourite tape was an early Simon and Garfunkel album. Kelly had asked the undertakers to play
The Sound of Silence
at her mother’s funeral.

That moment was clear in her mind, poignant but beautiful. She started singing the song now, softly, and fancied she could hear her mother’s voice giving strength to her own.

After the first few words,
she paused, feeling slightly foolish. She hadn’t inherited the singing gene. But there were only the butterflies and birds and cows to hear her, and if she closed her eyes, she could see her mother smiling her encouragement. So she took a A Father at Last

breath, deep into her diaphragm, and resumed.

Then a strange thing happened. She fancied she could hear a man’s voice, soft but true, join hers.

She stopped singing, but the man’s voice continued; she saw her mother’s smile widen and change, and she was looking past Kelly into the cemetery beyond.

Kelly opened her eyes.

She turned her head and he was there.

Dad.

She didn’t know whether she’d said the word out loud or in her head. But he was there, just four paces away, real, not a vision.

She gasped and her hand flew up to her mouth.

‘Dad.’ This time she made sure she said the word aloud. But it came from her mouth shakily, like a sob.

He wasn’t a figment of her imagination because the breeze was ruffling his fair wavy hair a little.

It was thick hair, just as it had always been—he wasn’t going thin on top as most of her friends’ fathers were. Nor had his hair gone grey. But his neatly trimmed beard, once bright russet, was now silver.

He was dressed simply, in a T‐shirt and jeans, and he carried a single red rosebud.

He said nothing, nor did he move. Kelly thought she could see the bright sheen of unshed tears in his eyes. She stood up and stepped from the rug onto the grass, facing him, close, but not close enough to touch. She was aware of the sounds in the silence of the cemetery: the wind in the trees, birds singing, her own breath, quickened with emotion.

In the last two days, since Ben had suggested she meet her father on Wednesday, she’d wondered what she would feel when she first saw him again. Nervous? Awkward?

Embarrassed? But all she felt now was golden light surging through her.

He looked like Dad, the old Dad, fit and strong, the one she remembered before the trouble, except for the silver beard and the deep furrows in his forehead, and she wanted to step forward and hug him, as she had when she was a child, but she wasn’t a kid anymore and she’d treated him badly these last few years. In the last two days, she’d agonised about what she would say when she saw him.

Hello, Dad, we’re both adults. Let’s put the past behind us and move on.

Or,
you do understand, don’t you, that I was justifiably angry at what you did?
Or maybe,
I didn’t want my son to be embarrassed by having an ex‐prison inmate for a
grandfather.

Now she knew none of those words were right. The anger was gone, dissipated on Julie Mac

the breeze. He was her father, she was his daughter, end of story. She opened her mouth, but no words formed. Then he spoke.

“You were off‐key, Kelly. I’ll have to give you some singing lessons.”

She laughed out loud and the golden light filled every corner of her being.
‘I’ll have
to give you some singing lessons.’
He was thinking of them, him and her, in the future tense.

A weight, heavier than any of the dark old slabs of solid granite all around her, and infinitely sadder, lifted. Dad was back. The old Dad—witty, funny, full of life.

He was watching her laugh, a slow smile lifting the corners of his mouth, even as a single tear slid down his cheek. He made no attempt to wipe it away.

“I didn’t hear you arrive,” she said. She wanted to jump up and down with joy, like a little kid would. “I thought I was alone, otherwise I wouldn’t have been singing.”

“I pulled up when that other car was leaving.”

She looked beyond him to the cemetery car park where a white van was parked alongside her Toyota. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

“What for? Singing out of tune?” He said it quietly.

She shook her head, knowing that wasn’t what he meant. “For all the other stuff. But mainly for ignoring you at Mum’s funeral and cutting you out of my life when you needed me most.”

“And I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know for getting myself in that position in the first place. I failed you, Kelly—and your mother. I remember you coming to the prison in the very beginning. You were just a little kid, but you were so strong—”

“You told me to be strong; you told me and Mum we had to be strong. I remember that.”

“Yes, I did, and you were, both of you. Far stronger than I was at the time. You marched in there with your head held high, a proud, stoic little human being, shouldering far more than a kid should ever have to bear. There were no tears, no feeling sorry for yourself because of what had happened.”

There was a huskiness to his voice that hadn’t been there when she was a child. The after‐effects of a cold, maybe. Or emotion. She watched him flex his fingers, an old gesture she hadn’t thought of for years. Now she remembered: when he was angry or upset, he’d look perfectly calm and his body still—apart from the flexing of his fingers.

“I was the one who was weak when you came to the prison.” He was silent for a long moment, his grey‐blue eyes steady on hers, then he dragged in a deep breath and continued, “By then the effects of the stuff I’d been taking had well and truly worn off. I could see what I’d done, so clearly. So bloody clearly. I knew what I’d done to my wife and child. I knew how badly I’d let you—and everyone else—down. I seriously thought about ending it all that night—”

A Father at Last

“No!” Tamara’s revelations yesterday were still fresh in her mind, and his words were a knife‐stab to her heart. “That would have been the worst thing you could have done.