Experiment in Terror 09 Dust to Dust (26 page)

“Well that’s good.”

“Yeah,” she said, swinging our arms in the air for a few steps. “It’s good. I just hope it doesn’t get worse, you know? I don’t wish our…problem on anyone. I know my mom has kind of been horrible these last few years but she’s still my mom.”

I nodded. Oh, I knew how that went. No matter how badly they treat you, no matter how much you fear them, they are still your mom. You love them despite all that. You hurt despite all that. It really fucking sucks.

“So,” she continued, trying to keep her voice light. I could tell she was close to crying. I didn’t mind if she did, she had a lot to let out. We both did. She cleared her throat. “I am really sorry I switched the pills, but I don’t regret it. Does that make sense?” When I told her it did, she said, “For you too. It made you move in a certain direction, made
us
move in a certain direction.”

“It brought us together,” I told her matter-of-factly.

“And I think it will do the same for my mom and me. She’s already different around me, you know? I think…I think maybe she’ll finally really get to be my mom. I’ll feel like I have a mother that loves me. Not to say she didn’t before, but you know how different it is when you
feel
it.”

I did. And I only knew it for a brief moment, in that last dream my own mother was in. But it was enough.

After that we walked like any couple in New York, stopping for hot dogs and complaining about the heat and stink while taking in the sights. Okay, maybe we were like any tourist couple in New York but that was fine with me. Seattle was my home now – our home – and I was content to see this city briefly before saying goodbye. I couldn’t say I ever wanted to return. My memories here only worsened. It wasn’t just the place where my life went to shit…it’s where my new life went to shit as well.

But we were going to come out of it, like a fucking Phoenix out of the ashes. Or at least like Phoenix in
X-Men
. She was hot as fuck and a badass motherfucker.

We didn’t even make it as far as city hall, though. We stopped into a trendy coffee shop for yet another hit of espresso – both of us had trouble keeping our eyes open, I guess after being so close to death we wanted our hearts to beat into oblivion – and Perry sat down at one of the iPads they had at their tables.

It only took her about five minutes of searching the net while I was in the bathroom taking a leak for her to locate my father.

When I got back to the table, she was wriggling in her seat like a puppy, like she was about to lead me to a boy trapped in a well.

“What is it, Lassie?” I asked.

“I found him,” she said excitedly.

I don’t know what expression came on my face. Probably fear.

“Timmy O’ Toole?”

“No,” she said, holding up a napkin with writing scribbled on it. “Your father. He’s in Queens.”

I tugged at my eyebrow ring. “Interesting. Are you sure?”

“Dex,” she huffed out in annoyance, getting to her feet. “You’re the one who wanted to hunt him down. We’ll we hunted him. Or I did. He’s in Queens. I found him first in the paper for winning a regatta off of Long Island. Then I traced him through the online phone book. He looks, well, he looks like you, Dex. Or at least you when you’re older. Do you want to see?”

I didn’t think she could tell any better than I could about whether the guy looked like my father or not but before I could say anything, she was pulling an article up on the iPad.

And there was picture of Curtis O’Shea. My father. He hadn’t even bothered to change his name.

I frowned, trying to feel something between me and the pixelated face staring from the screen. I don’t know if I felt anything, though I had to say there was some resemblance between me and him and more than that, well, it was him. I may have been a teenager when he left, but he was in his forties. Now he was in his sixties and the aging process had been kind to him.

He had salt and pepper hair, but it was still thick and worn parted on the side. His face looked saggy but his eyes were dark and sharp, framed by impressive eyebrows. He could have given Jack Nicholson a run for his money.

It was my dad.

I rubbed my lips together and looked away. Okay, maybe this wasn’t a good idea right now.

“Hey,” Perry said, hand on my forearm. “Let’s just forget about it. You know he’s alive. He’s out there. And if you want to say hello one day you have that option. But you don’t owe him, or me, or yourself, anything.”

I nodded and sighed. I knew all of that. “Let’s do it.”

She studied me for a moment, perhaps trying to figure out if I was in fact Dex Foray and not someone else. I couldn’t blame her.

“Let’s do it,” I repeated, putting my hand on her shoulder and squeezing it. “Let’s go meet my dad.”

She gave me a small but supportive smile and nodded her head. We left without talking, the air heavy around us as we navigated the subway system that I still knew like the back of my hand. The closer we got to Queens the more she started to wriggle around again. It was so fucking cute. I would have banged her in the nearest disgusting washroom if we weren’t about to find my father.

It wasn’t long until we were walking down the street that she had mapped out for us. It was a nice neighborhood. Not as posh as the one on the upper east side, but it was one of the nicer ones in Queens and the townhouses and duplexes would have fetched a lot of money.

It was a workday so I wasn’t completely sure if we’d find him at home, or if he even had a job. The newspaper article didn’t say much except he had a boat and was an avid sailor. I know I wanted to find him, to see him, to make some sort of amends for things that weren’t my fault, but I wasn’t about to go hunt his saggy ass down at an office or anything like that. I would give, I would put in effort, but at a certain point I stopped. There were only a few people who I’d give all for and they weren’t my father.

“This is it,” Perry said as we stopped in front of a brownstone. In some ways it looked like the one I grew up in but for the most part it was different. The ceilings were shorter, giving the house a crouched appearance even with two levels and there seemed to be an expansive side yard. There were a bunch of flowers in the front, carefully arranged into terracotta pots. I wondered if my father had a green thumb – my memories pulled up that he did – or if he had remarried.

Shitballs, he might have had a whole new family, a new son, a new life.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” I said to Perry just as the front door opened and a woman stepped out. She had grey hair piled into a bun and was wearing a Native American poncho, jeans and Crocs.

“Are you Charles?” she asked in a very Katherine Hepburn accent, all nasally and raised chin.

“Uh, no,” I said, looking at Perry for reassurance, as if she was going to tell me that I wasn’t Charles. “We’re looking for Curtis O’Shea, though.” I said. Saying his name out loud kind of felt like saying Bettlejuice.

But as far as I knew, my father was not going to appear as Michael Keaton in a black and white suit. Though, knowing my family, I wouldn’t hold anything past us.

“Oh,” she said with a raised brow, looking us over. Well, she was wearing Crocs so she couldn’t talk. “Who might you be? We aren’t expecting anyone but Charles. He’s our new nurse. Or caretaker, as Curtis insists we call him.”

Nurse? I wondered what was wrong with him.

While I pondered that, Perry spoke for me. “We’re…interested in his boat.”

Okay, that wasn’t exactly what I would have said but I went with it. It’s not like we came up with coherent plan on the way here.

She nodded, her eyes lighting up. “Oh, goody. That’s wonderful. Stay there and I’ll go get him.”

She disappeared into the house and as soon as she was out of earshot I turned to Perry.

“Interested in his boat?”

Her lip snarled defensively. “Well we couldn’t quite say that you were his long lost son.” She looked around her. “They are in a nice neighborhood, they have money. People always think the worst before they think the best.”

She had a point and soon after, a man appeared at the door in a wheelchair, shadowed by the doorframe. The woman appeared beside him. “You can come up here. The ramp is at the side of the house but if this won’t take long…”

I raised a palm. “That’s fine,” I said, smiling even though some small part of me, maybe my toe, felt bad for the fucker already. I grabbed Perry’s hand and we walked up toward the front door.

And there, in a wheelchair, staring at me with begrudged curiosity, was my father. He didn’t look as happy as the woman had seemed and I assumed that whatever business there was to be done about the boat, well it pleased her more than it did him.

“I’m Curtis,” the man said and his Irish accent still lingered. It brought back a lot of memories. Most of them uncomfortable but some of them, a few of them, good.

Suddenly, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say anything at all. I was standing in front of my father, the man who had abandoned me all those years ago, left me with my mother and a nanny but with no wages to pay a nanny. He fucked off and he ruined everything – or at least he didn’t help. Over the years I had come to realize that everyone was at fault, not just him. Still, even facing him in his wheelchair, all these years later, I couldn’t help but think of him as a coward.

I vowed right there and then to never do that to my child, no matter if he saw ghosts, was as normal as apple pie, or happened to be the anti-Christ. There was love and there was pride and the former should always trump the latter.

“My name is Dex,” I said, and I swear I saw his brow raise for a minute. He reminded me a lot of Gregory Peck, all overgrown black eyebrows and silver-coated hair. “This is Perry, my fiancé,” I said, motioning to her. She smiled sweetly and I knew it warmed him over just a bit. Despite what she thought, she had that effect on people. She counteracted me in the best way.

“Very nice to meet you,” he said with a sharp nod, though his eyes were focused on me. He looked like he was trying to jog his memory, perhaps trying to place my name or my face and was coming up empty. “So you’re interested in buying Green Glass, is that it?”

That must have been the boat’s name. I figured we only had a finite amount of time before we had to come clean.

“Could you answer a few questions about her?” I asked, without saying yes or no.

He nodded and his palms kneaded the armrest of his chair. “Why not?”

“I read in the paper that you won a regatta. Has the boat won anything else besides that?”

He grinned, just for a moment. He had nice teeth. I guess the rich could afford that. Then again, I had nice teeth because of the settlement he left me through my mother, so I shut that thought up.

“That was a good ol’ fluke,” he said. “My buddies and I, we’re always racing off of Nantucket, Martha’s, all the haunts. I decided to go for it, you know, have a laugh or two. I took my buddy on as my skipper since I can’t do much with this damn arthritis and all. Somehow we won. But, if you paid attention to the ad, I never passed the ship off as a racing boat. We were just lucky.”

“Arthritis?” I asked and his face immediately went sharp.

“Yes,” he said defensively. “Plus I had an accident a few years ago. I don’t let that stop me from doing things though.”

“That lady,” Perry said, “is she your wife?”

He nodded. “Aye. Margaret. Been married about…”

While he trailed off I said, “at least fifteen years.”

He frowned but said, “That seems about right.”

“Were you married before her?” Perry asked and now I knew we were getting down to brass taxes.

“How is this relevant to the boat?” he asked, brow raised in such a way that it made Perry flinch. Not because he looked scary, but because he looked a lot like me. We were down to the wire now. Time to come clean before they called the cops.

“So Green Glass is for sale,” I mused, combing my hand through my hair, trying not to appear anxious but failing. Half of me wanted to just turn around and pretend this never happened but I knew I couldn’t do that. I needed this, closure in some shape or form. I never got it while my mother was alive, I needed it with my father, especially after I knew what had happened to Michael.

“Yes it is,” he said, eyes narrowed. “But my marriages have nothing to do with it.”

I nodded. “I understand. The truth is, we actually don’t want to buy your boat, Mr. O’Shea. I mean, I love sailboats and everything but I just don’t think I’d buy one here, on the east coast. We live on the west coast.”

“So you’re wasting my time,” he said gruffly, his hands going to wheel himself away.

“Maybe,” I said, “maybe not. It’s not a waste of my time. You see, if I had a boat, I’d probably call it Fat Rabbit. Or, maybe not. Maybe I’d call it Michael.” He stiffened slightly. “Or Regine.” Now his jaw was clenched. “Or Declan. But it’s pretty lame naming a boat after yourself. I’m not Donald Trump.”

I kept my eyes on him the whole time and I recognized that acquiescence in them. The way his chin dropped a bit, his shoulder slumped slightly. His eyes took on this weight, as if I had just demanded the world from him. But that wasn’t the case at all.

“You’re Curtis O’Shea,” I said. “You’re my father. And I don’t want anything from you. Even though you fucked right off when I needed you most, you still made sure I was taken care of. And I was. I did good for myself, at least I think so. So don’t worry. I’m not here to cause trouble or law suits or whatever you East Coasters do with your time. I just wanted to see you, that’s all. And I wanted to know you were alive. I wanted you to know I was alive. Simple.”

He stared at me in disbelief for the longest time. I thought he might have had a stroke. But eventually he pulled himself out of his tailspin and blinked at me. “Declan,” he said and he sounded just as I remembered, only less mad.

“That’s me.” And suddenly I felt my heart crumbling into tiny little pieces. Shit. That was unexpected. I looked away, trying to keep the water behind my eyes.

There was a swath of silence between us and in it, my emotions were building. “It is you,” he said after a moment. “My god.”