The Mysteries (4 page)

I let the door slam shut and held my breath because it had been so loud, I couldn't believe it wouldn't alert someone to my presence. Far away, I heard a dog bark. I stood there beside the car and waited to be caught.

But nothing happened.

My breath huffed out in a pale cloud, and I followed the yellow beacon to the front door, and knocked.

The man who opened it wasn't as tall as in my memory; his hair wasn't so thick and black, and there was a heavy softness around his middle, the start of a beer gut. He'd changed a little in seven years, but not as much as I had.

Daddy!
cried the little boy inside me, but the detective I'd made myself kept quiet.

He looked at me blankly. “Yeah?”

I moved a little, to give him a better view of my face in the weird yellow light. “Remember me?”

He frowned a little, impatient. “You the paperboy?”

“I'm Ian.”

Something flared in his shadowed eyes. He shook his head, pulling back. “Sorry, wrong house.”

“You're my dad!”

I was talking to the door. All at once, I was possessed by self-righteous anger. How
dare
he shut me out, deny me. All at once, I knew that my fantasies about spies and secret missions were so much bullshit. Joe Pauluk had abandoned us deliberately, because he wanted to, because he could, because he didn't care. I pounded on the door with my first and shouted. “Hey, you, let me in! You listen to me! You're my dad, and I know it!” I saw the doorbell, and stabbed it repeatedly, alternating the melodic electric chimes with the brute thudding of my fist.

The door opened so suddenly I nearly fell.

My father's face, contorted with fury, was almost demonic as he thrust it into mine. “Stop that!”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Who zat?” A tiny child clutched my father's leg and peeped up at me with bright, merry eyes.

“Mikey, get back inside. Go on, back to Mommy.” He gentled his voice to speak to the infant, and the familiar tones made my throat ache.

“What's going on?” A woman appeared behind him, shooting me a hostile look. She was very thin, with bleached blond hair in a bad perm. She looked twenty-five going on sixty, and I hated her.

“I'm dealing with it, don't worry.”

“I have to talk to you.” I was not going to leave, and he saw it. His eyes darted around, searching for a way out, well aware that in another second or two I might say something he didn't want her to hear.

“Joe, I am
cooking
your
dinner.
I can't do that unless you look after Mikey and Sammy and keep them out of the kitchen.”

“I'm sorry, hon, but something's come up. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go out.” He spoke in leaden, unnatural tones, as if I was holding a gun to his head, but she didn't seem to notice.

“Go
out
? But what about your dinner?”

“I can eat later.”

“Can't this wait?” She looked at me, and frowned. “He's just a kid.”

“It can't wait,” I said flatly.

“Just hang on a minute; I'll get my keys; we can talk in the car,” said Joe. He turned away from me, herding the woman and child ahead of him, and dropped his voice to a pleading tone: “I'm sorry about this, hon, but it won't take long.”

I heard them talking as they went away—her high, irritable whine, his lower, broken rumble—but paid no attention. They'd left the front door open. I felt constrained from actually going in without an invitation. Without stepping across the threshold, I leaned my upper body into the house and gazed around, drinking it all in. I caught a faint whiff of frying onions, and the sound of the Coca-Cola song, but both of those came from other rooms beyond my ken.

This front room, clearly, was a formal space reserved for special occasions, not the ongoing daily life of the house. There was a big, new-looking pink couch and two matching armchairs. Between them, a shiny coffee table displayed a stiff arrangement of artificial flowers. Shelving units lined the far wall. No television, but I saw a stereo system and a line of LPs on a low shelf, along with two oversized books. On second glance they weren't books, but photo albums. There wasn't a single book in sight. All those shelves, which in my mother's house would have been stuffed to overflowing with books, here held only a frozen display of china knickknacks, silver-framed photographs, more artificial flowers, and a set of gold-rimmed wine glasses.

“OK, let's go.” My dad came through, shrugging on a grey windbreaker, still avoiding my eyes.

Neither of us said a word as we got into his car. He backed swiftly out of the driveway, drove down the street and around the corner, then pulled to the curb and stopped. He put the car in park but left the engine running. Staring straight ahead he said, “How'd you find me? Did your mother send you?”

“She doesn't know anything about it. I found you myself. I've been looking for you ever since you disappeared. I didn't know what had happened. I thought—” I broke off, unable to tell him what I had thought, unwilling to confess how much of my life had been given over to childish fantasies. I folded my arms and stared ahead, frowning hard.

“How did you find me?”

“You're in the book.”

He exhaled noisily and shook his head at his own stupidity. “Oh, yeah. I never thought. For two years, three, I was so careful, but after so long . . .” He turned to me, frowning suspiciously. “But what're you doing here? Aren't you still living in Milwaukee?”

“Mom's still there. And Heather.”

“Don't tell me you ran away from home!”

“Like you did?”

“I didn't run away.”

“Oh no?”

“You don't know anything about it.”

“Of course I don't—how could I? You never told us anything—you didn't even say good-bye. What were we supposed to think? We were
worried
. Scared. We thought you might be in trouble.”

He stared at me. In the dim light I couldn't be sure of his expression, but I thought he looked stunned; that our long-ago anguish was an unsought revelation.

After a while he said, quietly, “I'm sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”

“Why did you go?”

“I had to. To save my own life. I was in so deep, I couldn't see any other way out. I had to leave, to start over again. It seemed like the only thing to do.”

I felt a surge of excitement. “What do you mean—were there people after you? Like gangsters? Did you owe them money? Or did you know something secret, or . . . ?”

He sighed and shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that. No debts or drugs; nobody was after me. It was just . . . I couldn't stand my own life. I had to get out. You know, a wolf will gnaw off its own paw if it has to, to get out of a trap. That was kind of what it felt like I was doing.”

What was I in that scenario, I wondered: his paw, or part of the trap? How had he been trapped? I didn't understand, and I said so. Finally, after all these years, I'd found my father, and I wasn't going to let him go until he'd explained himself.

“What was it you didn't like? If you didn't want to live with us anymore, you could have just moved out, like a normal person. You were free; you weren't even married. You could have quit your job, too—it's not like you were some indentured servant. You didn't have to sneak away like a criminal and disappear and make everybody worry.”

“I'm sorry.” He didn't sound it. If anything, he sounded bored with the whole business. He drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel. “I just did what I had to do. Sometimes, you have to look out for number one, even if other people get hurt. Surely you can understand that?” He gave me a hopeful look. I stared back, stone-faced, and he sighed. “Well, maybe when you're older. Maybe you'll be able to forgive me then. Now look. I'm going to drive you down to the bus station and get you a ticket to Milwaukee, and you can call your mother and tell her where you are—”

“She knows where I am.”

His eyes widened with shock. “Did she send you here?”

“She doesn't know about you. I mean she knows I'm in Minneapolis—I'm here for a student conference.”

“You didn't run away?”

I shook my head.

He looked disappointed. I felt I had let him down, then hated myself for caring. He wanted me to be a runaway, someone like him, who could disappear without a word of explanation and let people down. But I wasn't like that and didn't want to be.

“Why didn't you ever call us? Once you got out of your trap and knew you were safe, I mean,” I added sarcastically. “Didn't you care what happened to me and Heather? Didn't you miss us at all?”

“Of course I did—I missed you terribly.” He spoke with a sudden, intense sincerity which, I decided angrily, had to be fake. “You don't know how many times I started dialing your number—”

“You're right, I don't know. Don't care, either.”

“Of course you're mad at me for leaving. I don't expect you to understand why I had to do it. But, Ian, believe it or not, I've always wanted the best for you. Mary's a great mother. I knew she would look after you fine. And after a couple of years I thought, what right do I have to get in touch? You'd been managing all right without me. You'd probably nearly forgotten me. For all I knew, you might have a stepfather or something by then. It wouldn't be right, it wouldn't be fair to
you
for me to come barging back into your lives just because I wanted to see you again. It was better if I stayed away.”

I felt like my head would explode if I listened to another second of his self-justifying crap. I yanked the door open.

“Ian, where are you going?”

“Away.” I got out and slammed the door.

He lowered the window on my side. “Come on, get in. Tell me where you're staying, and I'll take you there.”

“I can get back on my own.”

“Don't be silly. Get in.”

“Don't you tell me what to do.” I marched off, and the car rolled slowly after me, my father telling me to get in.

I really did want to walk away and have nothing more to do with him, but I was miles from where I should be, with no idea of how to get back there, and it was dark and very cold. After a brief struggle with my pride, I got back into the car and told him the name of the motel.

He tried asking me about the conference, and how I was doing at school, and what my interests were, but I wouldn't play, and after a few attempts he gave up and just drove. When we reached the motel, at least he didn't try to pretend that this was the ending of a sentimental made-for-TV movie, or apologize, or explain. Not a word about how someday we might see each other again. I didn't even say good-bye, just shut the door and walked away without looking back.

When I got home on Sunday night, I told my mother that I'd found my runaway father. I waited until Heather was in her room, and I had my mother all to myself, eating grilled cheese sandwiches at the kitchen table.

“Ah,” she said quietly, searching my face. “And was it all right?”

I shrugged, then shook my head. “It wasn't like I always thought it would be. I thought I'd be solving this great mystery, and all I did was to find a guy who didn't want to be found.”

“People are mysteries,” said my mother. “There are no solutions.”

“File under the Wisdom of Mom,” I said, but not in a nasty way. I scowled at my sandwich and felt my pulse rate speed up. “You don't seem very surprised.” I looked directly at her. “Did you already know where he was?”

She looked uncomfortable. “I'm sorry, Ian. Your grandmother told me about two years ago.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because . . . you didn't ask. No, really, I mean it. I didn't want to force it on you, stir up painful feelings. You were doing so well at school and all, I thought you'd gotten over it. Especially since I had no intention of getting in touch with him. I decided that if you asked, or were obviously, you know, thinking a lot about it, then I'd tell you.”

I was shocked, but tried not to show it. How had she not realized that I had never stopped thinking about and wondering what had happened to my dad? It was an obsession with me, and yet she had not known anything about it. As the first shock faded away, I was more relieved. There were plenty of things in my mind that I wouldn't want my mother knowing about. People were mysteries. Thank goodness for that.

I stuffed the rest of my sandwich into my mouth and, as I chewed, thought about my paternal grandparents. We'd never seen that much of them. They lived, frugally, in Madison, in the same two-bedroom house they'd owned since my father was in grade school. They had never approved of my mother and didn't visit us, their excuse their reluctance to take their deteriorating old Ford out on the highway; but we went to them at least twice a year, and they'd always been very generous to me and Heather at Christmas and on our birthdays. They had seemed as worried and as clueless as us when their only son disappeared.

“How long did Grandma know?”

“I didn't ask her that,” said my mother, pulling her crusts apart and nibbling at the cheese.

I thought of something else from two years ago. “He wasn't at Grandpa's funeral.”

My mother nodded, looking sad. “He didn't want to meet us. He knew we'd be there. He'd been in Madison with Grandma just the day before. She tried to talk him into staying, but he wouldn't. He wanted her to promise she wouldn't mention that she'd seen him.” She shook her head.

“So that's when she told you. Has she even met her new grandchildren?”

“Ian, that's between them. It's none of my business, and I don't care—but I
do
care about Grandma's feelings, and I don't like seeing her hurt. Joe didn't have to create this big mystery and hurt everybody else just because he'd stopped loving me.”

“I don't think it was about you,” I said. “I don't think he wanted to be a dad anymore. Or a son. He wanted to disappear out of the world and start all over again, fresh. That's more or less what he said, I think.”

She nodded as if this was old information, and reached across the table to hold my hand. “Then I hope you know it wasn't about you, either. You're a wonderful person, Ian. Your dad doesn't know what he's lost.”

After finding my father, I lost all interest in being a detective. For years, just remembering my fantasies of solving mysteries was even more embarrassing than listening to my mother talk about love. Looking for people who didn't want to be found—and, let's face it, that had to be most people who disappeared—was a thankless task, at best.