I always wondered why my mom had left my father in the first place. It wasn’t something she ever talked about. Every time I brought up the subject, her face would redden and something would be thrown my way. If I was unlucky that day, it may have been a cordless phone or a ceramic plate. She was an angry woman. The only thing she would say on the matter is that my father lacked passion. One night, after I got her liquored up and convinced her that I was just as drunk as she, I got something more out of her. She told me that there had been passion at first, in those first few years of their relationship, but that, at some point, it stopped. Sometime around when I was born something collapsed inside him. He stopped talking about anything besides his car, and he stopped touching her. I think she always wondered what exactly happened, what caused him to suddenly change. At first, I thought it was me; I thought that my coming into this world had broken him. Then my teenage years kicked in and I assumed it was my mother that drove him away. She had done well enough for herself on her own, getting a job at a law firm and becoming partner. It suited her. All that anger and bitchiness that welled inside her, I think, did well for her role as a prosecutor.
I’ll admit, I had forgotten about him for a long while. But when I found that picture of him standing in front that Firebird, I wanted to know him, if only to know what happened. So, I started looking. I tried searching on my own, but there’s only so much you can find online with a name and a location. I would Google Keith Carlyle and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and find a few posts from online directories that just wanted my credit card information. It was no use. But I was determined, and so I sought help.
Dan, the private investigator I hired, called me one day in August last year. He said that the picture I had shown him and the information on the back of it hadn’t led anywhere, but in January he called with a different story. He said that a Keith Carlyle was in an assisted living home in Flagstaff, Arizona. There was nothing connecting him to Las Cruces where we had all lived as a family for five years before my mother loaded me up and took me to New Hampshire to stay with her sister. There was no real indication that it was my father except for a blood type of AB-positive that matched mine, but it was more than I had found on my own. It was enough for me to take two weeks off from work and drive across the country.
I hadn’t seen my father in nearly thirty years. I had no real image of him in my head—no collected memories of him holding me or playing catch with me. In my mind, he was just the guy that used to pour milk over my cereal while my mom was at work. It was barely a memory, a flicker in a montage of life experiences. I sat in my car for half an hour outside the facility. The coffee was roaring through me, and I desperately needed to use the restroom, but my body didn’t want to start the descent into the building. I wanted to see him. I did. Part of me did, at least. That part had driven me to Arizona, had abandoned responsibilities, if only for a short while, to be careless and determined. But there was also a part of me that was overwhelmed, and that part was overwhelmingly telling me to just go back home. When I finally walked inside and found my way to a restroom, I sat in there for a long while—thirty-seven minutes, actually. I stared at my phone, thumbing through hook-up and gaming apps, trying to occupy my mind, but all I did was watch the time tick by as though I had a deadline and I’d be able to leave if that I reached that time without asking what room Keith Carlyle was in.
When I pulled the picture out of my jacket pocket as I sat on the toilet, a tremor quacked through the muscles in my left hand, echoing past my heart, through my ribs, and rippling in my thigh. Had it been a year before, I might have mistaken it for nervousness—I might have assumed that my body was just responding to my possibly being in the same building as my father. But it wasn’t a year before. It wasn’t a normal response to uncertain situations. It was the onslaught of Parkinson’s. The doctors gabbed about how it was quite an early diagnosis, but the way my left leg liked to stick to floors as if I stepped in glue every time I took a step and the way my left arm failed to swing as I walked signaled their diagnosis. All four of them had said the same thing: Parkinson’s. I always assumed my issues were born from my mother’s ridicule. Anxiety, depression, a constant urge to drink—I associated it all with my mother. But when my wielded the words “no emotion” and “no passion” during our last fight before she left me for good, something clicked, like a flicker in a montage of life experiences. Maybe it wasn’t my mother after all.
An orderly led me through speckled corridors, lined with ads that warned of the dangers of smoking and drinking, that wanted to let everyone that passed by know about likes of diabetes, heart disease, and bed sores. The orderly walked with determination, her flat feet stomping down on the cold, white tiles with a harshness that echoed my urge to stomp out of the building. When she opened the door to Room 442, she advised me to wait outside first. She was inside the room with the door closed for a long while. I considered bolting more than once, but I just stood there, my eyes pacing between the door and the picture of this man in front of a Firebird. For a moment, I wondered what it was about the car that he loved so much, what it was that made him spring his arms out like a dove and show such joy on his face. I was so entranced that I didn’t realize the orderly had called my name. As I stepped inside the room, a voice croaked out. “Petey?” I clutched the picture in my hand so fiercely that the polaroid crinkled and creased in my fist.
Over the course of four hours or so, that man and I traded stories of adulthood, of joys and pain, of adventures in sex and the workplace. I had reasons for driving all that way. Questions had formed on the way there, overlapping one another in urgent need for answers. But as I sat in that beige vinyl chair next to his bed, none of those questions wanted to come out willingly. When our lively conversation found a pregnant bubble of silence, I forced out the questions I had been pondering on the drive. I stared at the picture as I started.
“So, I found this picture in a shoebox in Mom’s closet.” I lowered the picture into his feeble, shaking hand. “I thought it would help me recognize you. But it was the only one I could find of you smiling. I guess I thought you’d be happy to see me—"
“I am happy to see you.”
“No, I know that. You’ve said that, like, six times. No, I meant I guess I was thinking that there’d be this same look on your face when you saw me. After all this time, y’know?”
“Petey—"
“I know, it’s kind of a childish thought. What I mean to ask is, what was it about that car? Mom never really talked about it. All she ever said was that she hated that car. I’m curious though: Why were you so happy in that picture? What was it about that car that made you loved so much?”
“I hated that car,” he laughed out the left side of his mouth. “That car was a piece of shit. The motor mount was broke, the exhaust manifold was broke, the head gasket was broke. That car was broke from hood to tail.”
“So, what’s going on in that picture?”
“Your mother took this the moment she told me she was pregnant with you.”
At that, my heart began to drown in my stomach. My face must have been flush because it felt like all the blood in my body had sank to my ass and my feet and was weighing me down. I thought I might fall through the floor, I felt so heavy.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—um.” I was lost for words. “Mom always said that you had no passion. No joy, except for the car. I just assumed that was what was going on in the picture.”
“That woman always had her own way of seeing the world.” He was funny even if he didn’t smile. “No, I had issues. Your mother was so self-involved that she couldn’t see that. She couldn’t hear anything unless it was about her. But I was happy in that picture. I was happy because of you. I’m happy now—“ He stopped and turned his head away from me. I could tell his eyes were starting to tear up. I could hear it in his voice. “I’m happy to see you. I know you probably can’t see that because of all this."
His voice faded out from my register as I looked at him, really looked at him. His whole body wobbled side to side as if he was a bobbling toy on the dash of a car that was driving on a severely bumpy road. His arms didn’t extend very much as we passed the picture to one another. He didn’t shift his weight in the bed much. I was so enthralled with meeting him, so wholly engrossed in just getting to know the man I never got to know as I child, so hell bent on trying to recognize the man in the photograph that I didn’t recognize his disease.
“You have Parkinson’s?”
“Yeah. Had it for years. That ‘no emotion’ shit your mother brought up—that’s part of it. It’s a devil of a disease.”
“How long have you had it?”
“I don’t know, honestly. I didn’t go to the doctor about it for a long time. I think it was when I met Cheryl that I finally went.”
“Cheryl?”
“Old girlfriend. It didn’t last long. We met at the bar one night and hit it off. I took her to dinner a few times. On our first date she asked about the way I walked or something. It was the first time anyone besides your mother had said anything about it all to me, and that was, what, twenty years ago?”
“You never went to the doctor?”
“Not really an option if you ain’t got health insurance.” He must have noticed a question write itself in my expression because he elaborated. “Can’t really get health insurance if you ain’t workin’, and you can’t work if you can’t move. I’ve been through a lot of jobs. I just figured I was getting’ old, y’know. It never dawned on me that I was sick. I finally went and they did tests, but the doc told me it wasn’t really necessary. He could tell I had it the moment I hobbled into the office,” he finished with a cackle.
“So, if you don’t have health insurance, how’d you get here?”
“I didn’t have it then, but Maggie did.” He paused and closed his eyes. For the first time in the hours we had been talking, a smile broke his lips. “Oh, she was a beautiful woman. That brown curly hair and those green eyes. I loved her.”
“Who’s Maggie?”
“My wife. She passed about a month ago. Breast cancer. It was quick. We had a retirement plan, life insurance, health insurance—it all pays for this. Maggie. Oh, she was a good one. We were married for nine years. For nine years, I had someone to help me, and when she passed, I realized I couldn’t take care of myself, so I got myself in here. I think your mother left me because she couldn’t take care of me and her ego at the same time, but Maggie? She could. She did! I just wonder if she knew how much I loved her. I hope you know how much I love you.”
“Why didn’t you ever reach out to me?”
“I didn’t know where you were. Your grandparents didn’t want to help me. They took her side. All the divorce stuff was handled through our lawyers. Your mother and I never spoke face-to-face about it. Hell, I didn’t hear from her until the day you moved out. She called wondering if you had found me then or something. I wanted to see you, though. I just didn’t have the means to. I didn’t know where you were.”
I left my father in his room shortly after that. We ended our first conversation in nearly thirty years with agreements to stay in touch and all. I had taken two weeks off from work, but I was back after one. My father and I did talk on the phone a time or two in the weeks after I returned home. We had talked about me going back out there to see him, but I didn’t get a chance to. About a month after I left him in that assisted living facility, my father died of a heart attack. That was three years ago.
It’s funny. I brought my father’s picture with me so I’d recognize him, but I didn’t need it. All I needed was a mirror. We look so much alike. We are so much alike. There are moments where I wear my emotions on my face, but time has passed and with it I’ve lost some of that natural ability. But Ingrid doesn’t complain about it. She understands what’s going on. I made sure to explain it all on our first date. It was odd, I’ll admit, but she stayed despite my disease. She married me and my Parkinson’s.
And now I pass by that picture of my father in front of that old Firebird every day on my way to out the house. It hangs, framed, on the wall near the front door. I have this habit now: I speak to him every day. “See you later,” on the way out the door; “Hey, Dad,” as I walk inside. And next to it is a picture my Ingrid took of me yesterday, standing in front of my Corolla, arms out like a dove, smiling the moment she told me she was pregnant. I’ll make sure she knows how much I love her.
This piece was written in response to prompt #2088 at The Writing Reader: "I brought my father’s picture with me so I’d recognize him."
|
Author
Born and bred in a small town, Tony now helms from a suburb just outside Birmingham, Alabama. He earned his Bachelors of Science in Elementary Education from the University of Phoenix and plans to guide young creative minds through the joyful wonders of writing as regularly as possible. In what little downtime he has, Tony writes as often as possible, acts in community theatre productions around Birmingham, dabbles in filmmaking through acting and writing, and more. He is the creator and co-writer of "the Park bench," a new webseries from Background People Productions coming in 2017. Tony has a deep love for music, movies, television, tacos, Greek yogurt and Yankee Candle candles. His website is Bedbug's Writing, which can be found at tonylovell.weebly.com. His books Bedbug's Writing: A Collection of Short Stories + Poetry, Volume One, and MMMMM., are available now in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon.