by Frankie Rose
******
It takes twenty-five minutes to drive out to my old family home. Despite being off the beaten track, tucked away down hair-pinning, twisting roads set back from the main town, it should normally only take half that time, but with the snow coming down thicker than ever, I have to take it slow. The beater’s engine starts making a strange whistling, grinding sound about halfway up to the old house, and I spend the later half of the journey praying angrily that the thing holds out until I make it to the house. It does hold out, but only just. Steam is billowing from the hood as I park up outside the house where I grew up, and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s just because the engine is hot or if there is something more sinister going on underneath the hood.
I glare hatefully at the rundown truck and then turn to the house. My chest squeezes painfully as a flood of memories surge over me—my dad clearing out the gutters; him shooting hoops with me around the side of the house where the steel ring is still bolted to the side of the building; my dad and I sitting in the car as he showed me how to operate a car for the first time. He’d promised to teach me properly when I was old enough, but of course that never happened. He’d died a horrible death, and a stranger had been paid to teach me how to drive. I pull out an all too familiar key, one I haven’t used in over five years, suck in a deep breath, and walk up the driveway. The front door opens easily. I hurry inside, not wanting to loiter there. That single spot carries perhaps the most painful memory of all—Luke standing there in his uniform, Chloe Mathers at his side, as he told my mother that my dad was dead.
Inside, the house is warm, and the upstairs landing is lit by a yellowing light. My throat swells so badly it feels like it’s going to close off altogether. I know Brandon maintains the place well, keeps it clean and heated, and the lights must be to deter would be burglars, but I’m caught off guard by how right it feels here. Lived in. Like my dad is still sitting in his study, his old records hissing and scratching out sounds of old sixties music while he grades papers for school. I wander around the ground floor, a little stunned by the fact that everything is as it used to be. Caricature drawings of me and dad are still pinned to the fridge; there’s even one of Mom tacked up there, too, a huge shit eating grin on her comically too-big mouth. Cooking utensils still hang from hooks over the oven, like someone still prepares food here, and the remote control for the television still sits on the arm rest of Dad’s favourite chair.
I trace my fingers over the buttons, not wanting to disturb it in case Dad was the last person to touch it. I know he probably wasn’t. The police came through here and jacked everything up the same way they are doing over at Brandon’s, but I can’t help myself. The house is full of small reminders, each one bringing me back to him, bringing me closer to the ghost of my father.
Upstairs is even worse. My bedroom is still the bedroom of a fourteen-year-old girl. Band posters hang from the walls, and everything seems far too pink. I can’t remember ever liking pink this much. I pull the comforter from my old four-poster bed and drag it down the hallway towards my dad’s study.
The smell of old leather and musty books hits me with the force of freight train when I enter the room. Mom had removers pack up all her stuff when she left the house, but she clearly never had them pack up Dad’s belongings. His study is a little jumbled, books out of place, papers strewn across his old mahogany desk, but other than that it’s how I remember it. The battered old La-Z-Boy that he refused to throw out still sits in the corner by the window, and the archaic projector he used to love watching home movies on remains hooked up, pointed at the blank, white wall at the far end of the room that he kept bare specifically for that purpose.
I dump my comforter onto the La-Z-Boy and pace the room, running my hands over the shelves and nick-knacks, the clay disasters I constructed in kindergarten that he clung to with such fierce price, the photos of him and my mother back when she used to smile and they seemed deliriously happy. I have no idea what changed to make that happiness disappear, but the looks on their young faces as they hold onto one another like nothing will ever tear them apart makes me unbelievably sad.
I desperately want to call Morgan then, just to have someone to talk to, to fill the silence in this empty, lonely house. My mother still has my cell phone, though. I pick up the phone on my dad’s desk and I’m surprised when I hear a dial tone. Surprised and relieved. I punch in Morgan’s number and sit down in my dad’s old desk chair, pivoting from side to side as the line rings.
I’m terrible at sharing my problems. I have no experience with it all, no matter how hard Brandon tried to draw me out of my shell and discuss my issues when I went to live with him. I’m so lost in trying to figure out how I’m going to talk to Morgan about everything that’s happened, is happening right now, that I don’t realize how long the phone has been ringing out for. And then I get it. She’s not going to pick up. I place the handset back in its cradle and stare at the grain of my dad’s desk, numb and lost.
I’m alone.
I’ve never needed my dad more than I do right now. Just a hug, the sound of his voice, the smile on his face would be enough to fix everything. Then the idea hits me, and I grab hold of it with two hands. His projector.
I leap up from the chair and drop to my knees, focusing on the drawers to his desk. I know he kept his old reels in the larger bottom drawer, ordered neatly in rows with handwritten labels describing each one’s contents. It was always locked unless he was in there. I used to sneak in here when I was small to try and watch them, but I could never find where he kept the key. Thankfully, when I pull on it, the drawer slides open noiselessly. But all the films are gone.
I feel hollow, like I’ve lost him all over again. I slump back against the wall, my knees drawn up to my chin, and I let a few tears slide down my face. Anger takes a hold in the pit of my stomach as I consider what could have happened to them. The only conclusion I can come to is that Amanda must have thrown them away. I give her the benefit of the doubt for a moment, the judicious thing to do, but I know she wouldn’t have thought twice about trashing them. In fact, she probably had a bonfire in the back yard and watched on with grim satisfaction, arms crossed, as the flames ate my childhood and all evidence of how wonderful and loving my father had been towards me. Most of the films featured Dad and me alone, after all. She was gone most of the time, fighting battles in court that kept her from participating in the role-plays and games she considered juvenile. Which they were, of course, but I was juvenile. I was a little girl, who wanted both of her parents to be around. To love her.
If Amanda really did burn those films, then I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m reckless enough at this point to fantasize about burning down her pristine brownstone, a justice in symmetry, but just as the flames are establishing themselves in my mind, another image comes to me. It’s the young officer at Brandon’s, winding those Super Eight films and placing them in the evidence bags. Of course. They would have taken my dad’s films, too. They must have done. But they hadn’t found anything on them, otherwise I would have heard about it. So where were they now? Where would they have put them?
I scramble to my feet and charge from room to room until I’ve exhausted every avenue. They’re not in the kitchen, in the lounge, nor any of the bedrooms or the storage closets. I’m beginning to lose hope when I spot the door leading from the kitchen down into the basement, the basement where the indoor pool is located.
I was never supposed to go down there without an adult. It’s funny how I still feel like I’m breaking the rules as I twist the round brass door knob and jog down the stairs, my dad’s voice warning me in the back of my head: it’s not safe to be down here without me or your mom, little monster.
I throw the light switch and only the floor lights in each corner of the room flicker to life, casting a cold blue hue over the tiles, the walls, the ceiling. Another jolt of surprise relays though me when I see that the pool is still filled. I’d expected it to be empty, but
instead a dark blue pool cover gently bobs on top of the water. At the far end of the room, in front of a wooden rack still complete with folded towels, are cardboard boxes stacked high. A spark of hope—have I found what I’m looking for? That spark of hope transforms into relief when I rush over and find that, yes, they’re exactly what I’m looking for. I open the flaps on the box and my dad’s blocky, neat writing greets me, taped to canister upon canister of film. I could cry with how happy I am in that moment.
I waste no time in lugging the first box back up the stairs, leaving the place lit in case I need to come back down for more. I have the projector switched on and prepped in under thirty seconds, and a random canister opened, the film threaded up just like my dad showed me when I was a kid. The old thing sputters into life, making a familiar, comforting, whirring sound as the film flies through the feeder. Images, stilted at first, develop on the far wall and my heart rises up into my throat.
My dad’s smiling face grins out at me, laughing as he swats the camera away from him, the camera I’m holding. He reaches out and takes it from me.
“I’m not the star of the show, Monster. That’s you. Come on, tell me the story again.” The camera spins and suddenly I’m on the wall, eight or maybe nine years old me, missing two front teeth, hair tied into braids on either side of my head.
“Well,” I say, tipping my head to one side. “It’s about Icarus. He lived in a prison with his Daddy.”
“A prison?” my father asks, off screen.
“Yes, a prison.” I screw up my face in concentration. “Kind of a maze actually, a maze his daddy built, but they couldn’t get out so it was a prison, too.”
“Uhuh. And what happened in the maze?”
“Well, Icarus’s daddy wanted to escape the prison, but he couldn’t. There was water all around.” I gesture wide with skinny arms, making my dad chuckle, the sound close to the camera. “And so one day, Icarus’s daddy realized the only way to escape would be to fly away. He collected all the feathers he could find, and he made two pairs of wings.”
“And how did he stick all the feathers together?”
“With wax! He used candle wax,” I say.
“And what then?”
“He gave a pair to Icarus and kept a pair for himself. He flew away, but before he left he told Icarus to follow him. He said, “don’t fly too close to the sun, otherwise the wax will melt and all the feathers will fall off the wings!”
My dad laughs at me shaking my finger, pretending to be Daedalus, Icarus’s father, warning him. “And what did Icarus do?”
“He flew too close to the sun, Papa!”
“Oh no!” he gasps. “Did the wax melt?”
I nod sagely. “Yep. He fell out of the sky. But he was okay in the end.”
More laughter. The image shakes as my dad puts the camera down, and then it becomes stable again. He walks into frame and sits down beside me. He pulls me onto his lap, and I lay my head against his shoulder, the camera recording us now completely forgotten. “What do you think the story means, Iris?” he says softly.
“It means to always listen to your daddy,” I reply confidently. This earns me a smile from my father, who gives me half a nod.
“Yeah, you should always do that, I guess. But what else?”
I frown, thinking hard. “That if you go too high, you have a long way to fall?”
“Uhuh. But I like to think of it like this. Icarus couldn’t help flying so high. He was trapped in such a bad place for a very long time, and he was so happy when he was free that he just had to go up and up and up. He dreamed big things, of touching the sky. He wanted to reach his goals so badly that he forgot what his daddy said.”
“So I shouldn’t have big dreams, daddy?” My heartbeat thumps in my throat, my eyes furiously burning as I listen. The tender look in my father’s eyes breaks me, breaks me so badly I don’t think I’ll ever be whole again.
“No, baby girl. I’m saying the exact opposite. You should always reach for your dreams.”
“But won’t I fall?”
He shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter. Fly high, little Icarus. I’ll always be there to catch you, I promise.”
I’m sobbing by the time the film blisters and cuts out, the projector still chugging through the reel. I hurt so bad inside that I want to crawl into a ball and cry until I can’t feel anything anymore. I know from experience that’s not how this works, though. I’ll still feel everything, all the pain and sorrow and misery, regardless of how many tears I shed.
I’ll always be there to catch you, I promise. Except he’s not here to catch me. Why would he say those words as he died? Fly high, Icarus. Why would that be his last message to me? The only thing I’ve been able to think of is that he wanted to tell me that wasn’t going to break his promise. That he was never going to leave me. Not really. And in some ways, he hasn’t.
The opening chords of a song startles me from my tears. My head whips up, and I’m shocked by the new image that has taken shape on the wall. It seems the film wasn’t done after all.
Luke. Luke with a much too big guitar balanced in his lap. He can’t be more than eleven or twelve, I’m guessing. His hair is longer than I remember it, and there’s a heavy, haunted look in his eyes. My dad walks around the camera and sits next to him, smiling. “Are you ready?” he says.
Luke looks up at him hesitantly, hands hovering over the guitar like he’s worried to handle it. “I….I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do. Come on, I know you can do it. You’ve played it for me already.” My dad’s smile grows. “It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake or two, Lucas. Making mistakes is part of learning. And I’m right here. I can help you.”
My hands fly to my mouth. Luke cautiously peers down at the neck of the guitar, carefully placing his fingers over the frets. After one more hesitant look to my dad, he strums his other hand across the strings, pauses, reforms the shape of his fingers over the frets, and begins to play. Blackbird.
My dad taps out the rhythm with his foot, humming gently as Luke stumbles, then finds where he needs to be. Luke and my dad sing the lyrics together, and what was left of my heart fractures into tiny pieces.
I should have listened to Luke, heard what he wanted to tell me earlier in the kitchen, no matter how awful it was. I look at the twelve year old before me, and all I see is how much pain he’s in. No matter what my mother says, I can never imagine that this poor, broken boy did anything malicious to anyone, sexually or otherwise. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t deny it, I just simply can’t believe it. The scared little boy on the screen in front of me was learning to live again, and my father was trying to help him. My father was trying to help both of us—to give us both wings so that we could learn to fly. The wings he built for me, and the ones he wanted to fix for Luke. I turn the projector off and wrap myself up in the comforter in my dad’s La-Z-Boy, and I cry myself to sleep.
Thirty
Escape Part Two