by M. Katherton
Skeletons Out of the Closet
M. Katherton
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Copyright © 2019 by M. Katherton All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever.
Tuesday, December 25th, 2018
As a child, Christmas was my favorite day of the year. I ran downstairs to the living room to discover presents wrapped in whatever special paper “Santa” had picked out for me. The coffee table held the remnants of the store bought cookies I put out the night before and Mom would heat up cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Every year I looked forward to it until a few years ago when I realized the things I wanted couldn’t be purchased and wrapped in paper anymore.
The Christmas joy lived on through my younger half-siblings. Spencer, age seven, paraded his new remote control around the house, repeatedly crashing it into the couch and the legs of the coffee table. Macy, age nine, sat on the floor with Mom, flipping through the songbook of her new karaoke machine, a gift “Santa” would soon regret buying when our house was filled with off-key singing to the cheesy kids’ pop songs. Ross, my stepdad, sat in his recliner, surveying the instructions for a LEGO set Spencer got, probably more excited to put it together than Spencer was. I took in the scene as I lounged against the arm of the beige leather couch, admiring the Hallmark-movie family scene before me. The Schaefers were almost the American dream family – a mom, a dad, a daughter, and a son – except for me, the awkward remainder of the equation with a deadbeat dad and a different last name.
I was the product of teenagers having unprotected sex in high school. My mom was seventeen when I was born, the same age I am now. My biological father was never in my life. Mom refused to talk about him, tell me his name, or show me pictures. However, last summer, when my grandma paid me twenty dollars to help her clean out her attic, I stumbled upon a picture of Mom and the man presumed to be my father at the Lakewood High School Valentine’s Day dance dated February 2001, the same month I was conceived. I slipped it into my purse, figuring Grandma wouldn’t notice its absence. It currently resided in the bottom of my underwear drawer where hopefully Mom would never find it.
Ross did his best to fill the father figure role in my life. He and Mom started dating when I was four and got married in the spring of 2008 when I was six and a half. He took me to Daddy-Daughter dances in elementary school and was the recipient of many Father’s Day cards I had signed my name to. Ross was a great person and the only father figure I had ever known but he wasn’t my dad.
Every year, we spent Christmas Eve with Mom’s side of the family and Christmas Day with Ross’ side of the family. Like Ross, his parents Mary and Tripp treated me like their own. My much-hated school picture is framed next to Macy’s on their wall of grandchildren portraits and they sign all my Christmas gifts “Nannie and Grandad” just as they do for their biological grandchildren. They are either unbothered by the fact that Mom had a kid with somebody before Ross or spectacular at hiding it. Though I have known Ross' family for years, I still never feel like I fit in with them. Ross’ sisters, twins Jana and Lillian have kids similar in age to Macy and Spencer, leaving me in an awkward gap between the kids and the adults. Therefore, I awkwardly follow Mom around at family holidays, feeling like the awkward misfit step-kid. Mom’s a real estate agent and good at small talk, so I just listen in as she chats with Ross’ relatives, not sure what to say to these people on my own.
When we got home that evening, I went upstairs to my bedroom, socially exhausted from the day. I pulled the picture of Mom and my presumed father out of my underwear drawer and examined it for a few minutes. I wondered how my dad was celebrating Christmas. Maybe he had more children of his own and spent the day assembling toys. Maybe he had a wife that spent the whole day baking unlike my mother who nearly burned everything she cooked. Maybe he spent the holiday by himself, perhaps miserable and alone if he was really the asshole Mom claimed he was. Maybe he wasn’t even alive. I wished I knew his name. I could do a quick google search for any information that could clue me into his life and what he had become after knocking up his high school girlfriend and essentially vanishing into thin air.
“Goodnight, Jess!” Mom popped her head into my room, startling me out of my thoughts.
“Oh…goodnight!” I chirped, dropping the picture back into the drawer and slamming it shut. Mom’s face crinkled in confusion as she leaned against the doorframe.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah, you just startled me.” I admitted, climbing into bed, hoping she would go away.
“Okay.” She chuckled. “You have a good Christmas?”
I nodded, not wanting to talk to her about the empty feeling of only knowing half of my family. She accepted my answer, said goodnight once again, then closed the door and moved on to check on Macy in the adjacent bedroom.
With the year almost over, I decided my goal for next year, if nothing else, was that I was going to find my dad. If Mom didn’t want to tell me about him, I would find him myself. Maybe he wouldn’t want to meet or speak to me, but I at least wanted to know who he was. I deserved answers. I was going to find my dad.
Wednesday, December 26th, 2018
With it being Mom’s last day off work for the holidays, we spent the day taking down Christmas decorations because she claimed she was over them. Putting the decorations away gave me a sense of relief too. The awkward small talk with extended family was done for a while and the creepy talking Santa ornament that Spencer threw a fit in the middle of Target begging Mom to buy last year finally went back in the box where it belonged.
Our Christmas decorations lived in tubs under the guestroom bed among other junk, collecting dust until we pulled them out the day after Thanksgiving every year. I squeezed the last plastic tub in beside a stack of empty cardboard boxes, collected by Ross because he claimed we “might need them one day”. However, underneath a cardboard box I noticed an old yearbook: Lakewood High School 2001-2002, my mother’s senior year, the year I was born.
I peeked over my shoulder to insure I was alone, then flipped through the black and white pages filled of clubs and sports teams until I landed on the senior portraits. In the Ls, I found a very pregnant picture of my mother, smirking at the camera like she thought yearbook portraits were the stupidest thing in the entire world. The picture was taken likely in September or October, shortly before my birth in mid-November. Her cheeks were full as she claimed she gained thirty pounds when she was pregnant with me and the huge bags under her eyes hinted she hadn’t slept well in a while.
“Oh, I hate that picture!” Mom complained over my shoulder, startling me once again. I hadn’t heard her come in, but there she was, holding a few wreaths that lived in the guestroom closet from January to November.
“It’s not that bad.” I countered though it was not the most flattering picture of her.
“I had the worst insomnia when I was pregnant with you. And I couldn’t drink caffeine. I was a monster. The school’s lucky I even agreed to take a yearbook picture.”
I wanted to ask her if she could show me my dad. He had to be in this yearbook too. If she had not walked in, I would have looked through the entirety of the yearbook, comparing every face to the guy in the Valentine’s Dance photo in my underwear drawer. Instead I asked,
“Is this the only picture of you?”
She nodded, taking the yearbook out of my hands and flipping through it. “Once I got pregnant, I wasn’t really the posterchild Lak
ewood High School wanted in the yearbook. At least they didn’t put ‘school slut’ under my name as my senior quote.”
“Can you show me your friends?” I asked, hoping maybe if I got to look at a few more pages I might recognize my father if I saw him.
Mom cackled as if it was some obscure thought that she had friends in high school. “They all split after you were born. They wanted to go out on weekends and hanging out with someone with a baby only would have slowed them down.” She then closed the yearbook and slid it back under the bed. “I don’t know why I still have this. Only bad memories.”
Sometimes I felt guilty for cutting my mother’s reckless teenage years short. Because of me, she spent her time at home changing diapers instead of hanging out with friends, causing them to bail. Senior year was supposed to be an exciting time yet I had ruined hers.
I pretended to not be interested in the yearbook anymore, not wanting to raise any suspicious that would encourage her to hide or dispose of it. I would come back for it when she wasn’t home. I would scour every page until I found my dad.
Thursday, December 27th, 2018
When Mom went back to work and Ross took the kids to a movie, I used the alone time to explore Mom’s yearbook without the threat of being caught. I watched Ross’ truck pull out of the driveway from my bedroom window then trekked downstairs to the guestroom. I crawled under the bed and fetched the yearbook from the back corner where Mom had stuffed it, probably hoping she would once again forget its existence.
I started at the beginning of the senior class. The pages were filled with smiling faces, likely happy this was their last school photo or thrilled about getting to wear that fake dress or tuxedo for senior portraits at last. The first page contained the As – Peter Aarons, Emily Anderson, Lance Ashley – but none of the faces were familiar. I continued through the first six pages without any luck, beginning to wonder if maybe my potential father had skipped out on his senior photo or was possibly in a different grade. However, when I reached the page after my mom’s which housed the N-Q portion of the alphabet, I found my first clue. Someone between Marcus Oneill and Nina Pacheco was completely blacked out with permanent marker. It had to be my father.
Though both the picture and the name underneath were indecipherable, I now had an alphabet range for his last name. I went back upstairs to my computer and pulled up Mom’s Facebook page. I doubted she would be friends with my dad but maybe some of her friends were. Yearbook open, I scrolled through her friends list searching for familiar names. Though she still had a bitter taste in her mouth about high school, there had to be a few people she kept in touch with.
I narrowed her list of 612 friends to people in the Lakewood High School network, which yielded twenty-seven friends. Many of them had private pages so I couldn’t see their friends lists but a woman named Angela Dickerson who I recognized as a news anchor, had her page public. I knew Angela was one of my mom’s high school classmates because the first time we ever saw her on TV, my mom pointed out that she had done a group project with her in chemistry class back in the day. Angela insisted they film a video about physical versus chemical changes instead of just doing a poster like all the other groups, forecasting her future career as a news anchor. Angela had over a thousand friends so even when I narrowed it down to the Os and Ps, there were dozens of possible candidates. A guy named Michael Osage sort of looked like an older version of the guy in my mom’s Valentine’s Dance photo but upon further inspection of his page, he graduated from a high school out of state three years before my mom did. Other than that, no one else resembled my possible father.
I scrolled mindlessly through my mom's Facebook for about thirty minutes hoping for a clue when I suddenly remembered the public library kept copies of local high school yearbooks. During our freshman year, my ex-best friend Emelia Christiansen dragged me up there to scour through old yearbooks in search of a cute boy from another school she met at a football game whose name she couldn’t remember.
The comforting musty book smell filled my nostrils as I entered the public library. However, that feeling was quickly soiled by the sound of small children whining about being hungry while their mom browsed the fantasy section and a sketchy looking guy drinking from a paper bag by the computers. I found the yearbooks on the back wall between the magazines and the periodicals. Although I was instantly disappointed to find that the yearbooks only dated back ten years.
Normally my shyness would have gotten the better of me and I would have gone back home with my tail between my legs. However, today I had come too close to finding my dad to give up. I waited in line at the service desk behind a woman in workout attire renewing her library card and a man that smelled like he hadn’t showered in a week paying overdue fines. When it was finally my turn, a heavier set woman with gray hair and a nametag reading Sherry glared at me over the top of her bright red oval glasses.
“Hi. Um, do you have any more yearbooks? I’m looking for one from Lakewood High School. 2002.”
Sherry’s face crinkled up as though someone asking for a yearbook from seventeen years ago was some absurd request. “History project?”
“Yeah, kinda.” I admitted. She didn’t need to know it was a personal history project to identify my father instead of a school project.
“Hmm.” She pursed her lips, red lipstick slightly out of the lines. “We only have yearbooks going back as far as 2008. After ten years we sell them.”
I thanked Sherry anyway and went back home in defeat. There had to be an old un-blacked out yearbook somewhere. I thought about messaging Angela on Facebook and seeing if she had a copy, but if word got back to Mom that I had been talking to her old high school classmates behind her back, she would be livid. Besides, surely prestigous news anchor Angela Dickerson had better things to do than dig through her closet for her twelfth grade yearbook. Out of ideas, I sulked in front of the TV, wondering if I would ever be able to identify my biological father. Though earlier I thought I had made progress, I was essentially back to square one.
Monday, January 7th, 2019
On the first day back from school after winter break, my English teacher Mrs. Smith made us write a paragraph about our New Year’s Resolutions for our daily warm up. I only had one: to find my dad. However, I felt weird about writing that down for my teacher to read, so I made something up about how I wanted to get better grades and make more friends in school. When given the opportunity, a few students volunteered to read theirs in front of the class. Paige McClary wanted to get the lead in the spring musical and start narrowing down where she wanted to go to college, Ethan Christopher hoped to make the varsity soccer team and to bring his math grade up, and Leah Wilson wanted to work on overcoming her social anxiety, hence her volunteering to share instead of sitting quietly at her desk like she had done all last semester.
At lunch, Kendra Clarion, my best friend since ninth grade, gabbed on about the ski trip her family took in Colorado during winter break. Her mom died of lung cancer when she was in second grade but she had her dad, a stepmom, and two stepsiblings. Her stepbrother Mason was a freshman at the local community college and Lana was a sophomore at Lakewood High School, my mom’s alma mater. Kendra’s dad and stepmom tried to talk her into going to Lakewood as it was closer to their new house but she continued to go to Seaview, claiming it was too late in high school to try to start over. After her dad remarried during the summer, I noticed a change in Kendra. She seemed so much happier now that she had a stepmom and stepsiblings, especially Lana. Her dad was a police officer and always worked weird hours which left her alone for long periods of time so having people around to keep her company was so beneficial to her. One night on the phone she told me that she felt her stepfamily was the puzzle piece she had been missing since her mom died. I wondered if finding my dad could help me fill the void in my life like that.
I considered telling Kendra about my quest to find my dad but decided against it. Though well-meaning, Kendra was the type that wanted to
be involved in everything even if it had nothing to do with her. However, I knew Lana might be a good resource for me as she went to Lakewood and could possibly check out a yearbook from the library for me if there was one.
“What did you do over break?” Kendra finally asked after her twenty-minute story about Mason nearly falling off the ski lift and how she and Lana had met cute boys in the ski lounge filled most of the lunch period.
“Oh, um, not much. Just babysat, watched TV, the usual.” I lied, not ready to reveal my self-assigned genealogy project.
Kendra thankfully bought that and continued talking about herself again, her best subject. I smiled and nodded at the appropriate times as she complained about her history teacher assigning a full chapter of reading on the first day back and how two theatre kids I didn’t know had started dating over break. It wasn’t until we got up to throw our trash away that she mentioned tomorrow night she was going to Lakewood High School for Lana’s basketball game.
“Can I go with you?” I asked despite that I had never shown interested in sports before in the two years we had been friends.
“Really?” She raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows in suspicion. Though when I met her two years ago her brows had been bushy and unkempt, Lana had recently turned Kendra into a beauty guru that got her eyebrows waxed every six weeks and didn’t leave the house without makeup.
“Yeah, I missed hanging out with you over the break.” I fibbed, figuring I could stroke Kendra’s ego and possibly get my hands on a Lakewood High School yearbook in the same night.
“Aw, Jess. Of course you can come. It starts at six. You can ride with me and my parents if you meet us at our house.”
“I’ll meet you there.” I offered, wanting my own car there in case things went wrong and I needed an easy out. “Might need to take Macy to dance rehearsal on the way.”