Foster had faith in stories, though. Whatever changes were happening in his house and at the dinner table would surely, eventually, give way to another rollicking tale from his dad that would make his mom laugh again. So Foster became the dinnertime storyteller and carefully swallowed the gritty taste of not getting much response. Not much response at all.
Dad had a job that required a suit, and Foster liked suits. He’d decided that he would wear one when he grew up. It would be dark colored and have a crisp crease down the front of each leg. It would feel shiny to the touch and fit handsomely over a white shirt that smelled of ironing spray and Dad’s cologne. At the kitchen table before work, Dad would tuck a napkin into his collar to make sure no runny egg or milk got on his tie. Foster liked the way the bright white shirt cuffs poked out and then retreated from the sleeves of Dad’s jacket whenever he reached for the salt or a piece of toast. Sometimes Dad set his laptop up on the table next to his bowl or plate and scrolled through emails while he ate. He looked very important.
Sometimes he worked at night after he got home too. After baths and dinner, the laptop would appear again and Dad would tap tap tap away: tiny taps with the pads of his fingers. Not like the click click of Mom typing with fingernails that sounded like her high heels on a wood floor. Foster liked to sit at the table with Dad and work on a puzzle or read a book, occasionally glancing at Dad’s merry fingers or hard-thinking face. Sometimes he would ask, “What are you doing now, Dad?” and Dad would say, “Making money for other people,” without looking up.
Foster knew his dad was important without having to be told how or why. It wasn’t just the suits or the making money for other people. It was the sense that his dad was relied on. Not just by him and Mom, but by lots of people. There were work phone calls at night and sometimes early in the morning, and Dad’s voice was always different during these calls. It was slightly deeper; his words were fast and hooked together in such a way that they sounded like the car GPS when Mom accidentally set it to a foreign language. It was different from Dad’s storytelling voice. This work voice had fewer colors and less movement. Foster found it a little bit scary. It was straight-edged, a voice that didn’t waste time, a voice with no stories.
“Where does the suit voice come from, Dad?”
“The what?”
“That voice that’s like a stranger’s. The one you use on the phone.”
“I have a stranger’s voice on the phone? Is it this one? More coffee, woman!”
Foster jumped, but Mom laughed, standing at the kitchen sink, her back to them.
“I suppose you could call it part of my armor,” his dad continued. “Like the suit. No knight sounds the same with his helmet on.”
“Hot and echoey,” Foster said.
“Very good!” Dad said.
When Dad’s storytelling voice first started making an appearance during work calls, Foster thought it was funny. He thought Dad was doing it on purpose to make him laugh. First there would be a silence that seemed out of place. Foster knew when it was Dad’s turn to talk because the tinny chirp of the person on the other end of the phone would stop. Where Dad would normally begin speaking immediately, or even get in early and cut the tinny chirp off, he started to fumble with his words. He seemed distracted, like he was searching for the next part of a story. It was as if he’d lost his train of thought, or, more likely, boarded another one.
Foster noticed that Mom saw it too. She didn’t giggle about it like he did, though. She would stop what she was doing and look hard at Dad, as if her concentration alone could help Dad find the words he seemed to have lost. His face would look like he’d pulled a muscle. Sometimes he would take the phone away from his ear and just look at it before hanging up. But sometimes he would laugh and say something that didn’t make sense in that high-pitched storytelling whisper of his.
Foster wondered if the person on the other end of the phone noticed the giggling or the silences. Mom was all concentration and no sympathy. It seemed somehow wrong to him in ways he couldn’t possibly explain, even in a story. He kept waiting for Mom to find it funny too, and when she didn’t, it made him nervous.
Foster’s nervousness turned to hot and clammy the night Dad started to cry. Mom liked to read after dinner while Foster and Dad sat at the kitchen table and did their things. That was how Foster described it to her. On the way past, Mom ran her fingers across the top of Foster’s hair as she retreated to the family room with a cup of tea and said, “What are you two up to?”
Foster solemnly replied, as he always did, “We’re doing our things.”
“And what things are they?”
“Secret things. Aren’t they, Dad?”
“Oh, yes,” Dad said without looking up as he shifted papers this way and that. “We’re midritual here.” Foster shuffled his books and drawings about, mirroring each of his dad’s actions with the same attentiveness, brows drawn in, mouth puckered, and occasionally whistling on the hard exhale. It made him feel like he was helping.
When Dad’s phone rang, he passed Foster a sheet of paper covered in small indecipherable words and symbols and said, “Have a look over that for me, Fossie,” before answering. Mom gave Dad a kiss on the top of the head and headed to the family room. Foster stared at the document in front of him and tapped a pencil thoughtfully.
Foster listened to Dad’s armor voice for a while. It seemed in charge tonight. Foster began copying words from Dad’s report onto his drawing paper, coloring in the holes in the letters. Foster was so absorbed in creating pockmarks in every word he copied that he didn’t realize immediately that his dad had stopped talking. It was his pen not moving that alerted him. When he looked up, he saw Dad’s face was red and wet, and Foster had to look hard to make himself believe his dad wasn’t just sweating. But people don’t sweat from their eyes. Foster let his fingers hover slightly above Dad’s wrist before letting them land, because he was embarrassed for both of them. When his fingers finally touched down, Dad winced and recoiled his arm until it was curled up against his chest, his fingers in a knot under his chin. Foster slid quietly from his chair and went to the family room.
“Dad’s crying,” he said.
“Crying? I don’t think so, Fossie.” Mom didn’t look up from her book.
“I think so,” Foster said.
Mom looked at Foster then. She pressed her lips together and stood. She left her book facedown on the couch, clearly expecting to be right back. Foster followed her into the kitchen, where she stood behind Dad’s chair and leaned to the side to look at Dad’s face. Her hands were resting on his shoulders. Foster stayed where he was, watching the back of them. Mom took the phone that was still pressed to Dad’s ear from his hand, putting it to her own ear. She said, “Hello,” and clearly someone answered because she listened then, making a few thoughtful noises like mmm and saying “I see” twice. Then, “He’ll have to call you back,” and the small pip of ending the call.
“Malcolm?” She said it cautiously, as if to a sleepwalker she didn’t want to shock into wakefulness. When Dad’s phone, still in Mom’s hand, suddenly rang, all three of them yelped in such a way that Foster started to giggle. It was the yelp that was needed, the sudden blare of spiky noise into an increasingly uncomfortable silence. It snapped them all into a kind of action—small action, but Foster was grateful for it nonetheless. Mom took Dad’s hand and led him down the hall toward their bedroom. She shut the door behind them, leaving Foster standing in the kitchen alone with a giggle still pressing on his lungs. He walked forward and closed Dad’s laptop. Then he went to the couch and put Mom’s bookmark inside her book, placing it on the coffee table.
Dad used the word ritual a lot. He said rituals helped make sense of the unfathomable, and that we didn’t have enough of them. He said they didn’t have to be fancy either. Even small rituals can coax people closer together, just like cinching the neck of a drawstring bag. Foster had a drawstring bag he kept library books in. He liked the sigh of the fabr
ic sliding on the thin waxed rope that secured it. When it was shut tight, the neck formed a soft flower. Foster knew what his dad meant.
Foster’s favorite day of the week was Sunday. Not just because it wasn’t a school day, but because exactly the same thing happened on every Sunday. Other days, for all their sameness, came with all sorts of unpredictable stuff. Foster didn’t mind surprises if they were good ones (he didn’t like surprise spelling tests or trips to the dentist), but he liked his unsurprising routine more. The stuff Dad called ritual and looked forward to just as much as Foster did.
On Sundays Dad’s phone stayed off and his laptop stayed shut. Sometimes they stayed in pajamas until eleven o’clock. Mom didn’t rush to make the beds. Bathing was optional. Dad made pancakes with lemon and sugar, and Foster got to beat the batter.
“It doesn’t have to be completely smooth,” Dad said. “Some lumps are good.”
“Okay,” Foster said, allowing Dad to peek into the bowl.
“I said some lumps, Fossie. Keep going.”
“Do you need help?” Mom asked, wandering into the kitchen with the newspaper under her arm.
“Honey, we’re midritual here!” Dad said. He sounded all cross and put out, but Foster knew it was an act. Mom whacked Dad on the bottom with the rolled-up paper and strolled back toward the family room.
“What are we looking for, Fossie?”
“Ribbon consistency.”
“Good man.”
Sunday breakfast was always the same. It took a long time. They sat at the kitchen table and ate one pancake at a time. As soon as everyone had finished, Dad would get up and make three more so each serving was hot and crisp on the edges and warmed the cold lemon juice just enough to make some of the sugar crystals melt. Foster’s fingers and lips would be glazed with the tart, sweet syrup until moments before they headed into town.
Going into town was one of Foster’s favorite things to do with Dad. They played games in the car. I Spy, Who Can Spot Ten Red Cars First, and Foster’s favorite: the Road Sign Game. Dad would call out a word from a sign, and Foster would have to use it in a sentence. Then they would switch. Sometimes Dad said that their alternate sentences had to string together to make a story. That was harder, but the story always teased itself out of randomness as if the road signs themselves were helping in the creation.
“Mirror!” Dad called out.
“Umm, there was this big mirror on the wall of the…castle and…people who looked in it saw…”
“Don’t stop. This is good stuff. What did they see?”
“Magic things!”
“I love it! Pick the next word.”
Foster studied the streetscape. Road signs, shop signs, signs on the sides of trucks. Some of the words he didn’t know, but he didn’t want to pick one that was too easy. Then he saw a shop he recognized. He knew what it was called because he’d been in there with Mom a lot.
“Tapestry!” Foster called out.
“Fantastic word!” Dad said, thumping the steering wheel. “So. What the magic people saw when they looked in that mirror was a…tapestry of their possible futures.”
“A picture made of lots of colored thread? And they can choose what they do next?”
“Yes! My turn to pick. Ah…”
“By following the color they like?”
“Yes! I choose—”
“But it’s hard to follow colors in those big pictures that Mom does. They’re all kind of together, Dad.”
“It’s magic, remember? I choose…light!”
Foster paused for some time. Dad didn’t rush him. Dad always said there was no point in rushing good thinking. Then Foster said, “But if they couldn’t choose, the mirror went dark and there was no light anymore.”
“Good twist,” Dad said. “Now people are looking at a dark pane of glass? Does it still reflect? What’s your word, Fossie?”
“Why did you cry on the phone, Dad?”
“What?” Foster saw Dad’s eyes flick momentarily to the rearview mirror. “I didn’t cry on the phone, love.”
“You did, Dad.”
“No, I didn’t, Fossie. Let me tell you something about mirrors. They have been used to tell the future for a long, long time. Anything that reflects has been used by magic people to predict the future—and sometimes change the future. There’s a long storytelling tradition about prophets and seers looking into glass and seeing the future. So does your dark glass reflect? What’s your word, Fossie?”
Foster watched all the words in the world whirl past him. The car seemed to be going too fast now for him to settle on a word. Foster felt a pain in his gut he didn’t recognize. As Dad pulled the car into the parking lot, Foster felt his story word crawl from his clutched throat into his mouth.
“Dad? My word is liar.”
Foster’s dad half turned in his seat. “Did you see that on a sign?” he asked.
Foster was sorry he’d said it right away. Dad didn’t look confused or embarrassed at all. Foster couldn’t bear the thought of Dad using the word in the next part of the story, so he unbuckled his seat belt and said, “Come on, Dad!”
Even though they were stuffed with pancakes, the first stop was always hot chocolate and shortbread. There were lots of choices of cookies and cakes, but Foster loved the way the sweet, buttery lozenge of shortbread dissolved away when he held it against the roof of his mouth. They would have races too—like who could dip the shortbread in their hot chocolate the longest and get it into their mouth before the piece broke off and had to be rescued with a spoon.
The coffee shop they went to was right next door to a small secondhand bookshop. The lady who worked there knew them by name. Sometimes when they went in, she would have put books aside for Dad to look at. Dad always bought something. The shop smelled good too. “Smell of old stories,” Dad said. The books Foster liked were on a bottom shelf at the back. His dad would sit on the floor with Foster, and they would flick through the books, sometimes stopping to read parts. Week to week the books would be the same, but Foster didn’t care. He liked sitting on the floor with his dad, surrounded by the Sunday smells of brittle paper.
When they took their book haul home, Mom said, “Why do you go there? You don’t know where any of those books have been.”
“Tell her, Fossie.”
“Because we don’t know where they’ve been.”
“Good man. Every one of these books has multiple stories to tell. Look at this one,” Dad said, rummaging about in the bag. “The last reader put notes in the margin. Fascinating!”
“It’s fascinating, Mom!” Foster said.
“Urghh. Go wash your hands, both of you,” Mom said. But she was smiling, and she kissed Dad as he walked past.
The story about his grandma’s fire was the last story Foster remembered his dad telling him before he started to change. It stuck in Foster’s mind as the last one, anyway. It was the last story Dad told without looking confused and getting mixed up in the telling. Sometimes he would start telling one story and then trail off on some unrelated happening from before Foster was born. It didn’t happen all the time. Every now and then Foster would ask Dad to tell the grandma story again, almost like a test, and feel comforted if Dad could get through it.
“Dad, tell me about Grandma’s dragon fire again,” Foster said.
“Dragon fire,” Dad said. “Did we read that one?” Foster would feel strangely embarrassed every time his dad lost a story. He didn’t want to draw attention to the lost stories.
His dad began doing funny things when he first started to forget, so no one was worried. Foster thought the funny things were funny too. Dad went out for dog food and came back with cat food, when the cat had been dead for five years. Once he forgot to take the plastic wrapper off the cheese slices before putting them into sandwiches, and then couldn’t work out why he couldn’t cut them in half. Foster and Dad giggled about it. But then the forgetting got less funny. Like when Dad got confused on the drive home from work and had
to park on the side of the road to figure out where he was. The police found him parked there, looking muddled. They thought he was drunk at first. They put him in the back of the police car and called Foster’s mom. Nobody laughed much about that.
The beginning of the forgetting was the worst, because Dad knew about it. He knew something was wrong. Once the forgetting really set in, it didn’t seem to matter to him. But somewhere in between the funny forgetting and the not talking anymore, his dad had moments—just moments—of absolute clarity, which really hurt him. Foster could see that Dad knew. He knew there were things he used to know that were going away. Mom started to get angry at the silly things Dad sometimes did, and he’d go sort of pale, the color of a secondhand book page, and make little clicking noises in his throat to cover his confusion. Foster imagined the noises were Dad’s memory trying to squeeze out, like air being pinched from the stretched neck of a balloon.
His dad started walking differently. The change in his walking paralleled his forgetting, as if he were trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. He started shuffling like a tall person trying to conceal his height. He wasn’t a particularly tall person, but he stooped anyway, dragging his feet so they scuffed the floor. You could hear him coming. It made Foster’s mom mad. Sometimes Foster would stumble across Dad leaning against a doorframe or sitting in a corner—always still, always expressionless—and sometimes he wouldn’t answer when Foster talked to him. It was scary to come across Dad without warning. The only way to be sure where Dad was at any time was if he was making his way from one part of the house to another. Then there was that rasping of his feet on the floor.
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