The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  His father pushes open the door holding a packing box in his arms. They meet on the crosswalk, and his father gives Andrew a quick kiss on the cheek, his lips wet from chewing on a fresh stick of gum, then hands the box to Andrew. As they walk back to the car, Andrew looks at the self-help books and loose-leaf papers inside the box, along with a wallet, a comb, the Cornell sweatshirt he had sent his father last October, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of running shorts, and a sad, misshapen ship’s-wheel lamp, which Andrew takes out of the box and examines as though it has been put in there by mistake.

  “I made that in wood shop class,” his father says.

  “Nice,” Andrew lies.

  “It’s a piece of shit.”

  His father sleeps for the first leg of the trip, his mouth parted, eyes lifted, as if dreaming something precious. At a rest stop on the other side of the state line, Andrew gives him some money for a coffee and a pack of cigarettes, and the two stand outside the bathrooms, watching the travelers pull in and out, fat and unforgiving with their overfull minivans, shaggy dogs, and picnic lunches.

  “So,” Andrew starts, once they’re back on the road, “did I tell you my boss died last week?”

  “When would you have told me that? I didn’t see you last week.”

  “I thought you might be interested to know.”

  “How are you taking it?”

  “Fine, I guess. I’m not sure. Apparently there’s going to be a lot of movement inside the company now.”

  “You’re thinking promotion, then?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing. Though, when you move up because of something like this, part of you will always wonder whether you earned that promotion.”

  “Just because a man died doesn’t mean I haven’t worked hard.”

  “And just because you’ve worked hard doesn’t mean you deserve a promotion.”

  “Why’d I even bring it up?”

  “Don’t get sensitive, Andrew. I’m happy you’re in the position you’re in. That’s all you can do really, put yourself in a position to move vertically. You can’t help what happens to people in other positions. What I’m saying is it might be a burden. That’s all.”

  “I’m well aware of what a burden is.”

  “Don’t be rude.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Of course you did. I am a burden. I can admit that. Go on, pull over. It’s been awhile since I last drove a car.”

  He drives fast through the blankets of dark and lightless highways, a mist of rain pebbling the windshield, the wipers smoothing the rain away.

  “This is quite a ride,” his father says.

  And that’s all he says for the next three hours.

  * * *

  Andrew’s father scared him when he was a boy—his size, black eyes, the way he emphasized the An in his name when he shouted for him to come to the dinner table. But he showed him love, too, held him delicately when he cried, nicked his chin when he acted up. But this isn’t why he feels the old man deserves a break—his reasons have more to do with a general anxiety over letting go, that if he doesn’t help, his father will be gone forever.

  The cottage Andrew has rented for his father is nestled in the pines near a small pond in Wequaquet. There’s a short charcoal grill on the porch; a pan, two bowls, cheap bent silverware, and a miniature refrigerator in the kitchen; an old, musty green couch and a thirty-two-inch television set on a nightstand in the living room; and a stiff twin bed with a set of linens Andrew took from his house. A lingering odor of burnt coffee beans from his morning coffee still hovers in the kitchen and living room, which are nearly the same size and only separated by a scratched wooden table with two folding chairs.

  “This will do fine,” his father says, after touring the house.

  They unpack the boxes of old clothes Andrew has been storing in his basement, and decorate the place with a few framed prints not unlike a seasonal landscape scene hanging on a wall above a bed in a highway motel room.

  While his father sets his toiletries in the bathroom, Andrew flips through the pages of a self-published self-help writer’s guide, poorly bound, a clip-art copy of a hand holding a pen scanned onto the cover. The book is titled The Keys to the Self-Help Kingdom. The author, Henrik Corbyn, has selected a photo of himself looking very worldly in a canvas-colored shirt with a neatly trimmed goatee, and around his neck many necklaces of various stones, elbows propped up on a desk with his hands together and two index fingers held in a thinking man’s position just under the chin.

  From inside the cover, Andrew pulls out two folded pages of white, lined paper, and unfolds and presses them flat on the table:

  Power Presence!

  By Robert Kelly

  Chapter 1

  “There’s always the day before the day everything changes.”

  Let me start by saying that I’m not perfect. It took me losing my wife and kids, going bankrupt, and spending three years in prison to realize that. But there is more action when the world is falling apart. More fresh starts and do-overs and clean slates; there is the feeling of renewal, of having the body split open, the soul purged and purified, and everything done wrong laid out for examination.

  Let me start by saying that I’m not perfect. It has taken me three bankruptcies, two divorces, and one short term jail sentence to admit that.

  Then, in his father’s doctor-like scribble, a note in the margin:

  The key here is

  to motivate the

  reader right off the

  bat—introduce the hook—

  positive seeking people

  want instant answers

  not prophecy—the body split

  open? Sounds gruesome.

  Strike that.

  It has taken me fifty-seven years, a failed marriage, bankruptcy, and three years in prison to finally realize I’m not perfect.

  But there is more action when the world is falling apart. More fresh starts and do-overs and clean slates; there is the feeling of renewal, of having the body split open, the soul purged and purified, and everything done wrong laid out for examination.

  But it is that moment when your world is falling apart, that you can finally be honest with yourself. I had nothing to be proud of. I was humbled. I examined my past and admitted my failing. Then I was free.

  HOOK:

  Once you get rid of the past you can finally live in the present.

  One morning, eight months into my two-year stint in Allenwood, a bright light caught me as I was sitting on the toilet thinking about the time my father had taken my dinner plate and dumped the meat loaf and string beans onto the floor of the mudroom where we kept our shoes and jackets, ordering me to eat off the floor if I wanted to act like an animal at the table. I was eight years old. The light coming through the caged glass enveloped my memory and erased it. I could feel my heart pumping. I clenched and unclenched my fists, staring up at the sickly yellow auxiliary lighting that passed for darkness in prison. Suddenly I felt released. This feeling, I later understood, was the unexplainable power of the present.

  Andrew hears his father’s heavy steps on the hardwood floor in the hallway, and he quickly tries to stuff the pages back into The Keys to the Self-Help Kingdom.

  “Curious?” his father asks.

  “A little.”

  “There’s money to be made selling clarity. Books, DVDs, digital downloads, apps, and who knows what in the future—possible holograms, bright beautiful people guiding the sad and searching through their day.”

  Hope turns to disappointment turns to exhaustion. Why did he always get suckered in by his father’s enterprises? Inevitably, each one was just another scheme. Andrew will nod and ask uninspired questions, time ticking away on his watch face—how much time has he wasted with his father’s plans? And when they didn’t work out, how his father acted as though they had never existed. The last one he had was last month, written out in his prison cell on yell
ow legal paper, his least inventive: the dissolvable meal, a pill containing all the nutrients, vitamins, and calories you needed to complete a two-thousand-calorie diet, minus the chewing. “Not to mention the health benefits,” he had said. “And think about how many people we will save from choking or chipping a tooth or food poisoning,” and when, weeks later, Andrew got up the courage to tell his father that he had to pass on the idea, his father said, “People love to eat, I don’t know what I was thinking. Now I’m looking into kiosks, all different types of kiosks, you can put them in airports and shopping centers and parks, rent them to whoever checks out, they can sell Seventh-day Adventist literature for all I care, as long as they pay the rent each week, always a check in the mail, like collecting royalties, kiosks across the country, KELLY AND SONS etched into a small steel plate on the side, with a phone number and e-mail address, this is the future, sell and move, sell and move, people need change, only the old keep returning to the same place, and the same place grows old with them.”

  His father will never follow through. Something else will come along, something bigger and more profitable, something untapped, like undiscovered oil buried deep below a square of unexplored ocean. Andrew has cataloged his ideas in his memory. ATM machines, inflatable air dancers, super vitamin packs, nicotine lozenges, antiaging face creams, helicopter rides, and chocolate face-moldings for lavish corporate gatherings. And what if he raised enough capital, gathered the right group of investors, even asked Andrew to take a loan out in his name? If, say, he became a multimillionaire, a trailblazer, a man remembered. The same, Andrew thinks, because, for his father, there is no goal, only a constant, unattainable imagining of possibilities just outside his reach.

  His father pulls up a chair beside Andrew, picks up the papers, pats them down so the stack is even. Andrew can smell the sweet mint and coffee of his father’s breath.

  “But it’s not just another scheme,” the old man says. “I really feel the present. I had an awakening in there. Now I just need to figure out how to sell it. This Corbyn guy has it down. He says how you need the audience to sympathize with your upbringing and good intentions, your successes and failures, your unique, hopeful vision once faced with so much adversity.”

  He picks up the book from the table and flips through to a dog-eared page.

  “Listen to this: ‘The past is fiction. You can never know what it was like to live back then as yourself. You were not the you you are now. Just as we cannot truly know how the Romans and ancient Greeks lived or the Neanderthals. There are fossils and cave paintings and marble busts, but these are locked behind museum doors, reimagined by the viewers who stand before them with their own thoughts and emotions and ideas of past civilizations. The beauty of art is that a painting is never finished because it is never looked at the same way twice. So, too, is the beauty of the mind, always changing the person you were into the person you are. So it is our present perspective of the past that controls our fate. Can we move forward? Or will we root ourselves in historical fiction forever?’”

  He shuts the book and looks at Andrew with his unblinking, black eyes.

  “Is that not the most powerful thing you’ve ever heard?” he says.

  “It’s pretty powerful,” Andrew says.

  “Pretty powerful? That’s all you have to say?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “I bought some steaks,” Andrew says, turning from his father. “They’re in the fridge.”

  * * *

  The following week, when Andrew stops by to check on his father, he hears laughter from inside the cottage, and through the screen door he sees his father sitting at the kitchen table drinking bottled water with a red-haired woman not much older than Andrew, slender, in a cotton spring dress, her legs crossed, brown boots halfway up her calves. How, he wonders, is his father able to move in, move on, so easily, no matter the place, no matter the circumstance? The woman is holding a dog in her lap, a Jack Russell terrier with a brown face divided by a narrow patch of white fur down its nose.

  Something about her, Andrew thinks, with that dog and those boots and that red hair.

  “Andrew, don’t stand out there like a loon,” his father says. “Come in, meet my new friend … what was your name again?”

  “Millie,” the red-haired woman says.

  “That’s it. I don’t know if I agree with that name for you. I think Rebecca, or, possibly, Vanessa. Something with an a at the end.”

  Millie gives an affected laugh, as if by doing so, she is joining him in this bout of flirting.

  “Your father’s a hoot,” she says to Andrew. “Here I am, looking all over for my Rudolph, and he’s curled up on the front steps outside like some kind of lion cub.”

  “Do you live around here?” Andrew asks.

  “Sort of.”

  “Pull up a seat, bud,” Robert says.

  “Yeah, bud,” Millie says.

  “I just came by to check in on you,” Andrew says. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “Why do you need to be checked in on, Robert?” Millie asks.

  Robert pulls up his pants leg, revealing the home monitor bracelet strapped around his ankle.

  “I’m not a pedophile if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “I’m just a crook.”

  “We all got our secrets,” Millie says. “Some worse than others.” She turns to Andrew and winks. “Any-hoo.” She rises from the chair with her dog held in her arms like a fragile gift. “I’ll let the two of you alone.”

  “Oh, but…” Robert says, then stops himself. “Sure. You got better things to do than hang around with the likes of us.”

  “No, no. That’s not it. I think it’s important to spend as much time with your family as possible.”

  “That’s true,” Robert says.

  “It was nice meeting you,” Millie says to Andrew. “And it was nice meeting you, too,” Millie says again, this time in a slightly gruff voice, holding her Jack Russell terrier up by her face to make it appear as though the dog is speaking.

  After she leaves, Robert can’t stop from smiling every few seconds.

  “God, I miss a good woman,” he says solemnly, with a hint of desperation.

  Andrew wonders if his father has had a good woman since leaving his mother, and, if not, is it her he misses?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Andrew, lying in his old bed in his old room in his old house, now has time to ask himself when last he had truly been happy. Sometimes his memories of the Cape make him feel something akin to happiness. Such as when he used to ride his bike past the marsh, across the train tracks, then farther down the road to Long Beach. The time he discovered an old motorboat tied up to a rock at the edge of the landing. He untied the rope and pushed the boat out toward the landing and got in and pulled the cord. The engine wouldn’t start. He checked the tank and saw that it was full. He had brought tools this time and took apart the engine, carefully laying out each part in order to find the missing piece. It was simple really. There was no spark, no way to get the fuel to the motor. He spent awhile chipping at a flat stone and fit it in the engine and put back together the parts and set the motor on the boat. He greased the wheel with his spit, then pulled the cord. The small engine turned over and a blast of black smoke flumed out. He shifted the lever back and forth and up, and went slowly out into the bay and past the docks and around the blue striped buoy he saw in the distance, until bringing her back to the landing. He cleaned his hands in the seawater and gathered his tools and looked at the boat, feeling accomplished.

  But the memory disappears, and here he is now, living with his mother, ashamed, guilty, scared, alone, and unhappy. He has been lying in bed for the better part of the morning, listening to his mother’s unceasing cough. The heavy rains of late, and the pollen in the air, don’t help her condition. He has also started to ready himself for his brother’s arrival. What does Nathan look li
ke these days? More important, how will he act?

  It has been ten years since he’s last seen his brother, the day after the wedding, when they drank beers underneath the Wequaquet River Bridge and planned a trip to go fishing in Maine sometime in August. But neither of them liked to fish, and Nathan was gone before the end of July.

  In his socks and underpants, Andrew walks from the guest room to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door. There is nothing inside the fridge but a jar of pickles and two cans of beer. His mother lives like a bachelor. He’ll have to run to the store later.

  He cracks open a beer, drinks half of it in one, long gulp, then walks through the swinging door and into the dining room, where he looks out at the street through the bay window. A gang of kids on bikes are circling around the entrance to the driveway, hands pressed forward on their handlebars, their loud chattering indecipherable from that distance. The kids begin to pick up speed, as though feeding off one another, then zoom down the street toward the hill on Southbay Drive, which hundreds of years ago fishermen would climb back up with their catches.

  Finishing his beer, he begins to relax and take stock of the house, of the large painting of the cat in the dining room, which always frightened him as a child, making him feel watched by this cat, this hungry cat about to lap up the spilt milk before her, then to the mantel above the fireplace, where he places his beer can beside the wooden horses his great-grandmother had brought over from Sweden. One has broken and been put back together with glue. He studies the zigzagging crack along its leg and flank. Some splinters of wood have gone missing forever. He belches.

  “Andrew,” his mother calls.

  He rushes into the living room.

  “What is it, Mom? What do you need?”

  “I just wanted you to help me work this thing.”

  She pinches the remote control, holds it away from her face as though it is something foul. He turns it over and sees that the batteries have fallen out where she taped them in after losing the cover. Nothing in the fridge, but plenty of batteries stored throughout the house. He crouches down and rubs his hand underneath the couch. His mother nudges him with the toe of her soft slipper. Batteries taped back in, he hands her the remote and places a cushion underneath her feet.