Mind Games

by Heather W. Petty

  Literally nothing was as I’d expected. Where I’d thought to see a prison uniform, my father was dressed in street clothes, a suit jacket flung over the back of his chair. I’d thought to see him chained, at the very least to have his hands cuffed to the bar on the table. More than mere free hands, though, he was shoveling the last bits of breakfast into his mouth with one hand while the other grasped a mug that, when I was prodded closer, smelled more like whiskey than coffee. He even laughed, a sound I hadn’t heard in more than a year.

  In all the scenarios I’d imagined for that day’s visit, not one included my entering to see my father distracted by his own storytelling in a room full of his friends, cheering him on as he finished a proper English breakfast. But something was off. A glance at DS Day provided my first clue. He seemed as stunned as I was, which shouldn’t have been the case if he’d set up this little meeting. So I started to look closer.

  Dad’s wrists were my next clue. When he brought his drink up to his mouth, his shirtsleeve material pulled too far back along his forearm, telling me two things. First, he’d been shackled until very recently, going by the remaining impressions of handcuffs at his wrists. Second, he wasn’t wearing his own clothes. The shirt was too small for my dad, short in the sleeve and narrow in the shoulders, which probably explained why he wasn’t wearing the jacket.

  “You’re here,” my father said, as if I was the help coming to clear away his tray.

  I tried my very best not to grin at all his dramatics, and I didn’t flinch away from his gaze, which swept over me in one quick, studying movement. “I didn’t realize we’d have such an audience,” I said. “Perhaps I should come another time?”

  DS Day made a gesture with his head, but the other officers seemed wary to leave. They kept glancing between my father and me, as though they could predict what would happen just by judging the space between us. Finally, one of them tapped the other’s arm with the back of his hand, and they started for the door, only stopping short to drop a warning for DS Day. “Something happens and it’s your arse.”

  Day nodded and stayed behind after the officers were gone. I stood next to the interview table, watching him fidget by the door.

  “Out,” my father barked, coming closer to his true self.

  Day jumped a little at the command, but he still managed to sound authoritative when he said, “Recording’s off, but I’ll be watching. Not so much as shaking hands. I mean it.”

  My father smiled and gripped his hands around the bar atop the interview table as some kind of consoling gesture that meant nothing. I knew this visit would end with one of us being dragged out of the room; I just wasn’t sure yet who it would be.

  Once DS Day left us alone, I sat across from my father before he could offer the seat to me. I stared him down, waiting to see what he wanted from our little chat. His first question wasn’t unexpected, but I wasn’t focused on what he actually said, only which words were chosen and what they implied.

  “How are my sons?” Ownership, prioritized concern for their welfare. Both false.

  “My brothers are no longer your concern.” I watched him dampen a flare of anger at my words and decided to push the button again. “I wasn’t lying when I said you won’t see them, so you might as well strip them from your mind.”

  He shifted his position and cleared his throat. “I hear Alice is playing at being an adult. How long until she takes off on you?” Attempt at making me feel insecure, insult to the only adult left in my life who could help me.

  “How we are living is also none of your concern. Neither is Alice.”

  He leaned back in his chair and tried very hard to force an easy grin, something he might have known would never work if he were even slightly human. “How did you find the flighty bitch? I looked three months with no real leads.”

  “None of your business.”

  My father shifted his position in the chair again, this time laying his hands flat on the tabletop in front of him. He was already losing composure, which disappointed, really. His next smile crinkled the line of stitches along his cheek. That one movement made it so that I couldn’t seem to look away. And staring at the stitches brought my memories all back in a flash. My helplessness under his weight, the delight in his eyes as he opened the gash on his own cheek, the warmth of the blood dripping onto my face.

  “If you’re not going to tell me about my home, maybe I’ll petition to have Fred come for visitation.” A blatant threat, an ineffectual one at that, but the idea that he’d use Freddie to try to force me to talk, that he’d actually spoken the name of my brother aloud from his disgusting mouth—with those few words, my father had stirred up just enough anger to burn away my memories.

  I sighed out the last of my panic and said, “Non-molestation order.” I’d applied for an NMO for me and my brothers from my hospital bed the day after my father’s arrest. It was standard practice in attempted murder cases, according to the child services counselor they’d sent out. She was also how I’d discovered that while I couldn’t become guardian to my brothers, I legally didn’t need a guardian at age sixteen, and I had the legal right to continue occupying my house. I knew my father was aware of every step I’d taken through the legal system as well, so all of this ridiculous fronting was just more boring drivel from the man. And I was done listening.

  I rolled my eyes to stare at the door DS Day had passed through just minutes before. “I thought this would be more interesting than it is.” I stood up, and my father slammed his hands on the table.

  “Sit.”

  I crossed my arms, still standing. I thought perhaps he’d finally lost the last of his restraint, but he managed to compose himself once again.

  “I’ve a story to tell you.” He gestured at the chair. “Sit. Please.”

  “Pass.”

  I turned toward the door and he said, “It’s about your mother.”

  I heard the slightest edge of desperation in his voice and pursed my lips to stop a smile before looking at him from over my shoulder. “Do you think there’s anything you can tell me that Alice can’t? She was Mum’s best friend.”

  “That bitch will never know what I know about my wife. I can tell you the real reason we got married.”

  I turned back to face him, studying his features skeptically. “Still a pass. I don’t think you know all that much about my mother, least of all her reasons for doing anything.”

  This time I made it close enough to the door to rest my hand on the handle before he said something that stopped me. “She killed a man.”

  He was lying. I knew for sure he was lying, but I couldn’t seem to leave the room, despite how much I was internally yelling at myself to just go. I managed to create a neutral expression before I faced him again, not that it tempered the triumph blaring at me from his every feature.

  “That’s something Alice knows nothing about,” he taunted.

  “Because she knows better than to believe something so stupidly false.”

  His expression then was more than triumphant. It was outright victory. Whether what he was about to say was truth or a lie, he believed it. I, of course, still could have left, but he knew I wouldn’t, and that made me want to slap him as hard as I could. So I resigned myself to listening to more of his arrogance, newly determined to glean something more out of our meeting than pathetic power plays and his blathering on.

  But I wasn’t going to make it entirely easy on him.

  “Why would that matter at all? She’s dead and gone.”

  My father only gestured at the chair across from him. His turn to play games with me, it seemed.

  I sat and said, “I’ll listen.”

  “We’d met long before that dance, your mom and me.”

  He watched me carefully after he spoke, like I was supposed to express some kind of shock at this, his first revelation. When I didn’t, he said, “Thought I’d be meeting a whore that day, not a con.” And he was at it again. Apparently not even Saint Emily Moriarty wa
s safe from his skewed implications. “That’s how domestics usually go. We get called to an hourly motel to deal with screams from a lady and sounds of a fight, and it’s a pimp rolling his tart, nine out of ten.

  “But that night it was Em.” A darkness slipped over his expression. “She was beaten bloody. Makeup smeared across her cheeks, her hair wild and jutting up in spots like it’d been yanked. And some of the blood was dried, like she’d been bleeding for hours before I got there. But I didn’t notice any of that at first, on account of her hands.”

  His expression cleared, and I thought he was just excited to tell me the next bit, but he seemed somehow proud as well. “Her hands were coated red, like she had gloves on, but it was all blood on her hands, and none of it her own.” Definitely pride. He was proud of Mum for coating her hands in someone else’s blood.

  I couldn’t decide if I should act repulsed or fascinated, so I kept my expression neutral, which seemed to irritate my father. I wondered, though, if he knew my real reaction to his little story, would he understand it? Because under my neutrality, I wasn’t scared or horrified or anything close to what he might have wanted. I was angry.

  I didn’t believe my mother could ever have been involved in something like that, but I believed Emily was there. I was sure he saw the scene exactly as he described, but it still seemed like a story about a stranger. The mother I knew wasn’t the kind to go to an hourly motel, much less allow herself to be beaten there and bathe her hands in blood.

  And that was why I was angry. There was a time when I wished to know all her secrets. But in the months since Mum had died, I felt like I’d lost track of her completely. She’d somehow become all these different people, most of whom I didn’t know at all. She was this lofty sainted thing to my brothers, more concept “Mother” than actual being on most days. She was a Robin Hood–esque folk hero in the stories Alice had told me. Dad had always painted her as some tragic victim, an abused angel worth destroying everything to avenge. And now I was supposed to believe she was also a battered grifter who killed men in cheap hotels.

  Maybe I could have laughed off all those versions of my mother, maybe I could have even forgiven my father for constructing this latest portrayal, but I was losing track of what I knew about her—of who she was before all the pictures and stories and secrets. I wasn’t even sure I remembered my version at all. And I wanted my mum back.

  Dad went on with his story about a con gone wrong, and how Emily had to fight for her life and freedom from an angry mark. In the end she’d had no choice but to kill him. That much had been obvious from the beginning of his fairy tale. None of the details mattered, though he seemed to be embellishing the story as much as possible. Especially the parts where he turned himself into Prince Charming, dirty-cop version, who let her run off instead of forcing her to go through the physical exams, evidence collection, and statements that the police would demand from her in order to prove self-defense.

  They were supposed to meet at a café on the corner later that night, to make sure they had their stories straight, but she’d never showed.

  “Never did ask her why,” my father reminisced.

  I let out a gruntish laugh. “Because she was smart enough to realize that you’d end up using it to get something from her.”

  The monster returned with a sharp glare. My father clenched his fists and banged one on the table before he came back to himself and realized what he was doing. When he’d calmed down, he said, “We found each other.  Your mom and I were meant to find each other again.”

  I could guess the rest of his story. He saw her at the Tea Dance. She agreed to go out with him to keep him quiet about the dead mark and realized too late what he was. Maybe she even let herself fall in love with him for a time. But I was absolutely sure that it was the threat of jail that made her leave the safety of Alice’s farm and take us back to him when she was pregnant with Freddie. She probably didn’t yet know what he would become, but she knew she couldn’t protect us from him if she were behind bars.

  “I barely recognized her, what with her face all healed and all dressed up to play to those pensioners like she—”

  “Why am I here?”

  “I’m not done with my story.” His words came out a little clipped.

  “Why tell me this story? What is it that you actually want?”

  “She was all dressed up,” he started again, but I was done. I stood up and he yelled, “Sit!”

  I let loose a hiccup of angry laughter and glared at him with clenched fists. “This isn’t fun anymore. Rot in here. Die in here. I’m done with you.”

  He sat back in his chair, trying to play at calm with a pose that every feature on his face was betraying. “You’ll be back.”

  I laughed again. “You seem pretty confident for a disgraced ex-copper who’s about to shack up with all the criminals he’s sent to jail.”

  He smiled. “Won’t happen.”

  “You can live your delusions without me.”

  “You’re why it won’t happen. Not if you want to see those boys again.”

  That threat wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it made me wonder if I could still push the right buttons to make him tell me something useful after all. I leaned over the table to meet his eyes fully. “I’m why you want to stay in this cage until your last breath.”

  He stood, forcing me up as well, but I didn’t move my gaze from his, not even when he stepped out from behind the table to get closer to me. “You’ll be my salvation, daughter dear. You’ll help me live out the rest of my life—”

  “—Trapped, just like you trapped Mum?”

  He charged me then, pushing me back into the corner under the camera where Day could no longer see us. He held me there, his arm like a steel bar against my neck. I leaned as far back into the corner as I could and took a deep breath, one I’d practiced taking over and over at home, and then I met my father’s gaze, watched him startle at my lack of fear.

  “I can get to them anywhere,” he said, finally saying what he’d brought me here to say. “From out there, from in here, it don’t matter where I am. You’ll never see those boys again if you don’t help get me out of here.” When I still didn’t give in to my fear, he released the pressure on my neck and tried to act unfazed. “You’ll even come when I call like an obedient little thing.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  He was still intent on proving he was in charge, apparently, as he moved his face so close to mine that I could smell his breakfast whiskey and feel spit on my cheek as he spoke. “You’ll say I was with you when those thieves were killed, got it?”

  “This filthy brick-and-mortar cage is the only thing keeping you alive.” I kept my tone perfectly balanced and as soft as I could to keep anyone who might have been listening in from hearing my words. I watched something spark behind my father’s eyes as he took in my threat. Was it simply fear? I wondered. Was this what he looked like afraid? “Do you really think I’d help you get anywhere near my brothers? I told you that they’re no longer your concern. And don’t think for a moment I can’t stop your little plans.”

  “You won’t see it coming.”

  “I’ve already stopped Freddie from seeing your pathetic little note. I know Parsons followed my brothers home from school in a black van. And I know about that threat you had sent to me in the mail.”

  His expression was equal parts surprise and confusion, so that he suddenly appeared more pathetic old man than monstrous killer. “What threat?  You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He didn’t know about the threatening letter. Lock had been right after all.

  “I know this. You in here means I leave you alone. But the minute you become a danger to my brothers, I will kill you myself.”

  “Big words from a little bitch,” he spit.

  “Think of it as payback for all the years you forced this bitch’s mum to live with a pathetic bully like you.”

  The look he gave me n
ext I’d seen only once before. I’d flipped a switch, it seemed. He came at me again, and I didn’t know if it was his slowed reflexes or all my training that did it, but I somehow anticipated what he was going to do. I knew where he’d plant his foot, that he’d push my shoulder back with his left hand and throw a fist at me with his right, and I knew exactly how to move my hands to stop him. I felt my feet slide a few inches apart to my most stable stance, just like Lock had taught me, then my hands were in the air, guiding his fist, my body taking the force of his push and using it to turn me away, so that his fist hit the wall.

  It was a perfectly executed defense. I’d even managed to push us out of the dark corner. I looked up and the camera was pointed right at us. DS Day had to be on his way.

  My dad cradled his injured knuckles to his chest and bore his gaze into my eyes. “Now that you know what your mom was, know this:  You are all the worst sides of her.”

  I jerked my chin away, staring back up at the camera.

  “She was rotten on the inside until she met me. I cleaned her up.” He tilted his head, forcing his face back into my view. “Who do you think will do that for you?”

  I didn’t flinch away from him again, but I had nothing left to say either. I just glared back at him. There was nothing I wanted more in the world just then than for him to stop talking. I just wanted him to stop.

  “You better get really good at lying, little girl. You think someone’ll love you if they know the truth about who you are? Who you come from? You think anyone would want to be near you if they knew you’ve got killing in your blood?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could say anything, the door burst open, spilling the three detectives and a uniformed officer into the cramped space. They tried to separate us, but my father had grabbed on to my arm and wouldn’t let go.