Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  Uncle Henry! “Sarah baby?”

  “What daddy?” she was still trembling and whimpering from my interrogation. I laid her back on my arm as I would an infant and looked down at her.

  “It’s okay honey.” I wanted to calm her;

  to let her know that my forth-coming questions were not a continuation of the former brow- beating.

  “I’m not mad honey. I’m done talking about the freeze, okay?”

  “Okay.” She quietly croaked, not quite convinced of my sincerity.

  “Do you know Uncle Henry?”

  Her eyes shined back at me in wide silence; her little lids with tiny blond lashes almost pinned themselves to her eyebrows. Her eyeballs, speckled with red hair-line tributaries, were punctuated with dilated black spheres amid grey-blue sunrays. I sat her up on my knee and I held her shoulders again. The whites of her eyes grew larger. I had asked a question she had been dreading for a long time; a box she had hoped would never be opened; a secret she had been warned about, and sworn an oath to keep.

  “It’s okay. I’m not mad about it. Is it a secret?”

  “Yes.” Her expression was serious. She knew the weight of the question.

  “Is it a secret you had with mommy?” “Yes.”

  “Do you know Uncle Henry?”

  “Mommy said not to talk about Uncle

  Henry. She said you would get mad.”

  My stomach knotted up and tears once again began to fill my eyes. There really was an Uncle Henry. Sarah was not my flesh and blood. I looked into her eyes again, this time though I was not searching for guilt. I was searching for me. I had loved her since she was born. Since before she was born. I loved her still, flesh of my flesh or not. And no one, not Uncle Henry, not the police, not Catherine’s parents; no one was going to take her away from me.

  “It’s okay. Mommy’s dead now. She won’t care now if you talk about Uncle Henry. She can’t hear you.”

  Sarah’s eyes turned up and then rolled to the side as she sucked on her bottom lip,

  “Uncle Henry was mommy’s friend.” She stingily volunteered.

  “When did you see him?” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful and fretless but

  I heard my voice quiver.

  “He used to come and see us sometimes while you were at work.”

  “Where did you see him?” My voice slipped as a single tear slid down my cheek and I averted my head in time to catch the tiny bead of saline with my fingertip before I returned to her studied gaze.

  “Here, at our house.” Her voice grew more trusting; more casual.

  “Did he go into the bedroom with mommy?” My heart was breaking. I felt the piercing intrusion of pain in my chest as though a knife had been thrust into my ribcage. I could almost feel my bleeding heart as the imaginary shank penetrated my flesh and my heart pumped like a fountain.

  “No daddy. He was just her friend. He said he was really coming just to see me, not mommy.” Her eyes were sincere. She began to gush with words, like a river through a burst dam. “He just started to visit us a little while ago. At first he said that he was my daddy, but I told him that he wasn’t and that I already had a daddy, and mommy gave him a dirty look, like when I say something wrong and we’re in the grocery store. And then he told me he was my Uncle Henry and that he was just teasing about being my daddy. And he drank coffee with no sugar in it…” she grimaced, “and he talked about before when mommy took care of his wife, when she was sick, and then she died, and then mommy didn’t come over after that. And Uncle Henry is old and he has hair growing out of his ears.”

  “Older than me?” I had to interrupt. “Way older.” Her eyes got big and she giggled, “He’s got white hair and wrinkles and hair sticks out of his nose too.”

  I pulled Sarah too my chest again. I was so hurt. Catherine had had an affair. She had been with someone else. She had loved someone else. I felt so betrayed; so wronged. I wanted to die at that moment. I clutched Sarah to my chest as I slid down on the couch and I sobbed out loud.

  “Are you crying because of Uncle

  Henry?”

  “No baby, I’m crying because I miss mommy.” I lied. The truth was that I did wish that Catherine were there at that moment so that I could scream at her; so that I could interrogate her; so that I could inflict verbal injury upon her. I screamed inside of my head “Why! Why? Why did you do this to me?”

  And, finally out loud, “Why!” “Why what daddy?”

  “Nothing honey.” I shook my head and buried my face in my hand.

  Sarah lifted up from my grip and smiled and flared her eyebrows, “Okay, lover!” she giggled, and through my tears and pain, so did I.

  * * *

  Later that evening, while I was alone, after Sarah had gone to sleep, as I was rummaging through some papers in Catherine’s desk (in a corner of our semi-finished basement), I pieced things together. Henry, I remembered, was one of Sarah’s clients. Or rather his wife was her client. Henry’s wife was a terminal cancer patient who had contracted skin cancer on her upper lip but despite her late age (she was almost sixty at the time) she had vainly refused treatment because she knew that the proposed surgery would have blemished her beauty. The cancer eventually spread and metastasized to her brain and Catherine was employed as her visiting nurse during the later stages of her illness. Catherine fed her and comforted her and changed her diapers and performed other menial tasks until the day she died. The woman, Lenore was her name, refused to go to a hospital and made Henry promise to let her die at home. Catherine quit that job after Lenore’s death. She said that she couldn’t stand the heartache of befriending people knowing that they would soon pass away. It was just too much for her emotionally. And shortly thereafter Catherine discovered that she had become pregnant with Sarah and her career became a moot issue.

  I sifted through all kinds of papers on top of and inside of Catherine’s desk including medical bills and unfilled prescriptions and grocery lists; every odd thing. I got lost in the memories of some of the photographs I found and I became particularly distracted when I came across a pendant that I had given Catherine on the day after our first kiss. The morning after our kiss I woke up early and rode my bicycle all the way up to St. Clair Avenue to a pawn shop that I had passed many times but had never entered. I remembered my mother going there to hock her engagement ring once to buy groceries. I walked in with the almost twenty dollars I’d saved from delivering news-papers and I picked out a Beautiful necklace. As it turned out the necklace I chose cost over three-hundred dollars. The clerk laughed when I pulled out twenty odd dollars in single dollar bills and change and then directed me to some necklaces in my price range. I settled for diamond chips instead of diamonds but I think the clerk still gave me a generous deal.

  I got a little choked up and began to cry. I had forgotten that I had given the necklace to Catherine. I was touched that she had thought to keep it. I found it in a lower drawer in a little white box accompanied by the note that I had written. I unfolded the note and it read:

  I wish that I could kiss you forever. Love Mathew.

  I cried out loud for a while but then, through tear clouded eyes, I continued my search for clues to Catherine’s relationship with Uncle Henry. I didn’t find a single tittle of information; no love notes; no cards; no scrap of paper with his name or phone number.

  I did find Catherine’s journals, a series of diaries that she had kept since high-school, but the pertinently dated logs had been stripped of their pages, charred pieces of which I remembered seeing recently on the hearth of our seldom used basement fireplace. After hours of self-inflicted mental torture while searching through Catherine’s private papers I found not a thing. I sifted, carefully at first, and eventually impatiently, until it was almost morning and the floor around Catherine’s desk (along with her desktop) were covered with a collage of papers, photographs and mementos. And then, just before dawn, I started to pack.

  6

  I too had a secret.


  I had an escape vessel that nobody knew I had.

  After waiting for several hours for the darkness of night to pull the sun up over the horizon, I left Sarah sleeping in her bed, her little body from head to toe buried beneath the warm blue and green patch quilt that Catherine had made for her while she carried her in her belly, and I slipped outside through the rear sliding glass doors, in case anyone was watching the front of the house, and I crept through the patch of woods that separated my yard from my neighbor, Harriet and Gabriel

  Crump, to the rear. I pushed aside low leaning autumn shorn tree branches and kicked through fallen pine needles and rotting tree limbs until I reached the Crump’s garage. The morning air was dry and brisk and my arms were cold because I had foolishly worn only a short sleeve polo shirt. I sidestepped along the side of their garage and then along their house and then sauntered out from the path to the end of the Crump’s driveway as though the property were my own and I stooped and picked up the newspaper and looked around to see if I had been watched or followed before dropping the paper back where I had found it. I stepped into the street walking toward the little white house where my good friend John Bonjiovoni lived. It was Saturday so the street was quiet except for the creaking of the tree limbs swaying in the breeze and the low fading hum of the Crump’s heat-pump. I could smell the strong scent of firewood burning in someone’s wood-burning- stove and I could almost taste the soot in the air. The sky was overcast and the wind blew briskly sending leaves scuttling past my path as I scurried (the lack of light still too little for my personal comfort) like a scared gofer to the safety of its hole until I reached the sanctuary of John’s Garage.

  John was almost seventy years old and the longest standing citizens of my neighborhood. He inherited his house, a well maintained two story red-brick colonial anchored by wide towering sandstone chimneys on each side and adorned with black shutters which flanked the windows and a slate roof, from his parents. After he got married he raised his family there. I met him while walking my dog, Socks, my now long deceased Labrador retriever, almost twenty years prior just after we had moved into the neighborhood. A quick “Hello, welcome to the neighborhood!” turned into an hour-long conversation about old sports cars, of which he had a small collection: a candy-apple-red GTO, a yellow Grand Torino with fat red stripes painted diagonally across the sides and a sapphire blue nineteen-sixty-five Mustang convertible that Catherine fell in love with one warm Spring day when the old man took us for a jaunt through the country. The Mustang was his baby and it was the only car he had kept once his health began to fail.

  John approached me a few months previous and asked me if I wanted to buy the Mustang from him. I told him that I wished that I could, but I just couldn’t afford it. To which he replied in his raspy baritone voice,

  “How’s a dollar sound to you? Can you afford that?”

  His eyes bugged out grandly and he had to reach out to catch his teeth as they almost slipped from his mouth when he said that. He had lost so much weight since he had been diagnosed with cancer that his dentures no longer fit his gums causing him to look even gaunter than he was. I refused his offer at first. “Look,” he said, “I’m dying and I checked with the big guy and he said ‘no John you can’t take the mustang with you to hell.’ So what am I supposed to do with it? My kids never cared much for old cars. They’d just sell the Mustang. I want you to have it. You’ll take care of it. You’ll appreciate it.”

  So I struck a deal with him whereby I would tend his yard until he “croaked” and the car would be mine. He signed the deed over to me a few days later but I kept the Mustang parked in his garage as I had planned to surprise Catherine with it on her birthday which wasn’t until January twentieth. Catherine didn’t make it that far so it was time, as I saw it, to collect my vessel and escape.

  I walked through the garage man-door, past his greying wooden tool bench (covered with soiled red oil rags and two tins of oil- soaked engine parts) and his tall red mechanic’s tool box and his old blue air compressor and his red five gallon gasoline can and the sapphire- blue mustang convertible covered with a white tarp, and up the steps through the kitchen and into his living room. John and I had a comfortable arrangement where I was permitted to enter without knocking since his wife had died a few years earlier and he lived alone. I was welcome anytime, he said, although I wasn’t quite sure he meant that to mean the wee hours of the morning.

  I found John asleep in his ratty old lime-green recliner beneath the heat-lamp that he had hanging above the chair. The heat lamp had scorched a hole in the top of the recliner once when he had the light drooping too low from its flexible mechanical arm and the burnt cavity at the top of the chair was covered with silver duct-tape.

  John was snoring so I whispered, “Good morning John.”

  “Whaaa?” his eyes popped open like two eggs on a skillet, wide and white with milky-yellow-grey irises. His frazzled white hair stood out in tufts above his large ears. His jaw was thin, and a matte of thick grey stubble graced his wrinkled pale face which was huddled above a teepee of yellowish-white wool blankets.

  “Matt?” he squinted at me and then looked toward the window as if measuring the time of day by the amount of sunlight being broadcast into his living room , “What are you doing up so early?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you John.” I felt a little guilty for bugging him at seven in the morning.

  “It’s alright. The hour of the day doesn’t mean much at this stage of the game.” He reached for a grizzled yellow handkerchief and wiped his nose. “What brings you over here at this hour?”

  “I have to go John. I’ve come to say goodbye…and to take the car if that’s okay with you.”

  “Couldn’t wait til her birthday to give it to her huh?” He smiled big and his teeth appeared large against his gaunt grey face.

  He obviously hadn’t been watching the television news and I knew that he didn’t receive the newspaper anymore (he told me that the news of this world didn’t mean much when you got close to the next) and he evidently hadn’t been out of the house to receive the news of Catherine’s demise or my incrimination from his friends or neighbors. John said that they all thought that death was contagious and so they kept away.

  I didn’t want to waste a lot of time so I told a lie, “Yeah, I spilled the beans to her. We’re going to take a few weeks and head to Myrtle Beach and enjoy some sunshine. I thought it would be a good time. Do you mind if I take her today?”

  “It’s your baby now Mathew. You take good care of her.”

  I squeezed his hand, “You take care now, John.”

  “If I’m gone when you get back…I’ll see you on the other side.” He laughed, and then went into a coughing fit.

  “See you on the other side John.”

  I slipped back into the garage and I opened the door and shuffled down the steps where I lifted the door-latch and tugged at the car cover until it slid off of the shiny blue mustang and then I slipped into the leather bucket driver-seat of my Mustang convertible. The keys were in the ignition where I’d left them. I turned the engine over and it came to life with a low muffled growl. I opened the garage door with the remote and pulled the car down the driveway, closed the garage door, and into the street where I parked it in front of the Crump’s house.

  The street was still quiet and dark but I walked up the Crump’s driveway as though, again, it were my own, so as not to arouse suspicion. Back at my rear sliding glass door I retrieved the three suitcases, the gym-bag beneath my arm and the two large brown leather monstrosities in either hand, and I retraced my steps through the patch of woods and the Crump’s yard once again stepping over dead trees and wooded debris and down the driveway and I heaved the suitcases into the open trunk of the Mustang.

  Back at the house I gathered the few things of value which I’d forgotten, such as Catherine’s pearl necklace and her diamond ear-rings (I wondered if she had worn them the night she had first slept with Uncle Henry), Sarah�
��s Game-boy and her red pouch filled with games, a picture of Catherine (for Sarah), and the little bit of cash still clasped inside Catherine’s change-purse, forty seven dollars (hardly compensation in my eyes for the wrong she had done me). I peeled back Sarah’s covers and I slipped her little body out of her pajamas without protest as she still slumbered. Her tiny pink feet were warm as I slipped her socks over her toes and up her ankles. I wedged a pair of pink cotton sweat-pants up her legs and lifted her to slide her matching sweatshirt over her head. She was dead-weight still as I slipped her jacket and hat onto her and slung her onto my shoulder. As I slipped down the Crump’s driveway for the final time I felt a sinful tingle of joy come over me at the thought of stealing my freedom from the clutches of tyranny; of leaving an old life behind, like a locust shedding its shell, to start a new life. I was almost giddy as I slid Sarah into her seat and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove slowly away.

  As I pulled onto Erie road, though, I looked back at my yard and my house for what I assumed would be the last time ever. That house had been the only home that Catherine and I had owned. All of my memories were moored to its confines. The yard that I had mowed a thousand times and knew every rut and surface-grown root of; the driveway where I had played ball with Sarah, where Catherine and I had had snowball fights and played one- on-one basketball; soon to be a memory. The house which we had slowly remodeled room by room from the hovel it was when we bought it to the comfortable home we had made; soon to be the property of the bank. And the mortgage only eight years away from being paid in full. The only house that Sarah had ever known would be lost to us forever. I pulled away feeling the melancholy of mourning yet another loss while sensing awkwardly as though I had left something undone.