Tommy’s arm disappeared beneath the table and Dan caught the sound of the dog’s paws skittering across the hardwood floor. “Tommy, what have we said about feeding the dog at the table?”
“Sorry dad.”
Somewhere beneath the table Ginger crunched into a pizza crust.
“Sweetie, how was your day at school?” Dan asked Jessica, who had spent the last five minutes slurping tendrils of cheese from her plate. She stopped chewing but didn’t answer him. Linda swirled her wine in the glass and gave Dan a shake of the head. Don’t ask, her look said.
“Okay,” Jessica mumbled, poking her salad with her fork.
“Just okay? Did you make any friends.”
Jessica nodded.
“Who?”
“She pee’d her pants at school!” Tommy exclaimed with a giant smile.
“No I didn’t!” Jessica screamed back.
“Yes you did! All the third graders heard about it!”
“Did not!” She flung a pizza crust at Tommy, but it went wide and sailed past. Ginger seized upon the crust and disappeared beneath the table, snorting.
“Thomas! You stop that. Right now!” Linda snapped.
Tommy looked down and nodded as Dan’s gaze ping-ponged from Tommy to Jessica and then to his wife.
“Is that true?” he asked Linda.
A sigh. “She had an accident. It was her first day, these things happen.”
Jessica sank further into her chair. Dan felt Ginger’s paw back on his thigh as she awaited further fallout. These things happen, Linda had said. Lately, it seemed they happened with all the regularity of the tides.
Tommy mouthed the words ‘Pee-Pee pants’ and Dan caught it out of the corner of his eye.
“Thomas, go to your room,” Dan said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re being a rude little shit, now go. No video games.”
Tommy stared at his plate, let out a dramatic sigh, then tossed his napkin onto the table and stood up.
“Take your plate to the kitchen and go.”
Dan hated raising his voice, hated punishing his kids, but since the summer Tommy had become increasingly rude, not only towards his younger sister but also his parents. Linda blamed it on the video games and friends he had, most of whom were hyper-competitive in sports. His teacher blamed it on a ‘phase’ most boys went through around the same age.
Dan didn’t care about blame. Tommy was learning to press boundaries, looking for weaknesses no different from an animal digging holes under a fence. After hearing Tommy tell his mother to shut up a month back, Dan was determined to put an end to it, even if it meant his relationship with his son would have to weather a few storms.
Tommy stomped off into the kitchen, then up the stairs where the door slammed in a final, defiant act. He knew Tommy would probably be playing video games, but for now his mind was on Jessica.
“Sweetie, listen... what happened, it’s normal, okay? It happens.”
“Dad, I’m not stupid,” Jessica said, looking up at him through eyes that seemed ten years too old for their age.
“I know you aren’t honey, of course.”
“Then why did you lie to me?”
“What? I didn’t lie to you.”
“You said it wouldn’t be scary, but it was!”
Dan gave Ginger another nudge, perhaps a bit too hard, and he heard her growl as she slid back beneath the table.
“You know, when I was your age... I did the exact same thing. But worse. See, the teachers at my school, they made us put on a big play in front of all the parents. I had to be the sixteenth president, know who that is?”
“Abraham Lincoln,” she answered.
“Wow. Smart girl. Anyways, I had this uncomfortable costume, and it was really hot so I kept drinking water, right? So when I finally got on stage in front of all these parents, I really needed to pee, but I couldn’t because the play had already started. So I tried to hold it and hold it and when it was my turn to go out and say my speech I couldn’t hold it anymore. Then you know what happened?”
“What happened?”
Dan dipped his fingers into his glass of water--
“I pee’d all over the audience!”
--and then he flicked water droplets across the table. A few spattered his daughter, who covered her face, giggling, and wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“Eww, really?”
He nodded. “So, if you ever get embarrassed about peeing your pants, remember: I pee’d over all the parents.”
Jessica smiled, poking her pizza crust across her plate with her fork. Linda raised an eyebrow and gave Dan an approving nod.
He put the leftovers in the fridge, fished a beer from between the Lunchables and juice packs, and cracked it open with a satisfying pop. Linda ran the plates under the water in the sink and moved them to the washing machine one by one, smiling as Dan wrapped his hand around her waist and kissed her neck.
“I didn’t know they had parents day at the orphanage,” Linda said, closing the dishwasher and raising a mischievous eyebrow.
“You know what I was trying to do,” he said.
“I do. And it was a noble lie.”
She gave him a gentle kiss on the lips, smiling at that man, her husband, that big goof who had once been so uncomfortable around children he’d avoided them at her family reunions at any cost. The man who now could conjure up a lie to make his own kids feel better.
“You’re a good man Dan.”
No I’m not, he thought. I’m just a good actor.
“I might have to go away this weekend,” he said.
“What for?”
“Some stupid seminar. I’m trying to get out of it, but they’ve got me by the balls.”
“For the whole weekend?”
“Looks like it.”
She took a sip from his beer. He alway loved it when she did that. It reminded him of when they had sat on the hood of his car, watching the 4th of July fireworks over the marina during grad school. Sipping microbrews and getting high as the explosions mirrored off the water. It felt like another life, and perhaps it was. He sometimes thought he didn’t live one life but several, all strung together like beads on a necklace, separate but connected, if only by his name.
“You’re going to miss Tommy’s soccer game,” she said, taking another sip and handing it back to him.
“I know. Besides, I’m probably persona non grata right now.”
“I’m sure he’ll forgive you.”
“He’s pretty pissed.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
Tommy was still fuming by bed time. In part because he felt his dad had been a jerk, but most of all because his Nintendo had run out of batteries. Despite orders not to play video games he did. It was only when the battery died that he realized the cable was still plugged into the wall in the kitchen. If he returned for it his deception would be exposed. His dad, of course, would take the Nintendo for a day or a week perhaps, just like during the summer when he teased Jessica after she fell off her trike and cried like a sissy.
If his parents weren’t such jerks he could play computer games. This idea too, was out, since he shared a room with his sister, and his parents insisted on keeping the family computer downstairs in his fathers study, which was off limits.
It wasn’t fair, he thought, brushing his teeth over the bathroom sink. His friends had their own computers. Sam’s older brother had even stayed up with them one night, playing a game that involved stealing cars and shooting people. It was rated M and he heard words he didn’t understand but knew would get him in trouble if he used them around his parents.
Not only did his friends have their own computers, they had their own rooms. This, to him, was the most unfair. To share a bedroom with someone who couldn’t make it to the toilet without peeing down her legs like a baby. Even now, over the hum of his electric toothbrush, he could hear her voice through
the door, playing with her dolls and singing. She never shut up.
He opened the door.
Jessica sat at the head of the play table, her dolls and stuffed toys seated around her. She counted off each toy as if taking attendance.
“This is Lamby, and this is Misses Pembilton, and this is Zoey Zebra, and this...” she paused, holding up that threadbare stuffed rabbit, the one that smelled like what he imagined a mummy would like smell like if its bandages fell of. “This is Mister Bun. He watches me when I sleep.”
“Who are you talking to?” Tommy asked, toothpaste dripping down his chin.
“No one,” she answered, as if his question was absurd.
He rolled his eyes, mumbling: “Weirdo,” and closed the bathroom door.
Her gaze fell back to the table and the chair across from her, the only chair without a stuffed toy in it.
“Are you going to move in with us?” she asked the emptiness.
Incandescence
HER TATTOOED BACK glistened in the moonlight that fell across the bedsheets of their favorite hotel.
“I shouldn’t have come back,” she whispered, face hidden by the shadows.
“I wish you hadn’t,” Dan replied, his fingers running down her back. He loved watching the ink ripple, loved how the chrysanthemums and snakes, the bamboo and blossoms, how they all shimmered and slithered with his touch.
“I’m a selfish woman, what can I say?”
“I love my wife.”
“And I love you,” she sighed. “It’s a dilemma.”
“A conundrum.”
“A fustercluck.”
“A fustercluck indeed,” he agreed, and she shrugged as a wet line ran down her spine.
“Karina?”
Another line ran down her back, blue liquid, thick and flowing. It mixed with the red and formed pool of violet where the sheets met the crack of her ass. As his finger slid down her back flakes of skin came off like old paint.
“Karina!” he shouted, and her face came into the light but it wasn’t her face, it was Ginger’s, and she barked at him in shrill, high pitched yaps and the phone rang as the whole world shattered into an infinite darkness and he realized he was at home, in his bed, with his wife beside him and the dog was barking at the phone in the bedside charger.
“I got it, I got it, Jesus,” he groaned and flopped out of bed. The abrupt end to the dream, the confusion, the ringing phone, most of all the barking dog, all fueled an instant migraine. He wound up to give the beast a kick, a real solid one. Ginger, however, read his body language and beat a hasty retreat out into the hallway as his foot caught only air.
The time on the phone read: 6:47 a.m., and the caller ID displayed: STAFF.
“Hello?” Dan answered. Linda rolled over, glancing at his slouching form, phone pressed to his ear like some troll in the darkness.
“What?” he gasped. “How?”
She sat up, worried. Ginger returned to the door frame, panting and spinning, wagging her tail, ready to play.
“I’m on my way,” Dan said and hung up the phone.
The smoke was visible from the quad. As he parked he saw fire trucks and crowds of early morning students already gathered outside the Fine Arts Building on the west end of campus. It took over an hour to declare the fire officially out. Dan and Dean Robert were allowed inside but only under the escort of the Fire Marshall, a man who carried himself like a four star general briefing reporters after a successful military victory. Dan found the little man annoying.
“There’s no structural damage that we’ve found. The building is fine. The fire itself was isolated to the end room on the fourth floor.”
“The Archive,” Dean Robert said with lament as they made their way down the hallway, past several firefighters busy coiling up hoses and sloshing through water an inch deep. The air smelled of chemicals and paper. A mist clung to the ceiling.
“How much damage?” asked Dan.
“Considerable. I’m afraid most of the contents were incinerated. See for yourself.”
They stepped into The Archive and Dan felt his stomach drop. Considerable damage was an understatement. Industrial fans were set up to ventilate the room. All the windows were broken, either from the fire or the attempt to control it. Rows of workstations had been reduced to featureless mounds of plastic and metal. The cement ceiling was scorched black and dripped with water, like an ashtray left out in the rain.
At the center of the ceiling, where flames and smoke had licked the belly of the cement roof, sat a single giant scorch mark, like an inkblot out of a psychiatrist’s stack of crazy cards. A vague image, and when Dan gazed up at it he thought of a bird. Water dripped from that black stain, down the scorched metal guidelines that held scraps of burnt canvas in each clamp.
Considerable damage indeed. The whole place had been reduced to some gutted meat locker, some barbecue.
Some fustercluck, Mr. Glass whispered.
Some fustercluck indeed, Dan agreed, rubbing his temple.
“It’s too early to say what exactly started it. Faulty wiring, surge protectors loaded past capacity,” the little man said, tapping a work-lamp over one of the stations. “Hell, I’ve seen bulbs with half the wattage burn buildings over night. Add chemicals to the equation, faulty sprinklers, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”
“I can’t believe this,” Dan said. A day ago he’d helped his students start on their thesis projects, most of which were housed in this very room. Some of the paintings had survived wars, trips around the world, or generations tucked away in walls and forgotten boxes. They had travelled, perhaps first by horse and carriage, then boat and car and airplane until they had arrived here, in room 42-14. Their stories were not only in the contents of their images, but in the unseen hands that had cared for them down through the centuries. Hands that had carried them, protected them, perhaps even died for them. And now they dangled, little more than ashes clamped to metal wires.
“Believe it Dan. The administration is going to have our heads if this was negligence.”
“I’m not ruling out arson either,” said the Fire Marshall. “The door, it has a security card reader, correct?”
“Correct,” Dan answered.
“How many have cards?”
Dan had to think. “Students? Maybe thirty at most. Faculty, another half dozen. Maintenance and shipping have keys as well. I don’t know the exact number.”
“Most security readers keep logs and timestamps of every card, in and out. It’d help to know who was here last, see if there were any irregularities we can track down.”
“Of course,” said Dean Robert. “I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Dan found himself staring at three paintings stacked against the wall, furthest from the destruction. They were the new arrivals and, as such, they hadn’t been sorted, prioritized, or assigned to a student. They were untouched by the fire, however the sprinklers had soaked the outermost painting for hours. It was warped and torn from where the moisture had pooled around the bottom of the canvas and separated the paint. Small clumps of paint flaked off in his hands like wet scabs as he moved it aside. Another total loss.
Behind it sat that bizarre painting he had received the day before. It had suffered minor water damage, a small stain along the top from where it had protruded behind the smaller painting. However it seemed to be minimal, and he estimated that with a few hours he could repair it.
“No, no no no,” rose a voice that Dan recognized. Even though there were firemen outside and the area was sealed for the morning, Karina had somehow gotten access to the building, perhaps flirting her way in.
“What happened?” she gasped, staring into the remains of The Archive, her mouth agape.
“I’m so sorry Karina,” he said. He didn’t have to lie. For her, he felt pity. Despite their tenuous relationship, she truly did care about her craft and, knowing that several projects she had worked on last semester were among the destroyed, he felt a sense of guilt.
>
Before he could say anything else, she turned and left, a single frustrated scream echoing out down the hallway.
Two Funerals
SHE POURED DETERGENT into the dishwasher, closed it, then wiped her wet hands on the dishtowel. She took a moment to rearrange the vase of roses, tucking a few wilting ones behind the others. She placed the vase back above the sink, next to several photos. Linda, in her commencement gown, Dan standing at her side, and they both looked so much younger that she felt like she was staring at a stranger. Had the past decade done that to her? Turned her from a girl that smoked the occasional fatty and giggled at South Park on the few weekends she and Dan didn’t have assignments, into the woman that fought off panic attacks and arranged roses in the cold silence of a now empty house?
Another photograph, taunting her. Her mother and father at her wedding, standing behind her and smiling those fake smiles they’d worn with such ease their whole life. That smile her father gave whenever he returned from his business trips with a present and the smell of cigarettes on his jacket. “A gift for my princess, my little fair lady,” he had always said with a smile.
And he had worn that same salesman's smile when he broke the news to her family that he had, for the last decade, been raising another family with another woman in another city, and they also called him daddy and she knew that he brought them gifts and called them princess too. That photo, with that happy smile that man who had shattered everything she knew about her family before she went off to college. That smile that she swore she would never return to, on vacations or holidays or ever, yet always did, hugging him a little less each time until one day, a few years before his death, she realized that she only shook his hand and gave him a kiss on his cheeks, and somehow daddy had become father and he no longer smiled but only nodded.
She looked at the photos of her own family: the kids at birthdays and holidays, Tommy pulling Jessica in the red wagon, Ginger curled up next to Dan when she was a puppy and no larger than a toy, and the knot in her stomach loosened. There were no false smiles on those faces, only happiness and the occasional speed bump, which was to be expected.
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 5