Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

  I don’t have a nightlamp and I don’t have Campbell and I don’t have Daddy, so I must do this alone.

  I take my special book, the one book that I have left and I tie a string around it just like Daddy taught me to tie my shoelaces and then I tie another string around my wrist, because then even if I fall asleep I will be able to catch them. Mommy kisses me on the forehead and she asks if I want her to read to me but I shake my head and I say, “No, Mommy, I am too old for reading,” because being too old is when things stop working the way they did before. So Mommy smoothes my hair like she did when I was itsy-bitsy, and she sits on the bed with me. I want to tell her not to sit on the bed, that I don’t want the twins that close to me, but Mommy is so big with all the dishwashers and bookshelves and staircases and basements sticking out of her that I can’t believe she even fits on the bed.

  “Are they building a house in there, Mommy?” I ask and Mommy just laughs and shakes her head. “No, Angela Clothespin Jacket, they are not building a house, they are going to come live in our house.”

  Then I am crying again, and I cry until I go to sleep.

  I wake up in the middle of the night and there is a tugging at my wrist, so I look and there is the string and the string is pulled out all the way to the book and then there are the twins. The twins are not two people, they are just one person, and they are not a person at all because really they are just a bunch of arms, and legs, and foreheads like in the picture.

  “Why don’t you just go away?” I ask the twins. And the twins say, “Because we love you, Angela Clothespin Jacket. You know what it is like to live in the dark, just like we do. We want you to come live with us forever inside Mommy where it is safe and warm and there are nightlamps and there is Campbell and Adie.” I think about this for a while because I don’t like the twins very much, but it is lonely out here and perhaps it will be less lonely inside Mommy, in the dark, with the twins. At least then we will be all together, even if it is inside Mommy.

  I say, “Okay, twins,” and then I go through the bellybutton with them.

  The thing is that the twins are cleverer than I thought.

  Adie is in here and Campbell too and the flower fairy and every part of Mommy’s world, but the twins have locked the bellybutton and it is very dark and I don’t know how to get out.

  I feel around, amidst the ten-speed bikes and the sequined purses and the nightlamps, and then there is a sound and it is Daddy. It is not the real Daddy. It is the Daddy that lives inside of Mommy. I am feeling very scared, so I climb over the bookshelf and the club chair until there he is, smelling like cinnamon and coffee and chocolate. I want him to hold me, but it is too crowded for holding in here, so I hug Campbell close to me because he is small enough for holding.

  “We have made some bad decisions,” I say to Daddy, and he says, “No, peanut, this is what was supposed to happen. This is what we planned for all along, it was supposed to be the twins coming out and you going away.”

  “Why?” I ask Daddy. “Because,” he says, “we made you a very long time ago. Out of peanuts and honey. And now we want a real baby, a baby with worlds and worlds inside it, not just a clothespin jacket.”

  “I can be a real baby,” I say. Maybe I say that. I’m crying so it is difficult to tell.

  “No, honey, you’re a clothespin jacket. Now that the twins are born we don’t need you anymore.”

  I think about this for a while. I cannot see Daddy’s face in the darkness. All I can smell is cinnamon and coffee and chocolate, and I decide that I don’t like those things anymore. Those are just things, and they aren’t Daddy.

  “No,” I say to Daddy, “I’m going to get out of here, and when I do I’m not going to take you with me.”

  Daddy doesn’t like this very much, but I don’t care. I like this, and Campbell likes this so I think we will be okay.

  It is time for another plan, I say to Campbell, and Campbell also thinks it is time for another plan.

  I take Campbell and I put him in Mommy’s sequined purse and I put it over my shoulder. Then I climb the bookshelf and feel along the top of Mommy’s tummy which is big and curved like being underneath an umbrella. Daddy tells me to stop doing that but I have decided that I will not listen to Daddy anymore. I know that there is a bellybutton somewhere and so all I have to do is find it.

  “You can’t do that,” says Daddy. “There’s no room for you out there! We have the twins now, and we need you to go away!”

  “Well, Daddy,” I say, “you should have thought about that before you made me.”

  I climb from the bookshelf to the club chair to the minivan, and for a moment I wonder how on earth the twins managed to fit all of these things inside Mommy, but then I stop wondering and I keep climbing. Finally, I discover the bellybutton at the very top of Mommy’s tummy.

  I put my ear to the bellybutton, and I can hear that on the outside Mommy is laughing. I think she must be laughing because the twins are doing something funny like telling jokes or aerial acrobats, and I hate the twins a little bit more for making Mommy laugh and I hate Mommy a bit more for loving the twins like that. But at least I have Campbell, and at least Daddy has already taught me how to tie and untie knots.

  I start to untie the bellybutton, and Daddy says to me, “You’ll never be able to get out there, you’re not a real daughter, Miss Peanut, Miss Honey, you’re not a real Angela, you’re just a clothespin jacket.”

  “No,” I say to him, “I am too real, you made me because you wanted me and so I am as real as the twins and I am real as Campbell and we are getting out of here right this very instant!”

  First there is a light, and my eyes hurt because I have gotten used to the dark, but Campbell tells me to be brave, that it will be okay out there, and I say, “I love you, Campbell.” He says, “I love you, baby girl,” and I like it when Campbell calls me that, so I tug at the string and the light gets brighter and the hole gets bigger. Then I am sticking my head out and then I am staring at Mommy and she is staring at me, and I am half inside her and half outside of her so I climb out the rest of the way even though I can hear the Daddy inside Mommy still crying.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “I just wanted to see the sunshine,” I say. And there is my proper Daddy, and there are the twins, and they are all the things that they were before but somehow they look more and more like people and the people they look like are Mommy and Daddy. But when I look at Mommy, Mommy looks more and more like just a mess of arms and legs and skirts and pantyhose and lipstick and eyelashes and not the thing that she was before.

  “What will it be now, peanut?” she asks me. “Can you love the twins?”

  I think about this for a bit because I will be lonely and scared without Mommy and Daddy. But I know that the Daddy inside Mommy is right. There are worlds and worlds inside of Mommy and one day there will be worlds and worlds inside the twins and inside me it will be hollow as a drum. Hollow as an empty soup can.

  But then I take Campbell out of the purse and he whispers something in my ear.

  For so long I have tried to be the thing they have wanted me to be, but now I want to be the thing that I am.

  “This has been a real object lesson,” I say to Mommy, and I am holding Campbell close to my chest because I love him so very much, “but I think we will be going now.”

  And we do.

  “This is the great fear of fatherhood. To know that love is a chancy thing. It has its tides, it has its seasons, and it can shatter a man’s luck.”

  ALL MY LOVE, A FISHHOOK

  Listen.

  It was not that I believe my father did not love me. He did. It is not that I fear I do not love my own son. I do. I do love him. It is a truth written in my blood and bones. Inescapable. As strong as faith and deep as ritual. But there is a thing that pulls inside me—it pulled inside my father, my babbas, this I know—and it is something like love an
d something like hate.

  Do you know the feeling of being on a boat for the first time? It is a feeling of alternating weightlessness and great heaviness. Now your body is light—soaring even!—and now your knees are catching the great burden of you. Some men stagger about as if they are drunk. It makes others ill. Being a father is very much like that. There is great joy in the littlest thing. A smile. A skill freshly mastered. The way he walks on legs that have not learned to carry him. The shape his mouth makes when he begs for milk. But also a great blackness that descends. Your child will not be mastered. He grows at odds to you. Now he is your friend. Your comfort. Now he is your enemy. He will best you. He will live long after you have died, make his way in a world that no longer needs you or cares for you. Now he is your greatest luck. Now you wish you had drowned him at birth.

  Stefanos was quiet as a boy. Prone to long silences, eyes fixed on the horizon, his little fingers dancing across his palm as if he were counting. He is quiet as a man. Dark-haired. His jaw has the same sharp line that mine does, that my babbas had once. But his eyes are the same tawny brown as his mother’s: like the heartwood of an olive tree. They grow very round when he laughs, which is seldom. He smiles rarely, but he has a very beautiful smile.

  Perhaps it is something hooked inside all the men of our line—the way my babbas would jam a fishhook in a piece of wood for luck and quick healing if he cut himself on it. I remember dark spells when I was a child. I would disappear to the cliff face around sunset some days when the wind was high enough to maybe send a young boy—small for my age—reeling off the edge and into the dark waters of the Aegean. I called these the knuckle cliffs. Their cracked ridges reminded me of my father’s hands—callused hands, unyielding as granite. Yet in the evening the sun would catch hold of the edges of the gneiss and send up very beautiful sparks of light.

  My mother worried for me during these spells, but when I returned, wind-chapped and shivering, she would brew strong coffee over the gas burner and sit with me as my body, wracked with shivers and nearly blue, quieted. Together we would listen to the wind scrabbling at the cliffs, whistling through the holes in the plaster and brick. Her voice was a plucked string humming out tunes of worry: “Kostas, what were you doing out there? The wind, you hear, boy? Aieee!”—a toothless whistle, a half-sucked breath—“Please don’t go out again. Please. I could not stand for it.”

  My babbas would say little, but his eyes were flinty and cold. He would work me hard the next day, re-caulking the boat or checking the nets until my fingers bled from loosening and retying salt-hardened knots. He was impatient with me. A hard man, intolerant of weakness. He had survived two wars in his lifetime, buried his brothers, seen his home ravaged by looters and communists. Sometimes I hated him. Sometimes I think he hated me.

  But I loved him too. Perhaps even more because of that hardness. We are like that as children—always chasing storms, running toward the wolf’s teeth. And perhaps he did love me. He taught me a trade and made sure I never starved as he had, never suffered the ache of a stomach gnawing away at itself. But he grew to smile less and less for me. Eventually the love I had for him, at high tide when I was seven or so, began to recede. When it did, it left little behind but sharp rocks, broken shells and the gasping struggles of tiny fishes—ignorant of death until they were taken.

  It is one such memory—a broken fragment whose shape I have never fully understood—that I hold closest to my heart. So close it cuts me, I know, but that is the way of memory.

  Our family had lived on the island for many years. My babbas was a sailor and a fisherman. He kept a single caïque for long lining, which he made himself, from memory, without any plan. It was on my father’s caïque I learned to navigate the waters around the island, to work the windlass if we were trawling. It was there I learned to obey.

  Though Mama kept several crosses in the house and mass was a regular, solemn ritual for us, my babbas was not a particularly religious man. Like many of the older sailors he had his own private rituals, his own fears and superstitions, his own way of spitting in the nets before he cast them, or reading the clouds for signs of storms. He kept sacred objects. A medallion of St. Christopher which Mama gave him when they married. A little pouch filled with the bones of a bat. But his most precious possession—and never mentioned in the house after the incident I will tell you, for Mama did not like to think of her husband as an old pagan—was a small statue. Babbas told me that it was shaped in the image of Poseidon who had once owned the island of Delos—the sacred island, a place of many gods once, where it was forbidden for any to be born and any to die. I have seen this island from the water. It is filled with broken columns and arches, a graveyard now.

  The statue was very old, a stone lump, now the colour of old teeth. There was a face, yes, but its features had been worn down to something of a skull: gaping eye sockets big enough to hold my thumbprint when I was an infant. A snake’s nose—just two slits in a little mound. The upper arm had broken off, leaving a solid stump like a growth. The right arm, clenched against the body, had worn away into a ribbed mass.

  The statue was very dear to my babbas, and it is perhaps this love for it that drew me to the thing when I was a child. I longed to hold it. Mama said I wept for it in the secret language of babes before any could understand me. Once, in my infancy, I remember knocking it from its position beneath Mama’s portrait of Jesus above the table. Babbas was furious! I remember bursting into tears immediately at the sight of him, red-faced and grunting like a bull, his fists clenching and unclenching.

  “Mama!” I cried, lunging for the safety of her arms. But Babbas was faster, terrible in his fury, like a storm overtaking me on the cliffs: hot air whistling from his nostrils, the sudden slick sweat of his hand pressing against my mouth. There was violence in him. I had known that always. Babbas was an ocean. His strength was irresistible. My arms were weak, my skin soft and ready to bruise.

  He took a knife to my palm and cut a single red line. He would have severed my thumb if I struggled, but I did not. I was helpless. As brittle and breakable as the twig of bone he kept in his pouch. I could not see his face. His hair hung lank and damp as a curtain. It clung to his chin in a strange pattern. Mama was screaming at him, and this shocked me more than anything, how suddenly these people I loved had become like animals to one another. To me!

  Babbas pressed my bleeding hand against the little statue—and in that moment it seemed like a great tooth. Oh, how I howled! I feared it would gobble me up! But the blood only smeared against the jagged line of that lumpish stone body, the little withered arm smashing against my palm.

  Then it was over. Aieee. It was over.

  Perhaps I am lucky. In another age Babbas might have drowned me in the sea. Or left me on a hill to be torn apart by animals. It is strange to look at one’s own father and think he might have done such a thing, but I cannot say with any certainty that it would have been beyond him. I loved him. He was a stranger to me. The scar still grins at me when I look for it.

  When I was older, Mama told me that some piece of the statue had broken in the fall. I had not known, I was too young then, but the family’s luck was not good for several years. Babbas’s boat was loosed from the shore in a bad storm while all the other boats were safely harboured. No one knew how the ropes slipped or the knots failed. But they did. Much of our meagre savings went to repairs. I know Babbas blamed me.

  But that thing—whatever it was that had my clumsy infant fingers reaching and reaching and always reaching for it—it never left me. Babbas took the statue away and kept it in a secret place, but by the time I was ten I had discovered it again. I would sneak into his room and take hold of it from behind the loose brick where he kept it among his other sacred possessions. I would turn it over gently in the uncertain light and run my fingers along its grooves. I could see the rusted spots of my own blood, ancient then, or so it seemed to me. It could have been anyone’s blood.


  It was blood that bound me to Babbas. Our shared blood. Sometimes it made me smile to see my blood upon the statue. Sometimes it made me feel proud.

  My babbas left Mama when I was fifteen.

  It was a shock to me but by then I cannot say it was an unwelcome one. I had lived in the shadow of his temper for many years, and grown up stunted the way a tree does when it must cling to rocky soil. I knew he was unhappy. There are many forms of violence that one can do upon another when love is gone. Once blood bound us like a knot. Now blood made my mother and me weak to him, vulnerable, those first touched by the storms of his passions. There were ways he could hurt us for loving him when he did not love in return.

  What we did not know was that he had found happiness with another woman. She was pregnant, Babbas told us. He had responsibilities to her. I was close enough to fully grown that Mama would not starve if I was a man. He delivered the words like kicks. Carefully. They were meant to cripple, perhaps; to wound, almost certainly. But to me they simply brought relief in the knowledge that, with another child, he would not return to us.

  He took few things. A wool blanket. His favourite knife. A pot he had mended on several occasions. It heated unevenly, burnt whatever it touched or left it raw, but when it disappeared from its hook, Mama wept like a child and I wrapped her in my arms. Arms muscled from turning the winch on our boat, hauling nets from the sea. They were not weak arms. They were a man’s arms. We would survive.

  It was only some time later that memory struck me. I raced to Babbas’s room—the room he had shared with Mama for all the years of my life. I went to the little hiding place. He had left the stub of a candle. A tin medallion of St. Christopher. A satchel filled with bat bones—they were lucky, he had told me once. But the statue was gone. Of course it was gone. These other things were trinkets. These were the lesser lucks he had carried with him. He had taken his greater luck with him for that new child.