by Meg Howrey
There were some mini-biographies of him on various websites but there wasn’t any mention of me on those. I was prepared for that: he told me in that first phone call that he had always thought a lot about me and wondered and stuff, but that he was careful to keep his personal life very personal.
“And I didn’t want to do anything without talking to your mom,” he had said. “I wanted to respect her privacy, and yours too, of course. She’s great, by the way, your mom. I was pretty nervous and she could not have been nicer or cooler.”
At school on Monday, my semi-sort-of girlfriend Amy asked, “What’s up with you?” and I said, “What?” and Amy said, “You’re weird today,” and I said, “Really?” After school, I biked to Kim’s Video and searched for every movie Mark Franco had appeared in that I could find from the list I got from the Internet. I rented The Hard Line and Flight of the Phoenix 2: The Phoenix Rises to start with.
“Did you tell your sisters about your father yet?” Sara asked when I got home that day.
I hadn’t. I hadn’t even thought about it, which was weird, because normally I thought about my sisters all the time, especially this year since Pearl was away too, and I had been feeling a little lonely.
“Maybe I’ll go see them. This weekend?” Aurora and Pearl both go to college in New York City, two hours away by train.
“Oh, good.” Sara was being very cool about the whole thing, but I could sense anxiety underneath the coolness, and on top of it as well.
Mark Franco was barely in The Hard Line but had a much bigger part in Flight of the Phoenix 2: The Phoenix Rises. I watched these on my computer, using headphones to conceal all the screaming, shooting, and “Motherfucker!”s from Sara and Nana. His character got killed halfway through Flight of the Phoenix 2, and as it was now almost two in the morning, I stopped the movie there. I still couldn’t see any resemblance between my father and myself, but I knew that in movies they put a lot of makeup and stuff on people. I also thought he was a very good actor, even in the small part.
In the following week, I rented Time Out, and In the Zone, and Goodnight Stranger, which my father, in an email response to me, had listed as the ones where he had “halfway decent parts.” I’m not sure why, but I didn’t tell any of my friends what was going on. I actually kind of avoided Amy, really.
At the end of the week, Sara came to my room for a talk. I had been expecting this. The DVD of Goodnight Stranger lay on my desk, and I put my American history textbook over it when I heard her footsteps in the hallway.
“Tea?” Sara asked, from the doorway, a cup in each hand.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said.
“Okay time to talk?”
I nodded.
“So.” Sara handed me one of the cups and sat down on the end of my bed. “It’s funny. The moment I heard his voice on the phone all these memories about him came flooding back. Little details, things I had forgotten.”
“Really?” I took a sip of my tea, which turned out to be kind of cold. “I thought it was just like … this moment that you had.”
Sara eyed me thoughtfully.
“Not exactly. There was a little more to it. There was love, for one thing.”
That sort of surprised me, because Sara had never said that she loved my father. “You loved him?” I asked.
She blew into her teacup, which must have been as cold as mine was.
“Well, it was a moment of love,” Sara said finally.
I nodded.
“He worked in an electronics store,” Sara said. “That’s where I met him.”
I remembered that Sara did actually once describe her brief relationship with my father as “electric.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like a RadioShack or something like that?” I tried to picture Mark Franco in one of those shirts the employees of Best Buy wear. Maybe with a name tag.
“Something like that. He—your father—helped me with a VCR.”
“It was one of those things,” I said. I knew the next part. Sara and Anthony—Mark—my father—had made a connection. There had been a spark. It seemed my mother’s choice of words in describing the night of my conception had not been entirely metaphorical. I tried imagining my father in a jumpsuit with a tool belt, cords dangling from his hands.
“No, it was a real choice,” Sara said. “I wasn’t … well, I knew that there was a reason we had met, and when a few weeks later I found out I was pregnant, I knew the reason we had met was going to be you.”
Sara’s had the safe-sex talk with all of us, but to her credit, she’s never said, “You have to have safe sex,” because she obviously didn’t in my case. What she says is, “Be aware of the choices you are making and accept responsibility for them.”
“So when you found out you were pregnant,” I said, “you called him.”
“Well, no.” Sara shook her head. “I didn’t have a phone number for him actually.”
“Oh.” I wondered where I had gotten the idea that she called him. It had been a long time since we had had the “your father” conversation.
“But you did see him again. To tell him about me.”
“Yes, we saw each other on the train.”
“The train?” I asked. “Like, a train train, or the subway?”
“The subway, Luke,” Sara said, patiently.
“How long had it … I mean, when was this?”
“Oh, well, let’s see … awhile … it was a few months before you were born.”
I thought.
“So you were pregnant when you saw him again,” I stated. “On the subway.”
“Well, I was pregnant since the night I had met him!”
“I mean … visibly pregnant,” I persisted, shaping a phantom hump in front of my stomach. “Big, I mean.”
“Mm-hm,” Sara nodded.
“So he guessed?” I said. “When he saw you, he was like, Did I do that?”
Sara laughed a little.
“It was funny. He knew. Right away, he knew. He looked at me and he said—oh, I don’t remember exactly what, but he knew. And we got off the train at the Sixty-sixth Street stop and we sat by the fountain at Lincoln Center and we talked all about it.”
“What did he say?” I thought that the scenario sounded like the kind of movie Mark Franco didn’t do. Mark Franco did movies where if people met each other in a subway train, they started fighting, or slipped a tracer into the other one’s pocket, or yelled, “Everybody get DOWN!”
“Did he freak out?” I asked. For the first time I was really trying to imagine my father’s side of this whole thing, and it seemed like freaking out was probably a reasonable response.
Sara let a little silence elapse before she answered.
“There was no freaking out.” Sara leaned back and switched over to her guided meditation voice and started explaining about how my father wasn’t in a place where he could be there for me, etc., but how ready and eager for me she was and how they were really honest with each other and how he came to see me right after I was born and held me and some other stuff but I wasn’t really listening because I had already heard all of that and I was still trying to picture my father by that fountain.
Also I was thinking that Sara left it all to chance, really, that she would see my father again, and if they hadn’t been on the same subway car he might never have known I existed. That part was definitely new. I didn’t say anything more to Sara about it, though. What I was thinking was something along the lines of, “Okay, seriously, what the hell,” but I needed some privacy to organize my ideas, so I just told her I understood, and stuff like that.
Saturday I took the train to New York City to see my sisters and tell them the news. Aurora, uptown at Columbia, and Pearl, downtown at NYU, met my train in midtown, at Penn Station.
“We thought a walk through Central Park.” Aurora waved an umbrella and a Zabar’s bag at me. “Kind of a late-winter picnic.”
“What’s up?” asked Pearl. “Sara called us both last night. We’ve
been told to ‘be there’ for you.”
“Pearl thinks it might be girl trouble,” Aurora said.
“Is it SEX?” hissed Pearl, leering at me over her (not Starbucks) coffee.
“Shut up,” I said. “No.”
“Oh crap,” Pearl said.
“Well, I guess it is in a way,” I reconsidered. “Just not mine.”
Later, camped out on one of the benches in front of Bethesda Terrace, I explained the situation.
“No WAY,” said Pearl, when I was finished. “That guy from The Last is your DAD? No WAY.”
“I know,” I said.
“This is so weird.”
“And Sara didn’t know about him?” Aurora asked. “I mean, she never recognized him?”
“Well,” I said, “you know Sara.”
We all nodded. Sara loves music, so she’s current on that, but she’s not into TV. She was once asked to do a yoga series for television, and she turned it down because they wanted it to be like a workout thing, and Sara says yoga is moving meditation, not exercise.
“She recognized his voice on the phone. And they talked about it all.”
“God,” Pearl said. “I’ve never really pictured your dad as an actual person, you know? I guess all that celestial talk really sunk in.”
“How did he find you?” Aurora asked.
“He said he hired a private investigator.”
Pearl looked impressed. She lit a cigarette.
“Apparently it only took him about twenty minutes,” I told them. “The investigator, I mean.”
“So you’ve talked to him?” Aurora asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “And we’ve been emailing every day.”
“Also he probably has to be careful,” suggested Pearl. “I mean, you could sell your story to the tabloids, right?”
“Pearl,” Aurora said, “I’m sure it’s not like that.”
“ ‘TV Star Abandoned Son,’ ” intoned Pearl.
“Come on.” Aurora stretched out a leg and kicked Pearl. “Luke wasn’t abandoned.”
“ ‘No Presents at Christmas, Says Boy,’ ” Pearl continued. “ ‘Son Left to Be Raised by Deranged Women.’ ”
“Luke had presents. We gave him presents.”
“Okay.” Pearl conceded the point with a wave of her cigarette. “Wow. This is huge.”
“What’s Sara’s take on it?” Aurora asked.
“Luke, go and live and breathe freely as I have always done,” Pearl said, in Sara’s meditation voice.
“Kind of,” I said. “Mixed in with a little ‘Are you okay/are you really okay/is it okay if I ask you if you are okay.’ ”
“Sara hooked up with the guy from The Last,” Pearl said. “That’s something to brag about. This is really juicy.”
“He seems cool,” I said. “He wants me to come visit him in Los Angeles.”
I had given some thought to how my sisters might react to the news, and had decided it would be best to play the whole thing kind of low-key. I mean, it wasn’t likely that my sisters’ father would become a television star in India and would soon be contacting them with offers to fly them to Mumbai for the summer. I also decided that I wouldn’t tell them about Sara leaving it all to chance and just running into my father randomly on the subway. Because I wasn’t sure I could say it without sounding pissed off about it, and then Pearl would get pissed off on my behalf, and either one of them might tell Sara that I was “upset” and there would be drama. Sara would want to talk more and she might get weird and not want me to come here and I had already decided that I really, really wanted to.
“This is a big deal,” Aurora said.
“It’s a big deal, Luke,” Pearl agreed.
“Well, yeah, it’s a big deal,” I said. “But it doesn’t change, you know, anything fundamental. I’m still me.”
Another month of phone calls and emails passed. Plans got made. It was decided by everybody that I would not go to Belize for the summer to build homes and a school with the Helping Hands and Hearts program. I would go to Los Angeles for the summer and get to know my father. The Belize trip—or something like that—could be found for next summer. Sara stopped asking me if I was okay and started leaving me little notes that I would find in my textbooks, or my backpack, or my sock drawer:
“Accept life whole, as it is, without needing by measure or touch to understand the measureless untouchable source of its images.”
And,
“The man of stamina stays with the root below the tapering—Stays with the fruit beyond the flowering: he has his no and he has his yes.”
I finally told Amy the whole thing. Well, not the whole thing. I didn’t say “Mark Franco.”
That’s when Amy told me she had been spending some time with her ex-boyfriend, Darren Vincz, and they were getting back together. I wasn’t really surprised. I guess a part of me always knew that Amy was using me a little. So I just sort of nodded, and then she wanted to make out, and we ended up almost having sex. Sara always talks a lot about the mind-body connection, but your mind and body can act in total opposition to each other. Like, I knew it was ethically wrong to hook up with someone else’s girlfriend, and I even knew Amy only wanted to do it because I had been too okay with the Darren thing, and so I really thought we should NOT have sex, even though my body totally wanted to. Anyway, it didn’t happen.
Later, when I got home, I watched The Kindness of Strangers on my computer. In that one my father, hair slicked back and sporting a Middle European accent, manages to kill several FBI agents before being shot himself, in a car-chasing sequence, in Prague. It’s really good.
A plane ticket arrived: round-trip, first-class.
“I wonder if you will recognize each other,” Sara said to me on the way to the airport in Philadelphia.
“I sent him some pictures,” I reminded her. “And I know what he looks like.”
“You know, I’m really excited for him,” Sara said. “It’s like I’m sending him the best present in the world.”
Six hours later I stepped off an escalator and into the baggage claim section of Delta Air Lines in Los Angeles. I looked around and met eyes with this tiny blond girl—well, woman, I found out later—and she came right up to me.
“Luke?”
We shook hands.
“I’m Kati,” she said. “I’m your dad’s assistant. He’s waiting for you right over there.”
I nodded, looking around, although Kati’s “right over there” had not been accompanied with any sort of gestural indication of where “there” was.
“I’ll get your luggage, okay?” Kati patted me on the elbow. That’s when I realized I was still holding her hand.
“Oh, I can get it,” I said, letting go of her.
“Just tell me how many and what color.” Kati smiled over my left shoulder.
That’s when I turned and saw my father, standing by a row of metal chairs. That is, I saw the outline of my father: baseball cap pulled low, sunglasses, slightly hunched shoulders. Nevertheless, I recognized him. I would say that this was because of the movies I had rented, the first season of The Last my father had sent on DVD, and all the images I had found on the Internet. Sara might say I recognized him from that one and only meeting, seventeen years before. Either way, I saw the man—Anthony Boyle—Mark Franco—angel, comet, cop, bodyguard, bad guy, bomb-squad captain, beautiful person, astronaut with a destroyed planet to navigate, and thought,
“That person is my dad.”
So that’s how we met. We didn’t fly into each other’s arms or anything like that. We shook hands. I appreciated that, because I think it’s better to not load a whole bunch of feelings on top of things. Like, you could have a bunch of feelings about my family history and say it’s very meaningful, or you could say, “Nope. Just random. Doesn’t mean anything.” You could say, “Oh, my long-lost father, what an emotional moment,” or you could say, “Okay, we are biologically related. Interesting.” My point is that people act like their feeli
ngs are something they can’t help, but that’s not totally true. Every time you run something over in your head you are firing the same set of synapses into the brain. You can create an emotion, is what I’m saying. You have to be careful about that.
Yesterday we went to the ocean and he said, “Do you want to go in?” and I said, “Well, just to feel it?” and he said, “Let’s do it, man,” and we took off our shoes and socks and sprinted to the water and Mark yelled, “Jesus fucking Christ it’s cold!” and we started laughing and trying to jump over the tail edges of the waves coming in and this became a sort of game of who jumped the best and where one would say, “Oh, you are going down, my friend,” or “You can run, but you can’t hide,” right before a wave hit.
And that did have a certain qualia to it, sure, but I don’t really know how to describe it. I’m not good with similes.
This is why I need to start organizing my thoughts, while running. Surely I can get three hundred words assembled during a 10-K.
Luke sighs, and stops typing. He did not “space out” while running today, but space in the brain is an issue. So is relevance. Luke had passed a rose bush, heard a dog bark, noticed a squirrel dart across the street in front of a Mercedes with a dented fender and a bumper sticker that read “IMPEACH BUSH,” and said to himself, “Man, those roses were as big as my head.” Luke may use the phrase “roses as big as my head” in the postcard he will write later to Nana, but in summoning the phrase he will probably not ALSO recall the dog barking, or see the squirrel, or the bumper sticker. On the other hand, if he recalls the bumper sticker, he might forget about the roses.
Actually, Luke had spent most of his run trying to remember everything about the moment of being in the ocean with his father—the exact degree of coldness of the water, the way the beach looked, how it felt to say something that made his father laugh. Luke wanted to return to this moment because it had seemed possible then, jumping over waves, shouting at each other, laughing, that they could simply be known to each other like this—as two guys, genetically linked, doing something together, isolated from all expectations and desires contained in the words “father” and “son.”