Mister Tender's Girl

by Carter Wilson

  “Exactly,” he says. “That’s why I resent you.”

  I need to stop this. I wanted even the smallest insight into my mother’s past, but I’ve just made things worse. “Thomas,” I say. “Enough with the arguing, please. Can you just tell me about that?” I point to the book, which is still in my brother’s hands.

  It takes him a second to pull his anger away from my mother, but Thomas finally opens the book and studies the panels. Suddenly I’m itching all over to see it, panic attacks be damned. “I never actually saw the book,” he says. “Just that cover art. In Dad’s study, about a week before we moved out.”

  “You never told me,” I said.

  “Of course not. He said he’d never draw Mister Tender again, and then he did. I didn’t want to give you a reason to be angry with him.”

  “She already had plenty of reasons to be angry with him,” my mother says.

  “Mom, stop. Dad loved me. He didn’t want any of this to happen.”

  “Yet he had to keep drawing, didn’t he?” She shakes a meaty finger at the book Thomas holds. “He said he never would, and look what we have right here. He couldn’t help himself.”

  “It’s the final book,” Thomas says. “I asked him about it the day before we moved out. Told him I saw the cover. He actually cried.” Thomas’s voice is suddenly so, so soft. “He said it was something he wanted to do to help him process what had happened to Alice, but he told me he only drew a few panels.” Thomas looks up from the book, and for a moment, his eyes are perfectly clear, free from the clouds of medication and the blackness of judgment. They are sad, beautiful eyes, a deep, soulful brown. He says, “He was a good man. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  “No,” I say, “he didn’t.” And for that moment, until I hear my mother release a frustrated sigh that snuffs the silence, Thomas and I are connected by an energy that is both tragic and lovely. It’s been years since we’ve had three seconds like the ones that have just passed, and I fear it might be years until it happens again. Poor, poor Thomas, the river of his life run dry by the bite of a tick.

  “He couldn’t let it go,” my mother says. “He could never let anything go, and he ended up getting killed over his stupid cartoons.”

  My father never drew graphic novels again, but he didn’t give up his calling as an illustrator. In the last two years of his life, he worked for a political satire magazine with its office in the Southwark area of London. Three years ago, one of his colleagues, Brett Simonson, wrote a scathing essay about the disturbing trend of wealthy young London girls running away from home to Syria and joining ISIL, usually as sex slaves. My father illustrated the piece, which included a drawing of Mohammed looking down from the sky and weeping at the sight of Islamic extremists beheading Christians. The office received threats and demands to take the piece off the website. Management refused, and my father had a quote in the Guardian about their stance.

  We are equal-opportunity satirists. We target all races and religions, not just Muslim extremists. Why is it that these fanatics insist everyone in the world, most of whom are non-Muslim, follow the laws of their religion? A devout Jew couldn’t care less that I, an atheist, don’t observe the Sabbath. Why should these Muslims care if I draw a picture of Mohammed? Yet the world bows to their demands, time after time, because of fear. I say this: It’s a cartoon. Relax.

  It was the only time I ever recall my father referring to his work as cartoons. Two weeks later, my father was stabbed to death as he exited the office building. The perpetrator was never found, and no group ever claimed credit.

  “Mom, stop, please.”

  I often think that, in her own way, she’s sicker than Thomas, infected with emotional extremes, ping-ponging constantly between illogical defiance, doting, enabling love, and miserable self-pity. Before she can launch into whatever tirade she has planned, Thomas speaks first.

  “There’s an inscription,” he says. “Look.”

  He hands me the book, and I look inside its pages for the first time. My skin is flushed with excitement, because no matter the origin of this book, there is a connection to my father here. And the connection is even more personal than I could have guessed, for on the title page just after the cover, there is indeed something written in ink. It’s written, in fact, to me.

  In my father’s handwriting.

  Alice, what did the penguin always tell you?

  Ten

  It’s familiar.

  It makes sense only in a vague, comfortable way. I should know what this means, but its meaning is just out of reach.

  I look at the letters, the familiar half cursive, half print. The steady hand of an artist, the swirls of each s, the half-crossed t’s, the offset dots over each lowercase i. This is his handwriting, the ink patterns I’ve known since I was old enough to read.

  If it didn’t have my name on it, it would trouble me less. But he wrote this to me. The book was sent to me. By a man murdered three years ago.

  Thomas takes it from me and holds the pages close to his face. My mother peers over his shoulder and reads the inscription aloud.

  “What does that even mean?” she asks.

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  “He’s a loon,” she says. “He always was. What kind of sick joke is this?”

  “Mom, stop.”

  “I will not stop, Alice. He’s been dead for three years, and somehow he’s arranged to have this sent to you from the grave?”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  But she didn’t hear me. “What a sick, sick man,” she said. “Good riddance, is what I say. You should take that book and—”

  “It’s from our stories.” Thomas says this as he continues to stare at the words on the page.

  My mother snaps her head to him.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  He looks up at me, and I see life in his eyes, a liveliness most often buried deep inside him.

  “Remember, Alice, when we were kids? The stories he used to tell us? Chancellor’s Kingdom?”

  Chancellor’s Kingdom.

  “Yes,” I say, finally making the connection. “I remember.”

  As children, Thomas and I shared a bedroom, and each night at bedtime, my father would tell us a story. He never read us books; the stories we heard were the ones he made up on the spot, the most epic of which was about Chancellor’s Kingdom, a faraway world throughout which little Alice and her younger brother Thomas journeyed on the back of an impossibly gigantic penguin. Every night was a new adventure, and as much excitement as Alice and Thomas had in discovering this world, all they really wanted to do was come home to their parents.

  But there was always an obstacle, a challenge to overcome, an enemy to defeat. The story took months to tell, all revealed in fifteen-minute chunks every night. Shortly after the story ended, after the fictitious Alice and Thomas found their way safely home again, the real Alice and Thomas moved with their parents to a new house, one a few streets away, next to Gladstone Park. That house was bigger than the previous one. Thomas and I got our own rooms. We never heard of Chancellor’s Kingdom again.

  “The penguin,” Thomas says. “What was his name?”

  “Ferdinand,” I reply, the ridiculous name immediately coming to my lips after years of dormancy. “The penguin’s name was Ferdinand. And he was twelve feet high and was all white, with only wisps of black at the ends of his wings. And he could fly.”

  Alice and Thomas rode on Ferdinand’s back high into the skies above London, just as Wendy, John, and Michael had soared after Peter Pan. But the similarities between Neverland and Chancellor’s Kingdom had ended there, and although the former had plenty of scenes of action and suspense, it was nothing compared to the darkness my father could command. Chancellor’s Kingdom contained entire cities of ruin, graveyards with the bodies of heroes only mostly bur
ied—heads rising above the dirt—and a vast amusement park full of flesh-eating zombies. My father’s stories always enthralled and frightened me, and I sometimes wonder how life would have turned out had he just been content penning a trite and toothless Sunday comic strip.

  Then another jolt of a memory. Mister Tender was born in Chancellor’s Kingdom. He lived as a character in my bedtime stories before making the leap into the world of graphic novels, evolving from the stories meant to put me to sleep.

  “Alice, dear, you look ill,” my mother says. She gives my arm a little squeeze, more of a pinch, just below the elbow. “Let me get you some tea.”

  She leaves the room, and Thomas says, “Do you understand what he wrote? What did the penguin always tell you?”

  I do remember now. I can hear him saying the words, and my father always used an almost-American accent when speaking as Ferdinand. Several times, in situations when Alice and Thomas were about to face a rather tense situation in Chancellor’s Kingdom (which was almost every night, because Dad knew how to pace a story), Ferdinand would look down at them with a very serious face and say, Now then, if you get the sudden urge to start trusting someone, be smart and do away with it.

  Ferdinand never wanted us to trust anyone. One time, the Alice of the story asked Ferdinand why, if that was his advice, should they indeed be trusting him, to which Ferdinand simply replied, Perhaps you shouldn’t be.

  I go back to the beginning of the book, turning each page with care. There’s the title page with my father’s inscription. A blank page follows. Then another title page, this one with a more demanding font, with the words LAST CALL stretching side to side. No publisher information, no copyright date. But at the bottom of the title page, in a font so miniscule, I have to bring the book close to my face, there’s a website address.

  www.mistertender.com

  Beneath the address is a single word: gladstone.

  Nothing else.

  The scent of the book hits me. It’s so familiar. It makes me think of my father’s office, of those times he’d receive boxes of his advance copies. He’d open them up, and the room would fill with the incense of fresh ink and binding glue. The heady scent of glossy art.

  I now realize I’ve already forgotten about getting fingerprints on the volume; we have all now handled the book. My second realization has a more visceral impact, because I flip through to the next few pages and see they are completely blank. Is there some kind of hidden ink I need to detect, or is this just an extension of a cruel joke? Why bother setting a hundred blank pages into a bound volume?

  But the following page isn’t blank. I recognize the characteristics of my father’s art: bold, straight strokes; angular, shaded faces. White eyes, no pupils. The first panel is a double panel, stretching from one side of the page to the other. There are a little boy and a little girl, and they cling tightly to the back of a penguin, a miraculously large and airborne penguin, which descends into a heavenly plane of clouds holding gleaming white castles.

  This is not the usual gritty setting in which Mister Tender dwells. This is Chancellor’s Kingdom. Thomas and I are those children, and that impossible penguin is Ferdinand. I read the perfectly straight lettering in the white dialogue box.

  What is this place? the little version of myself says to Ferdinand.

  This is Cloud City, he says. I remember now. Cloud City was the capital of Chancellor’s Kingdom.

  Why are we here?

  Because, young thing, there’s nowhere else to be at the moment.

  I realize Thomas is now reading over my shoulder, and I turn my head just enough to see his face. He looks desperately tired, but I think there’s more than just fatigue in his eyes. The inception of tears.

  The next panel shows Ferdinand landing on a cloud, and a rat in an immaculate yeoman warder uniform stands guard before an unwelcoming spiked steel gate.

  “I remember the rat,” I say.

  “Me too,” Thomas whispers.

  The rat challenges Ferdinand with a riddle, which must be answered to gain entrance.

  Step aside, Ferdinand says. I’ve no time for your puzzles. Can’t you see I’m carrying precious cargo?

  The rat draws his sword.

  Look out! little Thomas yells.

  Then, with one swoop of his wing, Ferdinand smacks the rat, sending him sailing right off the edge of the cloud.

  I turn the page. The three adventurers pass through the gates of Cloud City, and once again little Alice questions Ferdinand as to why they are there, and the penguin tells her they must find someone to help them get home. That’s the point of it all anyway, Ferdinand says. If you can’t get home, why bother exploring to begin with?

  That page ends. The one adjacent to it is blank.

  I flip past two, three, four more pages. They, too, are blank, and for a moment, I think my father’s brief, incomplete story is a tiny, solitary island surrounded by empty, white gloss sheets. But then I turn to the next page, and this one is not blank.

  Not at all.

  As I take in the first panel, I can already tell something’s a little off. It takes me a moment, but then I realize this is not my father’s work. It is impressively close, and probably to the casual observer, the differences would be indiscernible. But I know how my father would hold his pens, the angles from which he approached every blank canvas, the trajectory of every stroke, and while the artwork here is a beautiful imitation, it is an imitation nonetheless.

  The first panel shows a woman, who, despite the exaggerations of the face, is most clearly me. She’s walking along the street at night, scarf snaked tightly around her neck, eyes down, her frame caught in the moment within a focused pool of street light. This light illuminates the thing in her hand, which, on closer inspection, is a movie ticket.

  A wave of goose bumps peppers my arms.

  The ticket displays the name of the movie.

  I remember that movie. I saw it two weeks ago.

  Eleven

  My gaze sweeps the rest of the page, the other few panels.

  I turn the page.

  Blank.

  They are all blank, the rest of the book.

  “What is it?” Thomas asks. I can’t tell what he’s been able to see, and I snap the book shut.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  My mother walks back into the room. “Give the tea a few minutes, then.” She clearly sees the fear on my face. “What’s wrong?”

  If I tell her what I just saw in the book, she’ll freak out. Perhaps even more than I’m freaking out, and I’m the one with panic attacks. Then she’ll launch into a furious tirade against my father, worse than before, and I don’t want that. This house is toxic, and I don’t want to add to it.

  “It’s nothing,” I say, a lie so obvious I wonder why I bothered with it at all.

  “Alice—”

  “Mom, please, just let it go.”

  I shouldn’t have come.

  She looks at me, her small eyes set back in her meaty face. She wants to assail my father more, reminding me why she tore me from him. She wants to justify her actions, wants to remind me my only chance at normalcy is thanks to her. But, in a sweet and seldom moment, she doesn’t. She lets it go.

  Instead, she switches to small talk, her second language after her native language of complaint.

  I last two more hours at the house next to the cemetery. Two agonizingly slow hours, and the whole time, my mind whirs about what I saw in the pages of that book. My mother carries on about things like Thanksgiving plans, a holiday we’ve adopted but that still feels like forced, manufactured happiness to me. I tell her, Of course I’ll be there.

  Finally I escape. On the drive home, I keep checking my mirrors, feeling as if a ghost has stowed away in my backseat.

  As I pull up to the curb of my Manchester home, I feel pricks on my skin a
nd cold metal in my stomach, like an impending flu just beginning to dig its claws into me. It’s shortly after dusk, and the sky hangs heavy, barely holding in its guts. As I walk up the steps to my house, my tenant, Richard, descends the exterior steps from his upstairs unit. He’s tall and gaunt, his shoulders perpetually slumped forward, a sunflower too heavy to keep its face skyward toward the sun. His hands are burrowed in his baggy jeans, and an Army coat wraps his thin frame. Richard is perhaps my age, but age is somehow difficult to guess on someone who rarely smiles. As he sees me, his dark eyes brighten a tad.

  “Hey, Alice.”

  “Hi, Richard.”

  I’m in no mood to talk, which is fine since Richard rarely says more than hello.

  But this time, as I pass him on the walkway to the house, he calls to me from behind.

  “Are you okay?”

  Pricks on my skin again.

  “It’s just…” He stammers to find his words. “You don’t look great. I mean, you don’t look bad, you just—”

  “I think I’m coming down with something,” I say. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  He nods and then looks back to the ground, his black, stringy hair falling over his left eye.

  “Have a good night,” he says and keeps walking to his car.

  “You too,” I mumble.

  Richard works mostly nights at Elliott Hospital as an RN. I’m happy to have him gone tonight, because I don’t want him pounding on my door in concern if he hears me gasping for air or sobbing in exhausted fear.

  I fumble with my keys and barely seem able to let myself in the door. The security system chirps its thirty-second warning, and I manage to punch in the code on the illuminated pad. I race to every light switch and flip them all on. Along the way, I drop the book on the kitchen counter, facedown.

  Then the tingling begins in my fingertips, tiny stings of frozen extremities plunged into hot water. A sign of an impending panic attack. Sometimes I can force it down, but I have the sense this one has come to play. You can’t battle a million firing synapses that force your brain to relive suffocating dark moments for hours on end. Well, actually, there is a way, and it’s called medication. I’ve tried them all—legal and illegal alike—and have given up on every single one. Medication is life’s CGI—a fancy trick that makes everything beautiful and surreal, yet astoundingly flat and hollow.