by Jean Hegland
“It can’t be, Dad. I’m sure. I—” she begins, but then she appears to change her mind or lose her nerve.
“Would you like another chocolate?” she asks a long moment later, holding out the box so that it hovers above his lap. When he does not respond, she says, “I’ll just leave them on your dresser, okay? Maybe you’ll want one later.”
Rising from her chair, she crosses the room to place the chocolates beside the framed photograph that is the dresser’s sole decoration. “Is this Sally?” she asks, examining the image and then tilting it in John’s direction so he can see himself and Sally standing together—Sally in her knit travel skirt, he in his Gucci polo and new dark slacks—the stunning vista of an ancient Greek theater spread out behind them.
“I never met her,” she offers carefully. When John still does not respond, she says, “She looks nice.”
“I wouldn’t say …” He frowns. “Nice.”
“Really?” After an awkward pause, she asks, “Where was this taken?”
“Sicily. We went …” He waves his hand vaguely. “Before.” He frowns. “Were you there?”
“No, Dad.” Setting the photo back on the dresser, she returns to her seat beside her father. “I’ve never been to Sicily. In fact, I haven’t been out of the country at all—except,” she adds after a splinter’s hesitation, “for London.”
“London—” he echoes. But before he can go further, she rushes to ask, “What was it like, in Sicily?”
“Hot,” he answers wearily. “Old.”
“Didn’t you guys have fun?”
“Guys?”
“You and Sally. Didn’t you guys have a good time in Sicily?”
“Guys?” he repeats sternly.
“Oh, right,” she says with a laugh. “I guess I’d forgotten. Guys is supposed to only mean men.”
“From Guy Fawkes. Co-conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot. Contemporary of Shakespeare’s,” he continues, sitting up straighter in his chair. “Guys were first effigies, then urchins. But always male,” he adds warningly.
“Okay, okay.” Grinning back at him, she says, “But here’s what I always used to wonder: if ‘men’ is a word that is supposed to include women, then why can’t ‘guys’ include women, too?”
He frowns, thinking. A moment later he shoots her a shrewd, proud look. “I forget where you got your degree.”
“I didn’t, Dad. I said. There was never a good time. But like I started to tell you, I just sent off my application to Art—”
“We burn daylight.” John says abruptly. “It’s time to go.”
“Go?”
“Leave, depart, vacate this place—hotel,” he adds with an impatient flip of his hand, “hostel—hovel—what you will.”
“I don’t know—”
“I have work to do,” he says, rising from his chair. “Important work.”
“Yeah, but—I mean, I’m not sure how we can just leave …”
“It’s easy,” he snaps. “How did you get here?”
“I drove,” she admits reluctantly.
“So!” he pounces.
“Yeah, but, I don’t think—”
“Yeah, but, you don’t think,” John echoes bitterly. “That’s always been the case, hasn’t it? That’s certainly a theme. Where the hell were you, anyway? Where did you go? You have no idea the doom you caused, running off like that.”
“Dad,” she pleads, “please, just—”
“I had a chance—a golden chance—but it was mangled beyond repair. And even now, you won’t help me do my work.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he huffs in disgust. “It’s much too late for sorry. Take me with you.”
“But I can’t just—”
“Take me with you, or get thee gone.”
“It’s not that eas—”
“Then get thee gone,” he thunders, glowering at her as if he might glare her out of existence, “Get thee gone, and dig my grave thyself.”
Randi races down the white sidewalk that leads to the back of the building where the receptionist has just informed her there is a smoking area. She moves rapidly, oblivious of the blossom-scented air that enfolded her the moment she pushed the panic bar and burst through the building’s front door. Rounding the corner, she walks along a windowless wall until she reaches a pair of stained white plastic chairs flanking an ash receptacle.
She feels a flutter in her sternum, a mounting urgency. Her fingers tremble as she fumbles the package of cigarettes from her bag, takes one out, gropes for her lighter. She runs her thumb across the little wheel, and a flame sprouts obediently. When she inhales, the smoke is harsh and chemical laden, but she lets her eyes slide shut in relief, welcoming the slam of nicotine in her brain, the grateful shudder.
“Good fucking god,” she whispers, sinking into one of the chairs while a million emotions battle for space inside her smoke-filled chest. She exhales, takes another drag, then lets the cigarette dangle between two fingers. Gazing at the ivy-covered wall, she attempts to find a shape for what just happened, tries to imagine how she will describe it to Mink, what she will tell their friends, tries to plan the story she will make of it, the few sentences she will use to corral the craziness.
She gives an inadvertent sob, thinking of her father’s old, noble face, how his hair had turned completely white since she’d last seen him, thinking how familiar and how strange it was to see him again. Like a dream. She feels a swirl of vertigo, wonders if he will begin to appear in her dreams—now, after all this time. Again.
Three nights ago it seemed like a dream when the landline rang and the woman on the other end asked if she were speaking to Miranda Wilson. She and Mink had been working at opposite ends of the little table that filled their crowded kitchen, he planning curriculum for the summer science program at the junior high school where he taught, and she finishing up the final section of her college application, writing the essay in which prospective game design students were asked to develop a character or describe a world based on one of the images ArtTech College had posted on its website.
It had been yet another revelation, that prompt, such a luscious invitation to do what she was always doing anyway that it seemed almost like a cheat to find it in a college application. The image she’d chosen was a scene of a foggy, craggy world, a place filled with an odd gold light that illuminated distant pinnacles which might be either the spires of an ancient castle or jagged mountain peaks. In the foreground was a lake or bog or calm river in which a creature with features both horse- and wolflike stood, placidly drinking.
She’d named that country Norgone, and when the phone rang, Scrap was curled on her lap like a purring sack of sand, and she was deep into her description of Norgone’s history, explaining how generations of greed and disagreement had wasted the promise of both land and people, until all that was left were isolated ragged bands—Dreamers, Warriors, and Farmers—who needed each other’s skills and goods to survive, but who looked upon each other with distaste and distrust.
It wasn’t the kind of story she ached to make. It was too derivative, too simplistic, too two-dimensional. It wouldn’t let a player chew on questions or make discoveries or explore ideas or emotions in the way she dreamed of a game being able to do. But despite all her criticisms, the more she wrote, the more that world wrapped itself around her, pulling her in, inviting her to follow it further, to discover more, proving yet again that, despite her age and sex, despite her poverty and her ignorance of programming, she was right to try to follow this strange calling.
The phone was shredding her concentration with every ring. She cast a hopeful glance at Mink, but the apartment had been hers before it became theirs, and the only calls that ever came in on the landline were for her. Groaning at the intrusion, she cast the cat off her lap, saved her work, and rose to answer. When a voice asked if she were Miranda Wilson, she’d nearly hung up, instantly convinced that only a telemarketer would use her full nam
e, only a telemarketer would ask for her in that brisk professional manner. But she’d hesitated just long enough for the woman to explain that she was John Wilson’s wife, and ask if she were speaking to his daughter.
“I would have called sooner,” the woman continued once Randi had stammered that yes, her father’s name was John Wilson, and yes, he was a professor—or had been—at Solano State. “But I’m afraid it took me this long to find your dad’s address book. I’ve been thinking you should know,” she’d paused for the merest sliver of a second, “your father has Alzheimer’s.”
“Alzheimer’s?” Randi echoed. Although she was holding the phone to her ear with both hands, the word slid past her like an eel. Instead, she tried to envision what kind of woman her father’s fourth wife was, who he could possibly have found to marry him now, imagining a woman even more self-serving than Freya had been, or even more needy than her mother.
He’d sent a wedding announcement, four or five years ago, back when Mink was just another regular at the coffee shop, a dark-haired scrawny guy who nursed a single coffee for an entire evening while he frowned into a textbook, and who then slipped out at closing time, leaving, more nights than not, a dollar bill folded into a flower or animal or miniature musical instrument at the table where he’d sat.
Her only commitment back then had been to keeping her anxieties and self-loathings contained by making sure her life was small and manageable. She was living in a little dump of an apartment with Scrap, the kitten she’d discovered in the alley one wet night while she was taking out the trash. He’d been a tiny black rag of a thing when she’d found him, with claws like needles and a huge pink mouth, but he’d grown into a sleek, well-muscled creature, her sole ally and her only true friend. His aloofness soothed her, his weight at the foot of her bed helped her to sleep, and if his golden eyes did not exactly read her thoughts, at they least mirrored them back to her.
She spent her days pulling shots and steaming milk at the coffee shop, and her nights at home with Scrap and her computer, playing her way through one new game after another. Daggerfall … The Ocarina of Time … Abe’s Oddysee—she was fascinated by the worlds those games let her explore, the adventures they invited her to embark on. She liked how replenishing her life meter or collecting mana or escaping the Oddworld Stockyard could become such meaningful achievements, and she liked how failing was just an invitation to respawn and try again.
The corny stories, stilted dialogue, and same old epic battles for good and evil sometimes annoyed her, as did the fact that most of the female characters looked like nearly naked Barbie dolls. But there was something about that moment when she first ventured into the caves of Hyrule, or generated a character for Daggerfall, or heard that klutzy, cute slave Abe describe his grim discovery at Rupture Farms that made her forget her qualms. There was something about the challenge of learning the rules and figuring out the strategies that would allow her to live and even let her flourish in a new game that kept her both soothed and captivated.
It had been over a year since her mother moved away, five years since she’d last heard from her father, but she recognized his handwriting instantly when the handsome envelope appeared among the usual shuffle of ads and bills in her mail slot. Standing in her apartment’s dark entryway, she’d teetered between tearing the envelope open or ripping it to pieces right then and there. Instead she carried it upstairs to her apartment, let it sit on the coffee table like a Hyrulean Bomb Flower that only detonates when it’s picked while she checked her messages, fed the cat, and fixed herself a bowl of cereal.
Later, after she and Scrap had both emptied their bowls, she sat in the dusty recliner left by some previous tenant. With Scrap asleep like ballast in her lap, she stared at her name in her father’s thin, academic scrawl and tried to imagine what he might be sending her after so many silent years.
They hadn’t spoken since her seventeenth birthday, when he’d phoned from some dumb conference or other, trying to pretend that nothing was really wrong, explaining it was Freya’s fault he hadn’t returned Randi’s call when she’d been so desperate to reach him earlier that fall. Of course, she’d realized by then that it was actually lucky he hadn’t got back to her when she’d wanted him to. But reaching out to him had been excruciating, and she’d never believed him when he claimed that Freya had forgotten to tell him that she’d called.
She still harbored the vague belief that someday—when the time was right and they both were ready—they would find a way to get back in touch. Once or twice, she’d pondered looking up his number, or maybe even driving up to Solano to drop in on him. But then she recalled how awkward and awful it had been, that time when he’d dropped in on her, and she decided she would wait a while longer.
For the moment, her life seemed just fine in its little way. She was used to her parents being gone. She had her work, her apartment, her PlayStation, and her cat. It made no more sense to revisit her disaster with her dad before she was really ready to deal with it than it did to visit the Fire Temple Dragon before she’d collected the hammer she’d need to fight it. Especially since she couldn’t explain the magnitude of her anger without having to tell him things she still could not bring herself to say, in the end it seemed better to just stay away.
Abruptly, she reached across Scrap for the lighter that sat beside her cigarettes on the coffee table. Giving the striking wheel a swift flick, she held the flame poised below the envelope for a long, contemplative moment. Then, as carefully as a surgeon or an artist, she lifted the lighter to run its little fire along the envelope’s bottom edge. Slowly the lower corner of the paper began to brown and then to blacken. A corner of the envelope twisted into a curl of ash. Randi watched with a kind of stoic satisfaction as the singe crawled toward her name.
Suddenly a hot orange flame surged up. She felt a spike of panic, an inadvertent dismay. Hastily, she tried to blow the fire out. But blowing only made the blaze expand. She waved the envelope, sending shards of hot ash cascading onto Scrap, who leapt up with a yowl and raced out the open window into the night, leaving Randi to fling the flaming envelope to the floor, and then jump up herself, stomping on the burning paper till she had extinguished all the little sizzling worms of fire.
Snatching up a jacket, she raced out into the dark to scour the neighborhood for Scrap. Hours later, when she finally slumped home alone, the half-burnt envelope lay like a baleful toad on the floor where she’d dropped it. Wearily she picked it up, and when she pried the layers of singed paper apart, she found enough remaining inside for her to read that Jonathon Wilson and Sally Crystal were pleased to announce their marri—
The rest of the engraved message had been burned away. Turning the card over, she discovered that her father had written something on the back. Sally is, she made out, and, I would like … if things … I don’t …
But there wasn’t enough of his message left to make any real sense of it, and her more pressing worry was finding Scrap. She spent the next ten days trudging through the neighborhood with an open can of tuna, knocking on doors, calling his name, abandoning the search only when it seemed clear there was nothing more she could do.
Three weeks later, when he finally jumped back through the window while Randi and Mink were sharing a pizza and discussing the potential of massively multiple online role-playing games like Ultima, Scrap was as sleek as ever and utterly unconcerned by all the consternation he had caused, and Mink had already progressed from being a gallant cat hunter to becoming a sturdy friend.
By the time she recalled her father’s announcement, it seemed like yet another thing best left in the past. She couldn’t imagine how she could get in touch with him without admitting she hadn’t read what he’d written on the back of the card, and she couldn’t think of a way to explain why she hadn’t that wouldn’t be more awkward than just letting the whole thing go. Someday, she told herself, she would try to see him again, but she wasn’t ready—and besides, she was suddenly too busy—right then.
“Or at least some kind of memory loss,” his new wife was saying. “They won’t know for certain it’s Alzheimer’s until they do an autopsy.”
“He’s dead?” Randi gasped, and Mink looked up from his laptop, concern tightening his face.
“He’s not dead,” Sally answered gently. “But no one’s ever recovered from Alzheimer’s. I’m afraid it’s a terminal disease.”
An image of their horrible parting in Heathrow Airport shouldered its way into Randi’s mind, when her father had delivered her like a parcel of spoiled goods to the nonstop flight that would return her to California. Freya had not deigned to come with them to the airport, but even so, their good-byes had been excruciating, her father’s shame and rage equaling but not mirroring Randi’s own. She’d yearned to cling to him, longed to sob out her confusion and her horror with her face pressed against the wales of the dorky corduroy jacket he was wearing. She’d ached to tell him what it had been like, both her adventure and her ordeal, longed for him to help her understand it herself.
When the idea came to her to venture into London on her own, the risk of it never crossed her mind. She’d assumed her dad and Freya would be glad she’d found a way to entertain herself while they were off at their play, and after she’d managed to wander her way to Trafalgar Square, she’d stood at the base of one of the bronze lions, watching the red buses and black cabs circling the wrong way round in the early dusk and imagining how pleased they would be by both her initiative and her accomplishment.
The freshly lit streetlights shone like beacons in the tender gray air, and everything—from the staid stone buildings to the brightly colored buskers—seemed charged with possibility. In that moment she’d truly felt there was no one she would rather be than herself, standing at the heart of that great and ancient city, feeling the thrum of London rise up through her, feeling the world opening out in every direction around her, feeling certain that her own cramped life could change, now that she had seen how much more was possible. Standing in that bustling, balmy, dusky square, she’d understood how small her previous dreams had been.