Catch My Fall (17 page)

I didn’t look at him, but I smiled. “I must seem like a lunatic.”

“No, you seem happy. It’s been missed.”

I shrugged. “No it has not -”

He nodded, and his expression was strange. “I can tell you the exact day it went away -”

“You cannot!”

His brows shot up, and his lips pursed in an almost daring expression. “It was the day before you quit art school.”

I stopped short and swallowed. A memory seemed to bubble up and spill over, like a boiling pot of potatoes left untended.

I shook my head, wanting to deny this profound revelation. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Actually, I always wanted to ask you what the hell happened.”

“Why I changed majors?”

“And why Faye Jensen, the most creative, punk rock, and funny person I’d ever known, decided she needed to go straight and be a responsible, humorless yuppy at the age of twenty?”

I stared at him drinking his root beer. Before I could even consider the implications of being honest, I knew I would be. Somehow, I was ready to tell a secret I’d kept for a third of my life.

I took a deep breath and watched his face. “My dad came back.”

The implications were clear immediately. Stellan’s lips parted, but no words came. He stared at me.

My hands grew heavy in my lap, as though someone had sewn thread through my fingernails and tied them to a sinking anchor. I waited for him to speak. The waiting began to burn.

The last time I saw my father – well, the time before I was twenty – is my earliest memory. He was standing on the third story landing of our old apartment building, sobbing. I remember his voice, pained and high, like a woman’s almost. He was begging my mother to let him in, to let him see me. She’d put me to bed hours earlier, but the sound of my father wailing had woken me. I looked outside and saw him, his face contorted so deeply I feared he was in physical pain. His brown hair was sticking up around his unshaved face, his shirt sleeves were tattered where they could be seen at the hem of his jean jacket, and his work boots were untied. As always he had paint spattered all over his jeans. He looked lost somehow, like some stray that had found its way up onto our porch. My mother didn’t let him in that night, or ever again. When she finally threatened to call the police, he left. She came back into the dark living room and startled at the sight of me out of bed. Her eyes were so sad, and her face slick from tears. She let me sleep in her bed that night. I found out much later that the initial restraining order wasn’t requested until the following day, when while I was at preschool, my father returned to the porch with a baseball bat, screaming to be let in.

“You can’t keep her from me, I’m her father,” he’d screamed until even the neighbors were calling the cops.

She didn’t just threaten him that day.

I was four years old.

My father’s name is Charles Winslow Bentley, and he’s also a heroin addict.

He’s also a genius.

Not like Stellan. From what I gather, my father couldn’t solve a math problem with a calculator and a borrowed brain. Yet, when it comes to painting, my father was and is a master. He could recreate any work, any style, to the point of fooling an expert, in just a few days. He is four years younger than my mother, and the two of them fell madly in love at college. My mother was studying Art History. She met this young painter there on full scholarship during one of the student art shows, and that was the end of it. The two of them were together every day after that.

My mother used to tell me how she reveled at my father’s talent, watching him paint into the late hours. She loved art, and he literally breathed it. Despite my protests, I’ve heard how passionately they expressed their love, spending months at a time naked in my father’s apartment while he worked. My mother still has dozens of his paintings hidden away. One of them is a portrait of my mother, nude.

I was born shortly after my mother finished college. My dad didn’t care much for school and dropped out. My father worked, my mother took care of me, and that was life.

Dad had been using for a year when my mother finally kicked him out. He’d become distant around us, my mother said, acting at times as though he’d come home to strangers. My mother tried to ignore the signs; the strange hours, the calls from his boss wondering where he was, the stuff that went missing around the house. It wasn’t until he came home alone one afternoon after taking me to the park that my mother was forced to accept him for what he was.

‘Where’s the baby?’ My mother had asked. When she saw my father’s face, she knew.

He’d forgotten me at his dealer’s house.

She threw him out that night. He was sobbing on the porch three nights later.

I don’t remember the drug dealer, or his wife, or his kind children who were taking care of me when my mother stormed in, and though I won’t defend him, I will say wasn’t left at some gun toting pimp’s house, by any means. The guy was like my father, selling on the side to support his own habit. (Those two kids were adopted from the foster system after both their parents ended up in jail – or dead. Apparently they grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. Not all drug tales have sad endings.)

Dad disappeared after the restraining order, and we moved in with my Grandmother. My mother told me why when I was much older. We moved when she found the house ransacked, one day. My nicer toys, clothes, my mother’s jewelry and our bikes had all been taken. The only thing left behind was my mother’s engagement ring, which she’d stopped wearing soon after the restraining order. She kept it in her jewelry box, next to all the other pieces that were long gone.

I don’t remember my mother being afraid, though she was. I don’t remember her pacing, locking the doors, checking on me a dozen times before bed each night.

I do remember her crying.

Some might call it a sad story, but it was neither sad nor happy to me. It was just a story, and it was mine.

And Stellan knew it well.

“What do you mean he came back?” Stellan asked, his voice low.

I shrugged. “He found me because of some comic strip of mine they published in the Globe. Mass Art student, Faye Tanner Jensen. He hunted me down through the school.”

Stellan shifted his weight onto his elbows, leaning closer across the island. “What happened?”

“He took me to lunch.”

Stellan glared at me. “Is that all?”

I nodded.

He took a deep breath. “Your whole personality changed overnight because your dad took you to lunch?”

“My whole personality didn’t change -”

“Completely,” he said, and it was the most powerful whisper I’d ever heard. “Do you realize how worried we were?”

“Who?”

“Me. Evan. Your mother called me constantly. ‘Something’s wrong with Faye, do you know what happened?’ And I didn’t. I had no fucking clue. Christ, we thought-”

I waited, watching him scratch the back of his neck. “Thought what?”

By the sound of his voice, it sounded as though I’d come home one day an amputee without explanation. “You don’t want to know.”

He wouldn’t look at me. I waited for him to continue, or to glance my way, but he seemed thoroughly riveted by the knotted grain of the kitchen counter.

“I just changed schools, changed majors. People do that every day.”

He shook his head. “You didn’t change your major, Faye.
You
changed.”

He stood up from the table. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came. Was he right? Had he noticed despite my efforts to hide that event from the world?

He stood there a moment, pushing his chair in. The silent was loaded like a rifle. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

The hurt in his voice left a crack in me, as though someone had taken a chisel to my chest and split it open. “Stellan, come on. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“I’m not anyone, Faye.”

He turned from the table, his eyes nearly closed. I knew this look well.

I moved to speak, to say something, but it was too late and I knew it. “Stell?”

He walked down the hall to the basement door and disappeared downstairs. I knew better than to follow him.

CHAPTER nine

F
our days passed. Four days of texting empty air, of my leaving messages on his voicemail, four days of trying desperately to distract myself with sketching up ideas for
his
game. Yeah, that didn’t help.

I was spending a good part of my day hovering by the kitchen windows, with a cup of tea in one hand and my cell phone in the other. I didn’t dare part with it, just in case it went off.

I found myself desperate for distraction on the third day, enthralled with the birds at my grandmother’s feeders - all the little details my grandmother taught me. I was the designated feeder filler, trudging out there so she could stand by that same window and watch the sanctuary she created.

My grandmother, Edie Tanner, owned this house with my Grandfather, Terry Jensen. She was a powerful creature – a proper lady in every sense. She went to work when WWII broke out, then refused to stop working when the boys came home. She fell in love with my mechanic Grandfather, but refused to marry him until she finished school. She never left the house without pearls and lipstick, and toward the end, never let anyone see how much pain she was in.

These were her windows waiting for Grampy to come home from the War. Later, she watched her daughter playing from these windows, and held her here when her father died suddenly when she was nineteen. Cancer took Grampy Jensen at forty-five. Grammy never so much as looked at another man. She once told me she was waiting to die, because then she would be with Grampy again. Dark words to tell a seven year old, but they made it easier to let her go when she did pass.

My mother had trouble recovering from her loss, but in an effort to ease the transition, I tried to adopt some of her habits – the birds, the fires she set on cooler nights, the homemade quilts, folded with lavender packets to help with sleep.

I spent months at this window after she passed, watching the birds, waking with the sun some mornings to catch sight of the Cardinals that only came with the dawn or the snow. My Grandmother had referred to the red and brown birds as ‘Mr. and Mrs.,’ making me watch as the ‘wife’ waited patiently for her husband before she would eat. I’d always thought that strange, but Grammy Jensen was too busy fiddling with her binoculars to consider the sexist implications of Cardinal behavior. She would stand there with me, her curved fingers on my shoulder as she pointed out the Purple Finches, or the White Breasted Nuthatches. Her scent would surround me; sweet coffee breath, hairspray, Gold Bond powder, and Gardenia. She taught me the calls of the birds;
Peter-Peter
was the Tufted Titmouse,
Fee-Bee
was the Chickadee, and though I cannot remember what bird makes the sound,
Madge-Madge-Madge-put-on-your-tea-kettle-ettle
was her favorite. As a result it was mine, too, they I never seemed to catch it when she pointed it out. I remember laughing with her, the beaded strand of her glasses cord hanging down her soft, folded throat as she mimicked the sounds to teach me. She said she heard that specific call quite often. I told her she was full of beans.

Over the years since her passing - as a teenager, or a returning adult visiting for Christmas - I’d sometimes find myself sitting here by the kitchen window, listening.

I’ve still never heard that call.

Meghan sensed the shift in my mood by the fourth day, and she assembled the cavalry. By noon on that day, I was piled in the backseat of Meghan’s car, with Jackie sitting quietly in the front, heading for the mall for a ‘much needed girl’s day.’

Not sure how needed it was, but no one asked me.

“Don’t ever tell him I said this, but I kinda see where he’s coming from,” Meghan said as she pulled off the highway. I grumbled at her, but didn’t speak. “Hell, I didn’t even know you then, and I’m kinda pissed.”

I watched the world pass from the backseat. “It wasn’t the end of the world,” I said.

Jackie glanced back at me, and I knew she was keeping something to herself.

“Hon, let me be frank – your bat shit crazy, heroin addict father appears wanting to bond and hang out, maybe take you fishing, and you don’t think it’s worthy of telling anyone? Really?”

Meghan was glancing in her rear view at me. I wished she’d focus on the road and not glaring at me for effect.

Deep down, I didn’t begrudge Stellan his upset. Still, not hearing from him for four days was rough to endure. I’d done my best to apologize. I’d done everything shy of dropping by the house. Still, part of me knew I was wrong. All this time, I thought I’d magically hidden the trauma of my father’s resurrection like some emotional Houdini.

“I didn’t want to worry anybody,” I said.

Jackie glanced at me again, but didn’t speak.

“What Jackie? Please, just say it.”

“Oh please, we both know what she’s going to say. You’re a jackass. End of story.” Meghan was a master of conversation.

I gave an exasperated sigh. “Look, telling Stellan would have been the equivalent of telling my mom. Her knowing good old Bentley was back was the last thing I would ever want. Who knows how she’d take it?”

“It sounds like you worried her anyway,” Jackie said finally.

“I know.”

I felt the car shift and looked up to see our destination. “Wait, what are we doing here?”

It was the temporary Halloween Superstore that appeared every year somewhere near the mall.

Meghan shot me a piteous look. “We’re cramming this tits in every costume that’ll fit until I find the one that makes me look like hot sex on legs.”

I had a feeling there would be several contenders for that title. Meghan had great tits.

“So what are you going to do?” Meghan asked. I knew damn well she wasn’t challenging me to a Halloween costume try on competition.

I shrugged, checking my ever silent cell phone. “I don’t know. He won’t talk to me.”

“Yeah, so what are you going to do?” Meghan liked to get to the point.