My next tat didn’t cover a scar – not a visible one. Arianna put a rose directly over my heart. I didn’t need to add her name, Rosemary Lucas Maxfield, to say who it memorialized. Dad didn’t need her name, either. His face mottled purple the first time he walked into the kitchen and saw me in my board shorts and no shirt. He stared at the tattoo, still new and shiny with medication, and his fists clenched. Slamming through the back door, he hadn’t said another word about it until a couple of weeks later, when we were out on the boat.
I’d just baited a kid’s hook. He was ten or so and looked like he would pass out if he had to do it himself. Poor kid. He’d probably rather be building sand castles or slurping a snow cone on the beach than fishing with his dad and uncle. Instead, he would be stuck on this boat all day. I knew how he felt.
As I turned to open another bucket of bait, Dad said, voice low, ‘It’s illegal for you to get those without parental consent. I checked.’ He stared where a dark red petal peeked out from the neckline of my white tank.
I waited, silent, until his eyes, ghostly silver in the bright sunlight, met mine. ‘It’s my skin, Dad. Are you going to tell me I’m too young to mark it on purpose?’
He flinched and turned away. ‘Dammit, Landon,’ he muttered, but didn’t say anything else. Every few months, I added something new. Black flames licking over my delts, following the sharp lines of my biceps. A gothic cross between my shoulder blades for my maternal Catholic ancestry, with Psalm 23 scripted round it. Mom hadn’t been full of religious devotion, but she’d possessed an innate spirituality I envied now, and we’d attended mass often enough for me to have an idea of what it was about. I wondered if it would bring me peace to think of her in heaven, instead of in the ground.
Probably not.
On the second anniversary of the day we buried her, I got my eyebrow pierced. Dad railed satisfactorily while my grandfather seemed baffled that anyone would pierce a body part deliberately. ‘I’ve gotten enough hooks through various parts of my anatomy to not wanna put a hole through m’self on purpose!’ He had a scar near his eye where a hook at the end of an inexperienced fisherman’s pole had almost rendered him half blind. ‘Half an inch more and he’d have yanked my eyeball plum out!’ He was fond of telling the story, and I’d heard it enough times to almost keep from pulling a squeamish face at the imagery.
Come fall, the Hellers were suddenly much closer, because Charles accepted a tenure-track position at the top state university – two hundred fifty miles inland. While their new place wasn’t the twenty minutes we’d been accustomed to when we all lived in Virginia, it wasn’t an impossible distance for a weekend trip. Except to Dad, who refused to make a four-hour drive to see his best friends in the world. His excuse was work, same as always.
I figured then that people never change. Dad might have quit his high-powered banking job, but he brought his workaholic personality with him when he left Washington.
Even though the teaching position was a step up for Heller’s career, Cindy had to look for a new job, and Cole and Carlie had to make new school and neighbourhood friends. I knew they’d done it with us in mind, but Dad closed his eyes to the sacrifice they’d all made. For him. For me.
His silence seemed to blame them for what had happened, though maybe just being around them reminded him. Maybe my presence – which he couldn’t ditch as easily – reminded him, too.
I didn’t need a reminder. I knew who to blame for us losing Mom. Myself, and no one else.
Dad dropped out of Thanksgiving at the Hellers’ place – big surprise. Since I was fifteen and carless, he drove me to the bus station pre-asscrack of dawn. I could have refused to go by bus, alone, just to be an asshole, but that would have been a pointless rebellion. I wanted to go, even if I had to board a bus with a collection of broke degenerates who took one look at me and concluded that I was the most menacing guy on board. Silver lining: no one sat next to me.
The bus stopped in four piece-of-shit towns to pick up more transportation-challenged losers before arriving in San Antonio, where I transferred to an identical crap bus with a matching set of losers. The total trip would have been less than four hours by car – straight shot, no stops. Instead, after six hours, I arrived at a station that smelled like the combination of a poorly run rest home and areas of Washington, DC, that my friends and I had been forbidden to venture into on our own. Charles was waiting to pick me up.
‘Happy Turkey Day, son,’ Charles said, wrapping me in an easy hug that pinched my heart with a single, abrupt awareness – my father hadn’t touched me since the funeral. Even then, I remember clinging to him, unleashing my grief into his solid chest, but I don’t recall him reaching for me on purpose.
He’d never uttered a word of blame, but there were no words of pardon either.
Remaining within Charles’s embrace a beat longer than comfortable to clear the moisture from my eyes, I shoved at the never-ending guilt in my mind and wished it would fall silent, just for today. For an hour, even. For a few minutes.
‘You’re gonna be Ray’s height, I think,’ Charles said then, drawing back to take my shoulders in his hands and inspect me. I’d grown since I’d seen him last; we stood eye to eye. ‘You favour him quite a bit, too – but you got Rose’s dark hair.’ He crooked an eyebrow. ‘And lots of it.’
Charles had been a military guy before he went to college. I’d never seen a hair on his head longer than an inch. If it even got close to that, he joked that he looked like a damned hippie and went to get a haircut. It amused the shit out of him to harass Cole and me about our hair length whenever he got the chance.
‘You’re just jealous that we have hair,’ Cole smarted off the last time his dad had grumbled that he couldn’t tell him apart from Carlie. I’d spat milk through my nose.
My parents met the Hellers at Duke. Dad and Charles were PhD track in economics – worlds apart from Cindy and my mother, who were undergrads and best friends. None of them would’ve ever met their future spouses if not for my mother’s decision to stroll through a doctoral student get-together held by her father – a distinguished economics professor and a member of Charles’s and Dad’s dissertation committees.
I was eight or nine the first time I heard the story, but the telling I remember was when I had my first real crush – Yesenia, in eighth grade. Love and destiny had suddenly become essential things to comprehend.
‘I saw your dad from my bedroom window and thought he was so cute.’ Mom laughed at my eye roll. I couldn’t imagine my father ever having been cute.