Chapter 12 Present Day
PRESENT DAY
OSCAR
Oscar had to run somewhere. It might as well be to Glacier National Park—a place where he always found peace.
Too tired to set up his tent, he immediately built a fire to fight the cold and slumped into a camp chair in front of it. Buki sat attentively beside the chair and nudged Oscar’s arm with a cold nose, urging an ear scratch.
Oscar’s emotions teetered on the edge of overload with the betrayal of Caroline and Ben and the bomb his mother had just exploded in his lap.
Even in the midst of the pain, his life assumed clarity for the first time ever.
Now he knew why restlessness constantly pulled on his mind, why his father treated him with such distance, why he continuously lived with the feeling of not being good enough, always searching and always feeling like something was missing.
The truth had confused everyone around him, even old Doc Murphy at the Student Health Center.
Last year, while struggling with depression and anxiety, Oscar had visited the gray-haired patriarch of the student health service and shared his struggles.
The doc reminded him of all his positive traits—his stellar grades, his athletic build, and his supportive family.
“My god, son, look at yourself in the mirror. You’re like a young Christopher Reeves.
You must have all the girls swooning over you,” he’d said.
“Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and grow some thicker skin.” Oscar got little from the pep talk or the comparison to a dead guy, ignoring the doctor’s allusion to Superman.
Staring into the campfire, he believed the answers to all his questions became crystal clear.
He was a bastard son.
The anger, the grief, the sadness pounded his chest, and he picked up a rock and threw it at the fire, sending up a plume of sparkling embers.
He wanted also to send up a loud, growling curse, but the surrounding campers hadn’t yet stirred from their cocoons on wheels, and he didn’t want to arrest their slumber and rouse the entire campground.
They might think a grizzly bear prowled the grounds.
Why his mother chose last night to come clean seemed cruel. Didn’t she realize he was suffering enough? Why had she not told him before? “Too embarrassed to tell me she’s a tart,” he murmured. Buki tilted his head at him and perked one ear.
“Yeah Buki. My mother the tart and me the bastard,” he muttered.
Oscar regretted the words as they left his mouth. Embarrassed for sure, but who wants to think of their mother as a sexual being? The entire drive he’d gagged at the thought.
After all, everyone knew their parents had to have sex at least once out of obligation or they wouldn’t exist. But Mom hooking up with an old boyfriend at her bachelorette party…he gagged again. Not the natural order of things to think of your mom as a party girl.
His mother told him she loved his father.
That sounded good until Oscar made her explain which man she meant, because now he had two fathers.
A biological one and another who never seemed much interested in him.
Oscar swore under his breath and sighed.
No wonder the dumb schmuck doesn’t like me.
Every time he looks at me, he sees betrayal written across my forehead.
He sent another rock into the fire, exploding a trail of embers.
His mother had explained she had dated the other guy through high school. She hadn’t seen him for years until that night the week before her wedding when she and her pals celebrated. She excused it away with, “I had too much to drink.”
Oscar really didn’t want any other details to pollute his mind, but she had gone on to say that she’d regretted it every day of her life since.
She admitted she wasn’t even going to tell her husband about her indiscretion.
When Oscar arrived nine months later, they celebrated the fact she’d gotten pregnant on their honeymoon.
“But wouldn’t you know it? The truth always has a way of sneaking out,” she’d said.
“You popped out quite jaundiced, and they did a bunch of labs. Turns out you are Type A blood,” she said with an embarrassed giggle.
“I’m O positive. Your dad is B positive.
” She’d wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
“So, your father knew from the beginning, but raised you as his own. He was mad at me, but took it out on you, I’m afraid. ”
“Sorry to blow your cover,” Oscar had said, knowing that with their blood-type combination, it would have been impossible for him to be type A.
Before Oscar had stormed out, he’d confronted her with, “Did you ever tell the a-hole?”
As she searched the floor with her eyes, he’d felt a flash of contempt and pity for her. She’d lived with this pain for all his life.
She’d shaken her head slowly and then added, “Your dad made me promise not to tell anyone. I think it bruised his ego,” she’d said just above a whisper.
“Who is my biological father?” he’d demanded.
She looked up at him with both fear and concern.
“Mom, I have the right to know!” he’d yelled.
She blushed and hesitated.
“Mom!”
“He’s an artist up in Bigfork.”
“Have you seen him again?” Oscar demanded with the emphasis on “seen.”
“Oh, Oscar…no, son. Please don’t think of me like that.” She stood. “You know how it is these days with social media. We went to high school together, so…”
Oscar had raised his hand. He hadn’t wanted to hear any more about her high school shenanigans. “Name, mom…what is his name?”
“Oscar, he doesn’t know.”
He stood his ground and crossed his arms.
She seemed to know where this was headed and relented. “Pat…Pat Hoshed.”
“I guess that makes two of us who were in the dark,” Oscar had said, slammed the door as he left, and went to collect his camping gear.
The campfire popped a burning ember at his feet and Oscar stomped it out, snapping his mind back to the present. The unwelcome revelations clutched his throat.
Oscar bent over the fire and gagged. His thoughts made him retch, but his body resisted puking.
He wished he could vomit to release what he’d heard and now knew.
Oscar hadn’t taken one bite of the macaroni and cheese and hotdogs, and with his stomach completely empty, nothing came out.
He retched again and spit into the embers until the smoke from the fire choked him back into his seat.
He slumped in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair.
“What in the world am I going to do?” He wanted to sob, but like his bile, that too was stifled.
He just shook his head, looked around at his campsite, then filled his lungs with the crisp morning air of Glacier.
Even in July, the morning temperature hovered slightly above forty and he realized he was shivering.
He leaned over to the picnic table, grabbed his North Face jacket and slipped it on.
Buki whimpered with cold. Oscar picked him up and opened the jacket to enclose the dog. “Come here, boy,” he said. “You’re cold too, and I bet you’re hungry.”
He carried Buki to the car, opened the trunk, and found the box of kibble, two small bowls, and a bottle of water.
He brought Buki and his breakfast to the picnic table near the fire.
Setting Buki on the table, Oscar poured kibble into one bowl and water into the other.
“There. That should make you feel better.” Buki devoured half of the kibble before Oscar finished the sentence.
Two squirrels chattered at Buki from a nearby tree and a large crow cawed overhead until a man in the adjacent spot descended from his large fifth wheel and started his obnoxious generator.
“Stupid people,” Oscar murmured. “Why come camping and then disturb the solitude for everyone else?”
Oscar needed coffee and pulled his cell phone from his front pocket and looked at it.
No service. The screen opened to the last page he had looked at—the town of Bigfork.
He pursed his lips and couldn’t decide if an early morning stop in Bigfork had been a good idea.
Sitting in front of the Hoshed Gallery, at four in the morning, on an empty Main Street only filled him with more anger.
He’d been there before and had parked right in front of the gallery with its fancy carved wooden sign, but now he knew too much.
Pat Hoshed had become an accomplished sculptor. He remembered walking through the gallery with Caroline last year. Had I actually met my father? Oscar couldn’t remember. He blew air out his nose. “Wouldn’t that be the shits?”
Oscar reached for two small logs next to the picnic table and laid them on the embers, blowing on them to reignite the wood.
He decided it was too early to do anything except warm up.
He sat on the bench and patted his leg. A well-fed Buki sprung onto his lap and curled contently into a tight bundle.
At least with no service, the texts and calls from Caroline had stopped. But he knew deep in his soul the gravitational pull was too much, and he would go confront his father.
* * *
The desire for coffee and the curiosity over his biological father won over the beauty and peace of Glacier.
He got warmed up and tried to catch a few winks, but he couldn’t stand it any longer.
Oscar apologized to Buki, extinguished the campfire, and drove the forty-five minutes south to Bigfork on the northern edge of Flathead Lake.
He found an open roadside stand for coffee, then parked along Main Street.
Buki, always up for adventure, sat on the passenger seat, watching for Oscar’s next move. Oscar reached over and ran his fingers through the soft white fur that created a chest shield in the black and brown fur that covered the rest of Buki. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, boy.”
Buki licked his wrist and let out a short whimper.
“Hi Dad!” Oscar clowned, looking in the rearview mirror. “I’m your long-lost son here to claim my inheritance.”