CHAPTER SIX
As they pulled into the driveway of a very nice house in a wealthy neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Mad marveled at the variations of their father’s living situations.
He’d gone from an apartment in Boston to a farmhouse in Coalfield, to a modest two-story home in Oklahoma (though Pep had mentioned a few times that after their father left, they rented a pretty sweet McMansion in a neighboring town), and now she tried to imagine her dad, organic farmer Chuck Hill, reclining on a leather sofa inside this huge home.
She reminded herself that he wasn’t here any longer, had moved on, so she didn’t need to try too hard to imagine it.
That was the thing with their dad.
When you imagined him in his new iteration, he was already gone, had moved on, so everything wavered in your brain like a ghost or a wisp of smoke.
Rube got his trusty satchel while Mad and Pep stepped out of the car and stretched out the miles.
This was Rube’s third time doing this, Mad’s second, and Pep’s first.
Mad knew from the experience of finding Pep that it was hard not to consider your own moment, just before you found out the truth.
Of course, Mad understood that life was made entirely of moments where you could see the break, the before and the after.
Their father leaving them was one.
One day he’s there and the next day he’s not, and you remember that moment so clearly, because even then you know it matters.
And they were about to do it to this little kid.
Maybe it was okay.
They would show him that he was less alone in the world.
Ultimately, that had to be good.
She tried to convince herself that a life needed these moments, where you felt the split of who you were and who you became.
Without those moments, what was your life? Just an unbroken line that went from birth to death? Though that actually seemed kind of nice, Mad admitted, how lovely the sound of that unbroken string would sound when you thrummed it, a single sound that died when you did.
Wait, what in the fuck was she talking about? She couldn’t stop thinking of birth and death on this trip, but she needed to focus on the middle, which, you know, she was still living inside of.
She wondered if Rube and Pep were having these spiraling thoughts inside their own heads.
All that time on the farm, just animals and crops, you sometimes made two versions of yourself so you could have a conversation, but it made her feel a little crazy when it was happening in the presence of actual people.
Instead of waiting, she just started walking up to the front door, leaving Pep and Rube to chase after her.
She rang the doorbell, held her breath, and when the door opened, she had to look down to see a kid standing in front of her.
Theron.
Her brother.
He had buzzed-short black hair so you could see the paleness of his scalp and was wearing a huge T-shirt featuring the movie poster for The Phantom Menace that went to his knees.
As the siblings regarded him, this boy who did not look like them, he gestured for them to come in.
As Mad looked more closely, it was like Theron was their opposite, with black hair, so petite, and instead of the square jaw that the other kids possessed, a much more feminine and thin face.
Where the Hill siblings looked rough and weathered, Theron looked like a pixie.
“Hi. I’m Tom,”
he then said, as if he’d been waiting for them to introduce themselves. His voice, strangely, was scratchy and deep, like a cartoon frog, and it shocked Mad into responding.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,”
Mad finally replied. “Hey. I’m Mad. And that’s Rube and that’s Pep.”
Tom’s eyes widened when he saw Pep, as if he recognized her, and Mad watched his breathing quicken.
His eyes flashed, like a cartoon, little sparkles of an epiphany, and he then calmed his breathing.
It was eerie to watch, and Mad suddenly felt out of her depth.
“And is your mom around?”
“No,”
he said. “She’s in a meeting.”
“Oh, jeez,”
Mad said, looking over at Rube. “I think she told us to be here at four p.m.”
Trista, they learned, worked weekday mornings on the show from 5:00 to 8:00 a.m., hours to which Mad was accustomed on the farm but seemed like torture to Pep and Rube, and so they’d planned a time when Trista and her son would both be at home.
But now here they were, in an empty mansion with a little kid who did not look like them, no adult supervision.
It felt like a scam.
Why was Mad afraid of this situation while Tom, blinking up at them with genuine curiosity, seemed entirely in control?
“Well, is she coming?”
Pep asked.
“Yeah, eventually,”
Tom said. “Are you hungry?”
“What? Um, no,”
Mad said, but then Pep said, “Do you mean, like, a meal? Or just like finger foods, or—”
“Snacks,”
Tom said calmly. “Like, I have Pop-Tarts or there’s—”
“I’d like a Pop-Tart,”
Pep said.
Mad and Rube stared at their sister, who just shrugged.
As Tom led them into the kitchen, Pep turned and said, “Okay, first, I am hungry.
I think my eating schedule is very different from you guys, but, also, this is an easy way to get things moving, right? So we don’t just stand in the hallway for seven hours in silence?”
“Yes, it’s a smart tactical move,”
Rube said, “well done.
But I am very concerned that Trista is not here.
Like, I feel like she’s gonna show up with cops and pretend that we broke in.
Or just shoot us.
How conservative is Utah? It’s pretty conservative, I would think. I think they’d believe her.”
“We’ve got four kinds of Pop-Tarts,”
Tom announced.
Because he was so small, his arms and legs so thin, the T-shirt like a dress on him, she kept thinking he was much younger, but she remembered that he was eleven.
He was a preteen, she thought, though she didn’t know the exact ages of that category off the top of her head.
When she was young, you were just some dumb idiot child to the adult world until suddenly you were a teenager and an object of concern and pity.
“Ooh, man, you’ve got Splitz!”
Pep shouted.
“It’s two flavors in one.”
“Do you want one?”
Tom asked, smiling.
“Heck yes,”
Pep said, and Tom handed her a weird Frankenstein Pop-Tart that was half blueberry and half strawberry, and Pep ate it so quickly that it felt like a magic trick. “Hmm,”
she said, pausing for a second after she’d finished. “I can’t really tell the difference in flavors.”
“You literally ate it in three bites,”
Rube said, amazed. “How can you tell?”
“You have to alternate sides,”
Tom calmly explained, and everything about this kid made Mad think he was a fairy creature, his croaky voice and tiny body, handing out magical pastries.
“First you eat one side, savor it, then you eat the other side, and you go back and forth like that until it’s just the middle and you finally eat that and you get both flavors.”
“Ooh, I like him,”
Rube whispered to Mad.
Tom grabbed a few more packages of the Pop-Tarts and gestured for them to follow him into the living room.
He tossed the snacks on the coffee table and then jumped into a huge papasan chair with a bright orange cushion, and the siblings cautiously walked over to a giant white leather sofa and sat down, Rube and Pep on either side of Mad, the leather squeaking in a way that made Mad think that no one ever sat in it.
“You’re my brother and sisters,”
Tom said, and it felt like they were on a talk show from the seventies. Mad had never tried acid, but each new meeting with a sibling felt like a different possibility if you took acid.
“That’s right, Tom,”
Rube offered. “I’m your oldest brother, and my name is Reuben, but I go by Rube.”
“Nicknames,”
Tom said, nodding, like he was familiar with this concept.
“And I’m Madeline, but I go by Mad,”
she said. “We met earlier.”
“In the hallway,”
Tom answered, nodding again.
“And I’m Pepper,”
Pep said. “I go by Pep.”
“How old are you?”
Tom asked.
“I’m twenty-one,”
Pep said. “I’m a senior in college.”
“What’s your major?”
Tom asked.
“Oh, I’m a health and exercise major with a minor in business,”
Pep replied.
“Will you be a doctor?”
Tom asked. “Like an exercise doctor?”
“I don’t know,”
Pep said. “I play basketball and I guess I might coach after I finish playing, but I could go into training or physical therapy or something. I honestly don’t know.”
“You play basketball?”
Tom asked.
“She’s a star,”
Rube offered. “She’s, like, one of the best college basketball players in the country.”
“Wow,”
Tom said. “Do you like the Utah Jazz?”
“Not really,” Pep said.
“Me, either,”
Tom offered. “My mom’s boyfriend, he’s the sportscaster for Channel Four, gave me a signed Andrei Kirilenko jersey, but I just threw it in the closet. I was gonna give it to you if you liked the Jazz.”
“I kind of like the Hornets, because they’ve been playing in Oklahoma City,”
Pep offered.
“I don’t follow basketball,”
Tom admitted.
“So your mom has a boyfriend?”
Rube interjected, trying to get the discussion off of basketball, even though Mad kind of wanted to know why a team in Utah was called the Jazz, which seemed weird as hell to her.
“Oh, yes, Mitch Manning. He played football for Utah. His favorite movie is Pearl Harbor . One of his fingers is permanently crooked because it got broken so many times. He got arrested once for drunk driving. His wife died in a skiing accident. I absolutely cannot stand him.”
“Oh, wow, that’s a lot to process,”
Rube replied. Mad felt like this was a good test. Five details about a person and you decided if you hated them or not. She also thought she would dislike Mitch Manning. She tried to imagine the five details about herself. Then about her siblings. It was less fun then.
“Maybe we should stop asking you so many questions and you could ask us anything you want to know about us or about our dad—who is also your dad, of course—when he was with us. Or with us individually, because, up until this year, we didn’t know each other existed.”
“I don’t have any questions,”
Tom replied. “Mom said you guys wanted to meet me.”
“Oh, well, nice to meet you,”
Rube said. “Tom, sorry, do you understand the situation? Your dad was my dad. He was my dad first, though it’s not like a contest. And then he left my family, and he made a new family and Mad was born. And he left Mad and her mom and he made a new family and Pep was born, and—”
“And then he left her?”
Tom offered.
“Exactly, okay, I guess you do understand. Yeah, he left Pep and her mom and he ended up here in Utah, and that’s when he had you.”
“Are you guys not from Utah?”
Tom asked.
“No,”
Pep said. “I’m from Oklahoma. And she’s from Tennessee, and he’s from Massachusetts.”
“Boston?”
Rube looked at the boy. “Yes, I’m from Boston.”
“And Coalfield? Coalfield, Tennessee?”
“Wait, what?”
Mad replied. “How do you know that? Did your mom tell you?”
“I … never mind.”
What in the world had Trista told this kid? Had she said, “Three adults will come a knockin’, and these three random adults are related to you in ways that are too complicated for me to explain. Give them an hour of your time. And then you will never see them again”?
In the resulting silence, Pep reached for another package of Pop-Tarts and ate one, this time exactly in the manner that Tom had instructed. She nodded her approval to Tom, who smiled and bowed his head knowingly, and now he seemed a little like Yoda to Mad, that weird voice in that little body.
“And so then he left Utah and he’s in California,”
Rube continued, and at this news, Tom’s eyes widened and seemed to radiate light.
“He’s in Hollywood?”
Tom asked.
“Oh, well, maybe at one point? He’s in Northern California, or that’s the last address I have for him. If nothing else, that address will either lead us to him or to someone who might know where he went. And, after all of this, we’ll see him.”
“You’re going to see my dad?”
Tom asked.
“ Our dad, yes,”
Rube continued. “We’re all on our way to go see him. None of us have seen him since he left us.”
“I haven’t seen him since he left us,”
Tom offered, as if finally, in this moment, he understood the connection between himself and these three people sitting in his living room. “He left us almost two years ago and I haven’t talked to him since then.”
“Oh, god, I’m sorry, Tom,”
Rube offered.
“I miss him,”
Tom finally admitted and his voice softened. “I love my mom. She’s my mom. But I miss him a ton. He kind of understands me a little better than my mom. She’s really busy. She doesn’t like many of the things that I like. I think I scare her a little bit. Just a little.”
“That’s not true,”
Mad jumped in. “We talked to your mom on the phone. She loves you a ton. She sounded so proud of you.”
“She thinks I’m kind of weird,”
he told them. “I’m a filmmaker.”
“Oh, wow, I think that’s amazing,”
Rube said. “I’m actually a writer.”
“A screenwriter?”
Tom asked.
“No. I write novels.”
“Oh, okay.”
He was clearly disappointed.
“One was made into a movie, though!”
Mad offered, and Tom smiled again.
“Do you have connections in the film industry?”
the boy asked Rube, who smiled and nodded.
“Kind of? I mean, I have an agent and I know a few people.”
“I’m more of an indie filmmaker,”
Tom admitted. “I’m a low-budget independent filmmaker.”
“Oh, wow,”
Rube replied.
“You, like, make movies right now?”
Pep asked, struggling to keep up. “Like, you’re eleven and you make movies? With a camera?”
“Oh, yeah,”
Tom said. “I have a Sony Digital-Eight Handycam. It was Dad’s, you know? He’s a filmmaker, too. But he isn’t a low-budget independent filmmaker. He called himself an ‘experimental filmmaker.’”
“Wait, what?”
Mad asked. “That was his job?”
“Well, yeah, kind of. He was a cameraman. Did you not know that? He was a cameraman for the news. He worked with Mom at Channel Four when she first got started there. And then they had me, and he stayed home with me. He did commercials and he did these, like, industrial shorts for companies, and he had a whole little production company. Did he not make movies when he was with you?”
“Well, yeah, he did,”
Rube admitted, and Mad also remembered that both versions of their dad loved cameras and making home movies. It was the constant of their childhood, their dad filming everyone else, always off camera.
“He said he worked on this movie, Code of Silence , in Chicago, as a camera operator.”
“Well, it’s possible. When did that movie come out?”
Rube asked.
“In 1985? It had Chuck Norris in it.”
Rube looked at Mad, who shook her head, because her dad had left before that, and Pep shrugged, not sure of the exact dates of her dad’s life before she was born in ’86. Even with all four of them in the same room, they had trouble piecing it together. They needed a chart of the years, a single line that represented their father’s life, with brackets to indicate each child, as well as their moms. Instead of a family tree, with roots that reached deeper and deeper into the earth, it would look like a shark, constantly moving forward, with remora fish attaching themselves to him for as long as they could. Mad looked over at Tom and said, “I think it’s, like, chronologically possible, actually. Who knows?”
Mad truly believed in the possibility that their father had a brief foray before he married Pep’s mother where he was a camera operator on a Chuck Norris film before he decided coaching girls’ basketball was the right path.
“I wouldn’t care if he lied,”
Tom admitted. “It’s okay.”
They were all quiet for a moment, each thinking of their version of their father.
Tom seemed to be considering them, the truth of what they were telling him. And then, pulling his shirt even tighter over his knees, he said, “I want to show you something. I believe you. But I need to show you something.”
He stood up and when Rube also stood, Tom gestured for him to stay in the living room. And then Tom scampered out of the room and up the stairs.
After a few seconds, Pep asked, “Do you think he’s running away? Or calling the police? Or his mom?”
“I mean, any of those are possible,”
Rube admitted.
Tom returned with a padded CD wallet and he unzipped it. “I found some stuff in Dad’s studio after he left. I burned them onto these discs, but I have the originals, too.”
“What are they?”
Rube asked, but Tom went over to the entertainment center and opened it up to reveal an enormous TV and all manner of electronics. He powered up the DVD player and placed one of the DVDs in the machine. On the screen, a silent image flickered, this fiery orange static hovering on the edges of the image like it was being conjured by memory. Mad stared at the movie, a boy folding a paper airplane.
“That’s me,”
Rube said, his voice cracking. “That’s our place.”
It was so strange to watch Rube as a boy, to see the ways in which he had grown out of being that boy, the things he held on to. Mad looked at what she assumed was his mother, glamorous on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. They watched the whole home movie, such a brief little vignette, so perfect, though maybe to Rube it was shattering.
Tom turned it off when it finished, and he held up another DVD, which was labeled 1978, coalfield, tennessee, 8 mm, and Mad tensed for what would appear. When the screen again came to life, she watched an image of herself as a child, holding a chicken, and it broke her heart. “That’s me,”
she admitted to her siblings. “That’s our farm.”
She watched her mother, so beautiful, the real and fake exasperation she had for her husband. She watched herself drive a John Deere 4010 tractor, which they still had and maintained, though they’d since bought a new tractor. How in the world was she, a child, allowed to drive such a huge tractor? She was barefoot. She uttered a brief squeak of recognition when her father, previously hidden behind the camera, reached out for the egg that she had offered him.
Tom stopped it. “Me next?”
Pep asked, nodding. He held up one that they all understood would be Pep, and after a few moments, the camera panned over to her, bouncing a basketball. “Holy shit,”
Pep exclaimed. “That’s just across the border in Arkansas. I remember this.”
They watched her dominate on the court, so easy for her even at that age, and Pep said, “I still have that trophy. I really earned that one. I was two years younger than everyone else in that league. I’ve never seen this before.”
And once it was finished, Tom turned off the DVD. “These were movies that Dad made.”