CHAPTER TWO #3
He was a farmer, of course, or was when Mad knew him.
He cooked constantly, barbecued whole pigs and experimented with soba noodles made with their own milled buckwheat, and perfected yeast rolls with crunchy flecks of sea salt and crushed pieces of lard.
“Well, we’d love shirred eggs,”
her mother said, and she directed Rube to a high shelf with four dusty, rarely used ramekins and produced a slab of bacon from a local smokehouse, and, of course, their famous eggs, while Mad slumped into a seat at the kitchen table, too overwhelmed to do much else.
She watched Rube and her mother discuss the differences between gas and electric ovens, and she wondered if her mother had expected more children.
Mad was ten when her father left, so it wasn’t like they hadn’t had time to have another.
Or maybe her dad had insisted on one, or maybe her mother hadn’t even wanted her.
Who knew? But it wasn’t surprising to imagine additions to the family, her and her mother and her brother and maybe another sister, all of them working the farm.
There would have been less pressure to marry, to start a family, though truthfully, her mother did not push on this all that much.
But it might have been easier for Mad to leave, honestly, if she’d known there was someone else to help keep the farm running.
It was too much to think about, not enough time, and suddenly there was a table being set around her catatonic body, iced tea and silverware and fresh butter, and then Rube placed a ramekin with a beautiful egg looking up at her, pieces of red pepper and a dusting of Parmesan, all housed inside of a little bowl-like nest of bacon.
It was beautiful.
And they all sat and ate in silence, only remarking on how wonderful it tasted and for Rube to admit that the eggs tasted so much better than what he got back in the city.
And Mad felt the reassurance of food animating her body, keeping her tied to the world.
HER FATHER WAS STILL ALIVE.
IT WAS 2007.
OBVIOUSLY SHE COULD HAVE found out.
They had very slow dial-up on the farm, which she used to communicate with vendors and to order things for the farm.
She emailed a few friends, just to stay in touch.
She knew the internet could do more, but she didn’t think she needed any of that.
Or maybe she was just afraid to find out how much she needed and how her barely functioning dial-up wouldn’t allow it.
In college, when she was studying plant and soil sciences in Knoxville, she finally got a student email address and used the internet regularly in her junior year.
One weekend, having finished a mid-semester project in the nearly empty computer lab and not wanting to go back to her dorm and have to talk to her roommate and her skeezy boyfriend, she had made sure no one else was watching her.
And then, in the AltaVista search engine, as if she was searching for porn or instructions on how to make a bomb, she had typed “Chuck Hill”
and there were a few possibilities that came back to her and she felt her heart racing, all these links that might lead her to a reunion with her father.
And she spent the next two hours clicking on websites that never led her to the Chuck Hill who had been her dad on that farm in Coalfield.
She tried “Charles Hill”
and that made it worse, giving her information about a foreign policy guy who taught at Yale or a detective who had found Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream after it had been stolen in Norway.
So many Charles Hills.
At this stage in her life, she had not known that her father could be anyone other than a farmer.
She kept searching, using other search engines like Yahoo Search and Lycos and Excite and WebCrawler, as if one of these engines had proprietary ownership of her father’s life.
But they had too much, even in 1996, when the internet wasn’t so omnipresent.
Charles Hill was too common, and she wished her dad’s name was something like Cornelius Rainbird.
When the work-study student in charge of the lab came to tell her that they were closing, Mad nearly shouted in surprise.
To have been witnessed searching for her missing father who had never once tried to even contact her was a kind of embarrassment so specific that even now, as an adult, she could easily remember that sensation and feel the heat rising to her face anew.
And, yes, she had checked since then, as the internet got bigger, but each time she’d come up with nothing tangible, no Chuck Hill that was her own dad, and she wondered if he was dead or had changed his identity in order to avoid child-support payments.
And each time, when that tiny little desire to find him came back to her, when she gave in and typed his name into a search engine, only to be disappointed, it felt like a betrayal of the life that her mother had made for her, the farm that they now shared, her entire existence.
And she would clear her search history, resolve to never try again.
If he wasn’t going to come back, it was as if he was dead.
And if she had found an obituary, real proof, what would it have mattered? It was better to let him live in those ethereal spaces untouched.
He was in limbo or he was walking along the information superhighway or he was running a soft pretzel truck in—whatever the hell—Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Anywhere but this farm was beyond what Mad could imagine.
She was, she would tell herself, better off without him.
She had occasionally felt the weight of being his progeny, of holding whatever made him leave inside of her.
Sometimes, when something good happened for the farm, another magazine feature, she felt the embarrassing desire to make him proud of her.
Now she realized that she had been holding too much of the burden, that, depending on how many half siblings she now had, they had all been carrying more than they needed of their father’s legacy, holding him up for so long that it made their father weightless, able to walk on water, to escape, to never be bound to anything if it did not interest him any longer.
“I’LL GO WITH YOU,”
SHE FINALLY SAID, WHICH SEEMED TO SHOCK BOTH HER mother and Rube.
“You will?”
Rube asked.
“Yeah, I guess I will. I am going to go with you to, you know, do all that stuff you said.”
“Find our dad? Find our siblings? Drive across the country?”
“Yeah, Rube, yes. All those things.”
“Have you packed?”
her mom asked her.
“Have I packed?”
Mad repeated. “When would I have packed? No. I just now decided to go.”
“A cross-country trip,”
her mother continued, “so many different weather possibilities. That’s all I meant.”
“You can help me pack,”
Mad offered.
While Rube, having borrowed her mother’s apron at some point, washed the dishes, her mom helped her fill a suitcase with whatever she needed.
And the house was quiet, the only sounds being those of the actions necessary for any life, to clean and compile and to move through each space and occupy it.
And it was not truly a family, or it was not Mad’s new family.
But the simple addition of Rube, after nearly an entire life of learning to live with subtraction, with less, did not feel unpleasant to Mad.
She tried to promise herself to remember this feeling, the strange peacefulness of it, when things got worse.
THEY’D AGREED THAT RUBE WOULD DRIVE AND HIS HALF SISTER WOULD handle the navigation.
His name was the only one on the rental agreement because he hadn’t wanted to talk to the rental car employee and get into the complicated nature of whether or not he’d be able to convince any of his half siblings to join him on the trip, and he hadn’t actually met these people yet, and he didn’t know if maybe they’d had their licenses revoked or had never learned how to drive (they had no father to teach them, you understand?), and so he was going to be the only person authorized to drive this PT Cruiser for the entire cross-country journey to find their delinquent father.
So Mad had the atlas, though it wasn’t that difficult for her at the moment, hundreds of miles due west on I-40 toward Oklahoma, so instead she was reading a novel while Rube stared at the flatness of the interstate, occasionally looking over at Mad to check her response to the book.
It was Rube’s novel, or one of them.
She’d bought it at a Barnes it might have been fun.
He had hoped this time in the car would allow them the chance to talk, to get to know each other, though he also worried that they wouldn’t have much to say.
But he’d prefer awkward silence to enforced silence.
Mad was not overly emotional, though maybe it wasn’t fair to say that, since he’d only just met her two days earlier.
But the news of their familial bond, their father siring children and abandoning them as he marched toward the Pacific Ocean, didn’t produce the kind of response that he’d expected.
She had just seemed annoyed.
Tired.
A little put out.
She had not wept for three consecutive hours and then tried to set their father’s remaindered novels on fire until her boyfriend got a fire extinguisher and then broke up with her.
His mother had died of an aggressive form of cancer, a quick but unfortunately painful death.
That had been the catalyst.
Rube was a writer, and he liked constructing narrative, creating an animating event and then working backward and forward in order to make sense of it.
He liked to make a thread that stretched so tightly from point A to point B that no matter where you thrummed the line, it would vibrate in the most pleasing way.
It was why he wrote mysteries; it wasn’t exactly a result of his father’s legacy because his father had no real legacy, had abandoned it, boxes of his unsold novels taking up space in their apartment, his mother refusing to get rid of them.
As a kid, Rube had read them, multiple times, and had found them lacking.
They were so dour, so grim.
No one was happy.
Yes, there was murder, but murder could be fun, right? If you weren’t the one murdered, of course.
Did it always have to be raining when a possible source was found dead in an alley? Could it maybe be an affirmation of life to follow the clues until you figured out the how and why? He was a boy prone to fits of mania, deep obsessions, but he was honestly still charmed by the world.
Could you not have both?
His first attempts at writing were simply retyping his father’s novels and making the changes necessary for them to be good.
He did it over and over until the books were almost unrecognizable, the murder inexorably tied to a completely different murderer, the detective calmly following the new and more believable clues to an ending that would both surprise and reward the reader.
And then it was almost as if his father disappeared from the equation.
I could do this, Rube thought to himself.
And so he did.
But, okay, yes, if not for his father, would he have done it? He preferred not to think about it.
He made no mention of his father in interviews and no one had even heard of Charles Hill, so he allowed himself the story that his life was his own.
He had done some detective work, of course, but it led nowhere.
He didn’t have a ton of information to work with.
How do you ask your mom, who never married again, to give you the Social Security number of the man who left her for the open road? And, honestly, it felt strange to hire someone to find your dad.
And, he understood this inherently, his dad did not want to be found or else he would have returned at some point.
Enough time had passed, right? Rube’s life was going well.
Why invite upheaval and chaos? It would inevitably come, so might as well put it off for as long as possible.
Other than the enormous psychic scarring of him leaving Rube and his mother without even saying goodbye, his father didn’t come up in his life that much.
Lots of his friends were kids of divorce.
Of course, they saw their dads in the summer or on weekends, but a few didn’t have any contact.
And they seemed to hate their dads more than Rube, who just felt sad that his dad hadn’t thought of their family as enough.
He eventually assumed that if he and his father would reconnect, it would simply happen.
The story would open up to him.
And then his mother died.
And Rube had spent the next month cleaning out her apartment, getting it ready to sell, cataloging papers, finally free to search through her private effects and find ing there wasn’t much to discover, nothing about his dad, other than a framed photo of him that she’d hidden in the bottom of her dresser.
He was sitting on some ugly piece of furniture, looking bemused, as if he knew all of this was temporary.
The photo went into a box, and Rube used more tape than was necessary to seal it shut.
Rube’s boyfriend, though they weren’t necessarily serious, but still someone who had a stake in Rube’s life, suggested that Rube was prolonging the cleaning of the apartment to avoid closure. “You’re saying that I’m delaying the moment when I have to finally accept that my mom is dead?”
he asked his boyfriend. “You think that’s some revelation? Of course that’s what I’m doing. And I’m gonna keep doing it.”
He went back to the apartment two days later because it would have been his mother’s birthday, and he wasn’t sure how else to remember her that wouldn’t make him dangerously morose. There wasn’t much work left to do, everything boxed up and ready for a storage locker he’d rented, so he just sat on the floor and looked at photos of his mom. He was startled when the phone rang, and he remembered that he’d never shut off the phone service, just another thing he needed to do before he would let go of her. He was going to let the answering machine take the call, but then realized he’d have to hear his mother’s voice, as if she was in the room with him, and he rushed to the phone and answered, slightly breathless.
“Winnie?”
the voice said, which was the nickname his father used for his mom, who had then reverted back to Winona after he left them.
“No,”
Rube replied, and he knew. Of course he knew. It was his father. He didn’t recognize the voice, nothing like that. He couldn’t even remember what his father actually sounded like, but he knew this was his father on the other end of the phone. He felt the thread that connected them pull taut for the first time in over thirty years. He spoke, just to make that line vibrate. “This is Rube. Winnie, my mom … she died.”
There was silence on the line.
“There was a funeral,”
Rube continued. “She died of cancer.”
“Rube,”
his father said.
“Would you have come if you knew?”
Rube asked.
“I have to go,”
his father said.
“Could I come see you?”
Rube asked, but his father had already hung up.
He put the phone down and wondered if he’d dreamed this.
He had constructed stranger fantasies that he’d imagined to be real.
But it had happened.
His father had called his mother on her birthday.
He had remembered her birthday.
And then Rube realized that maybe his father had always called his mother on her birthday.
Was that possible? His mom told him that she’d never seen their father after he left.
But she had talked to him, he now realized.
Once a year? Every five years? Why had it never worked out that Rube had answered the phone when his father had called? And why the hell had his father never called him on his own birthday? He didn’t have to sing the song, of course.
Rube was not that demanding. All Rube needed was a “Happy birthday, my son,”
and that would have sustained him for an entire year.
It seemed cruel, now that he knew that his own mom was getting birthday calls from this man.
His dad had shown up at the worst possible time to now make Rube somehow hate both his father and mother.
He hit *69 and he was connected to the last incoming call, but no one answered and there was no answering machine.
He imagined it was a pay phone.
He imagined that his father was on the run from the mafia, that his novels had been based on actual experience, and he had been traveling across the country under assumed names to evade them.
And then he thought, no, his father had left them out of sheer boredom and sometimes got lonely and called his ex-wife on her birthday.
He’d left them behind but sometimes needed a reminder.
But not of Rube.
And that made Rube so angry that the rest of that day was kind of a blur, though he apparently called his boyfriend, rambled about his father, then he tried to set the remaindered novels on fire, and then the boyfriend put out the fire, a huge mess of white foam everywhere, and said they were over.
And then Rube, after weeks of intense sadness, and an adjustment to his medication, hired the best private detective in the business, at a very expensive rate, to track down his father and, as it turned out, his half siblings.
If nothing else, his father had given him a mystery to solve.
And it was such a stupid mystery that he had created, so unnecessary, but Rube knew how to turn the things his father made into something better.
He knew how to make the story work.
In the PT Cruiser, Rube looked over at Mad, who finally seemed to notice her half brother’s need for acknowledgment. “This is good,”
she said. “I mean, I don’t read a ton, but this is gripping. And it’s fun. It’s—you know—funny, kind of. There’s murder, but you don’t get too sad about it.”
“Thanks,”
Rube said, and he meant it.
“So,”
Mad started, before she paused, as if she was testing Rube’s capacity for emotional honesty. “Is the dad the murderer?”
she asked.
“In the book?”
Rube asked, slightly startled. “Why would you think that?”
“I mean, he shows up years after abandoning the girl who has just won the lottery, and then she goes to Claude and says she’s certain that someone is trying to kill her for the money.”
“There are a lot of possible suspects,”
Rube allowed.
“Yeah, but, I just thought—”
“This is fiction, though,”
Rube offered, but Mad seemed unsatisfied by that answer. “Do you want me to tell you who did it?”
“No!”
she said. “I want to be surprised.”
The father was not the murderer. He was just a greedy dumbass who never got the satisfaction of reuniting with his millionaire daughter. Rube knew enough not to be so obvious, or to be obvious in sneakier ways.
She went back to reading the novel, and Rube started to think of another plot, a mystery he’d been working on the last few weeks.
It was about a son who murders his estranged father who ran out on him and his mother years before.
He discovers the father’s whereabouts and then picks up all the siblings he didn’t know he had, gathering up a little army of angry and emotionally unstable people, all with their own betrayals and motivations, who want to confront their dad.
And they find him living in a mansion with his heiress wife, so wealthy that their dad spends all day long beside the pool drinking mai tais.
Rube thought about how, with so many possible suspects, it would be harder to say for sure who actually killed the father.
The murder might never even be solved if there wasn’t a detective like Claude Wilkinson, who was attuned to the deeper motivations of unbalanced people.
He thought it could be a good story.
He liked point A (the elaborate plan) and he liked point B (the murder) and what separated these two points was that thread, and you just had to follow it until you reached your destination.
The story pretty much wrote itself, he thought.
Most stories, he decided, could write themselves if you knew enough to let them happen the way they needed to.
1968, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, 8MM
Close-up on a young boy who is smirking but focused on some task.
The camera pans out to show him sitting on the thin orange-and-brown carpet of an apartment hallway as he folds a complicated paper airplane.
When finished, he holds it up to the camera and smiles.
Mid-shot of a woman sitting on a lime-green sofa while reading a manuscript and smoking a cigarette.
She reaches for the pen behind her ear and marks something on the manuscript.
The next shot is taken over the shoulder of the young boy, who is standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
He looks searchingly back at the camera for instruction.
He then nods, steadies himself, and holds up the airplane.
The camera now focuses on the woman in the distance, still reading, a curl of smoke rising into the air.
The boy deftly flicks the airplane toward the woman, and it catches the air and hovers until it lands in her lap.
She drops the cigarette, exclaims, drops the pages to the floor, and then picks up the cigarette and puts it in the ashtray on the coffee table.
She looks up at the camera, briefly irritated, but then she softens, smiles.
She unfolds the airplane, reads something on the paper, and smiles.
She stands and the camera follows her to a desk against the window of the living room.
She smooths out the paper, puts it in the typewriter, and types a message.
She refolds the airplane, stares back at the camera, and sends the paper airplane sailing toward the camera.
The boy unfolds the airplane and holds up the paper to the camera, which takes a moment to focus.
It reads, in awkward, large letters: i love you, mom! There is another line, typewritten, that reads, i love you, too, rube.
The boy folds the paper back into the shape of an airplane and walks over to his mother at the desk.
She opens the window, and he tosses the airplane out the window, and the camera follows the path of the paper airplane as it catches the wind and disappears from sight.