CHAPTER SIX #2
“Home movies,”
Rube said, “of us.”
“Short films,”
Tom replied. “I didn’t know they were home movies. I found them. I didn’t know. I thought it was his early stuff. I thought all of you were actors. He’s not really in them, you know? And he left it behind, and I was trying to figure out how to use it in a movie, little pieces of it. And then you showed up. And I saw Pep, and I knew who you were. I remembered you. But I wanted to be sure. I thought maybe I was making it up, like a fantasy or something. I don’t know.”
He put another DVD into the player and they watched Tom, a tiny boy in a suit, pointing to a weather map that showed insane variations of temperature, little cartoons of disaster presented in such a straightforward manner.
“Dad came up with this,”
Tom told them. “He did all the special effects. Isn’t it cool? It’s a home movie, I guess, like yours, but it’s more like a movie. It’s a movie of all of us. He was maybe making a movie about all of us.”
The siblings tried to keep watching as the images changed to the food court in a mall, but they couldn’t pay attention.
“Dad kept those,”
Rube said, confused. “He took them with him when he left us. Each time, he took them.”
“I guess to remember us?”
Pep offered.
“Maybe,”
Rube allowed.
Mad wondered how often their father, when he was alone, when he could allow himself to remember all the people he’d left behind, would watch these little home movies.
“Are there more?”
Mad asked.
“Not of you guys,”
he admitted. “These were in a box by themselves.”
“Why did he leave them?”
Rube wondered. “He took them with him each time he left us.”
“Maybe there were more,”
Pep said. “Maybe he took other ones with him and left those.”
Pep was probably wondering the same thing as her, Mad figured, if somewhere in their own houses, there were home movies of their previous sibling sitting in a box. What a bizarre feeling, to think that there were clues that they’d never discovered. But then Mad corrected herself. She could not imagine him leaving that kind of evidence behind in those years. He had gotten lazy now, or forgetful. Or was just so tired of hiding it that he wanted it to be found. Or he finally wanted to let it all go, that he was so far from that version of himself that there was no point in holding on to it. Because he was never going back.
She wanted to watch the video again, all by herself. What a strange thing to have denied herself, the pleasure of memory, of living inside a moment that, however mundane, held some piece of who you had once been. That chicken she had been holding, which she had not named or cared about more than any other chicken, was long dead. How lovely to see that chicken again. How lovely to see herself again.
“You can have them,”
Tom told his siblings. “Dad would want you to have them.”
“No, he would not,”
Mad suddenly replied, which made Pep and Rube laugh. “But we’ll take them.”
Tom returned to the chair and considered his siblings, as if accepting for the first time that they were tangible people and not the manifestations of a dream. He now seemed a little more at ease with them.
“And you’re all going? To see Dad?”
he asked them.
“Yeah,”
Pep answered. “They picked me up and then we wanted to meet you and then we’re heading to California.”
“Can I come with you?”
Tom asked.
“I don’t think so,”
Mad replied, because she wanted to answer before Rube, who would definitely have said that this child could come with them. “You’ve got school.”
“Does she not have school?”
Tom asked, pointing at Pep, who frowned. Rube and Mad actually turned to Pep, who said, “It’s spring break. Or, wait, maybe it’s over. It doesn’t matter. I’m taking two classes. I pretty much have graduated already.”
“Fifth grade isn’t that hard,”
Tom said. “It doesn’t matter. I never miss school. And our school says you can have excused absences if you’re doing something that—what do they say?—it’s, like, if it’s … um … oh, culturally enriching. And this would be, right?”
“Yes, absolutely,”
Rube answered.
“Tom,”
Mad interrupted. She wondered why it mattered to be reasonable. She wondered why she would even think of herself as reasonable at this stage in the journey. “Maybe you and your mom could, like, caravan with us. And that way you’d have, you know, proper parental supervision.”
“She can’t miss work,”
Tom replied, and his voice was getting croakier as he got more excited. “She is, like, the most famous morning newsperson in Utah. All these people would go crazy if she wasn’t on TV. And she wouldn’t want anyone to know why she was leaving. She doesn’t ever talk about Dad at all, and I’m not supposed to talk about him to people. She’s embarrassed about it. She couldn’t come.”
“Well, I just don’t think you can come without a parent with you,” Mad said.
“We’re going to go see my dad, right?”
he continued. “He’s my parent, yeah? You guys are just taking me from one parent to another parent.”
Mad could already feel herself weakening because the psychic vibrations coming from Rube and maybe even Pep were overwhelming her. “I mean, maybe Dad has joint custody with Trista,”
Rube offered, and Mad groaned. She leaned over to Rube and whispered, “He has joint custody and just hasn’t seen this kid in years?”
“Well, it’s murky legal territory, at the very least,”
Rube replied.
“If my mom signs a permission slip,”
Tom said, “that would be okay, right?”
“Tom, when is your mom getting back?”
Mad asked. “Like, she is coming back, right?”
“Yeah, she’ll be back. I’m gonna go get a piece of paper and you guys can help me write up a permission slip, okay?”
“No, Tom, that’s not—Rube, you should call Trista—that’s not how this works,” Mad said.
“Why did you come here, then?”
Tom asked. “You were just gonna leave me behind? That’s not fair.”
“It does kind of suck,”
Pep admitted. “Remember when you guys were gonna leave me?”
“No!”
Mad said, now defending herself, like it mattered somehow. “You said you didn’t want to go, and then you, like, dove into the car as we were leaving.”
“No, I know. I just mean, when I realized I’d missed my chance, and you two were together and I was by myself, it felt pretty bad.”
“It feels awful,”
Tom insisted.
Rube had his phone out, and Mad asked if he was calling Trista, but he said that he was actually looking online for examples of a document that transferred authority of a child to a sibling.
“Okay, Rube, can you make a permission slip?”
Tom asked. “And, Pep, could you help me pack? And, um …”
“Mad,”
Mad said, and Tom nodded and then continued, “Mad, maybe you wanna wait for my mom to get here?”
“No!”
Mad now shouted. “It’s a long drive. I feel like maybe we’re at capacity, you know?”
She looked at Rube and Pep for support, but she knew it was over. “I don’t even have a bag,”
Pep said. “And look at him! He’s little.”
“I’m tiny,” Tom said.
“The Chevrolet HHR has a seating capacity of five individuals,”
Rube informed them, like he’d memorized the manual.
“I meant more, like, you know, emotional capacity,”
Mad weakly offered.
“There’s four of us!”
Tom said, smiling. “Does Dad have any more kids? We could fit one more kid!”
“Where the hell is your freaking mom?”
Mad asked, but Pep and Tom were already running upstairs, and now Rube was holding up his phone for Mad to look at it. “It’s actually just the most simple thing in the world,”
he said. “It’s just a child travel consent form. It doesn’t technically even have to be notarized. It’s actually kind of wild. Plus, it’s easier because we are his siblings, so it’s not that big of a deal.”
“What is this website?”
Mad asked.
“Hmm, it was just the first site that came up. Let me see. Oh, it’s called easychildlawdepot-dot-com. They even have a template you can download. Wait, hmm, it might require a membership. How much is it? Let’s see.”
“Rube! Please. Don’t you think this is insane? This is too fast. We’ve met him. He knows we exist. We can get to know him. Send him birthday cards. He and Trista can come visit me on the farm one day. We don’t have to do this all at once.”
“You saw him. He wants to see Dad again. We all do. That’s what we’re doing, right? And why not have all of us? I know, I know, I know. When we started, I just said it was good to meet each other and we’d see what happened, but once Pep came along, it just seemed like all of us needed to go to Dad.”
“Just try to think about this for a second. If it goes bad for us, okay, whatever. We’re adults. We’ve made a life for ourselves without him. Tom is young and has only just lost Dad. If Dad is a jerk, or if Tom freaks out, what if it ruins his life?”
“It’s better if he’s with us, right? We’ll all be together.”
Pep and Tom came back down with a duffel bag and then some camera equipment. Tom was filming them with his Handycam, which made Mad immediately feel self-conscious. She stopped talking, deferred to Rube, who waved at Tom, who waved back. “This isn’t for anything,”
Tom assured them. “I’m not gonna, like, make a documentary about this. Dad just said it was good to film random things and maybe you could use it later. I have a lot of little pieces and I like putting them together.”
“I’m working on the permission slip, and I think it will work out,”
Rube told the boy.
Mad felt exhausted.
Why resist? Their dad was pulling them toward a reckoning, and it felt like the sooner that happened, then the sooner she could see what was left of her life, how to get back to Coalfield.
They’d nearly ruined Pep’s life in only a few days, and she seemed okay.
Maybe all of them had a preternatural gift for self-preservation.
Maybe they couldn’t be hurt.
Or maybe they kept their emotions so deeply inside of themselves that it just took longer to reach them.
She accepted the possibility, even wished for it, that nothing would change.
They would meet their father again, have it out, ask him the questions they wanted to ask.
He would impart some kind of wisdom or reveal that there was no meaning to anything, and then they would each return to their lives, those separate compartments spaced out by so many miles, and everything would go back to the way that it was, except that strange emptiness they’d felt when their father had left would now be replaced with certainty.
Maybe the secret to pain was to acknowledge it, to admit that it hurt so bad, so you didn’t have to pretend that it didn’t.
And maybe it didn’t go away.
Maybe the secret to pain was to respond to it in ways that made the pain worth it.
Maybe she was trying to rationalize the fact that she was taking a child, one who was clearly very fragile, to the farthest edge of the country to meet a father who might not even exist.
She finally turned to Tom and his camera, and she waved, smiled.
Pep was holding the duffel bag, and Rube was now carefully printing out a legally binding contract, and Tom was making a movie, and what else could she do but be a part of it.
“Do you get carsick?”
she asked Tom, who replied, “Sometimes, oh yes.”
“We’ll take care of you,”
she told him. She looked past the camera. “Do you believe me, Tom? Do you believe that we’ll protect you as best as we can?”
Tom turned off the camera. He looked down at the floor for a few seconds and then he regarded his oldest sister. She waited, would wait forever, and then Tom nodded. “I do believe you.”
“Okay, then I guess we’re going to do this,”
Mad said, and it was at this exact moment that Trista walked in through the front door, holding a giant box from a bakery, tied in ribbon.
Tom’s mother regarded everything going on, as if she had suddenly been awarded custody of three additional children, frowned, and then said,
“Tom told me that you weren’t going to get here until five. He asked me to get this cake. He said it was one of your birthdays.”
“Oh,”
Mad replied. “Pep, is it your birthday?”
Pep shook her head. “I think there was a miscommunication along the way. Like, crossed wires.”
“How long have you been here?”
she asked.
“Not long!”
Pep offered.
“I’m going to California, Mom,”
Tom told her. “With my brother and sisters. To see Dad.”
“Why did I buy a cake?”
Trista asked.
“To celebrate!”
Tom replied. Trista shook her head, exhaled, and resigned herself to making sense of things once she was no longer holding a birthday cake that celebrated nothing real. It began to dawn on Mad that perhaps Tom was the kind of child that exhausted responsible adults, that having a pixie living in your house with unlimited access to Pop-Tarts and forever working on a low-budget independent film was perhaps not as magical as it might seem. And this scared Mad because, up until this very trip, she had been a responsible adult.
Rube sheepishly walked up to Trista and offered to take the cake, and as he awkwardly took control of the box, he handed her a piece of paper.
“What is this?”
Trista asked.
“It’s a consent form to allow your child to travel with us, his biological half siblings. I’ve actually put down Mad’s name as the actual responsible party who will be charged with caring for Tom.”
“Rube!”
Mad shouted.
“It was purely random. Alphabetically, you know? Mad comes before Rube or Pep. That’s all it is.”
Trista regarded Mad, which made her shrink under this beautiful woman’s scrutiny. Even though her hands were clean, Mad always felt like she had dirt under her fingernails, worried that the smell of chickens and manure was always in her hair. Men did not intimidate Mad, they never had, but beautiful women who announced their femininity with confidence made Mad want to die. And now the number one morning news anchor in Salt Lake City and quite possibly all of Utah was staring right at her.
“I’m thinking that you are the most responsible child of Carl. Am I correct?”
she asked Mad, who could only nod.
Trista was now actually looking at the contract, as if it were a real document, as if she were considering signing it. “Can we talk privately?”
she asked. Mad could only nod again.
“Tom?”
Trista shouted. “I’m going to talk to Mad, for a few minutes. You and your siblings can sit tight. You could show them your movie, okay?”
“Can we eat this cake?”
Tom asked.
“Yes, that’s fine,”
Trista replied, already leading Mad down the hallway and into what appeared to be the master bedroom.
“Sorry about the state of the house,”
Trista said. “It’s been a crazy day, obviously.”
Mad observed the bedroom, which was spotless, as if she had just checked into a penthouse suite in a hotel.
“Oh, it’s no problem,”
Mad said, realizing there was no furniture to sit on except the bed, so she stood awkwardly while Trista took off her jewelry and hung it on a bronze tree sculpture on her dresser. “And, obviously, we’re not going to just take Tom with us to California.”
“Well, it’s actually not the worst idea,”
Trista replied, still looking at herself in the vanity mirror.
“Well, I mean, even if it’s not, like, the worst idea, it’s not something we’d do without asking you or considering how it might affect Tom.”
“Mad. And, just let me understand, is your name short for Mattie or Madeline or Mary, or what?”
“Oh, sorry, yeah, that was Dad’s thing. Mad is short for Madeline.”
“Okay, so, Mad, I am going to tell you some things that literally no one else knows.”
“Oh, god, no, you don’t need to do that,”
Mad replied.