Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 7 ~ Fathers, part 2

Why doesn’t your father want you anymore?

Russ woke up with a start.  He didn’t remember any of what he’d been dreaming besides the lingering last question, but he didn’t have to.  He knew the dream well.

He rolled over and put his hand on an empty pillow beside him, then squinted as he realized that the reading light in the corner was on, lighting the room with a soft glow.  Liseli sat curled up in her blue chair under the lamp, and she glanced up.

“I’m sorry, did I wake you up?”

“No.”  He sat up, rubbing his eyes.  He didn’t mention the dream.  “Can’t sleep?”

She shrugged one shoulder.  “I don’t feel sleepy.  But this book always puts me to sleep.”  She laughed softly, lifting the book — a thick New York Times bestseller — for him to see the cover.  “I could go to another room if the light’s bothering you.”

“Nah, I’ll be asleep again in a minute,” he said, and turned over so his back was to the light.  Liseli often got up in the middle of the night and read or wrote because she couldn’t sleep.  He had gotten used to it over the years and didn’t worry over it unless he found her staring out the window with that faraway look of hers.

He drifted back to thoughts of why he’d woken up.

The dream.  He hadn’t had that dream in so many years.  Why on earth would he be having it again now?

The dream had started when he was ten, because, of course, it had happened when he was ten.  The camping trip.  The long bus ride home.  The wondering why.

It stopped when he was eighteen; when the letter came.  He decided then that he was done with it all; done with caring, done with wondering, done with wanting anything to do with his father.  Done with giving a fuck.

Eight years was a long time to dream the same dream, but then, it had not always been the exact same dream.  Always it started with the bus ride . . . pretty much just like it had been in reality. He dreamed the light shining down onto the floor through the fingerprints on the window; the humming of tires rolling over the road; the feeling of the hard plastic seat he sat on, buried under a jacket and a guitar too big for him.  He had been scrawny at ten.  Short.  He’d reached six feet by the time he was sixteen, but back then he was still small and felt so much smaller all by himself.

He dreamed the faces of the people who rode with him.  They had been with him but had ignored him completely during all the long hours south.  He had felt invisible.  He dreamed snatches of the conversations that went on around him, but that was what was always different about the dream.  He no longer remembered what the people had spoken of in real life, but in his dreams they spoke about him.  In that way the dream had grown up with him, changing as what was on his mind changed.  They would talk about him, his sister, his mother, the few friends he had had as a child, the girls he’d wanted to date in high school.  They talked about his life in front of him, as if he were not there, as if he couldn’t hear them.

And then sometimes they did ask him, Why doesn’t your father want you anymore?

They’d gone camping for a week, just the two of them.  No Mom for Dad to argue with, no Kyla to pick on Russ.  No Mom to scold him, no Kyla for Dad to yell at because she wasn’t leaving the house looking like that.  No Mom or Kyla, period.  It was heaven, for a week.  They paddled around the lake, and fished, and swam, and hiked, and Dad had shown him how to do things.  He could gut a fish and fillet it pretty good.  No bones left, or at least not so you could notice.  Dad brought along the old guitar that Russ had been trying to play.  It was big for his scrawny ten-year-old hands, but when Dad finally had the time to show him where to put his hands, he could play.  It was heaven.  For a week.

They lived all the way across the state, down in the southern part.  They’d driven in the pickup truck for two days to get to the camping grounds on the lake up north.  Dad had let him steer sometimes.  Once or twice he’d grinned and sat back, shifting the bill of his baseball cap down over his eyes, saying he was going to nap a bit while Russ drove.  Russ knew that Dad was still peering out from under the bill, pressing down on the pedals, shifting.  But he could believe that he was driving, if Dad said he was.

At the end of the week Dad and his truck went one way and Russ went another. He gave Russ some things with directions on what to do with them.  Money, to buy food at stops.  A letter, to give Mom when he got home.  The guitar, yellow wood with chipped red paint trimming the soundboard.  “You can keep it.  I never had the patience for it, really.  But you keep at it, keep practicing those songs I showed you.  Okay?”

He’d said okay.

The last thing his father gave was his old denim jacket, pulled from the back cab of the pickup as an afterthought.  Russ had forgot his own jacket back at the campsite; left it hanging over a tree branch, drying because he’d slipped into the water and soaked one sleeve through.

Russ didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t questioned he father.  He never had.  “You’ll be okay, Rusty,” Russell Markson, Sr. said as he bent down to tousle his son’s hair, a black mop like his own.  “I’ll see you around.”

“See ya,” was all Russ said, as his father straightened and turned away, walking away.  He’d watched as Dad got in the pickup truck and revved it up, waving one last time, with a smile.  That was the last time he had seen his father.

He sat with the guitar over his lap, sleeping and sometimes staring out the window or watching the people on the bus.  Listening.  He’d opened the letter to Mom and read it, and he’d read it again when he got bored enough.  It said what he’d thought it would.  Dad wanted a divorce.  They just weren’t right for each other.  They never had been.  He knew she didn’t want to be divorced, she didn’t like the stigma.  Well that was tough.  He was gone.  By the time she read the letter, he’d be on his way back home to San Francisco.  He never should have left with her.  They just weren’t right for each other.  They never had been.

Why, Russ wondered, and would always wonder, didn’t he take me home to San Francisco?  He wanted a son.  Mom didn’t want a son.  Why did he send me back to Mom?

The letter said:  Family life just isn’t for me.  I’m going back to S.F.  We just weren’t right for each other.  We never were.  It was a mistake.  Deal with it.

But it wasn’t the answer.  Not the real one.  Russ didn’t think of himself as “family life;” he was Rusty.  Russell Jr.  He was the son Dad had wanted when Mom had been content with just Kyla.  Why didn’t his father want him anymore?

Why doesn’t your father want you anymore? the people on the bus asked him in his dreams.

We just weren’t right for each other, he told them.  We never were.  It was a mistake.

Deal with it.

Russ had dealt with it.  Oh, yes he had.

For eight years after the divorce he hadn’t heard from his father at all, but then when he turned eighteen, he got an envelope in the mail.  Inside was a letter scrawled on one page, folded up with two photographs tucked into the envelope with it.

One picture was of his father with another woman, who had a baby in her arms. He’d remarried three years after leaving and had another son.  The second picture was of just the boy, now a healthy toddler with a head of brown hair and a pair of blue eyes.  Like his mother, not his father or his half-brother.  Jacob John Markson 5 yrs, said the back of the photograph.

Russ’s father was so happy now.  He’d found the right woman, which made family life so much easier.  So much better.  He’d wanted to get in touch, but don’t you know how it goes.  Sandra didn’t like for him to interfere.

(Fuck that, Russ thought.  Mom would be glad if he was off her hands.  She’d send him packing to San Fran in a heartbeat.  All you had to do was ask.)

So now that you’re eighteen you’re a man.  I still picture you as ten, though.  Can’t believe it’s been that long.  What are you up to?

Russ quietly and calmly ripped the paper into long shreds.  Then he tore the shreds in half, and tore their halves in half, and then tore the photo of the happy family into small bits, and put it all together on the back stoop, where he flicked at it with a cigarette lighter and watched it catch.  He felt numb.  He got no satisfaction from it.  It just seemed a good thing to do.  A real fuck you to the old man.  The thing to do.  He’d been waiting for it for eight years.

He saved the picture of five-year-old Jakey.  He put it away upstairs in his room, after he looked at it for a moment and thought, Just wait, Jakey-Jake.  Wait till you’re ten.

Russ put it out of his mind, then.  It was easy to put his father out of his mind.  He burned him on the stoop.  He didn’t dream about the bus ride again, for a very long time.

Liseli clicked off her reading light and padded quietly over to the bed, bringing Russ’s mind back to the present.  She slid under the covers carefully, probably thinking he’d fallen back asleep by now.  He didn’t do anything to make her think otherwise.  She’d no doubt wonder what was keeping him up, and he didn’t know exactly what to say.  There was no reason for him to be rehashing these old memories, these things that didn’t matter anymore.

By the time Russ moved his family out to California, Markson had left his second family and disappeared again, seized by the discontent that had supposedly been Sandra’s fault.  But Dorthea, his second wife, wasn’t anything like Sandra, she was a sweet, funny woman who aimed to please everyone.  Apparently nothing could make his father happy in one place for long.  He’d done to Jake what he’d done to Russ, played father with him for a few years and then left as if it didn’t mean a thing.

Jake was only fifteen when Russ met him.  Jake needed a father figure in his life, and there his long lost big brother was, seemingly so much older at twenty-eight with three young children of his own.  It only seemed natural for Russ to look after Jakey, get involved in his life.  After all, he knew exactly what he was going through.

Maybe it was because Jake was not forced to be completely alone — he had a mother and half-brother who loved him — that he reacted differently when their father tried to return to their lives again.  It was the typical ploy of the absentee dad coming out of the woodwork when his kids made something of themselves.  When Ixion made a name for itself as a successful band, Markson got in touch with their manager.  Jake agreed to meet with him, but Russ did not.

Russ didn’t even want to know what he had to say to Jake.  He didn’t want to hear any of it.  In a way he was still burning his father on the stoop.  He knew it.  He didn’t see anything wrong with it.  It was what the bastard deserved.

That had been a few years ago, now, and Russ knew that Jake was still in touch with their father.  But they had an agreement — Jake didn’t bring up whatever it was that was going on and Russ didn’t give him a hard time about it.

Russ still hadn’t seen his father since that day he left, the summer Russ was ten.  Nearly thirty years had passed, and it had been twenty-two years since the last time Russ dreamed about that long bus ride home.

He didn’t like dreaming about it again.