When I was eight, my dad told me that he was a secret agent. He claimed to work for the CIA, and that when he left on road trips for business he was really going on trips to assassinate terrorists and drug kingpins.
Maybe he saw a tinge of doubt on my face (I had passed the age of reason, after all), so he showed me a gold badge stamped with the words U.S. GOVERNMENT on top and SECRET AGENT on the bottom, the words curling around within the badge’s border so that they almost met.
I promised that I wouldn’t tell a soul. Naturally, I told every kid at school who would listen to me. On the drive home from a meeting between my folks and Principal Frawley – during which I was seated outside the door of Frawley’s office, straining in vain to overhear what the grown-ups were talking about – Mom laid into Dad, telling him that she couldn’t see why he’d thought it a good idea to fill an impressionable young mind with such foolishness. She was utterly embarrassed, she said, that her son had been telling people at school that his father was a killer. Dad just laughed, giving me a wink in the rear-view mirror. Later, he showed me the badge again, letting me hold it. It wasn’t real gold, as I had thought, but cheap tin painted gold. He said I could keep it, and I did, though I lost it between that day and junior high.
“You still got that badge, Pete?” he would ask sometimes. “Yeah, Dad,” I lied. “I still have it.”
My dad wasn’t a secret agent; he was a novelty item salesman. He bought his stuff wholesale: tiny plastic baseball caps, sticker books, iron-on patches, fake vomit, glow-in-the-dark keychains. During the holiday season, he bought little plastic turkeys and cheap Christmas ornaments. That’s probably where he got that secret agent badge, from an entire lot that he bought cheap and sold for almost as cheap. He would take the train into the city and spend his days walking the streets of Chicago hawking his wares. He sold to mom & pop stores, ethnic markets, to anyone willing to write a check or hand over some cash for things that nobody would ever love, vulgar little items that shouted “I didn’t cost much!” to the people to whom they were given, and most of which would break or all apart before long.
Sometimes, Dad would travel east to Cleveland, or north to Milwaukee, and ply his trade there for a week or so. Sometimes, he would travel to some warehouse after getting a hot tip about a load of products that were sitting in crates or boxes awaiting some sly customer to buy them up cheaply in bulk. A load of toy ray guns from a warehouse downstate, a mother lode of small rubber dinosaurs from a toy store in Rockford that had accidentally bought three times what they needed only to find that they couldn’t return them.
Mom did the best she could with us. Zoe and I were pretty good kids; we realized that, with Dad gone all day – from the crack of dawn to midnight or later during the workweek – our mom was effectively a single parent Monday through Friday, as well as on the weekends when he took his trips.
We did our part to help out; as we progressed to our teen years, we cooked for ourselves more often than not. Zoe was a year older than me but two grades ahead. For two years, we shared the same high school. While we got in our fair share of minor scrapes with authority, we stayed out of any real trouble.
Trevor was a different matter. Mom sometimes called him her “happy surprise”, born when I was eleven and Zoe twelve. From the time he was old enough to walk, Trevor was trouble. “That little hellion,” Grandma Mable sometimes called him (always when Mom wasn’t around to hear it). He seemed to be in a constant state of warfare with the world at large, eager to avenge some secret grievance I couldn’t begin to guess at.
He was just nine years old the first time the cops brought him home. They’d caught Trev using rocks to break out the windows of the church on First Street. I have no idea how many novelty x-ray specs and joy buzzers Dad had to sell to pay for new windows at the church. I’m guessing it was a lot.
It was during what would have been my third year of college (if I hadn’t dropped out) that Zoe got married. It was nine months later, the gestation period for a human baby, when Zoe’s marriage gave birth to a divorce. Four years later, when I was settling into my new home in a new state, Trevor was sent to his first rehab. A year later, he was sent to his second one.
The morning when I got the call about Dad, I was running late for work. When the phone rang and I saw it was Mom calling, I almost didn’t answer it. I figured she would leave a message that was too long; later on, I’d listen to enough of the message to get the gist of it, and I would call her back if necessary.
Feeling a stab of guilt for all the times I’d meant to call her back but didn’t, I answered. I don’t remember everything she said, but I recall the broad strokes: Dad had a heart attack; he was in the ER; they wouldn’t let her go in to see him. I got a second call later that day. Dad was dead.
I flew in from San Diego two days before the funeral. I was surprised by how much gray had crept into my mother’s hair, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been. People get old, it’s just what happens. Even mothers are not immune to the process of aging.
Zoe arrived the day after I did, coming from the opposite end of the country, her pale skin a reminder that winter had only recently given way to spring, and had done so begrudgingly. She brought her girlfriend with her, and it was the first time any of us had met Trish. I could tell Zoe was nervous when they first got to the house. We’d known about Trish since they’d started dating the previous summer, but maybe Zoe – who’d dated the same boy through all of high school and who’d married her first college boyfriend – worried how Mom would react when her girlfriend stopped being a distant fact she knew about and became a living, breathing person that she could see and talk to. Mom was kind and welcoming to Trish; Zoe seemed relieved, like she’d been holding her breath all the way from Boston and was just now able to let it out.
Trevor had promised to arrive the same day as Zoe. He was coming by car, driving down from one of those small Wisconsin towns with a Native American name. I suspect all of us went through the list of excuses Trev would pick from when he showed up late: I blew a tire, or a fan belt broke, or I lost my car keys (and it’s the funniest thing, you wouldn’t believe where I found them). Mom would smile and say that it’s all right, she knew that he tried.
Since Dad’s family was from the area originally, most lived nearby. Those that had to fly or drive in from farther away had found places to stay, either with family or at budget motels advertising free cable and a pool. The McCarthy clan were a thrifty lot, after all. At the house, my bedroom was still painted the same electric blue I’d painted it during my sophomore year of high school.
My first night back, Mom and I ate dinner together alone, a pasta dish from a local restaurant that had opened nearby in my absence. The next night, Zoe and Trisha ate with us, and Aunt Kathy did too. Mom and Aunt Kathy made dinner that night. The baked chicken had been left in the oven too long and came out dry and tough. We all did our best to convince Mom that it was great, but she left the table with tears in her eyes.
“I can’t do anything right,” she said as she disappeared down the hall.
Zoe and I looked at each other, unsure which of us was supposed to go after her. Aunt Kathy got up before either of us.
“I’ll take care of this; you kids stay here. Eat before the food gets cold.”
Mom came back to the table a few minutes later, her eyes dry but red. She acted like nothing had happened, telling Trisha a story about the time Zoe was eight and made a pact with all of her friends to show up the next day wearing red. By the following morning, Zoe had forgotten and was the only one of the group to show up at school not wearing the correct color. Zoe had come home that day in tears, threatening to run away to Alaska if Mom made her go back to school.
“Why Alaska?” Mom stopped to ask. Zoe shrugged. “There must have been a reason,” Mom said. “Kids don’t think about going to Alaska for no reason.” “That was a long time ago, Mom. I don’t remember. Maybe I saw something about Alaska on TV.”
After dinner, as Zoe and Trisha washed the dishes and Mom and Aunt Kathy sat and watched the news, I stepped into Dad’s study. This is where he would go when he needed some time alone; he would smoke a cheap cigar while reading a hard-boiled crime novel or a mystery. He spent whole weekends in that study, absent from our lives just as if he were on a trip to Indiana to buy a load of rubber snakes. I looked over the small bookcase in there, tracing the spines of the books with my fingers. There was a stack of old newspapers on a small table. A shelf held about two dozen collectible shot glasses; if I remember correctly, Dad’s favorite was the one with the White Sox logo printed on it. I never understood the thing with the shot glasses. As far as I knew, Dad never drank.
As I stood looking at these things and the other knick knacks in the study, I was amazed that these were the things my dad had left behind. Those shot glasses, that chair with a worn seat: these were the reminders of a life that had been lived. The flotsam and jetsam of existence.
We went to bed early, knowing that we had a long day ahead of us. I must have dreamed of something, but if I did I couldn’t remember it even upon first waking. Aunt Kathy was the only one who felt like breakfast; the rest of us weren’t hungry. Trevor drove up to the house barely ten minutes before we were set to head out to the funeral home. Whatever excuses we thought he’d come up with for his tardiness, we all ended up being wrong. He didn’t give any excuse.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, and that was that.
I’d never been to a funeral, and it was strange for me to be there, looking at my dad lying in a coffin, his eyes closed, his hands crossed over his chest as if he were reciting a prayer. His skin looked unnatural; I’m pretty sure there was rouge on his cheeks. Uncle Teddy, Dad’s eldest brother, came up to me, clapping me on the shoulder and shaking his head.
“You just never know when it’ll be your turn, do ya?”
I agreed because I didn’t know what else to do; Uncle Teddy, having been satisfied in his opinion that one never knows when it will be their turn, grinned and took his tobacco breath elsewhere. A group of women was sitting together near a corner of the room, crying into handkerchiefs and the hems of blouses. I think they were cousins of my dad’s, or maybe second cousins. I vaguely remembered their faces.
When it came time for those who knew my father to say a few words, Mom was the first to speak. She gave the expected, sanitized version of their life together, dabbing her eyes with a tissue as she spoke. She stumbled in a few places, halting while she tried to think of what it was she was trying to say. When she finished speaking, she took a seat between Trevor and Zoe. Zoe gave her a comforting hug before going to the front to speak.
Standing at the lectern, her eyes shining with unspilled tears, Zoe took a moment to think. She looked to her left, at the open casket, then at our mom, and then up at the ceiling as if there was some secret script up there for her to read from.
When she lowered her eyes to those of us gathered before her, I saw that one tear had finally broken free, sliding down one pale cheek.
“When we were kids, our dad wasn’t around much,” she spoke. “He was always working. He often came home late. Sometimes, I’d still be lying awake in bed, and I’d hear him when he got home. Many times, Mom would still be awake and waiting for him. I remember hearing them talking quietly together after Dad came in the door. I would try to make out what they were saying, but I never could. Sometimes I’d want to get out of bed and go out there to…I don’t know, ask Dad how his day was. I wanted to but I never did; I guess it seemed private, the two of them seeing each other after a long day.”
I looked over at Mom; she’d gotten her tears under control and was watching Zoe speak.
“Like I said,” Zoe continued, “our dad wasn’t around much, but there were times when he’d drive us somewhere, maybe to Mulberry Park for a picnic or to the movies. We’d go together, all of us, even if sometimes us kids would rather have stayed behind so we could hang out with our friends. Dad…” She laughed.
“Dad would pass the time while driving by telling us stories. He would just make things up. I remember one time, we were taking a long drive up to Waukegan. I must have been nine or ten years old, and Halloween was right around the corner. I was saying that I wanted to dress up as a princess. Mom was always thrifty, so she was talking about how she was going to make me a princess costume herself. Out of nowhere, Dad says, ‘You know you’re a real-life princess, right?’. I asked him what he meant. He told me that we were direct descendants of the last King of Remuria. I laughed, but he said that he was serious. I’d never heard of this place, Remuria. Dad said it was a country in Europe, a tiny one between Austria and Italy. I guess I should have known he was pulling my leg, but maybe I just really wanted to believe that I was a princess.”
She paused for a moment before resuming.
“We didn’t have a computer then, but we did have an old encyclopedia set. It was missing a couple of volumes; a used book store had given the set to Dad for fifteen bucks. Sometimes, I would read those books when I was bored. I would pull a volume off the shelf, turn to a random page, and read about the Korean War, or cryptography, or brown bears. One day, a few months after Dad told me that I was a princess, I tried looking up Remuria. Of course, no such country existed. I don’t know why it mattered so much to me, but I cried. I was so mad at him for lying to me about that. When I told him there was no Remuria, he insisted that there was and that I really was a princess. He said the encyclopedia was wrong. He said that he planned to write to the publisher, to complain about the oversight. I knew he was lying still, but I joined the lie, helping him plan what he was going to write. We would demand an apology, and request that they put out a new edition with a long section on the history of Remuria. Dad said they would probably put our names in there, as the last living descendants of Thomas the Brave.”
Zoe smiled.
“He was a good dad,” Zoe finished. “And I’m going to miss him.”
She went back to her seat by Mom. It was Mom’s turn to give comfort, and Zoe’s to receive it. I waited for a moment to see if anyone else was going to go up there to speak; when it seemed that nobody would, I shifted to get out of my seat.
Trevor beat me to it, popping up and stepping to the lectern. I settled back in my seat and waited, hoping to God that Trevor wasn’t about to embarrass himself, or worse, embarrass Mom. My little brother stood for a while without saying a thing, his lips moving almost imperceptibly as if he were reciting a prayer to himself, a secret one for him and him alone.
“Dad and me, we never did get along, I guess. Mom used to say that we were like oil and water. I think we were more like bleach and ammonia. Mix us together, and you get poison gas.”
I looked over at Mom and Zoe; they were calmly listening to Trevor speak.
“But he was still my dad,” Trevor said. “I thought of something when Zoe was up here, telling that princess story. That was before I was born, so I can’t comment on it, but it made me think of this one time…I must’ve been eight or nine. Dad told me that he was going to let me in on a secret, but that I had to promise not to tell anybody. I kept asking what the secret was, but he insisted that I promise first. So I gave him my word that I wouldn’t tell a soul. That was when he told me the secret: he was telekinetic. I had to ask him what that meant, and he said it meant that he could move objects with the power of his mind. I thought about it for a minute, and then I looked up at him and told him that I knew he was lying. He insisted it was true, though, and he offered to prove it to me. He took me out to the shed in the back of the house. We weren’t supposed to go inside the shed because there were lots of sharp things in there and our mom was convinced that we’d impale ourselves or something if we went inside. But Mom wasn’t home; it was just the two of us. Sorry, Mom.”
There was some laughter from the mourners. Mom smiled.
“Dad had a punching bag in there; it was hanging from a chain that was bolted to the ceiling. So, he takes me in there and closes the door. It was a little past noon, and it was summer, so the shed was hot. The small window on the back wall was always so dirty that it let in very little sunlight, so Dad had to turn on the light in there so we weren’t standing in the dark. We’re standing in there, and I’m wondering what the hell he’s going to show me to prove that he has these powers. He tells me to keep watching the punching bag, so I do that. Dad closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and then opens his eyes again as he raises his hands so that his palms are facing out toward the punching bag. His face is all serious like he’s concentrating very hard, and I’m thinking that he’s lost his mind.
And then it happens. The punching bag sways a bit, just a tiny bit. I thought maybe I’d imagined it, but Dad just keeps on concentrating, he moves his hands around a little, and it happens again. He really did it. He moved the damn punching bag with his mind. I was so excited that I begged him to teach me how to do it. He said that he couldn’t do that, that having telekinetic powers was dangerous. Not dangerous just because you could accidentally make somebody’s head explode or something, but also because secret government agencies would want to use people like you as a weapon. It sounded reasonable at the time, and even though I still wished that I had those powers, I never asked him to teach me again. After some time, I didn’t think about it at all anymore. Then, a few years later, I started sneaking into the garage to smoke. One day, I’m in the shed, and the punching bag starts swaying on its own. I thought about it for a while, and I figured it out. The roof of the shed was aluminum. In the hottest part of the day, when the sun was glaring down on it, the aluminum expanded. This expansion was what made the punching bag sway. Dad had tricked me.”
Zoe laughed.
“He tricked me,” Trevor repeated. “That… that’s a good memory.”
Trevor came back and sat down. It was my turn. I went up there, and though I was never comfortable with public speaking, I told the story about the secret agent badge. Mom shook her head as I told the part about the meeting with the principal. When I finished with the story, I sat down. Nobody else got up to speak.
Afterward, some of the family came back to the house. Casserole dishes of every conceivable color and design covered the surface of the dining room table. A few cousins I barely remembered were there. Aunt Kathy was there; she seemed intent on serving punch to everyone whether they desired it or not. I wasn’t thirsty, but I thanked her when she shoved a glass of the stuff at me, walking around with the glass in my hand, the red liquid inside of it sloshing around like thinned-out blood.
One of the cousins that I barely remembered wanted to involve me in a conversation about real estate. Knowing less than nothing about the subject, I made an excuse to get out of it.
I started feeling a bit overwhelmed by the obligation of accepting condolences from blood relatives, the little smile, the ‘thank you for coming’, the assurances that I was okay, really, I was all right. I took refuge in Dad’s study. Sitting in his chair, I looked around the room and tried seeing it as he must’ve seen it: as a refuge from the obligations of being a sole breadwinner, a place where one could find a moment of relative quiet from a house with children in it. After a long week walking the streets of the city, hustling and selling, this was the place he came to sit and read or to listen to the Sox game. The study was his sanctuary, his Fortress of Solitude.
Someone walked by the closed door of the study; they were laughing about something. I got out of the seat and walked to the window looking out into the backyard, moving the curtain aside to let in some light. Fat beams of sunlight illuminated the small room, the shot glasses on their shelf sparkling like oversized diamonds. A squirrel went dashing across the yard, paused in some overgrown grass, and then climbed up the big tree in the backyard that Dad was always promising to build a swing on but never did.
The back screen squealed open and screeched shut, depositing Trevor into the backyard. I watched him pace back there for a minute. He seemed agitated.
“Fuck!”
I heard him through the closed window. The back door was in the kitchen; when I walked through the kitchen, I saw Mom sitting at the table in there, a bewildered look on her tired face. She didn’t look at me. When I went outside, I found that Zoe was already out there with Trevor. He was pacing the yard like an angry bull.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I’m trying to figure that out,” Zoe said. “What did she think I was going to do?” Trevor said. “Is that what she thinks of me?” “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Trev,” I said.
I looked back at the house and saw Mom standing at the screen door looking out at us. “I have a headache,” Trevor explained. “I was just looking for some aspirin. Mom sees me in the bathroom, looking in the medicine cabinet, and she rushes in to grab an old bottle of tramadol she had in there. Like what, I was going to steal it?”
Zoe and I looked at each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to point out that he’d stolen pain meds before. With me, it was a prescription I got after having a tooth pulled. This was before California, when I still lived in Chicago. Trevor stopped by when he was in the city for a job interview.
He watched as I popped a pill into my mouth, setting the bottle down on the kitchen counter so that I could fill a glass with water and swallow it down. About ten minutes later, while I was taking a piss, I heard Trevor yell from down the hall that he had to get going and that he’d talk to me later. It wasn’t until a few hours later, my gums throbbing, that I noticed the bottle missing from the counter. I tried calling Trevor; he didn’t answer.
“I’m trying real hard,” Trevor said as he continued stalking around the yard. “I’ve been doing good. I know you guys probably don’t believe me, but I have been. I’ve been doing my best, and I don’t appreciate people treating me like a criminal.”
I looked back again. Mom was gone from the screen.
Together, Zoe and I managed to get him to come down from his mountain of anger. With the anger drained, all that remained in his eyes was a hollow sadness.
Voices from inside the house drifted out to us. Voices asking where the sugar was, voices talking about the drive back to Barrington later that day, voices asking did you see Carl’s new fiance, voices saying no, I have not seen Carl’s new fiance. The three of us moved away from the voices.
We went into the shed, that place where Dad had practiced magic for a kid who still believed in it, making a punching bag sway with nothing but the power of his mind and the expansion of metal when exposed to heat. The punching bag was gone, and so was Dad’s magic. Trevor and Zoe shared a cigarette, Zoe standing near the door and turning to blow the smoke outside.
“I really believed him,” Trevor said. “I did.” Zoe smiled. “We all did,” she said.
When they’d finished the smoke, the cigarette butt ground into the concrete floor of the shed, we walked together into the bright, cool sunshine. The two of them walked ahead of me as I stopped to close the door of the shed, making sure to latch it so the door wouldn’t blow open on the next windy day. Zoe and Trevor went into the house, the screen door swinging shut behind them.
As I walked across the yard, the squirrel I’d seen earlier (at least I think it was the same one) rushed down the tree trunk and scampered across the yard. It came to a stop between me and the screen door, watching me as if trying to gauge if I posed a threat. After a staring contest that lasted maybe all of fifteen seconds, the squirrel moved on, disappearing around the corner of the house. With the squirrel gone, I was left completely alone in the yard. Not wanting to be alone, I went inside the house, rejoining the voices in there.
Mike Ramon is a writer from Illinois, USA. His fiction has been previously published in the Eunoia Review and Aphelion Webzine.