The Prodigal Daughter

She told us not to open the box until 20 years after death.
“It was a stipulation in her will,” A lawyer with tight dry lips told us in an overwarm office too dusty; a film had accumulated and made a blanket that trapped sound inside of itself. I was ten and knock kneed sitting on an over upholstered chair that lifted my feet off the ground which were the recipient of a glazed stare while his soothing voice got trapped and muffled.

Now we are standing in this bank with cold marble flooring where a sterile looking young man shows us the bank vault. The box was too large to keep in a locked box and she must have lived under the idea that its contents were too valuable or perhaps this was a sham, it was an elaborate joke for her to look upon in eternity. Whatever the case cancer had taken my father 8 years previous. Cancer or something like giving up.
after the rest of us left the house, me being the last to leave; we scattered about the country, my two brothers living at separate ends and I somewhere in between.

The one with the most years over all of us took over the property that the old man left behind. That was where, the dust in the carpets had made the house very quiet like a small town covered by snow on a cold February dawn. My brother had come down from the stairs descending like a patriarch, when really I despised him and his thin mustache. He looked at me with a tight grimmace around the corners of his mouth.

“I will meet you in the car” escaped from his mouth into the carpet dust.

I hated that the house was a poorly kempt wax museum, my father’s relics from hunting taxidermied long ago and my mother’s poor choices in wallpaper, now covered in dust and stained by years of indoor smoking. David was also a collector of useless paper items, as if he was responsible for the periodicals section of a library.

My other two brothers sat waiting in the car. None of us liked eachother, except for those two. They were born less than a year apart between David and I; shared girfriends as well as school and financial advice. Something had happened during their very last years of higher education that made them stop speaking but when I saw them as I got into the airport that morning they looked like old friends again. Christopher gave a smile like I was 8 and he wanted to give me some candy from his car. The brothers were sharing a cigarette in the rental, the smoke unfurled itself through the window as it rolled down into the door.

“We better get going to that box mom kept all her unknown treasures in,” my brother laughed from the window. I shrugged and walked to the street where my dad’s car, an Eagle station wagon with wood paneling, sat. It was now mine, he had said that much in the will. I sat in the burgundy upholstery remembering a trip we took down to the Virginias. There had been a hurricaine that my father insisted on driving through against the less than willful sighs from my mother. The wind was billowing out toward the east off the coast. I remember the wind breaking into the car through my fathers’ window as he consumed cigarettes. It was strange to be sitting in the family relic that dad had kept running throughout the years.

David got in and the car shifted under his weight as I turned the engine on. It was a short trip in silence there.

******

We stand around the box. The brothers next to eachother, as I share a space too close in proximity for comfort with David. The young man opens the box with a click of a key and we peer inside of it. It is a collection of items. Trinkets that looked as if they hold little to no value. Each have notes attached to them like the tag on a toe of a corpse in a morgue. I realise that this box is a memory box. Each item must have had its’ significance to my mother in some way and that in these she hoped that some memory would move on immortally preserving her in them. To the brothers are family records of where her ancestors came from. The note reads:

“Take care of the history of the family Chirstopher and Jack. Do some more research together if you are so inclined. This is what I could gather before I had to say goodbye. Please work together as I know only the two of you can.”

For David there was a book of postcards that she had collected over various trips. The note is this:

“David, I know that you are very attached to us in a way I believe that you will never be able to leave the comfort of home. Please look at where I have been in this world and take care to sell the house (that is if you still live in it) and go to them. If you can not muster this please take this out and look at the wonders this world has to offer.”

The last item is a smaller box. It has my name on it, written in my mother’s almost illegible scrawl: “Charlie”, they had it picked out when they had the boys and thought it did not sound bad as a girl’s name but they also refused to give up the name of my mother’s father. Inside is a ring, diaries bound together by twine, and a bundle of letters. The note:

“My only female and last child, to you I depart the biggest part of my life. You were too young to know when I chose this path for myself. I hope this offers some explanation of truth. There is a story in my life I have told no one and I entrust it to you”.

Karen spent two months inside the apartment. The last half of the fall and into the early part of the winter, near November. She knew there would have to be a homecoming for the feast of fall. It would not be something that would come easily. Getting on a plane and leaving the open sky for her hill tree lined home. The only way she knew of the weather outside for these months was leaving every few days to buy cigarettes at the convenience store not a minute from her apartment. She could see through the window that the sky was changing from gold to white over the weeks. In these months she became intimate with the television. They had a schedule like lovers who meet every Thursday in a Motel 6 or like a married couple that sits down to eat at 7:30 pm and on Friday it’s taco night. She knew when the programs that she enjoyed were on. She sat very close to the set, as if it was warming her, like a fireplace or a wood stove in an old home. The central source of warmth and hypnotizing flames now commercials and channels. It was the best pain killer she knew of. The best mind number out there.

She sat with the television families and felt sad and happy for their fictional joy and sadness that she could only share vicariously. The characters were predictable and she knew it was too easy to write a feel good family situational comedy. Put a few wrenches into the familiar frame work and see how the familiar characters react. It was predictable but likable and always wrapped up in half an hour.

Karen got upset with the people on the local news when they were complaining of the crime that plagued the city or recalls on devices and toys laden with toxic parts from China. She listened attentively to the newscasters’ tips on how to find the best lawn treatments. It was all very informative and hollow. The woman on the news’ coordinated suit jackets and jewelry reminded her of a phantom of what she prescribed to as professionalism. The man a trustworthy father figure, with a uv light bed tan and a million dollar mouth.

She watched talk shows where hosts tried to fix problems with a panel and forced dialog. A woman crying over a paternity test because she still didn’t know the father. Karen shook her head at these. Maybe they shouldn’t have banged, like 50, dudes, she thought to herself. Another host putting themselves in a fat suit or making themselves ugly to see how “it really was”. An offshoot of the talk show was the court show. She loved these and felt as if she could win any small claims court case she would ever have to be a part of. She liked it when the judges reprimanded the idiot people who would give back lip or were trying to interrupt.

The weather changed outside but nothing ever changed on the television. On a cold November evening, pre turkey holiday, a field reporter stood outside of a building. Their coat was zipped to a scarfed neck. The reporters’ cheeks were round apples and already rouged from the makeup room. Karen gasped at what she saw. The building on the television was across town but it was his building. It was the building that she had spent so much time in torturing herself with what could not be. It was the place that had forced her inside to take refuge with the television set. She felt compelled, for the first time, to leave her house and not just walk to the store to buy her cigarettes and junk food.

Karen pulled herself out of her chair. She rose too quickly and made herself dizzy. She gathered her winter clothes and threw them on. It was a bitter evening at 6:15 pm. Through the desert town she walked. The city scape was so sprawled. His building was a mile away from her but she knew all the back alley ways to get there. She passed the store. She walked and it was tiresome work, it was as if her muscles had atrophied and she was certainly not eating enough to keep up any kind of strength. She walked past the places they used to stop and eat and take their morning coffee at. It was all a blur of blue black light. She could smell the smoke that was surely rising from his building. There was the rose bush he had once picked flowers for her from. There was where they had committed some public sex act, which was a thrill. There was the building he had shimmied his way up and into so that she could swim in their pool. Her feet were bringing her to a destination that was both known and unknown. Known, in the way she had been there so many times, unknown because she had no idea why she was going or if he was even going to be there or if he would even care that she was there.

When she arrived there was a scene like Karen had imagined. It was something out of the television screen, but this was real. She had a hard time grasping this concept. She had left. This incident had forced her to leave the sanctity of her apartment. What she saw she could not have been prepared for in any way. There was a man on a stretcher, his face badly burnt and they had attached an oxygen mask on his face. Dangling from the side of the sheet was his hand and it was wearing the ring she had given him for his birthday. The fact that he still wore it surprised her. It was amazing that he hadn’t taken it off. She choked back tears. She was leaving tomorrow and there would be no way to know if he was to live or die.

On the plane she read in the local paper that the cause of the fire was that he had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette and it had set the rest of the building on fire. She would read that he had died in the hospital. She would only feel slightly guilty for smiling.

An excerpt from a new story i am working on, part of The Silent River:

Karen spent three months inside the apartment. The last half of the fall and into the early part of the winter, near November. She knew there would have to be a homecoming for the feast of fall. It would not be something that would come easily. Getting on a plane and leaving the open sky for her hill tree lined home. The only way she knew of the weather outside for these months was leaving every few days to buy cigarettes at the convenience store not a minute from her apartment. She could see through the window that the sky was changing from gold to white over the weeks. In these months she became intimate with the television. They had a schedule like lovers who meet every thursday in a Motel 6 or like a married couple sits down to eat at 7:30 pm and on friday it’s taco night. She knew when the programs that she enjoyed were on. she sat very close to the set, as if it was warming her, like a fireplace or a wood stove in an old home. The central source of warmth and hypnotizing flames now commercials and channels. It was the best pain killer she knew of. The best mind number out there.

*****
She watched talk shows where hosts tried to fix problems with a panel and forced dialog. A woman crying over a paternity test because she still didn’t know the father. Karen shook her head at these. Maybe they shouldn’t have banged, like 50, dudes. Another host putting themselves in a fatsuit or making themselves ugly to see how “it really was”. An offshoot of the talk show was the court show. She loved these and felt as if she could win any small claims court case she would ever have to be a part of. She liked it when the judges reprimanded the idiot people who would give back lip or were trying to interrupt.