THE WISH

 

 

6

 

THE CLOWN WAS TWISTING A long blue balloon when I heard the crash. His face had jerked to the side, alarmed. After a moment he looked back to us, gave a weak smile. The other kids and I ignored the sound, intent on the clown’s white-gloved hands, waiting for the miracle of creation.

“Well, I … okay …” he said, his normally booming voice subdued and hesitant. To his credit, he went back to the balloon with vigor, red curls bobbing, diamond-painted eyes intent.

He stopped again when someone screamed. His eyes shot up and over, away from the audience of children. His white cheeks were slack and hollow, his mouth an oval of surprise. The balloon fell to the ground, half-formed. One of my friends moaned.

More screams. Adult screams.

The clown’s spell broken, I stood and looked toward the other side of the yard, where the tables were set up and the grill chugged smoke like a Christmas day chimney.

I saw Mom yelling and dragging her nails down her face. She wore a bright yellow dress.

One of my friends started to cry, and the clown was saying, “Oh no, oh God ….”

More adults gathered by the spot of the crash, and when I ran over to see what had happened—crossing out of the tent’s shade and into bright hot sunlight—I saw my dad on the ground, clutching at his chest. He was pale and all his teeth were showing, as if he didn’t have lips.

Soon after, an ambulance came, but by then he was dead. Mom said it was a heart attack.

I was furious. Furious at Dad for ruining my birthday party, at his dumb heart for attacking him, at Mom for leaving me that night with a neighbor—on my birthday!—so she could go be with Dad.

After she made me dinner, the neighbor, Mrs. Shephard, made a big deal about singing while she carried out a birthday cake. Six candles perched haphazardly atop, sticking up like weeds.

“Make a wish, Jonathan,” she said, and I was so mad and sad and confused I didn’t know what to think or what to wish for. The only thing I could think of—the only thing that came to my mind that night—was how angry I was at my father for having missed me blow out the candles on my birthday cake.

I wish Daddy never misses my birthday again, I thought, and blew out the candles.

I got all six.

 

 

7

 

ON THE DAY OF MY seventh birthday, I had not forgotten about my dead father, or my wish.

My mother, of course, went all-out for this one, trying to erase the ugliness of last year’s event. The mental scars. This time we didn’t have my party in the backyard, but instead went to a cool arcade that had rides and games and a prize booth at the end where you turned in your tickets for toys and stickers. I got an eraser shaped like a race car, a bunch of candy, and a pen that wrote in purple.

That night Mom tucked me into bed, kissed my cheek and wished me one last Happy Birthday. After the arcade, pizza and cake at home, I was wiped out.

I was asleep before she closed the bedroom door.

 

“HIYA, CHAMP.”

Something cold rubbed my scalp. Pushed through my long hair. The air felt damp, and I tucked the comforter higher to my chin.

“Jon, wake up buddy. Wake up.”

I opened my eyes. The room was blurry and dark.

A man sat on the edge of my bed.

I inhaled sharply and sat up. He lifted away the hand that had been stroking my head. “Whoa, whoa, bronco. Don’t you recognize me? How about I turn on a light?”

He started to reach for the small reading lamp on my nightstand.

“No!” I said. Then, more quietly, “It’s okay. My eyes are adjusting.”

He laughed a little. “That’s good. So, you do recognize me.”

I nodded. “Dad.”

His dark head nodded, and as my eyes adjusted, I noticed he wore the same thing he’d worn on my sixth birthday: blue denim shirt, khaki pants, and a Tigers baseball hat, the old-English D a white tangle on his forehead. “That’s right. You made that wish, remember? And here I am.”

Without thinking, I leaned forward and hugged him. He was solid, but cool, as if he’d been out in the chilled night air without a jacket and had just come inside. He stroked my back.

He smelled like dirt, but not in a gross way. Clean, like grass.

“I love you, Son,” he said.

“I love you too, Dad.”

We chatted for a while. I talked about school and the arcade. He laughed and held my hand. After a while, near midnight, he said he had to leave. But by then I was falling asleep.

 

THE NEXT MORNING, I WONDERED if it had been a dream, and decided it must have been. The realization left me both disappointed and relieved.

 

 

9

 

“WHAT’S IT LIKE?”

Dad paced the floor of my bedroom. His shirt was untucked, and he kept pulling off his ballcap to rub his hair, as if it itched. “Honestly? Not great. It’s sort of … well, you’d think it was pretty boring.”

“What about God? Or heaven?”

He shook his head, kept pacing. “Nah, none of that stuff.”

I’d been waiting for him this year, excited to see him. After his first visit on my seventh birthday, he came again when I turned eight, but I’d been so tired he had to wake me up again.

Tonight, after a trip to Disneyland with Mom and my best friend Harry, I was exhausted, but forced myself to stay awake until he showed. I badly wanted to see where he came in from … but missed it.

One second the room was empty, the next second he was just … there.

I turned on the small lamp. Whatever had scared me from doing it before, I wasn’t scared now. It was just my Daddy, after all.

He sat at the edge of my bed, like he always did. He looked a little pale and acted like what my schoolteacher Mrs. Bridges would call fidgety.

“How’s Mom, huh?” he asked, wringing his fingers. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “We went to Disneyland today. It was awesome.”

“That’s cool. I’ve never been there. Guess I won’t be going anytime soon, huh?”

“I guess not. Except maybe you could be one of the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion,” I said excitedly. “You could really scare some people, I bet.”

He chuckled and rubbed my head with his cold hand. “I’m sure I could.” Then he made a weird face and threw his hands in the air. “BWAAAH!” he yelled, and I screamed despite myself. For a second, I was stuck between crying and laughter, but when he smiled the fear went away. It was pretty funny, after all.

I just hoped he’d never do it again.

 

 

12

 

FOR MY TWELFTH BIRTHDAY I went camping with Harry and our friend Tyler.

I’d been nervous most of the day, aware of what—of who—would visit me late that night. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t home on my birthday, and while I enjoyed the idea of hanging out with Harry and Ty in the woods (Harry’s dad was there, too, but with a tent of his own), I missed my mom, missed birthday cake and candles and opening presents in the living room while she took a hundred photos.

But it would also be the first time I’d see Dad outside of my bedroom. He always visited me there, and almost always at the same time. Just before midnight. Sometimes an hour, sometimes less. When I turned eleven, he only stayed about thirty minutes, but that was okay with me. He’d been angry, agitated. Kept asking about Mom. Asked if any strange men had come to the house.

He’d lost his Tigers cap somewhere and when I asked about it he just stared back at me with this strange, annoyed look. As if I’d insulted him.

He still paced a lot, and sometimes his hands twitched. More than once over the last few years he’d mumble something, as if to himself, and when I asked him what he’d said he ignored me, as if he didn’t understand what I was asking. As if he didn’t know, maybe, that he was even doing it.

So being out in the woods made me wary, and anxious. Would he even come? I mean, me and the guys were sharing a tent. It’s not like he could sit with me and talk, they’d see him for sure.

And wouldn’t that be something.

That night we ate hot dogs and smores, cooked up over a small campfire. Harry’s dad told a lame story about a maniac who lived in the woods. We knew he was trying to scare us, and it was pretty funny. I think Tyler was sort of freaked out, which made it even funnier. After, we brushed our teeth at a small stream near the campsite and settled into the tents to sleep. Me and the guys chatted for a while, farting and telling bad jokes, but I kept an eye on the watch Mom had given me that morning as my gift. It lit up green when you pressed a button. It could also go underwater or get dropped off a plane without breaking. Pretty neat.

I faked a yawn around eleven o’clock, and the guys caught on. Soon they were both asleep. I heard them breathing, and Harry tended to snore.

I waited.

Before long, the zipper of the tent started to slide up slowly. A draft of cold air pushed inside, sterilizing the warmth of our bodies. When the zipper got to the top, my dad stuck his head through the gap, looked at the two other guys, then at me. His eyes shone in the dark, otherwise he was nothing but shadow.

I reached for my flashlight, but dared not turn it on, horrified by the idea of my friends waking up to see my dead father’s glowing face. Probably turn their hair white.

I lifted one hand and waved. My dad lifted a hand, waved back.

He sat there for a while, not saying anything, not moving.

I wanted him to leave. But he stayed. Just sat there for almost an hour.

By midnight I was quietly crying. I hid my face in my sleeping bag so he wouldn’t see, wouldn’t hear. He didn’t seem to notice.

And he never said a word.

 

 

14

 

DAD KNEW ABOUT TOM.

“Who the hell is this guy? Is he here now? In her fucking bed?”

“No, no. He doesn’t stay over,” I lied. Harry and I had been trolling this team of ragtag survivors in a game called Fallaway, where basically you can play as a Survivor, a Peacekeeper, or a Scavenger.

We were Scavengers. There were five of us on the team, and we’d been picking off this weak team of Survivors who called themselves “Tina’s Drama Club” for some dumbass reason. Our team was “Poe’s Imagination,” which I’d thought up and the guys thought was pretty badass, although I don’t think they all knew who Edgar Allan Poe was or hadn’t read him other than whatever had been forced on them in English class. The guys were still on, but I logged off when Dad showed up.

If I’d known he was just going to bitch about Mom’s new boyfriend, I would have kept playing.

Besides, he didn’t look so hot these days.

Last year he showed up and talked for an hour about how miserable he was. How empty his world was. He kept saying how he felt stuck, how he was always on the edge of some great void, but never fell in. He said he’d jump into if he could, anything to get out of his “state of purgatory,” as he put it. Which seemed a bit dramatic. Even worse, he’d shown up shirtless and shoeless. He had pants on, thank God, but that was it. His body was thin, his bones sharp and pointed at his elbows and shoulders, and his ribs showed through sallow skin. His eyes were sunken, and his hair was dry and patchy, as if he’d been tugging it out in clumps.

He hardly looked like my dad at all.

When he arrived tonight, though, I thought he looked a little better than last year. He’d found a shirt to wear, although it was too long and looked stained. Torn in places. It was something a character in Fallaway would wear. Dad would be a perfect fit as a survivor of the apocalypse.

“Is she sleeping with him?”

I shook my head, disgusted. “How the heck should I know? I mean, no, I don’t think so. Come on, Dad. Please stop.”

But it was useless. He just paced and paced, his bare feet blackened and filthy. His hands jerked spasmodically, and his lips hardly ever stopped moving, whether he was talking or not. His teeth looked rotten.

He stopped pacing suddenly and yelled, “That bitch!” He picked up one of my baseball trophies and threw it against the wall. It shattered into pieces.

“Hey!” I jumped up, thinking to pick up the trophy, but he grabbed me instead. Like I was going for a hug or something. I hadn’t actually touched him in a few years, and I forgot how ice-cold his skin was. He gripped me hard and dug his face into my shoulder. I was nearly tall as he was now, and probably about the same weight based on how skinny he’d gotten. He wept into my shirt.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay, Dad.” I put my arms around him. His back felt lumpy and the flesh felt dead. Like hugging a cadaver. “It’s not a big deal.”

I held him as he cried and shook.

“Why did you make that wish?” he said, sobbing. “Why won’t you let me go?”

The cold of him curdled my flesh, and I did not answer.

 

 

15

 

IT WAS GETTING PATHETIC.

Dad arrived early again this year, waiting for me as I came to my room, not even ten P.M. He was hunched in the corner, naked and filthy. Like a wraith or a demon hiding in the shadows. His knees were drawn up to his chest, and he was rocking.

And the goddamned mumbling, just like always, the constant talking to himself.

I was beginning to think he’d gone insane.

I asked him if he was doing okay, said he didn’t seem well. He talked more about the void, about wanting to jump into it, about escaping purgatory yada-yada-yada.

Frankly, I wasn’t in the mood. All-in-all, it had been a pretty shitty birthday.

 

I’D DECIDED TO SPEND THE day with Harry, Tyler, and a couple other guys. We wanted to go see a new R-rated horror movie that was supposed to be insane, and the theater we went to didn’t care if we were eighteen or not, so we always got into the good stuff. The day before, in one of my more ballsy moves ever, I called Jane Sawyer and asked if she wanted to come with us. That it was my birthday. When she agreed, I was thrilled. I’d had a crush on Jane for years, and the idea of sitting in a dark theater with her clutching at my sleeve during the scary bits sounded like the best birthday gift ever.

What I thought was a fantastic plan, however, went quickly to hell. First of all, the seating got screwed up and I ended up jammed between Tyler and Drew, who ate like a slob and didn’t shower enough. Harry was two seats over and Jane was next to him at the end. Halfway through the movie Drew banged his elbow into my ribs. When I looked over, he nodded to the side, where the pale glow of the screen illuminated Jane’s bare thighs.

Harry’s hand rested on top of one, lightly squeezing. Jane’s hand was on his, holding it there.

My stomach flipped. I barely focused on the movie. It was all I could do to not get up and storm out. Even worse, and unable to help myself, I kept gazing over to see Harry’s slow, upward progress over the course of the film’s last hour. It was torture.

Finally, the damn thing ended, and we convened in the lobby. When Harry suggested going to the food court, I wanted to punch him in the goddamned mouth. Instead, I made up a story about plans with my mother and Tom. Some shit about how they wanted to take me to dinner. I think Harry knew I was full of it, and I guess he looked sort of worried, but fuck him. Fuck him and fuck Jane Sawyer. I hoped they’d have a dozen fat kids with a variety of diseases.

When I got home Mom was surprised, but happy, to see me, which took some of the sting out of the day. She and Tom gave me a new PC, which I wasn’t expecting and definitely helped soften the blow of Harry’s treason. Still, when I thought about hooking it up and logging onto Fallaway, I knew Harry would probably be there and want to chat about what had happened. The idea made me sick again and it ruined my excitement of the gift. Mom and Tom had obviously planned a quiet night watching a movie together, so I thanked them both and said I wanted to hook up the new computer. I tried to ignore their mutual relief.

 

THEN I HAD TO DEAL with Dad. As soon as I walked into my room, he was there.

I ignored him for a while, focused on setting up the computer. It was a lot faster than my old one, and the monitor was tits, so I was happy with it. But having Dad moan and rock away in the corner was putting a damper on the project.

“I went to the movies today. I invited Jane Sawyer, and the bitch hooked up with Harry,” I said, almost casually, as I labored under the desk with power cords and video cables. “Pretty messed up.”

Dad was quiet—real quiet. I backed out from under the desk and turned to see if he’d left.

He hadn’t. He was on his knees right behind me, looking over my shoulder. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. His skin now almost translucent. If he wasn’t so grimy, I’d probably see dark veins running all over his body like a road map. “You got girl trouble, Son?” he said, and smiled wide.

He had a few teeth left, I guess. But there was a lot of gum in that smile. He began to breathe weird, and I wasn’t sure what was wrong with him, then I realized he was laughing. Laughing at me. What the hell, right?

“Yeah, I do. You have any advice or anything? You are my father.”

He stopped the weird laughter then, put the point of his finger to his chin to indicate deep thought. “Well,” he said. “I’ll tell you what: You take back your wish, and I’ll tell you how to … you know … get the girl.”

The last few years he’d asked a lot about the wish thing. Honestly, if I had the first clue about how to take it back, maybe I would have. But frankly, why should I? He’s my father. He left me when I was just a little kid. And yeah, he looked like a homeless bum these days, and he wasn’t the best guy to have heart-to-heart chats with… And okay, he scared me a little. Or a lot. He was pretty creepy. But if I took back the wish, I’d never see him again. Ever. It wasn’t something I was ready to let go of just yet. Part of me liked having him around once a year. It was comforting.

“I don’t know how,” was what I told him. What I always told him. “It wasn’t like I planned any of this. It just ….” I shrugged, toyed with the HDMI cable in my hands. “Happened.”

He stared hard at me for a moment, the smile faded but still there, stretching those cracked lips. Finally, he gave a small nod. “Just happened,” he said. “Just happened … just happened ….”

A few fat tears slipped from his wide eyes, ran clean streaks down his face. He crawled away across the floor, back toward the corner. His bare, bony ass a visual aid to his thoughts on my lame excuse.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

 

 

16

 

ON MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY HE tried to possess me.

I’d been asleep and having this weird dream that I was drowning. The water was gray and freezing, my chest tight from not being able to breathe.

“You’re so very warm,” a voice said. “So very warm ….”

I opened my eyes and felt him moving into me. It was about the most awful feeling you could imagine. Like having someone slide their hand beneath your skin and wiggle their fingers against raw bone and muscle, feel up your organs, tickle your heart. I cried out, nearly gagging.

“GET OUT!” My voice was thick and raspy. Some protective instinct kicked in and, using my mind, I was able to push him out. Like suppressing a bad memory or burying an emotion. Once gone, he rolled off the bed, smacked the floor with a wet thump. I sat up, breathing heavy, ran my hands protectively over my body—my bare chest, my pajama bottoms. I felt disgusted. Violated.

I heard him laughing in the dark.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he was saying. “It’s just so cold, Jonathan. It’s so damned cold. It’s like I’ll never feel warmth again. But you? You’re so warm. So wonderfully warm.”

I’d had enough.

And so … I promised.

I told him on my next birthday—my seventeenth—I’d undo the wish. I’d wish to never see him again. Wish that he would be released from whatever purgatorial state he was in and go away, go wherever he should have gone on the day he dropped dead in the backyard, leaving burning burgers on the grill and a half-formed balloon animal dead in the grass.

“You swear?” he said, the words choked with emotion. “You’ll do it?”

“Yes, I swear,” I said. “Now tell me how to get Jane Sawyer to like me.”

He laughed at that, as if he’d found one last battery of saneness in his storeroom. He sat at the foot of my bed, and we talked for a while. It was nice. He told me about how he met my mom, about things he thought were important when it came to women. About being kind and respectful. Stuff like that.

I enjoyed hearing him talk, and for a few minutes I loved my father again. And yeah, missed him. The real him.

If he had known I’d been lying about the wish thing, I doubt any of that would have happened.

 

 

17

 

WHEN I TURNED SEVENTEEN, I was out of the country. Me, Tyler, and Drew went backpacking in Europe for Spring Break. Harry, who was now officially dating Jane Sawyer, was not invited. We hadn’t spoken much since that day at the movie theater, and I doubt I’ll ever forgive him for stealing her from me.

The guys and I had a pretty good time, though. Taking the trains and sleeping in hostels, walking through old cobblestone streets with giant backpacks strapped to us—young and free and alive. It was great, and I had zero intention of being alone any time before midnight. To play it safe, I stayed up all night on my birthday. The boys and I found a Brauhaus in Luxembourg that was happy to accommodate young Americans and all the other tourists until dawn the next day. We drank from steins, ate sausages, and sang along with the rest of the crowd in the high-arched hall. In many ways, it was my favorite birthday ever.

I did see him, of course. He stood among the crowd, watching me with a weird blank expression. Sometimes he’d be in a corner, tucked between revelers. Sometimes slouched at the end of the long tables at which we all sat. Once he even set down across from me, rubbed elbows with a pretty, fat German girl who had been giving me lovey-eyes all night. It was interesting to see her move aside when his blackened skin brushed her smooth white flesh, but nobody could see him, I guess. Just me.

I ignored him as best I could—just smiled and sang and drank. A couple times I grinned at him, and he’d grimace, or smile back, or just stare.

After a while I didn’t see him anymore, and that was fine. I’d had enough. Enough of being haunted. Because that’s what it was, really. A haunting.

It was time to let go.

And on my eighteenth birthday, that’s exactly what I did.

What I tried to do.

 

 

18

 

IT HAD BEEN A QUIET day. The older one gets, the less a big deal the whole birthday thing is. I get that, and I don’t mind. Tom and Mom took me for a steak dinner, where Tom revealed he was going to buy me a car.

He said we’d go together to the used car lot and pick out something nice. Something safe and reliable. I was ecstatic, and even though I knew the guy was sucking up to me because he was boffing my mom and laying the groundwork for marriage, I didn’t care. A car was a car, and if Tom had ten grand to blow on his future stepson, I was more than happy to give the guy a big hug, kiss my mom on the cheek, and wish them both the utmost happiness.

When dessert came, a tiramisu with a single candle stuck into it, I decided it was time to move on with my life, let my mom move on with hers, and—sure, why the hell not—let old Dad off the hook once and for all.

I closed my eyes and wished, just like I’d rehearsed a million times:

I wish to never see my father again.

I blew out the candle.

Mom and Tom clapped quietly—it was a classy place, after all—and I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders. I felt light as a feather.

Right up until I went to bed that night.

 

YEAH, HE WAS THERE.

I didn’t notice him at first, the way he was hiding under my bed. If I hadn’t seen him jerk back one clawed, pale hand from view just as I turned on the overhead light, I might have never known he was there.

“Oh shit,” I murmured.

His body was hidden, but he shuffled so his face was near the edge of the bed, then looked up at me from the floor. His eyes were shiny and so sunken into his skull they looked like black buttons pressed into a dirty ball of dough. He leered at me with that black, toothless grin.

“Jonathan …” he said softly, like an exhaled breath.

I didn’t like that he was under there, and I didn’t want to get too close. I went to my desk instead, sat down in the swivel chair and spun a couple times. “You’re supposed to be gone. I wished you to be gone.” I stopped spinning and met his eyes. “I swear.”

“I know, I know ….” He pointed across the room, toward the door and the light switch. “Turn that off, will you? I prefer the dark.”

I shrugged, flicked on the small lamp next to my bed, then went to the switch and flicked it off, killing the overhead light. The room filled with heavy shadows, and he seemed to sink right into them.

“Come to bed, Son,” he said. “Come on to bed.”

I really didn’t want to do that. But I sucked it up, kicked off my shoes and sort of hop-stepped onto the bed, worried he might try to snatch me with one of those clawed hands. Atop the firm mattress I felt better. I rested my head on the pillow, crossed my feet, closed my eyes.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” I said, and felt myself drift, imagining the car I would pick out next week. My father’s voice carried to me from the floor.

“Oh, it’s quite all right,” he said soothingly. “In fact, it was my decision in the end. Not to go on, I mean.”

I opened my eyes at that. The ceiling was a crescent of light against a pressing darkness. The lamp wasn’t very bright, and I’d have sworn it was dimmer than I remembered.

“See, I heard your wish,” he continued. “And the void opened, Jonathan. Opened like a giant mouth, ready to consume me, to let me …
go on.”

I swallowed. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because …” There was an almost childish glee in his voice. “I like it here. With you. And I was thinking, Jonathan, thinking about all the birthdays you have left. One day, you’ll have a girlfriend—something other than your hand, I mean—and then a wife, perhaps. Then, who knows?” He made a weird smacking sound with his mouth. An icy chill stitched its way up my spine. “Children.”

“Maybe,” I said, but the word was choked. My throat was tight with fear, a raw panic I’d never felt before.

“Yes, children. And I’ll visit you, Jonathan, I’ll visit you every year on your birthday. No … matter … what. And then, one day, I’ll visit your children. Won’t that be nice?”

I said nothing. My mind began to race. I started to think of future birthdays, future wishes. Different things I could say, different phrasings.

Maybe if I said it better, maybe if I said it right.

He was laughing, as if he knew my thoughts. Perhaps he did.

A cold hand reached up from beneath the bed and found my arm. Long, bony fingers gripped me tight, as if they’d never let go. I closed my eyes in horror, in revulsion.

“And one day,” he said, his voice now close to my ear, as if he’d whispered directly into it. “You’ll die. Just like me. And when you do ….”

I heard the click of my bedside lamp being turned off.

My eyes shot open to stare at the dark.

“I’ll be there.”