3.

Early the next morning, I packed and checked out. I didn’t get much sleep, spending most of the night being jerked awake by thunder. I drove to the international airport, left the Miata in a No Parking zone and walked inside, resolute on purchasing a one-way ticket home with the little money I had left. Washing my face in a bathroom, I stared at myself in the mirror.

Closing my eyes, I began charting my face with my fingers. What could be learnt about another from the delineations of their face? Perhaps they’re the truest measure of all. I wondered what the woman had read from the Braille of my years. I walked back to the Miata, ripped up a ticket propped under the wiper, and drove back to the motel.

I walked through St Claude with my hands in my pockets and head down. Reaching the house, I looked around to see if anyone was watching. A woman walking a dog said hello as she passed. I swore she did a double take. A bassline throbbed inside the house, the door swaying open when I knocked. ‘Hello?’ I said, keeping my voice down. There was no reply. I surveyed the street from the porch again. Broken glass crunched under my boot as I stepped inside. There was blood across the wooden floor.

‘Hello?’ I said again.

‘Who’s there?’ Her slurred voice emanated from somewhere I could not see.

‘It’s … It’s Mark – please don’t scream.’

‘Mark Ward. Son of Dylan Ward.’

‘Yeah, that’s the one,’ I said, following the defined trail of blood with cautious footsteps. It disappeared behind the far side of the couch next to the liquor cabinet.

‘You’ve got some nerve coming back, ya know? My brothers are coming and they’d kill ya. They’d kill ya if they knew what you did,’ she said.

I rounded the corner to find her sitting on the floor, propped up against the couch, still in her robe. Her neck, legs and hands were covered in blood; some dry, some wet. She took a sip from a drink.

‘Fuck. What happened?’ I asked.

‘I tried to clean up after the mess that I … that you made me make,’ she chuckled.

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘A little.’

‘Okay, hold on,’ I said. Locating a pair of tweezers in a bathroom, I soaked a rag in the kitchen and returned to her. I knelt down and asked if it was okay to touch her. ‘Didn’t ask last time,’ she snickered. I wiped blood from her neck and it came away with no cuts underneath.

‘My name is Felicia, by the way,’ she said as I wiped blood from a shin.

‘Well, Felicia, it’s nice to meet you. I believe we have a mutual acquaintance.’

I removed glass from her hands and cleaned cuts. She tensed when I lifted the robe up her leg. ‘It’s okay,’ I said, plucking a shard from her knee, blood following. I held the rag over the opening of the wound, watching as red seeped up the fabric. She refused to move to the couch, so I cleaned the rest of the blood and glass and sat with her on the floor.

I told Felicia about my life, and how a letter had led me to her living room floor twenty years after it was written. She then told me her story. How lucky a nineteen-year-old girl had felt to get a window seat on the streetcar back to St Claude during a bright and hot May afternoon in 1977. How tired she was after a long shift at the theatre. How a cool westerly breeze arrived to usher humidity out of the city. The man’s voice that roused her from a daydream to ask if the seat beside was free.

‘He just … sat down and started talking. Charming in an infuriating kind of way; I couldn’t stop smiling,’ she said, shaking her head with tight lips before taking in breath through her nose. ‘Insisted he come over for dinner. Ended up staying for months. But I knew he was something special right away.’

‘Surely not,’ I said, already feeling a stab of anger that Felicia, like my mother, seemed only to hold on to good memories of the man.

‘Mhmm, I did. The kindness your father showed me and my family was something I don’t think I’d ever experienced. We were still at the back of the bus not long before that. Lot of people still thought we should be. Some still do. Dylan might not have seen my colour, but I sure saw his. He just seemed to see … me.’

‘Were you two in love?’ I asked, wincing at myself at how blunt I’d managed to be.

‘I believe so, even though the word was never said. Ha, I didn’t even let him kiss me the one time he tried. Thought I’d received my second chance last night,’ she laughed before her tone turned cold. ‘It was a dark little dot wherever I looked at first. Had been with me for years, then one morning – few weeks after Dylan had arrived – it was suddenly just … bigger. Seemed to grow every day after that; a little less of the world getting in around it when I woke each morning. Got the diagnosis shortly after. Nothing they could do, they said.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I managed, gulping down the lump in my throat. ‘So, what? He left you when you told him?’

‘Dylan? Lord, no. No, he pleaded to stay even though I demanded he go. I told him I didn’t need his damn pity, but really I just didn’t want him to see it happen to me,’ she said with the calm intensity of someone who’d long ago made peace with an imperfect world. ‘So, in a desperate moment of weakness I will never forgive myself for, I told my brothers he’d forced himself on me. They sent him down those front steps so hard I’m surprised his bones didn’t break. Yelled he was dead if he ever came back. I’ll never forget that look on his face as he threw a bag over his shoulder and backed down my path for the last time.’

I breathed in deep, steadying myself. Felicia reached a hand to me. I met hers with mine and felt the strangest sensation of sadness draining from both of us as she squeezed it.

He’d written to her as well after that, albeit with a fake name, she told me. Even said he’d come back to her when the time was right in one of the last she read. The hardest part, she told me, was watching the paper of his letters slowly become as dark as the words written upon them. Felicia had truly believed with every part of her being that my father would return to her one day. A tear ran down my cheek. Her pain was so akin to what I’d grown up watching my mother endure.

‘I wonder what he’d be up to now – if he’s still out there, I mean,’ she said.

‘Probably more of the same. Men like him don’t tend to change.’

‘Do you hate him? You speak like you do.’

‘He didn’t give me many reasons not to.’

‘Nothin’ good ever came from hate, Mark.’

I didn’t reply. I’d been given this lecture too many times. She sighed.

‘You ever cut open a bit of fruit that looked good from the outside, but once you were in there you realised it was all spoilt?’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

‘Sweetie,’ she said, searching for my face with an unfolded hand. I leant forward to help her find it. ‘That’s hate. Hate rots. A man ain’t all that different from a piece of fruit, really.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘What I mean is a man can look real fine on the outside, but he can be rotting in there. What I’m saying, Mark, is be careful. Because sometimes, if you get into that fruit too late – if you judge it from the outside and let it go rotting too long, pretty soon you’ll find none of it can be salvaged. Pretty soon you’ll find none of it can be saved.’

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ I said with a lump in my throat. ‘My mother never had the strength to hate him. So I had to; enough for both of us.’

‘It takes more strength not to hate, Mark, and there’s always a choice. Your father was a wonderful, loving young man. He knew anger and sorrow, but didn’t live with them. They were guests in his home, but did not choose the carpets or the drapes or the colour on the walls. They visited occasionally, to sit and talk, but always left the place how they’d found it. They were familiar company, but he did not let them furnish his soul.’

I sipped from her glass.

‘You know, Dylan was only about your age when I met him on that streetcar. Just another lost boy trying to piece it all together. Maybe you two are more alike than you realise … Ah, what I would give to be back at that window seat. To turn around and see him again for the very first time,’ she said, with a smile. I watched as the richness of the slideshow of her memories played behind eyes that no longer worked.

There was a knock on the door before it swung open. Three enormous Black men entered the house.

‘Who the hell are you?’ one of them asked, stepping towards me, covering almost half of the room with a single stride. I stood up in a panic.

‘Christopher, it’s alright,’ Felicia said, craning her head around the side of the couch, ‘he’s a friend.’

The men approached and saw Felicia’s legs through the bottom of her robe.

‘The fuck happened?’ asked another, looking at me.

‘Nothing, Landon. I dropped a glass and tried to clean it up myself. Mark here was tending to my cuts,’ Felicia countered.

‘Well, why he look like he been crying?’ he asked.

‘Because I’d been telling a sad story. Now come, help me up.’

Christopher rushed to her.

‘Come on, girl, stop being so stubborn. Like that damn lawn, just let me mow it,’ he said as he sat her on the couch. I felt the floor buckle as he moved past me.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Chris, Landon, Cyrus, meet Mark. Mark, meet my brothers. Mark is an old friend passing through town. He stopped in to see how I was doing.’

‘Alright, man, that’s good. Good to meet you,’ they said, all shaking my hand and nodding. Their sister’s word was final.

‘But I’d say we’re all caught up now, and Mark is a busy boy. I’m sure he has many places to be. Wouldn’t you agree, Mark?’ Felicia asked, not looking at me but smiling.

‘Yeah, right. I, uh, I best be going.’

She extended an arm in front of her. I moved to it and leant in. She hugged me tight. ‘Good luck. Go find what you’re looking for,’ she whispered in my ear. The brothers wished me well. I opened the door and began closing it behind me.

‘Hold up, sweetie.’

I stopped and turned back to her.

‘Yeah, Felicia?’

‘Is it sunny out?’

The street was still drenched from the morning rain, but the sun had come out and everything glistened. I opened the door, filling the room with light, and spoke back into the house.

‘It is.’

‘Leave it open, dear. I love the sunshine after a storm.’

I smiled at her, nodded and walked down the steps, along the same path my father had.

‘Man, that dude looks real familiar,’ said one of the brothers.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I overheard Felicia reply.