Twenty-One

 

 

Naked, still, Sebastian’s face and body remain wet with the tears and the bathtub’s potion. He twists his wedding band slowly until it lodges against his knucklebone and reveals a tan line. Sad, but true: the phantom ring around his caramel-colored finger will probably fade in time.

Sebastian pictures himself on all fours, no cast, no forty years of skin. He’s six, maybe eight months old. He straddles the edge of a blank wall-sized canvas. As if wielding a rattle, he grips an oversized aqua-blue crayon. He forms a large, cloud-like figure in the center of the canvas. Within it he etches S + F.

“Sebastian and Frank,” he annunciates as he draws lines at five points around the cloud’s perimeter. Without warning, the cloud morphs into a brilliant yellow sunburst, the S + F still contained inside its body.

Forty-year-old Sebastian’s eyes grow heavy. He touches his wedding band, fingers the spot just above the knucklebone where it still won’t budge. For close to seven years now, Sebastian’s body has been this symbol of love’s home. He looks toward the ceiling. “It’s okay. I love you,” he says, wiping his face with his bare arm. “I’ll always love you,” he murmurs to Frank’s image in their framed photo. He tugs hard until the white-gold circle finally surrenders to his will and slides off. Sweaty, his body shakes with the onset of tears.

Sebastian takes a deep inhale and rises from the sofa, uses a steady breath cycle as he moves to retrieve his treasure box from the bottom dresser drawer. The small wooden box was a birthday present from his parents, a total surprise for their twelve-year-old son. Apparently, his father cut and glued all the dovetailed pieces, and his mother added the moss-green felt lining. The lid’s tableau is a trio of loons—his father created one, his mother the other, and finally, they etched the third figure together.

When they handed Sebastian the box his father said, “The loons, Seb. Both parents incubate the eggs and raise their chicks together.” His mother kissed his forehead and said, “It doesn’t matter that we adopted you. We’re all just as tight as loons. Daddy and I will always be your forever family.” They’d written on a card inside: “Always keep this box, please do. Beneath its floor, our treasure to you.”

Although the card they’d written on was lost long ago, Sebastian remembers those words as if his parents had offered them yesterday. Until tonight, however, he hasn’t visited the reason for the words in twenty-two years, not since the day he arrived in the city.

The treasure box cradled in his arms, Sebastian moves to the floor. The rug under his bare ass tickles. He scoots backward, using the bottom edge of the sofa frame for support. He groans and extends his cast leg forward, bends the other leg inward to form a triangle. He places his wedding band on his knee.

Sebastian takes a whiff; he could swear the treasure box still smells of lemon polish after all these years. Stiff hinges, but it opens easily enough. He squints; the felt that carpets the bottom interior is lifted at the sides, and flakes of dried glue are noticeable around the edges. From beneath the treasure box’s lining, a sheet of paper sticks out. He peels back the corner of the felt and tries to force the paper free. As he tugs harder, his wedding band falls off his knee and lands on the carpet. Reaching high, he places the band next to the picture on the side table.

He continues his tug-of-war with the paper. Finally, he bullies the felt bottom into surrendering, sending a cloud of dried glue particles into his face. To his surprise, he unearths five pieces of paper, folded in half and stapled along the top edge. When he unfolds the pages, he gasps. It’s a deed that he never knew existed. After both parents were gone, he was told the land on which the ultimately burned husk of his family’s home stood was owned by the bank. He didn’t question it. At eighteen then, with no more ties to Margaretville, all he wanted was to get to New York City and never look back.

At the time, there had been no lawyer or kindly relatives to help the legally adult yet utterly sheltered teenager. Both parents’ funerals, only six months apart, were quiet affairs attended by the pastor and a handful of their teaching colleagues. It pissed Sebastian off, but that’s the way it was. Yes, his parents were both teachers—his mother taught kindergarten and his father third grade—but the Harts weren’t particularly popular in town. Over the years, Sebastian had heard the whispers at school—that his parents were crazy, and that he must be too if they’d adopted him. Sebastian moans at the memory of it all. He doesn’t believe his parents were mentally ill, just too paranoid for their own good. They kept to themselves, the trio of so-called loons that made up the Hart family.

Before Sebastian left Margaretville, the manager at the local bank informed him that his parents had an account that contained seventy-five thousand dollars. He wasn’t sure back then how they’d saved so much from their small-town teachers’ salaries, although it was apparent to Sebastian from his earliest years that hoarding was their second career. Of the money his parents squirreled away for him, Sebastian only used half to help fund his first year in New York. The rest he deposited in a savings account; regardless of the bills he accumulated in subsequent years, Sebastian tried to survive without tapping into those funds. Now, twenty-two years later, zilch is left of his initial inheritance.

Sebastian shakes his head. Why didn’t his parents tell their only child about the deed? He looks toward the ceiling, then whacks the top of his head. “Dummy, dummy dummy!” he yells. Of course his parents told him about the deed. It’s just that for all these years, he hasn’t listened as carefully as he should have.

He fingers the loons on the treasure box lid and hears his parent’s voices: Always keep this box, please do, beneath its floor our treasure to you.