3rd Place Judge Selection
They had agreed to meet that morning in the parking lot of a diner on the outskirts of Lancaster, next to a farm stand with pumpkins and mums and a handmade sign advertising home-baked pies and jams. Mark and his wife Christina were greeted by Mark’s father and his Aunt Cecilia who were looking as fresh and hopeful as the box of donuts Cecilia held out to them. Mark was still stuffed from the all-you-can-eat Amish style family restaurant they’d eaten at the night before and groaned at the thought of donuts, but he did his best to mask it under a big smile hoping they hadn’t heard him. Mark’s father and Cecilia had come down from Massachusetts for a couple of days to visit them and tour the Pennsylvania coal country sights.
“It’s too bad your sister couldn’t join us,” Mark’s father said as they piled into Mark’s car. His sister, Brie, had moved to the Midwest after graduating from college and never looked back. She had been snatched from a church fair at the age of two and was missing for half a day before being returned “unharmed” to her family. Mark’s parents’ relationship took a hard hit though they’d stayed together until Mark and Brie graduated from high school. Mark was four when Brie was taken and his earliest memories of what used to be a household full of bright, technicolor moments had faded to a cloudy screen long before those high school diplomas were handed out. In the early years after the kidnapping, aunts and uncles often remarked how cute the two kids were, his little sister trailing him everywhere and Mark a little man, a shield between her and the world, seeking out blankets and finding snacks for her, getting her shoes. They were so close then, and they still talked often.
Mark was tall with hair the color of wet sand. He was told often that he looked more like his mom than his dad. When he’d decided to take a doctorate in child psychology his mother was his greatest cheerleader, but her enthusiasm faded fast when he chose to work with the most troublesome child abuse cases. Mark was now in his final year of graduate school and he and Christina were expecting their first child.
“Have you decided on a name for the baby yet?” his father asked. Mark pretended to fumble with the keys, not wanting to meet his eyes. “Not yet, then?” It got quiet in the car. Mark was hoping to avoid another conversation about having the baby baptized. He wondered sometimes whether his fears about taking care of a new baby were normal. Sometimes he broke out in a cold sweat, like when they were picking out the crib, or comparing baby monitors. Neither he nor Christina were religious though, and Mark was dead set against a baptism. His father had gone so far as to say that he could baptize the baby himself, what harm could it do, and nobody had to go to church or anything; it was just like free insurance.
As Mark pulled out of the parking lot, he broke the silence by saying, “We can go out to Pattersonville, if you want.” Mark’s great-grandfather had been a coal miner and his father and aunt were explosive with nostalgia for the days when they’d pile into the back of the family station wagon in the middle of the night to spend a week with their grandmother. They hadn’t been back to their grandmother’s house in Pattersonville since they were kids. Mark had heard the stories so many times over the years he could picture the neat white clapboard and tidy kitchen with the coal stove, but he could care less about seeing the house. He knew his father and aunt would want to go, though; there was nothing subtle about them and they’d talked about it non-stop since yesterday. Mark turned around for their response before pulling out onto the highway in time to see their heads bobbing up and down a “yes” as if they were going for apples. His dad’s smile made Mark think of a child about to open a present.
Cecilia thrust the box of donuts forward from the backseat to Christina who hesitated only a second before taking the box and balancing it on the console between her and Mark. Mark glanced in the rearview mirror to see Cecilia’s candy red lipstick looking as if it were hovering an inch over her round face, in contrast to the innocent, sky blue eyes that could trick you into thinking she was a small child. The day was all crisp sunshine and rapidly moving clouds, the kind that lets you know there won’t be another like it until next year. Then Cecilia declared out of nowhere, “I think our grandmother had all her teeth pulled before she was forty.” Christina shot Mark a look that said “disgusting” and started laughing. Mark covered his teeth with his lips and moved his jaw up and down pretending he was toothless. His father and Cecilia joined in and got so caught up in the laughter they sounded like they were choking. Mark thought maybe the day wouldn’t be so bad after all, and he relaxed into his seat. His father at times could test the limits of his patience.
The road they took brought them through forested countryside and Mark was directed by the GPS down a street lined with grimy brick and wood houses with sagging front porches that looked like they were ready to collapse under the weight of beat-up chairs. The street looked sad. Posters nailed to telephone poles advertised an ATV competition. Christina asked Mark’s father if the brick building on the left was where his mother had gone to school.
“I think so?” he answered, “but I’m not sure.”
Driving out of the town they lost their destination and Mark had to back track to find the road that wound into the hillside. He noticed a difference in the color of the foliage along a wide stretch of the hill parallel to the horizon and about midway along the rise, like a big gash cut into the landscape. His father as if reading his mind called out, “There’s the strip mine!” He’s like a kid, Mark thought.
The road became rough gravel and then dirt, and Mark drove slowly past dilapidated structures and trailers with smoke pouring out of chimneys, the road littered with assorted gloomy vehicles, just a short way to a dead end. “We must have gone by it,” Mark’s father offered without a note of apprehension in his voice. The rest of them looked around with their mouths open. Mark saw a woman wearing an apron over dirty sweatpants holding a battered looking rake watching them. He turned the car around, and Christina turned on the A/C. “It should be on the left,” Mark’s father said, leaning over Cecilia. She pointed out the house a moment after Mark drove past, and he had to back up a little onto the uneven shoulder.
Anyone looking into the car at that moment would have seen a quartet of confused faces staring back. The yard had only random clumps of green sticking out of its steep, bare front lawn where a dirty, diapered toddler appeared to run wild. A confederate flag stretched across a large, cracked front window, serving as a curtain. Mark had scarcely put the car into park when his father, apparently recovered from the initial shock, put a smile on his face and jumped out, walking briskly up the lawn towards a picnic table to the left of the house. A heavyset man wearing a black T-shirt and a trucker’s cap sat smoking, a beer can in front of him with two empties on their sides nearby. Mark, Christina, and Cecilia were transfixed on the scene, frozen, their mouths now shut tight with their arms and legs held in close to their bodies. Suddenly a dog, its head and chest comprising three-quarters of its nearly hairless body mass, ran up to the car out of nowhere, growling, its mouth slick with drool. Mark jumped. “What the fuck!” he said. Cecilia pulled into herself even tighter. Mark’s father was talking to the man who barely looked up at him, then Mark saw his father turn around and walk toward the side of the house, knocking on a door that soon opened and swallowed him up. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Mark said. “What is he doing? Christina, are you alright?” He turned to look at Christina who seemed to be practicing her breathing exercises in anticipation of childbirth, still two months away.
Within seconds, a truck came screaming into the driveway, fishtailing and trailing clouds of dust. The driver jumped out and strode over to where they were parked. He wasn’t tall but his frame was lean and gristly, all muscle and no fat. He came up to the car by the driver’s side window and Mark rolled it down, placing him face to face with the man’s midsection. He saw a chain attached to a belt loop on worn jeans leading around to the man’s back pocket. The man leaned down to look inside the car, then settled on his heels. Mark saw the shape of a knife in his pocket. Mark was beginning to feel a damp chill work its way down his shoulders all the way to his knees. He frowned and said, “My grandparents used to live here.” The man was about his own age, he guessed. Where the hell was his father? Christina was ice-bound, staring straight ahead at the dashboard as if that would make everything happening outside of the car magically disappear. Mark was feeling dizzy. The man hadn’t taken his eyes off the car once and Mark was sure he didn’t know that his father was inside his house. What could be going on in there?
Suddenly the dog started barking, causing Mark and Cecilia to jerk their heads to the left together as if cued. Mark found his voice long enough to say, “My dad’s here, too.” He thought his voice sounded whiney. The man didn’t appear to be listening, and his eyes followed Mark’s and Cecilia’s as he swiveled toward the house, still crouched down. There was Mark’s father, walking across the lawn and stopping here and there, gazing first left and then right, not a care in the world as if he were looking out over one of those scenic vistas on a highway on route to a vacation destination. Mark shook his head in disbelief, shutting his eyes. Christina was still a dark statue and Cecilia a little mouse in the back seat. From this angle, Mark’s attention fixed on a tattoo visible just below the man’s neck, filling the entire space between his shoulders. It was an eagle facing over its left wing. The part of the tattoo with the swastika, Mark knew, was hidden under the man’s shirt. Great, he thought. Neo-Nazis. “Dad!” he called out. “There’s my father,” he said to the back of the man, who was slowly rising from his heels.
They didn’t leave right away, of course. Mark could have called that one. His father greeted the man and the two started talking as if they’d been neighbors for years. They talked about the house, about Mark’s family; the man was giving Mark’s father a run-down about all the work he’d done on the house, his hands gesturing non-stop. Christina still hadn’t moved, but Cecilia started coming to life in a sort of dazed awareness. With his father back in sight, Mark was able to relax just enough to take in the whole scene. The house was a dump. There was limp police tape dragging on the ground around a big hole that opened up at the side of the yard. The house was inaccessible from the front porch that had no steps, though a new fiberglass door was installed over the drop. As he stared at his father chatting with this man who ticked off all the improvements he was making to the house, Mark was vaguely aware that the toddler had disappeared out of sight.
What kinds of improvements were these over the chickens and fruit trees and gardens full of vegetables, even the cow that used to be here so many years ago, he thought? How would anything this man was doing to the house excuse the tattoo, and what it stood for? His father and his father’s siblings had picked wild blueberries out back, selling them to a truck that drove through the neighborhood on Saturday evenings in the summer. There was nothing back there now; it was a wasteland. “Dad, Dad! We’ve got to go,” Mark whispered through his teeth.
When his father got back in the car, Mark pulled out onto the dirt road. He drove slowly at first and then faster as he felt the blood rush back into his head and hands, listening to bits of conversation that came at him sounding as if they were overheard between strangers. But he’s fixing up the house. I didn’t see the tattoo. Are you sure? We don’t know that. Look at all the work he’s done, though. See those light areas over there on the hillside? That’s where they’ve re-seeded the strip mines. It’s all good. “Give it a rest Dad,” Mark snapped. “Nothing about that place is okay.” He heard this come out of his mouth without even realizing he’d said it.
The rest of the ride back to the parking lot was dead quiet. It reminded Mark of his childhood bedroom when he couldn’t sleep—so quiet he could hear the minutes advancing from the mantle clock downstairs. He would slip downstairs by himself on those nights in the dark, falling into the enormous soft cushions of the couch where he hid and where his parents would find him asleep in the morning.
It was still early when they got back to the parking lot, and Cecilia bought some pies from the farm stand. They were all hungry, but Christina was tired, and Cecilia was going back home that night, so Mark and his father made plans to meet each other for food later at a place near campus. Mark and Christina said their goodbyes to Cecilia, who squeezed Mark a little tighter than usual.
When Mark walked into the tavern that evening, it took him a minute to find his father. “Hey,” Mark called. His father stood at the end of the long, worn bar pretending to watch a game. An older couple sitting at the bar were the only other ones there.
“Hey,” his father answered, smiling. They moved to a booth under the long chicken-wire windows set into the exposed brick wall. A server came over and they ordered. “Well, that was quite a day,” he said. Mark noticed that he looked five years older than he had that morning. There were dark circles under his eyes and grey hair he hadn’t noticed before around his temples.
“I’ll say,” Mark nodded. The server set down beers in front of them. “What time are you heading out tomorrow? If you can stick around for a while, there’s an art exhibit Christina wanted to see. It’s by a local landscape artist. Would you be up for that? You’d probably like it.” Mark was feeling a little guilty for having lost his temper earlier, but also trying to steer the conversation away from the day’s events. Mark knew he could be short tempered and today had been enough for him.
“I might. Sure, let’s do that,” his father answered. He took a sip from his glass, then set it down and looked at Mark with a certain cast to his eyes that Mark knew meant he had something he wanted to say. His face was smooth except for a bright red scar that extended from his eyebrow about an inch down and to the left in the direction of his high cheekbone. He was not bad looking, solid and barrel chested but not a big man, which made Mark think his father would have been able to move easily around in the mine tunnels his grandfather had worked in before he died. The miner hadn’t seemed real to Mark before, but he could easily picture him now in his mind’s eye, dark and sad under a miner’s helmet with those lamps like he’d seen in old photographs, standing with other lost-looking men. This is my family, he thought; this is going to be my child’s family no matter what.
“Listen, Mark. There’s something I want to tell you.” Mark’s eyes left his father’s face. “That time at the fair, when they took your sister...”
“I don’t want to talk about that anymore. I know all about it.” Mark looked back down at the scarred tabletop. His father’s face darkened as he looked down into his full glass of beer.
“No, no, please,” his father said, an anxious child pleading to be heard.
“I know this, Dad.”
“I know, I know you do,” he paused. “But I need to. You wanted cotton candy or a candied apple, I can’t remember which now. Brie was so strong for a two-year old, she pulled hard and her hand slipped out of mine,” he said, lifting his head to look across the table at Mark, “and she just got swallowed up by the crowd …”
Mark’s head bounced back up. “Are you saying it was my fault?” Mark felt his face flush and close up like his mother’s often did, but behind the closed face he was shocked at what his father had just said.
“No! No, of course not! It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. It was mine, but that’s just the point. Bad judgement, inexperience, whatever. It wasn’t your fault, or Brie’s,” he said. “I didn’t want you to blame yourself. That’s all.”
Had Mark even thought it was his fault, that he was to blame? He couldn’t look at his father right now. He knew children weren’t responsible for the terrible things that happened to them. He was an “expert.” The room darkened a little. A few minutes passed in silence, Mark sorting through what his father had just said, then his father stood up leaning to one side as if trying to lift a heavy object, like a full coal scuttle. He walked slowly over to the bar to settle the bill.
While Mark waited for his father to return to the booth, he felt a shock come from out of nowhere that ran up the length of his body. His scalp tingled and turned hot, then cold, and waves of dizziness propelled him forward, washing over him and creating a sensation of sheer panic that he’d never felt before. Images appeared in a snowstorm that had seized his vision, a maelstrom. He couldn’t see through it at first, but in that fuzzy frame images started to take shape. He saw the child in diapers from earlier in the day at the Pattersonville house. Where did it go, he wondered? Could it have fallen in that big hole? Next, he could picture his little sister, just a baby really, seated on a thin bedspread in a cheap motel room with strangers. The sensation of dizziness continued with images, one after the other like screen shots, of the abused and at-risk children he had already encountered through his internships. He tried to block the pictures out of his head, taking deep breaths, but it didn’t help. He saw all this clearly, and thought he heard a small voice in a language he couldn’t understand at the same time that he realized the truth—that there was no absolute way to protect your children from harm. His sister had been returned, physically unharmed, the kidnappers found, convicted, and sent to jail; but they never learned exactly what happened in the eight hours that she went missing. Whatever she saw, or felt, or feared, she was much too young to understand or to put into context. Still, it was obvious to Mark that this didn’t mean she was unharmed. They were all harmed by it in a sense, the whole family.
Mark knew his father was standing by the booth before he saw him. The panic of just seconds before started to subside and was gone almost as quickly as it had come on. “You do the best you can, that’s all you can do,” his father said. “And most of the time, it turns out alright.”
They walked out into a light mist, the streetlamps and car lights hazy. It reminded Mark of Friday night’s early in the midget football season when they’d race out of the house as soon as his father got home from work. His mother would lob a piece of chicken or something at them and they were off, just the two of them. He hadn’t thought of that in years, how much he’d loved those nights even though he played just one season. He had a sensation of a second heart all of a sudden somewhere in his chest, walking to the car now. At his car, Mark’s father grabbed his arm and gave it a squeeze and a couple of gentle tugs before saying goodnight and turning and walking down the block to his own car.
Mark pulled into a parking space in front of his apartment and sat for a couple of minutes before getting out and walking the few yards to the steps that led up to his front door. He unlocked it and walked in, kicking off his shoes and smoothing his hair, then quickly pushed around the mail on the table by the entrance and left it there. As he walked into the narrow kitchen, he spotted the pile of computer printouts from all the infant car seat manufacturers he and Christina had been poring over for weeks. Christina had left them on the counter top with a pink post-it note telling him she’d narrowed it down to two or three, stacked top to bottom in order of preference. The post-it ended with a big heart drawing. Mark smiled and started thumbing through the printouts as he reached over to his left to the box of leftover donuts from his aunt, thinking maybe he would be a decent father, after all. He pulled the box of donuts closer, flipped open the top and reached in, grabbing one at random as he studied the car seat specs. He bit into one without realizing it, ignoring the bits of glazed donut sugar coating and crumbs that fell onto the counter top.
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