Splattered

Four: Visiting Dad

The first week of November brought rain. Keltie heard it start in the middle of the night, not long after her disastrous exit from Sunset Lane, as a single, innocent drop on the window. She watched it trickle down, her mind blank. Then the streetlight on Benedict Avenue turned misty. Seconds later, it seemed like the whole world was going to drown.

That was the start of it. The wet month. The cold month, the crazy month. The month that changed Keltie’s life for the second time in less than a year. And as far as she knew, she’d been the only person awake in the building to see it.

Classes that week were drab and dull as the scenery outside. Girls slouched at their desks, chewing bubble gum, while the teachers droned away about world history, English, math. Even the science teacher acted too depressed to raise his voice above the maddening drip, drip, drip of the leaky ceiling.

“Miss Burke,” he called out on Wednesday, in the middle of a lecture about the solar system. “How many rings does Jupiter have?”

Goddamn, she thought.

Drip, drip, drip. The bucket in the corner was almost full.

“Miss Burke? The rings?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Agee,” she confessed.

He did not look pleased. “Why don’t you know, Miss Burke?”

“Because I’ve never been to Jupiter.”

Laughter from the other girls, but Mr. Agee only shook his head. “Take a wild guess,” he said. “Let’s see if you’re psychic.”

Keltie gave him a shrug. “Seventeen.”

“A swinnngggg and a miss!” the teacher bellowed—or would have bellowed, had the weather been sunny. “The answer is four. There is the halo ring, the main ring, and two gossamer rings.”

Keltie picked up her pencil and pretended to write this down. f**k Jupiter and its f*****g rings, she wrote.

***

The end of the week found her once again on Benedict Avenue, this time to visit her father. The skies were still gray, the rain still falling. Keltie reached Norwalk’s downtown area beneath an umbrella. The street dipped into an area known to locals as the flats. This was a depressing place no matter what time of year. There were a couple of bars, a couple of law offices. A veterinary clinic, an insurance agency. Cars bumped over a broken railroad crossing easier to ignore than repair.

At the top of the hill was West Main Street. Keltie knew it well—far better than she did Jefferson Street. Empty shop windows gaped at sidewalks devoid of people. Signs that read Closed and Going out of Business leaned on naked mannequins. A red light over the intersection switched to green.

Keltie turned left. She was almost at her destination. She could even see it—a church tower, looming over the business blocks, the maple trees. It stood at the edge of West Main’s residential district. As Keltie walked, houses old as the Civil War began to brood on wet lawns. Their windows, like the ones downtown, were all huge and dark. Nothing stirred at the curtains, but Keltie knew better, or thought she did. These were haunted places. Filled with gray ghosts from a dead time period. Strange knocking noises, antique furniture. Doors that closed by themselves.

The First United Methodist Church may have been haunted, too. Its age—a stone carving near the entrance proclaimed it had been built in 1903—certainly favored the possibility, as did the magnificent archways, three of them, that let on a shadowy porch big enough to park a truck on.

Tucking her umbrella under her coat, Keltie mounted the porch. A candle flickered through a huge wooden door. Stepping inside, Keltie found herself in the church’s nave. It was empty at this time of day, and all the more quiet for the fact. Candles glowed everywhere, providing just enough light to see. A sensation of immense emptiness hovered all around. For a moment Keltie imagined floating on a rowboat in the middle of an ocean.

“Good afternoon,” a cultured, male voice spoke from the shadows. “May I help you, Miss?”

Keltie’s eyes followed the sound to the altar, where a bald-headed priest with glasses was smiling politely.

“Hello,” she said. The priest raised his brows. Too loud, Miss, his face seemed to say. You’re at a place of worship, not a rock concert. “Hello,” she whispered. “My name is Keltie Burke. Do you have a Cameron Burke working here?”

The priest’s head tilted the tiniest bit. “Indeed we do,” he told her. “Mr. Burke is our custodian. Are you a relative of his?”

No, Keltie thought, we just happen to have the same last name by pure coincidence. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

“He’s my dad,” she replied.

“I see. Come this way, please.”

He led her out of the spooky nave—thank goodness—to a well-lit hallway lined with church offices. Computer keyboards clacked away behind glass doors with names stenciled on them. Internet junkies pretending to work. Keltie caught a glimpse of solitaire on one screen, a girl’s bare boobs on another.

The priest turned right. Here a flight of steps took them down to a newer section of the church, where a long, carpeted hallway stretched between doors decorated with cute Thanksgiving pictures: giggling pilgrims, gobbling turkeys.

“Bible studies wing,” the robed man said over his shoulder, as if suggesting Keltie needed to enroll immediately. “The children meet every Tuesday and Friday night.”

“Cool,” Keltie remarked.

They went down a second flight of steps—this one much narrower than the first—that made Keltie’s stomach begin to flutter with unease. She knew, even before they reached the bottom, that her dad was working in the church basement today.

The hallway at the bottom was only a little wider than the stairs. The priest walked quietly (was there any other way for them to walk?), never saying a word, never so much as turning his head to check if she were still there.

“File room,” he said at last, stopping in front of a plain door. “I believe your father is working in here today.”

He opened the door on a room full of metal cabinets. A stack of yellow folders lay on a table to the right. To the left was an abominable beast of a photocopier that looked ready to eat whatever came close to it. Keltie thought it may have last been used during the Carter administration.

“Mr. Burke?” the priest called out.

No one answered, but that was okay. Keltie could see her father just fine now. Straight ahead, half-hidden between two of the cabinets, he sat asleep on the floor, with one arm inside of a mop bucket and the other on a dustpan.

***

“Wake the f**k up!” the priest bellowed. “You shitty old man! There’s someone here to see you!”

Keltie rolled her eyes. Yes, that was probably what the priest should have said, anyway. In a worse world, in a better world, or whatever. Every time Keltie fell asleep in class the teacher would whack her desk with a ruler. Clearly, someone needed to do the same for Cameron Burke.

“Mr. Burke?” the priest put forth, his voice barely louder than what it had been upstairs. “Mr. Burke?”

A stocky man in a blue jumpsuit opened his eyes. He blinked for a moment, then jerked his hand from the bucket. Dirty water splashed onto a scribbled mess of salt and pepper hair that hung over a low forehead.

“Oh s**t!” he cried. “I mean oh darn! Darn.”

The dustpan skidded off as he leapt to his feet, so it did not catch the dirt he brushed, with frantic hands, from his jumpsuit.

“Father McQuillan. I was just on my break.”

“So I assumed,” the priest replied.

Cameron’s eyes fell on Keltie.

And froze. Saying nothing, Keltie put her hands on her hips. It had been over two years since she’d last looked at this man—this tall man with crazy hair and muscles too big for the brain that moved them. She’d gone out the front door on some snowy Tuesday morning, a suitcase under each arm. The detention center on Benedict Avenue, her new home, awaited. Goodbye, Dad, she’d said. But of course he had not answered. Sitting at the kitchen table, he had continued watching the little black and white TV that hardly ever got turned off. He had not answered. Today, like it or no, he was going to talk to her. And he was going to go first.

What will he say? she wondered. Something deep, to be certain. Something monumental. It had been so long since they’d seen each other. Keltie braced herself. Cameron Burke didn’t harbor many words of wisdom, but when he got lucky, oh! When he got lucky he could sound like Robert Browning.

Tentatively, she offered him a tiny wave, a tiny smile. No words, though. No way, not yet. She wanted to hear him get lucky first.

Cameron blinked, shook his head, and said: “Holy s**t and fried eggs for breakfast. Keltie. You’re here.”

***

Father McQuillan went back upstairs, leaving them to catch up on lost time. Keltie took off her coat. Beneath was something like her usual attire: V-necked polo shirt, denim skirt with studded belt, boots. Meanwhile Cameron cast several skittish glances at her, squeezing water from the mop once, twice, three times.

“Did you forget I was coming?” she asked. “The detention center arranged it. Or so I thought.”

“I didn’t forget,” he said.

“You look so surprised.”

He glanced at her again—but again, only for a moment. His eyes searched for a place to rest, bouncing all over the room like one of those rubber ten cent superballs.

“I got caught sleeping,” he explained.

“Was that the first time?”

“No. I mean yes. It was.”

Keltie grinned. “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

The eyes stopped, and at last Cameron smiled a little. “Oh, very mature. You’re growing up so fast.”

“It’s not mine. I think Robert Frost wrote it.”

“So what should we talk about first, Keltie?” he asked, suddenly grave.

It sobered his girl up in a hurry. “I don’t know. I was hoping you could break the ice.”

“You had a bad spring this year.”

“Understatement, Dad. Understatement.”

The other nodded. “My apologies. Think you can talk about it?”

“I guess. I already told Mom.”

“And what did she say?”

She filled him in as he walked her down to the janitor’s office, a pathetic little room not much larger than a closet. A box of glass cleaner rested on a small, wobbly desk. A Cleveland Indians calendar dangled by a shred of tape from a dirty mirror.

“You haven’t seen anyone get their head bitten off since that time your mother spilled beer all over our computer.” Cameron looked at her from behind the desk. “Remember that?”

“Yes,” Keltie said, wishing he’d not brought the incident up. Mom’s lip had been fat for three days afterward. “So you think I imagined it? Just like everyone else.”

“Don’t feel embarrassed, Keltie. If I saw a maniac kill my best friend, I’d be imagining all kinds of funky s**t to explain how it happened.”

She laughed at his choice of words. “Not too many people talk like that anymore, Dad.”

“Like what?”

“’Funky s**t’. You sound like Greg Brady coming home from a Pink Floyd concert.”

“Really?” he said, putting the glass cleaner up on a shelf. “I think I heard someone say it on American Movie Classics the other night.”

“See?” Keltie pounced, vindicated. “Old school, man.”

Cameron sat down, grabbed a pencil from the desk drawer and started going over what looked like a check-list of cleaning supplies. “So how’s your mom?” he wondered, without looking up.

“The same.”

“You mean drunk?”

“Yes. You’ve only been divorced a year, Dad.”

“And what about school? Things going okay there?”

He was still studying the check-list, though the pencil hadn’t moved off the top item. It made Keltie grimace. Either the old man didn’t know what the f**k he was doing, or he just wanted to go through the motions of pretending to care for her grades. Whichever, it was clear to Keltie his posture represented a charade. But why?

“I don’t think the teachers know much,” she told him.

“Spoken like a true teenager.”

“Dad, our history teacher was talking about the Texas Revolution. He said there was a popular fort that got taken by the Mexicans, but he couldn’t remember the name of the fort.”

“But are you passing all of your courses?”

She gave a nod that he didn’t see. “Yes.”

“Good.” Cameron dropped the pencil into a coffee mug. “Sit down, Keltie. I have an extra seat.”

She pulled a plastic stool out from the corner and put her butt on it. She then asked him about work. Was it really so dull that he needed to steal cat naps? Not usually, he insisted. In fact most of the time he was behind schedule. Did she know that janitors not only had to mop and wax, but keep track of chemical orders as well? His hand gestured towards the glass cleaner as he spoke, as if this were all the proof required.

“They expect a lot,” he went on, his eyes blinking. “And it’s not like I’m Hong Kong Phooey, or whoever the hell passes for him these days. I’m just an old guy trying to keep his s**t together.”

“It’s all right, Dad. I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

“I’m not upset.”

“You sound upset.”

His fist pounded the desk, making Keltie jump. “I’m not upset! Well…shit. Now I am.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t say that to me. You don’t owe me any more apologies.”

Now it was Keltie who began to blink. The old man’s tone of voice had always covered a wide range of emotions, albeit most of them could be traced back to the doorstep of his strongest: anger. Contrition, on the other hand, had never so much as stood on a welcome mat. Until today.

“Did I use to apologize a lot?” she chanced.

And immediately regretted it. She watched Cameron’s eyes squeeze shut as if he’d been stabbed with a kitchen knife. Behind them there doubtless swarmed a hive of painful memories Keltie had not intended to stir up. Yellings, cursings, beatings. Once, when she was ten, he punched her in the stomach hard enough to make her vomit the meal she’d just eaten, then had shoved her onto the floor for vomiting. She’d also gone to bed with headaches a lot, none of them caused by too much studying at school.

“I’ll go,” she said presently. “Maybe we can try again next month—“

Cameron leaped to his feet, banging the back of his chair against the wall. “No!” he all but yelped. “No. I’m taking you to dinner. How does Berry’s sound?”

Keltie smiled. “I still love their chicken burgers.”

“Then let’s eat.”

***

They walked back downtown on drying streets (the rain had stopped) to a restaurant that hadn’t changed much since Keltie’d last been inside. Red leather booths lined walls decorated with pictures of black and white photos from Norwalk’s bygone era. A regulator clock ticked over one booth; a badge from Fisher Body hung over another. Diners—most of them old—chatted over half-clean plates in the dim lounge.

Keltie chose a booth on the left side, above which hung a picture of one of West Main Street’s most famous mansions: Number 114. It had been built during the Greek revival era of the early 1800s and was absolutely huge. A grizzled old waitress dropped by with menus for both of them. Keltie went straight to the chicken burger with fries and a Coke.

“This your date for the night, Cameron?” the waitress asked.

“She’s my daughter.”

Keltie saw the waitress’ eyes light up. “The one you’re always telling me about? Carrie?”

“Keltie.”

The waitress smiled and patted Keltie’s shoulder. “Your papa loves you, dear.”

“I’ll have the same thing she’s having,” Cameron said tightly.

“Do you?” Keltie asked, once they were alone.

And the way he blushed when he answered was so cute. “May’s been working here a long time,” he said. “Discretion isn’t really one of her virtues.”

“Do you love me, Dad?” she asked again.

But again he dodged the question, this time with one of his own. “Why is love always so easy for girls to talk about?”

“Because it’s pure. It’s good. It’s the best thing we have.”

“It never sounds that way when I talk about it.”

“You’re letting it make you uncomfortable. Don’t.”

May came back with two glasses of water, then disappeared again. It gave Cameron time to change the subject.

“So when’s your birthday?” he wanted to know. “December, right?”

“The sixteenth, yes. I’ll be sixteen,” she added, as if this were some magical coincidence.

“I can’t believe it,” Cameron said. “You’re gonna be driving next year.”

“Not if the detention center has anything to say about it. I won’t be allowed to get a license until I’m eighteen.”

The food came. They dug in, occasionally touching upon other mundane topics of conversation. Cameron asked if she smoked; Keltie answered him with the bald truth. He asked if she had a boyfriend. No, that department was clear for the time being. This seemed to relieve the tension in his shoulders somewhat. He slouched back in his seat, and when May came by again he asked her for coffee.

“What about the detention center?” he put forth next.

Keltie slurped her Coke. “What about it?”

“Are you happy there?”

“I’m not sure anyone’s happy there, Dad. It’s not a place for happy kids.”

Just then a table on the other side of the room erupted into a song of Happy Birthday. Keltie looked over her shoulder to see a crowd of people gathered around tin foil balloons filled with helium. In the middle of it all was a girl who looked to be about ten years old, a smile glittering on her face. Keltie did not remember her tenth birthday; she did not remember any of them.

“You know, I sometimes hear these stories about reincarnation,” Cameron said, whirling her back to their own table. “Stories that kids tell. They say that before they were born they stood in a giant room with all these grown up men and women. Daddies and Mommies. And they claim to have chosen the grown-ups they thought would make the best Daddy and Mommy for them.” His head tilted. “You know?”

“I may have read stuff like that before,” Keltie allowed. “Can’t say I believed any of it, though.”

“So you don’t remember choosing?”

“Good Lord, no. I don’t think anyone over the age of two remembers what it’s like to be dead. If the stories are true.”

Cameron let the odd conversation stop for a few minutes. The coffee came. Keltie watched him mix it just the way he always liked: cream only. The sugar packs lay unused on the plate.

“When the detention center first called me about letting you come visit I got scared,” he said. “I almost turned them down.”

“Oh?” Keltie replied, curious as to where this sudden turn might lead. “And what made you change your mind?”

“I’d like to tell you.”

“So do it.”

The man sitting across from her sighed. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Keltie. It never sounds pure and good when I talk about it. And I want it to. I need it to.”

“Tell me, Dad,” Keltie said, her tone delicate. “I’ll believe you if you do.” She raised her right hand. “Promise.”

Noises from the restaurant—tingling silverware, muttering voices—filled the space Cameron let draw out between them. On his face was an expression that seemed to ask: Why would you believe me, after all the things I did?

Because this is a new you I’m seeing, Dad. I don’t know where he comes from, but I’m glad he’s here.

“A free strawberry sundae for the birthday girl,” someone over Keltie’s shoulder sang. “Free. Gratis. And on top of that, you don’t have to pay for it.” Laughter from the girl’s table rose over the lounge. Cameron glanced at the celebrants, then looked back at Keltie.

And then he said it.

For the first time in maybe ten years, he said it.

Did it sound sincere? Pure and good? Keltie thought yes. Even now the old man’s eyes were wet. A blink away from spilling tears. Yet their gaze remained steady. The party, the other diners, no longer tempted his humility. Shredded and raw, Cameron Burke was looking at his daughter, and awaiting judgment.

 “I love you too, Dad,” she told him. “Thank you.”