When I was seven years old, as I stood on the winner’s podium at the Junior World Fencing Championships, I became a murderer. I’m not sure why I chose that moment—perhaps it was the reflection of my silver medal in my father’s cold eyes. He looked at his watch, counting down the seconds until he and my mother could return their attention to my sister. Then and there, with hulking fat Tommy Chesterson balling like a baby over his gold medal on the podium above me, I had wished my sister was dead.
Suzanne was thirteen by then. She did not attend the match due to the flurry of readings and press interviews surrounding her début novel. Perhaps you’ve read it: I, Misanthrope, I. It won the PEN award, the National Book Award, a Pulitzer, and a whole basket of others. I don’t see how the book can be avoided. Even my seventh-grade English teacher assigned it.
Suzanne followed up this début with a slew of other successes and spent the last days of her short life reclining on a large pile of money in the basement of my parent’s summer home in Lake Tahoe. Driving to the morgue, I worried that my father would realize that her blood was on my hands, but he was too broken up over losing all of the women in his life in a single afternoon to notice.
“Can you imagine what I am going through?” he asked.
I nodded, but my mind was on that Saturday afternoon in Tulsa six years before, clutching my foil as I stood on the rickety plywood stand that had been painted so soon before the match that my shoes stuck to the surface. Then, with Tommy Chesterson flubbing above me I fired the karmic bullet that today brought down the cable car that carried the female contingent of my family. I slid one hand up under my shirt and fingered the silver medal, which had not left my neck for six years.
“Oh, you’re just a kid,” my father said, turning back to the road. “Your sister would have understood.”
I felt a pang of guilt for my mother and grandmother as I struggled to hide my smile. My father, as if sensing my hidden and inappropriate joy, pulled out his comb. Steering his Mercedes with his knees, he threaded the comb through his shining, tangled hair. I looked away, and ran a hand over my smooth scalp.
After thirteen years and countless sleepless nights concentrating for all I was worth, I hadn’t been able to grow so much as a strand of hair anywhere on my body. The doctors called it ectodermal dysplasia; Suzanne always said that I had the Gollum disease.
My father returned the comb to his breast pocket a few moments later, his hair still a mess. Neither of us had expected his short spurt of grooming to yield cosmetic results. Tidy hair was not his image; the comb was a message between father and son.
§
We beat the media to the morgue, but my father still slipped on his oversized sunglasses before we got out of the car. I was unsure if this was to make him unrecognizable to his own fans or to give the impression that he had spent the drive up to Lake Tahoe crying. Perhaps more than anything it was habit.
Despite his efforts, he was recognized by the receptionist on duty. The poor woman was so overcome by the appearance of my father in the flesh, no doubt more aged and gaunt than she had expected, that she failed to connect his arrival with the normal operations of her employer. After digging through her voluminous black purse, she held out a tattered copy of a Danielle Steele paperback on which my father’s younger and shirtless self was embossed in full color, caught in a passionate embrace with an anonymous brunette. My father, seeing the mane of blonde hair billowing from the head of his doppelgänger, reached tenderly to his scalp before he smiled.
“You’re very kind,” my father said, producing a black felt marker from his jacket and scribbling across the cover of the woman’s book. He handed it back across the counter and returned his marker to its holster. He smiled for a moment, but the poor receptionist seemed frozen in ecstasy. She hadn’t even set the book down; instead, she clutched it to her breast while her gaze remained, unblinking, upon my father.
“Excuse me, Miss” my father said, “but I do have some business to attend to.”
The poor receptionist gasped, as if surfacing from an underwater dream, and dropped her book.
“Oh, Fabian, I don’t know what came over me.” She glanced down at me for the first time, taking in the oversized ball cap pulled down to cover my lack of eyebrows, my dark, sunken eyes, and the look of dread that I wore like a protective helmet whenever I was alone with my father. “Hi there, Little Man,” she said to me. “Was it your wish to spend a day with Fabian?” She turned back to my father and smiled. “I just love that Make a Wish place.”
That my father was known to the general public by a single name did not bother me. That this name was granted by the marketing department at Love Song Publishers, who had purchased the exclusive rights to my father’s image years ago to evoke the unbridled lusting of its faithful female readers, was inconsequential. That I had endured, among the disappointment of never living up to my only sister’s impossible example, my father’s rippling and exaggerated physique capped by his blond mane leering at me from the racks at bookstores, the check-out aisle at the grocer, and even the occasional gas station, hurt, of course. But that never in my short life have I been seen by anyone, my own family included, as a bona-fide descendent of Duane “Fabian” Van Heusen made me furious.
“You’re a fat bitch,” I said to the receptionist, timing the advent of my smile with the disappearance of hers.
My father’s grip tightened around my upper arm, and I was dragged into the nearby men’s restroom. It was the first time in recent memory my father had touched me. I hoped it would bruise.
“What the hell was that?” he yelled when the door was closed.
I shrugged. “She thinks I’m a cancer patient.”
“Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my reputation?” My father released my arm and began to pace the length of the room muttering the names of his publicist and image consultant. I sat down on the edge of the counter, and waited for his tantrum to end.
When we emerged from the bathroom the receptionist was gone. In her place sat an elderly man in a frayed white lab coat, his smooth head covered by a handful of silver hairs that reached from one ear to another. He donned a pair of small glasses as he stood up to greet us, his eyes fixed on my father.
“Mr. Van Heusen, I want to apologize for Marilyn’s behavior.” He reached out a dry, chapped hand. “I am Vincent Redgrave, the coroner.”
My father shook the doctor’s hand and then removed his sunglasses. They stood staring at each other, neither blinking nor speaking.
“When can we see the bodies?” I asked. I was not eager, but I knew it was coming.
My father’s grip tightened again around my arm. I could feel his fingers digging into the depressions he had made earlier. Vincent looked at my father and nodded. He stood up and motioned for us to follow.
We were led down a long hallway peppered with darkened, unlabelled doors. I struggled to keep up with my father, trying without success to step on each of the black scuffs his boots left on the tile. I pushed my luck, and managed to step on nearly every crack between the tiles. What else could happen?
At last the doctor stopped, gesturing to a door on his left. “Are we ready?” he asked.
My father nodded and, as we followed Vincent inside, my father released my arm.
The room was clean, the white of the painted walls erupting from the dark, concrete floor. In the center of the room sat three rolling gurneys, their contents hidden by crisp, white sheets. Vincent stood by the first and waved for us to come over.
“Stay here,” my father said.
I thought about his voice, replaying it in my head, looking for clues to see if he knew that I was responsible for these three lifeless bodies. It was hard to tell. I stood on my tip-toes so I could see the gurney, and Vincent pulled back the sheet and looked at my father. I couldn’t see anything, but my father nodded and Vincent replaced the sheet.
They moved to the second gurney and repeated the act. My father kept his face firm as the sheet was withdrawn and answered with a brief nod. I was leaning as far forward on the toes of my sneakers as I could when they reached the final gurney.
§
I have seen my father cry only a few times, but even then it was restrained, nothing like Tommy Chesterson. But here, as the sheet was pulled back from the third body, my father lost control of himself. His broad shoulders slid down, his head following as if attached by a chain. The heaving was light at first, although rhythmic, and it was several seconds before he sucked in his first wheezing lungfuls of air. He slumped to the floor and ran his hands through his hair, rocking in time with his breath. I turned away from him, fingering my medal under my shirt.
I heard the shuffling of Vincent’s feet behind me. “Mr. Van Heusen,” he said in a voice that betrayed his experience. “Perhaps you would like to come with me?”
I turned around to see my father being led out of a side door. I followed them and listened, removing my hat so I could press my ear flat against the surface of the door. It was cold against the edge of my scalp, and I didn’t hear a thing.
I walked to the uncovered body. My sister’s swollen and bruised face lolled at the end of her neck at a sharp angle. She was almost unrecognizable.
I turned to look over the other two bodies, hidden from me in their death by the long, white sheets, and I felt a sadness building in my chest at having killed my mother and my grandmother with my childish desire. But they were innocent casualties, sacrificial offerings to Fate, who had granted my wish, six years late, in her own messy way.
I reached out for Suzanne’s long, black hair, still sticky and wet with her blood. As a child I had run my fingers through my mother’s golden tresses, and when I was six I had plucked the stray hairs from my father’s brush, laughing as I had snapped them in half with between my fingers. Still, in thirteen years, I had never had such unrestricted access to a head of hair.
There was a rolling cart next to Suzanne’s gurney, on which sat a neatly stacked collection of tools. Sharp knives, brushes, a box of needles, and several pairs of steel scissors lay at the ready. I reached for the largest of the scissors with my free hand.
Her hair was more difficult to cut than I thought. I had not known that hairs gained great strength in number. A few times I had to use both hands to push the handles of the scissors together. When I finished, I brushed the wet clumps of hair to the floor and wiped the blood off of the scissors with the sheet.
I did not have a razor, and so her head was dotted with uneven tufts of black hair. I rubbed her patchy scalp, still strange to my touch, the bristles of her hairs as alien to me as the clumps piled at my feet. I pulled myself up onto the edge of the gurney and reached under my shirt with my sticky hands to remove my medal. I held it out before me, admiring it off of my body for the first time in six years. My neck and chest tingled as if reaching out for a part of me that had been lost. I carefully straightened my sister’s neck and draped the medal over her head. Then, folding my dirty hands in my lap over the doctor’s scissors, I watched my sister’s blood dry into a thick cake on my knuckles as I waited for my father to return.
§
If you were raised in a house with a gun rack on the living room wall, you’d have turned out like Matthew Reidsma. Of course, that was when the house had walls. For a while there it didn’t. Now, he writes for reidsrow.com, edits InkCollective, and coaches his neighborhood’s Dance Dance Revolution squad.
