After a while I didn’t see him anymore, and that was fine. I’d had enough. Enough of being haunted. Because that’s what it was, really. A haunting.
It was time to let go.
And on my eighteenth birthday, that’s exactly what I did.
What I tried to do.
18
IT HAD BEEN A QUIET day. The older one gets, the less a big deal the whole birthday thing is. I get that, and I don’t mind. Tom and Mom took me for a steak dinner, where Tom revealed he was going to buy me a car.
He said we’d go together to the used car lot and pick out something nice. Something safe and reliable. I was ecstatic, and even though I knew the guy was sucking up to me because he was boffing my mom and laying the groundwork for marriage, I didn’t care. A car was a car, and if Tom had ten grand to blow on his future stepson, I was more than happy to give the guy a big hug, kiss my mom on the cheek, and wish them both the utmost happiness.
When dessert came, a tiramisu with a single candle stuck into it, I decided it was time to move on with my life, let my mom move on with hers, and—sure, why the hell not—let old Dad off the hook once and for all.
I closed my eyes and wished, just like I’d rehearsed a million times:
I wish to never see my father again.
I blew out the candle.
Mom and Tom clapped quietly—it was a classy place, after all—and I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders. I felt light as a feather.
Right up until I went to bed that night.
YEAH, HE WAS THERE.
I didn’t notice him at first, the way he was hiding under my bed. If I hadn’t seen him jerk back one clawed, pale hand from view just as I turned on the overhead light, I might have never known he was there.
“Oh shit,” I murmured.
His body was hidden, but he shuffled so his face was near the edge of the bed, then looked up at me from the floor. His eyes were shiny and so sunken into his skull they looked like black buttons pressed into a dirty ball of dough. He leered at me with that black, toothless grin.
“Jonathan …” he said softly, like an exhaled breath.
I didn’t like that he was under there, and I didn’t want to get too close. I went to my desk instead, sat down in the swivel chair and spun a couple times. “You’re supposed to be gone. I wished you to be gone.” I stopped spinning and met his eyes. “I swear.”
“I know, I know ….” He pointed across the room, toward the door and the light switch. “Turn that off, will you? I prefer the dark.”
I shrugged, flicked on the small lamp next to my bed, then went to the switch and flicked it off, killing the overhead light. The room filled with heavy shadows, and he seemed to sink right into them.
“Come to bed, Son,” he said. “Come on to bed.”
I really didn’t want to do that. But I sucked it up, kicked off my shoes and sort of hop-stepped onto the bed, worried he might try to snatch me with one of those clawed hands. Atop the firm mattress I felt better. I rested my head on the pillow, crossed my feet, closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” I said, and felt myself drift, imagining the car I would pick out next week. My father’s voice carried to me from the floor.
“Oh, it’s quite all right,” he said soothingly. “In fact, it was my decision in the end. Not to go on, I mean.”
I opened my eyes at that. The ceiling was a crescent of light against a pressing darkness. The lamp wasn’t very bright, and I’d have sworn it was dimmer than I remembered.
“See, I heard your wish,” he continued. “And the void opened, Jonathan. Opened like a giant mouth, ready to consume me, to let me …
go on.”
I swallowed. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because …” There was an almost childish glee in his voice. “I like it here. With you. And I was thinking, Jonathan, thinking about all the birthdays you have left. One day, you’ll have a girlfriend—something other than your hand, I mean—and then a wife, perhaps. Then, who knows?” He made a weird smacking sound with his mouth. An icy chill stitched its way up my spine. “Children.”
“Maybe,” I said, but the word was choked. My throat was tight with fear, a raw panic I’d never felt before.
“Yes, children. And I’ll visit you, Jonathan, I’ll visit you every year on your birthday. No … matter … what. And then, one day, I’ll visit your children. Won’t that be nice?”
I said nothing. My mind began to race. I started to think of future birthdays, future wishes. Different things I could say, different phrasings.
Maybe if I said it better, maybe if I said it right.
He was laughing, as if he knew my thoughts. Perhaps he did.
A cold hand reached up from beneath the bed and found my arm. Long, bony fingers gripped me tight, as if they’d never let go. I closed my eyes in horror, in revulsion.
