My Jack Side

Chapter Seven

    The drive home— our home— is even more quiet, and we make it there in good time. It's like not a day has passed in this house, like if one of the essentially live pieces that make this house a home isn't rotting to a bale of bones miles away.

    If I attend in closely, I'm sure my ailing mind will call up the dull hum of the oven steaming, my brother scolding some video game character from upstairs, my mom laughing at my father because he's 50 and still can't make his tie right.

    My father meets me and sits on one of the sofas, bringing a laptop and a bundle of papers. He unbuckles his wristwatch, takes it off and lays it on the table before flipping the laptop open. I choose the prop stool opposite him, which throws the shelves and half the brown rug length of the sitting room between us.

    He says, “Come closer, why are you so far away?” He laughs, but there is not one note of mirth in it.

    I draw my stool closer to him, the whole awkwardness of the situation reminding me of report card evenings, with the introductory theatrics before I'm put to the boot.

    I say, “I wanted to take my drugs when you called.”

    “Okay?”

    “Yes, I am.”

    Clicking on the power key, the laptop comes to life and washes his face in faint blue light. And he says “Who have you been talking to all holiday?”

    “Dad, I don't understand?” I do not. He's supposed to be Jack.

    “This doesn't have to take so long because I have to be in church for the Pastor's mother's birthday. Don't hope we'll reschedule this talk for any reason because we're having it now. Get? After his burial, I was going through his things in your room. It occurred to me to check everything since I didn't know exactly what's yours and what's his. I'm not my best father either when you serve me something like a dead son to deal with. I had to choose between clearing his things out to help you cope with the fact that he's gone or leaving them so you can always remember him by them, because you looked. . . on your last straw. It was a tough decision, but I'm glad I made it. You even look better now.”

    Believe him, I do. I cut the afro I had big dreadlocks dreams for and I started eating again.

    “I had already decided to clear out his things, but then I realized I wanted a second opinion from a professional. I agreed to meet a counsellor, seek his opinion—”

    “Jack,” I say. “Jack the therapist. You had Jack.”

    “I had who?”

    From my backpack, I grab a drink and two paracetamol tablets and down them, because this is going to be a long solve. And I'd just started to get a bad headache.

    My father says, “I never wanted children, now you see why. Your brother and you, so uptight about everything it made me want to grind my teeth off. If you know something, you tell me. Okay?”

    “Okay, sir. I'm sorry”, I say, but nothing after that.

    “I was partly hoping I'd find a note to us from him hidden somewhere. Your mother needed anything to comfort her at the time, and so did you. That's when I remembered this,” gun-gesturing at the laptop “up in the store. I knew it had to be there.”

    Since he started cutting himself, my brother had withdrawn to the store with his computer, the doors dead bolted, often lying on the brush carpet of beans dust thick enough to wallow an obedient cow in, and sleeping very little. You could hear him chasing something with a stick or sack, things dropping to the floor— an indoor hail of onions, utter stillness following, the staccato of his finger fidgeting on a key. Occasionally, you could hear my mom turn up at the door, crying into my father's chest that her son wouldn't let her in.