Till Next Time | completed | currently under re-edit

epilogue 0.1

I watch the faint sunlight bounce off her messy blond ponytails. She was sat on her duvet across from her new babysitter, her arms crossed over her chest. She cocks her head to one side when the babysitter crouches down to her level and I inhale sharply through my gritted teeth. She hates being treated like a child, even though she is one.

"Hello, Anastasia. I am Jessie, your new babysitter." The young woman with earnest eyes, roughly twenty-two years on her, extends her hand out to her.

My daughter cuts her short, rejecting the gesture outright. "It's Ah-nuh-stasia."

I leave the two to their devices when I feel my phone go off in my pocket and move away before being caught eavesdropping.

Will was carelessly tossing the coffee mugs into the dishwasher when I walk into the kitchen.

"How was it?" she asks.

"The very, very usual," I say. Will winces.

When I attended university in Michigan, majoring in English Literature and Contemporary European History and battling with my general lack of direction in life, fate intervened in the form of Will, who walked beer first into me at a party. Between a quickly strung apology in some heavyset Dutch accent and the frantic cleaning of a shirt I did not care about, I learned that Will was an international student studying Molecular Biology and had an aversion to being addressed as Wilhelmina. In the hay days of my loneliness, I practically latched onto her and to my wife Wilhelmina's credit, she held me right back.

I feel my phone buzz in my pocket again and groan as I glance at the name flashing across the screen. Maria de Rosario, Publicist.

"Maria, no calls before 10 on Sundays, remember?" 

"Dude, this is kind of important." She says and then pauses. "Is a John Carrey Baxter your father?"

I would not have been surprised had the phone slipped from hand.

It has been fifteen years. 

Fifteen years since the only whereabouts we got to know of him was from the business segment of the newspaper and occasional headlines in Fox News. No calls or messages on birthdays. No gifts or cards at Christmas. No emails on Thanksgiving. So eventually we stopped trying to enforce our civility on a man with whom I had spent 18 years of my life living under the same roof, the man who was my father.

I always believed if you were forced to stay with someone you someday find a reason to love them.
All this time I have been telling myself that I am a new person, that my past has been buried six feet deep in its own coffin. It is appalling how it took just a mention of him reaching out to awaken a weakness I had to learn to forget for fifteen years.

"He said he doesn't have your personal email. He found this one from your books-" 

A flutter rises inside my chest. He has read my books.

"He wants to meet you," she says.

"When?" I ask.

"At your leisure, he says."

"Is the email legitimate?" I ask.

"Yep. I wrote back and he replied."

Will must have sensed the tension in my voice or is my heart hammering that hard?
She glides closer to me.

I think and I think hard.

"Brooklyn?"

"Can we decline?" I say. I fail to recognize the man who speaks these words.

I am so quick to fall back into old patterns. I smile and shake my head morbidly, leaning over the kitchen island on my elbows to quell the trembling in my hands.

"There's a part of me that thinks you shouldn't, Brooklyn. Honest to God." Maria answers back.

I sigh, the cold hard marble top of the island digs into my flesh as I press down harder on it.