The Light Circus

2. Trust builder.

{Will}

I looked for my dad at the funeral. I checked every suit jacket and V-neck sweater; I scanned the crowd for any men crying while I read my mom's eulogy. No one resembled me. No one seemed particularly interested in me when they did the hug and handshake line.

I think he wasn't there. I know what his face looks like now, and I'm almost positive I've never seen it before except on this stupid laptop of my mom's.

A week after the funeral, my social worker dropped off a few things from my mom's house, including a slim, silver laptop and power cord. It's sitting on my desk in my room, playing its infuriating roll of digital images, locked up and mute as it's ever been. Whatever my mom hid behind this lock screen is a mystery to me.

I recognize most of the images on the slideshow—it's me at a dozen Cirque du Soleil shows, the lights and the acrobats spangled behind me. Or both of us on a cobblestone street in Montreal, where we went over summers. I don't love looking at my mom's face now, her high pinched cheekbones propping up her shaded sunglasses above her thin-lipped smile. She looks sick and she was sick and she never told me shit about that until just weeks before she was gone.

I don't know why I'm still mad about that, like it was such a surprise—she didn't tell me shit about anything, ever.

I was watching the flicker of the slideshow trying to fall asleep one night when this picture I'd never seen slid across the screen. I almost fell out of bed trying to pull the thing closer to my face. My mom, young, with ash-blond hair blowing back from her wide grey eyes, under the arm of a tall, older man with brooding dark eyebrows. And a baby— the image was gone before I could absorb it all.

I watched that effing slideshow in the dark until my eyes felt like sandpaper. There was just one more photo I didn't recognize—a baby, dark fluffy hair sticking up to one side like a blackbird's wing. All babies kind of look the same, like they were crumpled up in someone's pocket and imperfectly smoothed out. I guess that's me.

I've caught that picture of my mom with that man a couple times since, but I mostly ignore it now. It makes me feel like there's something stuck in my throat when I look at it, so I don't anymore. One of my summer projects is hacking that thing.

*

I'm shooting hoops in the driveway when a truck pulls up that I don't recognize. One of the doors is red when the rest of the body is rust-pocked white, and the windshield is cracked. This guy gets out and his truck's so big that he's halfway up the walk before I realize he's so big, like a mountain of a dude with a black bushy beard and a ball cap jammed over his head. He limps a little, not so anyone would notice, but I always check legs. His knee or his hip or his back are stiff and one leg doesn't swing as easy as the other.

I'm guessing this is my mentor 'date', but I tear up the ramp and holler through the screen door. "Ethan, someone's here to kidnap me! Ethan, he's a big white dude with a beard, call the cops!" As I'm yelling, I watch the guy for his reaction. He stops a couple feet away, taking off his cap and scratching his hand through a mop of greying hair and looking behind his shoulder like there could be some other big white dude I'm yelling about. He's pretty old to be wearing a ball cap, I think.

He looks me in the face then, his mouth tucked in on one side of his beard. "I'm here for Will?" He talks right to me, instead of waiting for a grown up or looking over my head: top marks for that.

I holler over my shoulder without breaking eye contact. "He's talking to me--Ethan and you said no talking to strangers!"

"Jesus--" Ethan slaps out the screen door, drying his hands on a dish towel. He looks genuinely annoyed—man, so sorry I interrupted your busy day. "Will, the whole neighborhood can hear you."