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  “Let’s get it over with,” he said to himself as he hit the call button.

  “Hello?” John answered, not recognizing the number. He rifled through some papers on his desk while he waited for a reply.

  “Hey, Dad,” Wyatt choked out, trying not to sound nervous. “How are you?”

  John raised his eyebrows in surprise and sat slowly in his chair. “I’m all right,” he responded coldly. “And you?”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer the question, so he settled on honestly. “Weird.” He laughed a little as he said it.

  “Well, that’s not really news, is it?” John said. “How are things? How’s Annie?”

  “She left,” Wyatt told him. “She wants kids and thinks I’m unfit. She’s not wrong.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” John said, almost dismissively. “Listen, I was just about to call you. There are some things we need to go over. When do you think you could make some time to come home?”

  Home. The word sounded strange coming out of his father’s mouth. The woman did say he would go see his dad and the truth was, he missed New York terribly. The pizza alone was enough to justify the trip.

  “Whenever you want,” Wyatt said. “I’ve got some time off.”

  “Great. Later today work for you? I’ve got some paperwork to finish up, but I’ll be done in a couple of hours.”

  “Sure. See you then.”

  “See you then,” John hung up and continued going over his files.

  Wyatt put the phone down and sighed heavily, relieved the call had ended, but more confused than before he’d made it. The woman had been spot on about everything she’d said. His father would have called him if he hadn’t called first and he was going to see him. If she was a stalker, she was incredibly thorough.

  Chapter 2

  Wyatt stood at the massive entry of his childhood home. The building that had been erected in eighteen eighty-four was as beautiful as ever. The history and grandeur of the place was still overwhelming. Looking up at the structure, the ornate iron gates and lanterns and the gorgeous stonework, he was suddenly flooded with emotion. He had fond memories there, though few and far between. Playing in the courtyard with his friends, occasionally meeting celebrities. The first time he kissed Annie was right across the street at the entrance to the park. As far as places to grow up in the city went, this was one of the best, in his opinion. But, the loneliness of being left with nannies in an apartment, no matter how beautiful, while his father worked sixty plus hours a week had left him feeling neglected and resentful. Combined with his dad’s general disregard of him in their daily lives, that indifference had created a strange, almost professional relationship between them. In high school, Wyatt had acted out, smoking pot, drinking, staying out all night, all in an effort to get his father’s attention. Once, when he was seventeen, John had caught him in his room with a girl. “As long as you’re safe.” he had said, leaving the teenagers to their business. It wasn’t until the hallucinations started that Wyatt’s father seemed to take notice. It was his buddy’s eighteenth birthday and Wyatt had stumbled in at around four in the morning, drunk off his ass after a long night of partying. He must have passed out on the couch, though he had no memory of getting past the doorway, let alone making it all the way to the sofa. A few minutes later, he was awoken by the sound of a woman crying. It was loud and filled the room, like an announcement over a loudspeaker. He felt hot, so he took his flannel off and dropped it on the floor as he attempted to find the source of the sobbing. It was dark in the apartment, no lights from the television, so he thought it must be a person. He had been proud that his father had finally brought a woman home, but why was she crying? Was his dad a date rapist? Was he going to have to kick his own father’s ass to protect some chick? He checked every room and found no one. Every room but one. He approached his father’s bedroom door and hesitated for a moment while reaching for the doorknob. He knocked quietly before entering, hoping to find his father listening to some weird radio show and not abusing some poor woman.

  What he found was his father, asleep in his king size bed, oblivious to the woman crouched in the corner of the room under the window crying her eyes out. She was wearing a long dress and her long red hair had half fallen out of it’s bun to cover her face.

  “Dad,” he had whispered. “Dad, wake up.”

  John rolled over and stretched. “What is it, Wyatt? What time is it?”

  “Dad, what the hell?” he had said, gesturing toward the very obviously upset woman in his room.

  John looked to the window. “What?” he had demanded.

  “What did you do, dad?”

  “What are you talking about? Are you just getting home? Boy, it’s almost tomorrow. You should be in bed.”

  “The girl, dad!” Wyatt had shouted.

  “What girl?” John asked, turning his bedside table lamp on. They both looked to the corner and they both saw nothing. She was gone. Wyatt didn’t hear the crying anymore.

  “She was right there,” he had told his father.

  “Damn it, Wyatt. Go sleep it off. Tomorrow, we’re going to have a serious conversation about your behavior.”

  The next day, Wyatt drank coffee while his father lectured him about responsibility and thinking about his future. “You’re almost a man now.” He had bellowed. “It’s time to get your life together.” As he droned on, Wyatt again heard the woman crying.

  “Do you hear that?” he had asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “The crying.”

  “The what?” John had asked. “Are you still drunk?”

  “No, I’m serious,” Wyatt had insisted. “You really don’t hear it? It’s so loud.” Just then, he saw the woman standing in the corner of the kitchen wearing the same long dress, her hair still disheveled.

  Wyatt jumped up from his seat at the island. “There!” he exclaimed, pointing her out. “She’s right there! I told you I wasn’t making it up.”

  John looked at the empty corner of the room and back at his son. As a lawyer, John had ample practice at snuffing out liars. He looked Wyatt in the eyes and knew that he believed what he was saying. John’s annoyance turned to fear and the next few years were spent visiting doctors and psychiatrists, trying this and that combination of drugs and therapies. Nothing worked. The hallucinations continued. Besides the crying woman, Wyatt soon started seeing other people that weren’t there, and they were all over. The apartment, the subway, on the street. While accepting his diploma at his high school graduation, he heard the woman’s voice for the first time. Where are you? It had caught him so off guard that he’d nearly tripped. The nightmares came later, in college. His roommate complained about him screaming in his sleep so much that Wyatt was given a private room.

  Senior year, he had come home for Christmas and while there, he had a particularly violent night terror. John had found him, eyes still closed, trying to rip up the floorboards in the living room with his bare hands while screaming, “Hang on! I’m coming!”. The next day was Wyatt’s first day at Clear View.

  Wyatt did his best to push the memories from his mind as he made his way to his father’s apartment. He was more than a little surprised that his key still worked. He knocked loudly as he walked in.

  “Dad?” he called.

  “Study,” John called back.

  Wyatt opened the door to his father’s office to find him on the phone with what sounded like a client. John motioned for him to sit in the chair across the desk and held a finger up as if to say ‘one minute’ before taking a sip of coffee. Guarantee there’s bourbon in that. Wyatt thought, remembering his father’s habits. He looked just as Wyatt remembered him; sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, clean shaven. His father, just like the apartment, hadn’t changed a bit.

  “All right, Charlie, let me know if anything changes,” John said to the person on the other end of the call. “You, too. Tell Elizabeth I said ‘hello’. Goodbye.” He hung up and took a good look at his son. He was
still more muscular than John thought was necessary and his face had grown mournful, like life had beaten him down. He supposed his mental illness and wife abandoning him was the cause of that and decided not to bring it up. No need upsetting him.

  “So, how was the trip?” John inquired.

  “Fine,” Wyatt answered. “How’s your life?”

  “Oh, can’t complain. Work keeps me busy, as you know.”

  “No girlfriend? Wife?” he asked, noticing John still wore his old wedding ring.

  “I have a wife,” John snapped. “She just happens to be dead at the moment.” They sat in awkward silence for a few seconds before John pulled out a file from a drawer and slid it across to his son. “Speaking of which,” he said. “Your uncle, Spencer, died.”

  “My what?” Wyatt asked, having no memory of an uncle at all.

  “Your mother’s half brother. You only met him once or twice as a kid. You were probably too young to remember. He lived in Indiana, barely kept in touch. Anyway, he didn’t have any children and his wife passed a few years ago, so he left his estate to you. There’s his house, of course, in a town called Southport. Bank accounts and stocks that have been transferred to you. There are also a few rental properties and a donut shop he owned that belong to you now to do with as you see fit. You will have to call the bank to get debit cards.”

  Wyatt was flabbergasted. The contents of this file solved his money problems. He no longer had to panic search for a job. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Not much to say,” John said. “People get old, they get sick, then they die.”

  “Is that what happened to Mom?” Wyatt asked. “Did she get sick?”

  “Wyatt,” John cautioned.

  “Come on, Dad. It’s been decades. Why haven’t you told me what happened? This place is like a goddamn shrine. There’s at least one picture of her in every room, but you’ve never talked to me about her. Not once. Why have you never told me anything about my mother?”

  “Because,” John said, his face a combination of enraged and heartbroken. “Talking about her kills me.” He took another sip of coffee, set it aside and pulled a glass followed by a bottle of scotch from his desk drawer. He poured himself a little and drank it, ignoring his son’s disapproving glance.

  “I’d just like to know what happened to her,” Wyatt said to his father as calmly as he could. “I’d just like to know something about her. Anything. Please, Dad.”

  John was nearly shaking, he was so angry. “You want to talk about this?” he threatened. “You really want to bring up all this old bullshit?”

  “Um,” Wyatt answered, taken aback by his father’s demeanor. “Yes.”

  “Fine,” he said, taking another swig and slamming the glass down on the desk. “Abigail was perfect,” he began, tempering his tone. “She was brilliant and funny and so goddamn beautiful, she didn’t look real. She liked The Beatles, Queen and Elton John. She liked to read and watch movies and complain that the book was better. She loved history, especially English history. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, stuff like that. She made me sit through the whole royal wedding, Charles and Diana, you know. I was bored to tears, but I would have done anything she asked of me. That woman was my whole life.”

  He poured another glass and took a sip before continuing. “She was a real estate agent and a damn good one at a time when women weren’t taken seriously in that field. She was tough, put up with a lot of shit that nowadays they’d call ‘harassment’. While I was striking out on my own, establishing my firm, she was the one paying the bills. She was the one that got us into this building and paid the mortgage. It wasn’t easy, but she made it happen. This place was her dream. She worked hard, sometimes seven days a week, and she still had time to attend the events and dinners and bullshit elbow rubbing functions I had to go to to get my name out there, form relationships with people that could potentially become clients. She was charming, graceful, poised. She was amazing on every level and it was because of her, because the fuddy duddies and the DAR ladies all loved her so much, that my firm took off the way it did. In less than two years, I went from leasing an office to owning my own building on the upper west side. She supported me and my dream and I always felt like I owed it to her to be successful, to put in the work to make it grow. Otherwise, what was the point of all her hard work and sacrifice?” He paused for a moment, bracing himself for what came next. “We had been so focused on our careers that we hadn’t discussed when we’d have children. I knew she wanted them, but it was always a ‘someday’ sort of thing. So, we were surprised when we found out she was pregnant, but she was thrilled and seeing her that happy made me happy. I was so fucking happy, I didn’t recognize the signs.”

  “What signs?” Wyatt wondered.

  John poured more scotch into his glass and took a drink. “Of her depression.”

  “Depression?” Wyatt asked. “You just said she was happy.”

  “She was. For a while. She put your nursery together, bought every toy in FAO Schwartz, I think. Spent hours in that room, just sitting in a rocking chair, rubbing her belly, singing to you. ‘Hey Jude’, on a loop. But around the eighth month, she just stopped going in there. She stopped working all together and started sleeping something like sixteen hours a day. I thought she was just tired from the pregnancy. She was edgy, easily irritated, but I thought that was normal hormonal crap. She complained that everything hurt. Again, it sounded normal to me. She was huge. Her back, her legs, her feet. It was all supposed to hurt. She stopped caring about how she looked, even when we went out. I wasn’t about to comment on her appearance. I never bought in to that whole ‘pregnancy is beautiful’ thing. It seems hard and miserable to me, so expecting her to be pretty during that time would have been ridiculous. Then, she stopped wanting to go anywhere. Ever. I wanted her to be comfortable in her last few weeks of pregnancy, so we stayed in. No big deal. But, then, she stopped reading. She stopped listening to music. That was odd, so I asked her about it and she said she ‘just wasn’t interested’. I called her doctor and he said it was ‘baby blues’ and it was fairly common and it would go away after you were born. It was maybe a week before her due date when she stopped eating. Said she wasn’t hungry. At that point, I was worried. I did everything I could to get her to eat. I got her favorite take out, bought all her favorite foods. Nothing worked. I got so frustrated, I tried to force a bite of pasta into her mouth. She threw the fork across the room and slapped me in the face. I was beside myself. I didn’t know what to do.” He paused. “You sure you want to hear this?” he asked his son. Wyatt nodded. John took another glass from the drawer, filled it with bourbon and slid it across the desk. “All right,” he began again. “So, one night, I get home from work and the maid’s freaking out, screaming something in Spanish. I don’t know what she’s saying, but she’s banging on the bathroom door in hysterics. She runs up to me and the only words I can understand her saying are ‘Mrs. Sinclair’ and ‘scissor’. So, I call to Abby to open the door, but there’s no response. So, I start kicking the door, trying to break it down. Finally, I throw all my weight against it and it opens.” Tears started to pool in John’s sorrowful brown eyes. Wyatt was getting nervous. He’d never seen his father show any real emotion in his life. John choked back the tears and did his best to still his voice. “She was on the floor, pale, not moving. There was blood and amniotic fluid everywhere. For a second I thought she had gone in to labor and passed out. But, then I saw the sewing scissors in her hand.” He paused, clenching his jaw and taking a breath before continuing. “She had stabbed herself in the stomach, the doctor said eight times. She lost so much blood, by the time we got to the hospital, she was gone. They said it was a miracle you survived.”

  Wyatt stared at his father, stunned and speechless, and it was like he was seeing him for the first time. When he regained his motility, he picked up the glass in front of him and drank greedily until there was nothing left. He wiped away the tears that had fallen from his own eyes as
he watched his father do the same.

  “You remind me so much of her,” John stated. “Smart, willful. Stubborn. You went off to New Jersey to be a fireman and I hated it. I mean, I hated it. But, I respected it. You did whatever the hell you wanted, just like your mother would have. Ballsy. It’s strange. I look at her pictures every day and I’m fine. But it’s always been hard for me to look at you.”

  “What?” Wyatt asked. “Why?”

  “You never noticed?” John asked. “You look just like her. Your face is her face.”

  Wyatt looked at the picture of his mother that sat on his father’s desk. He could definitely see the resemblance.

  “There’s a little bit of you in here, too, I think,” Wyatt told him, pointing towards his eyes.

  “You might be right,” John agreed, taking another sip of scotch. The two men sat in silence for a while, both of them coming to terms with the conversation they’d just had. Wyatt understood now where his father had been coming from all these years. It didn’t make him feel any better about their relationship, but it did give him a certain kind of contentment. Knowing that there was nothing he could have done to change the way his father had treated him growing up, that John had his own issues that caused him to be distant and maybe blame Wyatt a little for his wife’s death, was somehow comforting. His father was just a flawed, miserable, slightly alcoholic human being.

  “Thank you for sharing that with me, Dad.” Wyatt said. “I know that must have been really hard for you. I appreciate it.”

  “Yes, well,” John said as if waking from a dream. He cleared his throat and composed himself. “I would appreciate it if we never spoke of this again.”

  “I concur,” Wyatt teased.

  “And there’s the snark,” John pointed out.

  Wyatt laughed a little.

  “I really am sorry about Annie.”