Elias’s old neighbor, Tyler, waits outside airport security to pick him up. Elias was surprised at the offer, given the history between his mother and most of the neighborhood. Tyler, who had moved in across the street fresh out of grad school was now over 50 and had kids who Elias had never met. Tyler had never been handsome, but the scrawniness and sharp jaw of his younger years had melted, leaving Tyler softened and approachable.
“You’ve been gone too long,” Tyler says, embracing Elias briefly, and Elias knows he means it.
“Can you blame me?”
“No.” Tyler laughs and Elias joins him but sobers up too quickly. Tyler clears his throat, and leads Elias toward his old Mercedes that smells of dollar store air freshener and sweat. The ride back is long, leather seats squeaking during the silences in between mundanities. Tyler points out all the new restaurants, tells Elias which ones he should try.
“I don’t plan on being here long,” Elias informs him, and Tyler nods. Elias tries to start a new conversation, but he can’t find anything to say.
“Here we are,” announces Tyler, who appears eager to break the silence as they pull up to Elias’s old home. The one story house is greyer than Elias remembered, some black shingles missing and all the windows are coated in dirt. The concrete path up to the front door is broken up, and weeds are bursting out of the abandoned dust of the front yard.
“It’s more run down than I remember,” Elias muses as he lifts his suitcase out of the trunk. He brought enough clothes for a week, but he hopes to be gone after the weekend. He will be here for the funeral and then arrange for someone to sell the house and all that it contained. Five days is plenty of time to destroy the past.
“Your mother was in no shape to manage repairs.” Elias detects no accusation in Tyler’s tone, but he rushes through the goodbyes anyway. Rolling his small suitcase up the pathway, Elias is thankful for the cover of darkness. No one expects him to come to the funeral. In fact, Elias isn’t sure if anyone other than himself and Tyler will go. Elias lifts up the mat and feels around the dust for the spare key. His fingers find it immediately and Elias almost experiences nostalgia. Just like how walking through the door almost feels like coming home and the smell of burnt corn tortillas that never seems to leave the kitchen almost makes him hungry. Elias knows exactly which floorboards creak and avoids them instinctually, like he had in his childhood. He decides to turn on the lights, though he knows he could find his way around perfectly in the dark. The hanging light in the living room blinks to life and the muted tones of green and beige assault Elias. He walks to the kitchen, turns on the fluorescents in the ceiling and sees the same postcard from Miami hanging on the fridge, held up by the owl magnet he’d found on the street after school in 5th grade. It has remained in the same position, only the postcard betrays the passage of time with its curling yellow edges. Elias never looked to see who sent it, but it feels sacrilegious to even turn it around.
So he does it. Whoever wrote it did so in pencil, clearly not someone who traveled often. Half the message is gone, but Elias can read “-sorry to hear about your situation” and “Send me a picture some time.” It’s signed by Charles and Elias knows that Charles is his father. Elias picks up the phone and dials Tyler’s number. He is grateful when Tyler picks up, not his wife or children.
“Sorry to bother you again so soon.” Elias regrets calling already, he doesn’t even know what to ask.
“Don’t worry about it, buddy, what do you need?”
“What do you know about my father?” Elias has never asked anyone this before. He was a very observant child, he had to be to avoid his mother’s rage, and he knew the topic of his father was off limits without being told. So Tyler tells him, tells him what he’s heard around the neighborhood and pieced together from the few times he interacted with Elias’s mother.
Elias’s father, white, approximately 15 years older than his mother, was a happily married man living in the nicer part of town. The cleaning service Elias’s mother worked for at the time was hired to work at his office and an affair ensues. It’s not the most scandalous thing Elias envisioned, it’s downright acceptable next to incestuous rapes and botched murder attempts. Elias may have never asked about his father, but it was impossible to stop his imagination. He figured his father must have been pretty awful to make his mom hate Elias and everyone else the way she did. But he was just an average scumbag, and Elias knows nicer women who had been hurt more.
“How can I reach him?” Elias asks Tyler and he can hear Tyler hesitate. “Please. I just want him to know she’s passed away.” Elias turns the last two words around in his mouth, realizing it’s the first time he’s it out loud. “Dead,” he adds, savoring the taste of that too. “My mother is dead.”
“Hey, Elias, you okay? You want me to come over?” Tyler’s voice echoes in the receiver.
“No. Just – what’s his name? His full name.” My full name, Elias thinks to himself. He’s surprised by the implication. Though Elias did not have a nurturing mother, he never thought he needed a father, never felt like he was missing out on something. But now that the option is there, Elias is tempted.
“Charles Tripp, I think it was. They said he stayed in Miami, but if you can’t find him there, you can look through my Yellow Pages.” Elias thanks Tyler, hangs up, and doesn’t tell him no one uses phonebooks anymore.
“Tripp,” Elias tells the kitchen, cradling the yellow postcard in his hand, “Elias Tripp.” He marinates in the sound, the perverse joy in meshing the Spanish name his mother gave him with the name that should have been his birthright.
It takes Elias longer than he expects to find his father. He is only a few hours from dawn when he locates the businessman who shares his DNA online. Charles Tripp is a grandfather, long retired, but still in apparent good health, if his daughter’s Facebook is to be believed. He has lived a long life without ever reaching out to his son. Elias is no longer sure what he has to gain from calling him, so he goes to bed. The bare walls and one dollar action figures on the shelves remind him of the nights he spent alone, of his mother’s neglect. Friends were ephemeral, scared away by his mother or the neighbor’s gossip. His mother’s family? He’d never met them, never heard his mother talk about them. Probably Catholic, now that he gave it some thought, probably wouldn’t have anything to do with her after having a child out of wedlock. A bastard. Him, a bastard. Elias lies in his grey sheets, stares at the ceiling, and wonders why he has not thought of this before. Maybe his isolation was a bit self-imposed, easier to blame his mother for everything than to look too deeply inward. Elias thinks he hears birds outside his shuttered window.
Elias can’t remember falling asleep, but his iPhone rouses him nonetheless. He has plenty of time to get ready for the funeral, maybe can already start making calls about his mother’s estate. Elias had meant to pack a black suit, but all he has in his suitcase is a charcoal one. He supposes they looked the same in pre-dawn morning he’d packed his suitcase, mechanically folding each polo shirt and khaki pants. Elias had not told his friends where he was going, and he supposed they would not notice his short absence, every one of them absorbed in the world within their flat, in the trivialities of life that occur in a gentrified neighborhood, like Apple store appointments and walls painted the wrong shade of off-white.
Elias puts on the charcoal suit. It fits him well, the first suit he ever had tailored for himself. Even his mother would not be able to find a disparaging remark to make about it. She would say something about the inappropriate color, however. Good, thinks Elias, let her yell in her coffin. Elias had worked very hard to become a person who would never warrant his mother’s disapproval, even when he was on the other side of the country. He fixes his tie, combs his hair, and dials the number of his father.
A female voice answers. She’s young and in a hurry. Elias asks for Mr. Tripp and the woman sighs. She asks if it is urgent, and Elias says it is. Elias wonders if she is a nurse or if she is his half-sister. Elias imagines telling her, about him and his mother and her father, but she tells him she’ll be back in a minute and the line goes silent. His father’s voice is deep when he answers and Elias wonders if he has just woken up.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but did you know an Elena Montoya?” The receiver is sweaty in Elias’s hand.
“Who’s asking? Who are you?”
Elias panics. He did not plan this conversation out and he does not know how much he wants to reveal. “I just wanted to let you know that she passed away. She’s dead.”
“Who are you? How did you get this number? I don’t know who that is, I’ve never heard that name. Do not call here again!” Elias holds the receiver until the line begins to beep. He hangs up the phone and wipes his hands on his suit. He checks the clock in the kitchen, he has some time before Tyler picks him up for the funeral.
He thinks how cliché it is to pace, but he does it anyway. He wanders from the kitchen, to the living room, until he reaches a closed door. Elias could count the number of times he has been in this mother’s room on two hands. This is where she was found by the nurse Elias arranged to check in on her, two days after she died. The blinds are drawn. The walls are just as bare as the rest of the house. Elias moves toward the desk, even as a child he knew this was where adults kept their secrets. It looks untouched, holy. Elias can already hear his mother’s rebuke, can feel the sharp sting of her slap. Elias decides he has done enough discovering for one day, so he lets the desk sit there. Someone will come by in a few days, weeks, and clear it out so it can be sold. Elias will let his mother’s secrets rest with her.
