Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

Tee dropped the reels on the windowsill and pulled the shade so the light wouldn’t fade them. When he turned back, his mother was in tears. “Give me one good reason not to leave him,” she said.

He tried to think of something to negate the affair. He couldn’t. He kept picturing his father chewing the insides of his cheeks at his uncle’s funeral. “Remember you said Dad tried to film my adoption day, the whole family together, but Uncle Hi never came?” he said. “How it turned out Auntie had threatened to jump off the roof that afternoon? Remember Dad called you after I hit my chin with that toy car, and you argued so long I didn’t get stitches fast enough?” He lifted one hand to his chin as his father would, and rested the other in the middle of the faded square. “We’re family. No matter how much we hurt each other. You can’t do this.”

“These last six months,” his mother started. Her freckles darkened. “I remember everything. Everything.”

That night, after Tee had rescued what he could from the yard, he lay in his childhood bed. He felt the sink spot in his mattress, under his waist. He recalled his father’s voice cracking on the phone in September. Almost seven months had passed, but Tee could still see everything clearly. He was molding Reynolds Wrap to the TV antenna in his studio apartment in Brighton. The breeze took hold of the foil like windmill blades; he pricked his finger trying to set it. On the phone his father said a farmer had found the wreckage of his uncle’s plane in a wheat field in upper New York. A week after the terror attacks. Shock buzzed on the line, as if Tee could uncap the receiver and something would fly out and sting him. He asked whether the crash had anything to do with 9/11. His father didn’t answer. Tee would have to find out from his mother that it was suicide.

As he shifted his weight on his bed, Tee remembered how, as a boy, he had wanted his uncle’s rough pilot hands; he’d once burned himself trying to make calluses. He remembered how his uncle had shaved his lumberjack beard, and they had scattered the hair over Boston. His uncle could make anything a mystery: blisters, beards, surrender.

Finally Tee stumbled downstairs and turned on his mother’s computer in the den, the Internet so easily at his fingertips. He wouldn’t contact his friends. They would only ask why he hadn’t earlier, or why he was home at all. He sat in his boxers and Googled his uncle’s name, finding nothing new. He read the news from Afghanistan. In Prague it was nearly morning; soon the city would turn grain-gold, rippling with sunlight. He found an article in the Boston Globe about a suicide gene. How long had his uncle battled that gene within himself, or had the enemy for him always been life? The past more alive than the present. Like a ghost. Or like how Tee always reverted, in his parents’ house, to a little boy. When he felt exhausted of the Internet, Tee held up one of his father’s film reels to a flashlight, frame by frame. His uncle stood by the plane he’d started his business with, grinning as he always did in the air. It had been a huge bank loan that could have crushed him. He cut a disembodied ribbon. The camera moved over the shining metal, across his uncle’s arm to that familiar bearded face. Then, in a couple of frames, something strange happened. For what was merely an instant in film time, his uncle’s expression shifted and he looked — those fifteen years ago — like a man who was always going to kill himself. A few frames later, he seemed again brimming with life. Tee felt desperate to return to Prague.

When his father came back, two days later, Tee drove his mother’s SUV to the hotel. His father stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. “You won’t let me in?” Tee asked. They talked for a minute about the thermal spa in Oregon, until Tee said, “What are you hiding?”

Inside, penciled movie frames covered the walls, sweeping drawings of towers and eyes and a plane broken in a field. The drawings curled up the walls, almost to the ceiling. Tee wondered how his father had reached up there. He stared for a long time. Was this how a person lost his mind? Only his family could have recognized what his father had drawn. The old fixations. After the crash, when his uncle’s death received minimal coverage, his father had called the local news stations and begged them to see his point of view — their personal tragedy lost in the scope of the towers. As Tee studied the drawings, he remembered being painted in Prague, his doodling on napkins and coasters. What was his connection to these walls? To his father? They shared no genetics, yet he felt as if these frames could be running in his own mind. He couldn’t let them.

His father dropped his chin and whispered an apology, as if what he should be sorry for was re-creating what had happened, not what had happened itself. Tee was the adult now. Their roles had switched. He was bringing home the boy who had run away. Except his father had been kicked out.

“You know your mom checked your auntie into an institution?”

Tee opened the closet, expecting to find more sketches. “Was it easy?” he asked. “To love someone else? Your brother’s wife?” Only clothing, hung neatly for a long stay.

His father twitched his long nose, raised an eyebrow.

At the wake, Tee’s aunt had run to the urn screaming that she should be inside, it was all her fault. No one had restrained her. Then everyone had.

“Were you happier with her?” Tee asked, pulling down a suit.

“I’m still your dad,” his father said.

“Was she happier with you?”

Finally his father sat on the bed, shivering in the air-conditioning, in April. Tee tried to imagine the guilt of causing a brother’s death. But his father, as always, was in denial.

“The hangers aren’t mine,” his father said.

Tee threw everything on the floor, a heap of creases. His container emptied. “Since when have you worried about what’s yours or not?” he shouted. He thought for a second of the closet full of paintings of Katka, the feel of the thick brushstrokes under his fingers, the shadow in the hall.

As they packed and erased his father’s drawings, Tee held his tongue. His father was confused. It was like the week his father had lain in bed, speaking gibberish, after having his wisdom teeth removed, like a teenager. Dry sockets and codeine. Tee was nine. His mother mixed milk shakes. His aunt came over. One morning his father stared into the room and said hello in Korean, Annyeong haseyo , and they all turned to see who it was, he seemed so sure. Another time, he looked at Tee’s aunt and said, “Zoe.” His aunt reddened. Tee’s mother smiled and asked what she could do. It had always been like that with his father: you never knew where you stood.

On the drive back to the house, the suitcases banging in the trunk, a plane flew low overhead. His father said his uncle’s hangar had been sold.

Tee had stacked the boxes he’d saved from the yard sale in his father’s office; he moved his father in among his old things. His mother stared from the hall and clicked her teeth together. His father’s cheeks hung like a bulldog’s as she listed what she deserved in the divorce. She rapped her nails against the wood with each item. Car. House. Peace of mind.

Each time Tee entered the office, his father had sketched another scene across the walls. “Memory lives longer than anything else,” his father said. He turned and seemed to breathe in the pencil, then rested his forehead where the projection screen had hung, in the same spot Tee had put his hand. “You can’t change it.”

“But you can change your life,” Tee said.

“I’ve been paying for you to stay in Prague,” his father said, rubbing his neck.