Page 49 of The Lie Maker

We watched movies together, and he saw more of them with me than with my mother, who didn’t share our taste for thrills and violence. He let me watch films no responsible parents should, given my young age, and I loved him for that. Terminator flicks, James Bond, the Alien franchise. One of his favorites was the crime thriller The Untouchables, directed by Brian De Palma. He watched it over and over for that shoot-out scene where the baby carriage is rolling down the train station stairs.

No wonder that was one of the places I went looking for him.

He was the reason I ran away so often as a kid. I’d get it into my head that Dad was hiding out in Chicago, or Providence, somewhere out on the Cape. I’d interpret something found around the house as a clue, a message he’d left for me. A picture of a family vacation on Cape Cod would make me think he was there. I’d watch, for the fiftieth time on a faded VHS cassette, that baby carriage scene and know, with absolute certainty, that Dad was in Chicago. I’d stuff some food and a change of underwear into a backpack and off I’d go.

Once, my vanishing coincided with one of those threatening phone calls. Mom was convinced I’d been abducted, and that I’d be killed if she didn’t come up with some clue as to where my father was. Turned out I was enjoying the view from an Amtrak train.

And as much as I wanted to find my father, I hated him for abandoning us. I hated him for involving himself in things that he had to have known were going to bring him down someday. He had to know that doing Galen Frohm’s dirty work was never going to end well, that his luck would run out eventually.

Sure, my mother could have chosen for us to disappear with him, and I had come to understand, over time, her reasons for choosing not to. And while I had loved her very much, too, I deeply resented her, as well, for her decision. Maybe we all should have gone with Dad. If we had, I wouldn’t have been drawn to themes of abandonment and emptiness in the stories I wrote. Although what do they say? A fucked-up childhood is a writer’s best friend.

Hardly a day went by that I didn’t wonder where they placed my father. Wisconsin or Wyoming? Arizona or Arkansas? New Jersey or New Mexico? What sort of work did they find for him? Was he stocking shelves in a Walgreens? Working on a road crew, flipping the sign from slow to stop? A short-order cook at a truck stop, maybe? Bad as those jobs might be, they were better than prison, or worse, being buried in the woods after Galen Frohm found someone else to do his bidding.

Had he met someone new? Gotten married? If so, did his new wife know about his background, know that whatever past he alluded to when among friends was a total fiction?

Did they have kids?

Did my father have another son? Did I have stepbrothers or stepsisters I knew nothing about?

Had anyone done for him what I was now trying to do for Bill? Did anyone write Dad’s backstory? If so, was there any mention of a son, someone he took to baseball games, someone he took to a pond to run a remote-control boat? Or had I ceased to exist in his fictional history?

Within a few months of my father’s departure, he had ceased to be a subject of conversation between my mother and me. She didn’t want to talk about him, so we didn’t. My musings about where he might be and what he might be doing went unacknowledged. So we pretended to have moved on. (Except, of course, for my occasional, unannounced treks to find him.)

When I was eleven, Mom tried to persuade me that Dad was dead. One night, while eating dinner, there was a story on the evening news about some big-time CEO getting nailed for fraud, and that his conviction had been made possible by underlings testifying against him. I blurted out: “Just like Dad did to that piece of shit Frohm.”

I was expecting Mom to reprimand me for foul language, send me to my room without dessert, but instead she said, casually, “He’s dead.” Then she picked up her wineglass and had a sip of merlot, as if she’d told me it was going to rain tomorrow and I’d better wear my boots.

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“He’s dead,” she said again.

“When? What happened? Did Mr.Frohm find him?”

She shook her head. “Mr.Frohm could hardly find anyone. He’ll be in jail until his dying day.”

“But his people?”

Another shake of the head. “No. Your father had a heart attack. It happened about five months ago.”

That was when I knew she wasn’t telling the truth. But I played along.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to upset you. Like you are now.”

“How do you know? It might not be true.”

“They told me,” she said. “The government. It hardly matters. He’s been as good as dead to us since the night he walked out the door.”

I had walked away from the table, gone to my room, and barely spoken to her for a week. Not because I was upset that my father might be dead, but because she would tell me such an outrageous lie.

I had seen my father within the last five months.

I’ll get to that.

I wondered, later, whether my mother was practicing her lie with me so that she’d be able to say it with a straight face to a man she’d met and was starting to become serious about.

Earl Givins.

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