The Gift

I’m heading home, and the world is a smear on my visor. The Harley’s headlight flushes midnight’s soot from the road, a route I know so well I could drive it lights out. Every twist, every turn, every pothole. Not a year goes by my father doesn’t curse the highways authority for their slack repairs. But we’re out in the backwoods and low priority when it comes to road maintenance.

The display shows eighty. This beast can go faster, way faster—trust me, I’ve tested it—but like I said, I know this road. And it’s not just the lack of maintenance. It’s the wildlife, particularly at night, when headlights attract deer, and barn owls use the brightness to hunt.

I glance again at the dial. Nudging eighty-five. I make a conscious effort to ease off the throttle, promising myself I will get there in time. It’s only another seventeen miles. Even at sixty I can be there in less than twenty minutes. The doctor is sure she has days yet. Maybe even a week. And they say there’s still hope, but the way my father’s voice cracked down the phone told me he doesn’t trust their optimism.

I’ve been away for almost three years and didn’t leave under the best of circumstances. My mother had died a year before I left, three days prior to my eighteenth birthday. My sister was only eight years old at the time, and it would be another two years before they discovered she had inherited the same heart defect that had killed my mother. But the disease was progressing much faster with her, and atrophy had already set in.

For the first few months after I left there was no contact. I’d left angry, which made it easier for me, because anger is about blame. It let me off the hook. I’d left and it wasn’t my fault. None of it. I was consumed by my own self-pity and avoiding the guilt that would inevitably trip me up the minute I dropped my guard. I blamed my father for letting my mother work so hard, right up to the week before she passed. I blamed the doctors for not diagnosing her condition sooner. But most of all, I blamed God.

My mother had been a regular churchgoer. She sang in the choir as a child, loving the Harvest Festival even more than Christmas, which she adored. She encouraged both her children to attend Bible School on a Saturday morning. My sister, Elise, would follow my mother around as she tidied the prayer books after Sunday service. Or replaced the flower displays during the growing season. The altar cloth was something she had lovingly and reverentially stitched throughout all her treatments. I’d joined the choir with some reluctance, and it wasn’t long before the distractions of youth took over. I used to laugh and say I was grateful we were not Catholic, as I would have set the confession box alight. But right now, I would bow down to any faith in the world if I believed it would save my sister.

My father put his faith in the science, and the doctors were high priests. Never once did he question their treatment plans, which consisted almost solely of tests and pharmaceutical solutions. When my mother asked to see an herbalist, the request was smiled at and gently brushed aside. Members of the church congregation were discouraged from visiting, my father telling them they could offer their prayers more comfortably from home. Only at the end, when all medical solutions failed, did my father reluctantly allow the priest to attend and give the last rites. The only peace of mind my mother had was her adamant belief in an afterlife.

I focus back on the road. There’s a sharp left bend coming up any minute and my headlight etches the first of a series of warning signs, a white centre with black lettering—Slow Down—followed by one indicating a series of bends unsuspecting travellers never take seriously enough. Either side of me, black and white chevrons both reinforce the warning and act as a barrier to shield the unwary from crashing into the unforgiving trees lining the road, their mighty girths scarred from historic collisions.

To my left, a giant oak looms out of the dark. The size of its trunk tells me it must be into its second century, like the oak in our garden, where my father built our treehouse, rickety with age now. I was only seven years old when one day, right out of the blue, he pulled the long ladder from behind the shed and hitched his toolbelt around his hips. Then for the whole summer, he was up and down the ladder carrying any decent plank of wood he could beg, borrow, or steal.

‘What are you making? I would ask, over and over. But every time I received the same answer:

‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out, boy.’

Boy. The times he called me Joshua I could count on one hand. And he never called me Josh like my mother did. Sometimes I wondered if he’d wanted a son at all, let alone one like me, not interested in football or shooting rabbits and buzzards in the woods. I loved computer games and reading comics, things he labelled shallow. And puzzles. I was never happier than when I was figuring out a puzzle, from Sudoku through to crosswords, you would usually find me frown down, as my mother called it, my eyes scanning back and forth, fingers tapping on the tabletop. It was through puzzles I discovered I had a gift for numbers, and even in our tiny town school, the teachers recognised this and encouraged my ability. They thought I might teach. Even in a university. But I had other ideas. I’d watched my parents scratch a living in the back of beyond and I knew that wasn’t for me. I was barely into my early teens when I learned of places in the cities where big money could be made if you knew the right people. Wall Street, the Dow Jones, hedge funds—when the other kids were out throwing ball with their fathers or, as the years went on, sitting in the bar in the square sipping lukewarm beer—I was figuring out what for me, at the time, was the biggest puzzle of all—a way to leave and have as different a life to my father as possible.

The work on the tree structure had been slow, and it was only as the walls began to take shape on the sturdy platform that I dared to start hoping.

‘Is it a treehouse, dad? Please tell me it’s a treehouse. Is it for us? Can we play in it?’

‘Might be a treehouse. Might be a birdhouse. Might be somewhere I can sit and shoot thieving raccoons.’

My mother would give him an almighty tongue-wagging every time he killed what she would refer to as an innocent creature, with all the emphasis she could muster on the word innocent. My father would snort and retort that no way could a raccoon ever be considered innocent, and anyway, hadn’t she argued she was open to the notion of reincarnation. He was, he said, just helping a few of those innocent little souls along the next stage of their journey toward where they would be closer to Nirvana. She would snap that he was being blasphemous, to which he would argue back it was only when God entered the equation that blasphemy was born, and he didn’t think it applied to otherwise religions. My father had quite an opinion on most things when he had a mind, and he didn’t mind sharing them. But if he didn’t want to tell you something, you would never know it.

Despite his silence about the tree structure, every morning before school and every afternoon I got home, I would crane my neck as I walked the path to our front door, my heart thudding in anticipation. The day the roof went on I was almost sick with excitement.

‘It is a treehouse. It is,’ I cried, jumping up and down in frustration at his intransigence. But still he wouldn’t allow me the joy of knowing, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of anticipation flattened by the fear that all hope would be taken away.

It was on the last day of November, the day before my eighth birthday, the day I prayed the treehouse would be for me, that I came home from school to find my mother not there and my father slumped on the sofa. The light from the open fire etched exhaustion on his face, and it was like the life had been sucked out of him. Two weeks later my mother came home from the hospital with my baby sister. It had all happened in such a hush-hush way, like it had been a secret, but even my young mind could work out that the joy associated with the arrival of a new baby was absent. I didn’t find out until much later that my mother nearly died giving birth to Elise. Her rare blood type had meant they were unable to give her a transfusion and they said it was a miracle she’d survived the blood loss from the birth. Then, when they thought she was out of the woods, they discovered her heart condition. Although she lived for another ten years, she never totally regained her strength. There was no indication then it would prove to be hereditary. When my sister started to show symptoms a year after I left home, my response was to head straight to the best private clinic I could afford. All the tests came back and to my relief, I had inherited my mother’s blood type, but thankfully not her heart defect. I had dodged a bullet and partied long and hard into the night before the reality of my sister’s diagnosis sank in. I would have cursed God, but by then, I no longer believed. In anything. Except money. Tangible. Powerful. You can buy anything if you have enough money had been my mantra. Anything, it turned out, except my sister’s life.

I drop my speed and glide round the bends with ease, catching just a glimpse in my handlebar mirrors of car headlights in the distance behind me. Late for travellers out here. Weekenders perhaps, staying at the newly built fishing lodge on the lake, the one my father ranted about, saying it was an eyesore and a threat to the local ecosystem. He never elaborated on how a few dozen angling enthusiasts a year might bring the local environment to its knees, but it’s a town that change rarely touches in any significant way, so the development was a big deal.

The car behind me is gaining. If they are tourists, they will be eager to arrive at their destination and get a good night’s sleep. The lights disappear briefly, then reappear as the vehicle rounds the bend. I am so mesmerised by the way the lights come and go I’m startled when, without warning, my view of the car is obscured by a flurry of wings, and a snow-white plumage is picked out by the headlights as an owl purposefully swoops toward the verge, its eye on a meal. The car behind is now less than a hundred yards from me and I instinctively open the throttle. Then I turn my head back toward the road, just in time to see it: a magnificent white-tail stag. It stops and turns its gaze toward me. I register his horns. He’s a ten-pointer. A hunter’s wet dream, preferring to see his mighty head hung like a trophy, rather than attached to its beating heart out here in the wilds.

As if in slow motion, I register its hesitation, and the look of curiosity in its eye in the moment before its instinct tells him to run. I don’t register my speed as I swerve to avoid his bulk but catch the acrid smell of burning brakes as the car behind me tries in vain to stop before it hits him.

Too fast, my brain shrieks. Too fast.

I pick myself up. I have no sense of time. Have I been here for hours? Days? My bike lies several yards ahead of me. I look back at the car. The windscreen is smashed, and smeared with something red. My mind recognises it but can’t retrieve the word. I pick myself up and move closer. The redness has a strange effect on me. I think I can smell…I can’t grasp the word for it. I see two people inside the car. At least I think it’s two. The bodies are kind of clumped together. There is more of the red stuff, lots of it, and the smell is strong. I can feel my own heart pumping and my mouth opens and closes, as if I am tasting something. I tap against the glass. but nothing moves. Above me I hear the lone ‘peeee-uu' of a buzzard.

I leave the car and go back to my bike. I think it’s alive. I know that’s the wrong word, but I think it will roar, just as soon as it is upright. I stretch my neck and move toward the handlebars. All at once my instinct is to leave. To do what I came here to do. To do it now.

I am on the bike seat, and again I see the barn owl in the mirror, the beauty of its heart-shaped face, its white breast, broad and open. So stark is the sight against the blackness of the night, it’s easy to understand how it is mistaken for a ghost by those who believe in such things or fear it as a bad omen. I shake the vision away.

Speed no longer concerns me as I fly as fast as I can toward my destination. My thoughts are no longer with the car, or the crumpled bodies inside, covered in red stuff. I have stopped searching for the word I can’t remember. All I feel is the wind on my face as I hurtle homeward, not even noticing the potholes in the road, ignoring the twists and turns, stopping for nothing and no one until I reach the iron bar gate that is all that stands between me and the path to our house.

I alight at the gate, taking in the world in front of me. It is exactly as I left it three years before. The house with its two storeys and gable in the roof that allows light into the attic. The guttering still rusted and leaky. The veranda, a faded pea green from the paint my father got in a winter sale, set out with the cheap modern patio furniture that looks so out of place. My father hated it but bought it to appease my mother the first birthday after her diagnosis. She loved nothing more than to sit with an iced tea and a copy of Vanity Fair. She said it made her feel modern, though most of the time she would be looking over the top of the magazine, watching her growing children climb up and down the ladder to the treehouse, where Elise would play tea parties and I would spreadeagle myself on an old quilt and puzzle to my heart’s content.

Looking toward the house I see there is a light on in an upstairs room. I still have no sense of time, but the moon is high in the sky, way above the roof of the house. I want to get closer, to see inside the room. In the old oak, the treehouse creaks in the wind. From up there I will be able to see inside the room with the light. I move lightly forward, making my way toward the tree. I move onto a large branch, but I am not high enough to see in yet. I move upward then onto the roof of the treehouse. Now I am too high, so I move back down and onto the branch that supports the platform beams. I edge along. The shutters are open, and I can see shadows on the wall. I shuffle sideways until I am at the point where the branch begins to thin and shudder with each blow of the strengthening wind. For a moment I think I will not be able to see inside, but then the shadow moves, and a figure appears at the window.

My sister has her back to me. She’s talking to someone in the room. I hear him speak.

‘Close the window now, you’ll catch a chill.’

‘I’ll be fine, papa. I just want to see the moon.’

I hear my father’s voice. It has a tremble I have never noticed before.

‘You need to rest. You’ve been through so much. The doctors said...’

‘I know what the doctors said. But it will be fine. I know it will. And I’ve been shut up in that hospital for so long. I want to watch the moon. Oh, papa, look.’

My sister moves to the window and leans out.

‘There, papa! Look! Can you see what I see?’

She points. As she leans forward the folds of her nightdress part and I see the scar that runs in a line along her breastbone. It looks fresh, like it was once daubed with the red stuff in the car. What is that word? I can’t remember.

My father leans out of the window so he can see.

‘Come away,’ he says. ‘It’s a bad omen.’

When did he get to be superstitious, I wonder? The man who was once always so rationally inclined.

My sister shakes her head firmly.

‘I don’t believe that. It’s an innocent creature, and nothing that beautiful could be evil.’

My father ruffles her hair.

'You can't always take things at face value, Elise. You just can't.'

She leans further out of the window. Her face in the moonlight glows with life. The she laughs and gives a little wave.

‘Hello owl,’ she calls out.

I move my mouth to answer, but no words come.