You've Been Warned

Suspicious, I lower my camera as if somehow this piece of metal and molded plastic in my hands is the culprit, the cause of all this.

It’s not.

I can see clearly with my own eyes. The square jaw, the bullet-shaped head, the thick glasses, even the narrow, hunched shoulders. It’s him.

My father is standing there on that street corner.

Don’t think, just shoot.

Quickly, I snap a few shots, even though my hands are jiggling the camera insanely. Then I call out.

My father sees me, I know he sees me, but he doesn’t answer.

I take a few steps forward and call out again, louder. “Dad!”

He’s looking right at me. Why won’t he say anything? Or wave? Or something?

I continue toward him, and at last he reacts.

By walking away! Fast walking. As if he’s afraid of me or something.

“Wait!” I yell. “Dad! Please don’t go. I need to talk to you!”

He disappears around the corner, and I immediately sprint after him. Crossing the street, I see him farther up the block. He’s running now.

What’s going on? What can this possibly mean?

I call out again, begging him to stop. “I just want to talk to you! Dad! Dad! Daaad!”

We were always so close, practically inseparable. When I was a little girl, he used to pretend to race me all the time. Back then I knew he was letting me win because he loved me so much.

He wasn’t letting me win now, though. Obviously not now.

Chapter 31

I’M RUNNING AS FAST as I can. The sidewalk is crowded, and I try my best to weave in and out of pissed off–looking people while keeping an eye on the gray coat and crew cut head bobbing farther up the block.

“Hey, watch it!” a woman barks angrily, as we slam shoulders.

“Sorry,” I say.

My father turns another corner. Then he darts across an intersection, just as the light turns green. Cars, cabs, and trucks hit the gas.

But I don’t stop. I don’t even look both ways. I have to catch him—nothing is more important. I’m convinced he’s the answer to everything that’s happening.

Leaping from the curb, I hear tires screeching and feel the hot breezes kicked up from the asphalt by one near collision after another. The huge chrome grille of a bus misses me by less than a foot. “What the hell is your problem, lady?” yells the driver out his window.

You have no idea.

“Please, Dad! Please stop!” I yell. “Daddy—please!”

And just like that, the gray coat comes to a halt. My father turns on the sidewalk, and our eyes meet. We’re maybe fifty feet apart.

“I want to help you,” he says. “But you have to do it yourself.”

“Dad, what’s happening to me?”

“Be careful, Kristin.”

I open my mouth to ask, Why? How? What is it that I have to do? but he takes off again before the words can form.

I cave in to my emotions, collapsing to the pavement. My palms are skinned raw as they break the fall. I look up helplessly and catch a final glimpse of his head disappearing around the next corner.

Meanwhile, people form a circle around me, watching and wondering what my problem is. I know that look. I’ve given that look.

They think I’m crazy.

“You don’t understand!” I tell them, tell anyone who’ll listen or even stare down at me with a look of disdain. “You don’t understand!”

My father’s been dead for twelve years.

PART 6

Chapter 32

ANYWAY, AFTER SEEING my dead father, I can’t get home fast enough, though it’s the very place I had to escape from less than an hour ago.

In the cab back to my building, all I do is stare at my camera and wonder about the film inside. I squeezed off three, maybe four shots of my father. I can’t remember exactly.

But all I need is one.

What’s scarier—that it’s really him or that it’s all in my head?

Practically busting through the front door to my apartment, I make a beeline for the darkroom. And hopefully some answers.

“Hurry up!” I implore the film as it stews in the processing tank. “Move it!” I think this is the only time I wish I owned one of those instant cameras.

I’m so single-minded about getting these shots developed that for a few minutes I don’t pay the slightest attention to what’s all around me. Pinned to the corkboard walls are the pictures from the Fálcon, a morbid exhibit if there ever was one.

But once I notice them, I can’t keep from looking at them.

Bad idea.

Also, on one corkboard are some old shots from my days growing up in Concord, Massachusetts. My mother, my father, my two sisters. And one shot of my boyfriend from college, Matthew, with his head cropped off—which is so richly deserved.

“Hurry up!” I yell again at the developing film.

Finally, there’s something to see.

I pull up one of the shots, staring hard at the image. The gray coat, the hunched-over posture—the man whose casket I saw lowered into the ground back home with my own eyes. It’s my father.