By Terry Dubow

Featured Art: Day 4 by John Sabraw

When the phone rang at two in the morning, Michael leapt out of bed so as to not wake Natalie, his exhausted wife who’d been working far too much and far too late for a fifty-three-year-old. In the hallway outside his bedroom, Michael looked down at the screen of his phone and saw his son’s face staring at him. It was a photo of Ezekiel as a little boy, which was how Michael liked to picture his son, who was no longer little. He was actually quite tall. Six foot two at least. And old as well. Nineteen with a flop of uncombed hair and a tattoo on his forearm that he still tried to hide from his mother even though there were few if any secrets among them.

“Zeke, you okay?” Michael huffed in a half-whisper. From the hallway, he squinted into the darkness of his bedroom where Natalie remained still, which was good. He worried about her. “It’s after midnight.”

“I know. I know. It’s actually two.”

“Two? Jesus, Zeke.” Michael stepped carefully into the kitchen, barefoot and aware of the loose board that groaned. “Is this about Bandit?”

“No, no. Bandit is fine.”

Bandit was their family dog, a dopey and energetic Labrador mix. Zeke was taking care of the dog for the next week while Michael, Natalie, and Juniper spent five days on Lake Leelanau in Northern Michigan. Juniper was sixteen and as foreign as a fostered cat to Michael. Earlier that spring she’d shaved half her head and pierced her eyebrow. She carried herself in a nearly constant state of anxiety, affront, and aggrievement. Separately, Natalie and Michael had each wondered out loud what they possibly could have done during Juniper’s early childhood to earn this late childhood response.

The trip to Lake Leelanau was designed as a reset. Natalie had billed it as a chance for the family to swim back to one other. Zeke couldn’t join because he was in summer school down in Oberlin where he’d just finished his first year of college. It was a good hour away from the family home in Cleveland Heights.

Michael lowered his voice. “Are you hurt, Zeke? Are you in jail?”

“Dad, it’s cool. I’m okay, I’m okay, but –”

Michael heard the rip of a motorcycle engine through the phone and then Zeke’s breathing. “Zeke, just fucking say it, buddy.”

“I have to ask you something, and I am telling you now that you can do whatever you need to do to me afterward, okay? Like, any punishment is cool, Dad. I’m cool with whatever. Like you could bill me or make me cut the grass this summer or, I don’t know, make me pay for next semester. I don’t know how I’d do it, but I’d do it, you know what I mean, Dad? So, whatever you decide is cool. Cool?”

“Zeke! Spit it out. Our flight to Detroit takes off in like seven hours. We gotta wake up in five hours and then –.” Michael’s chest began to tingle. “Where are you?”

“Okay, so, I’m out of gas.”

“Where? In Oberlin? Call Triple-A.”

“Up here.”

“What?”

“I’m at Millie’s.”

Michael quick-stepped deeper into the kitchen where he turned on the light above the stove. The midnight world blinked open. “What in the living hell, Zeke?” Michael heard himself ask. He was nearly growling even though he didn’t feel rage. He felt helplessness. “That’s over, right? That’s why you’re down there this summer. You’re done! Remember?”

“I know, Dad. Totally. I’m done. You’re right. But here’s the thing, Dad. She called me, which she, like, never used to. Remember that? How needy I got because she wouldn’t call?”

“I know. I know. So, she called, but you’re supposed to just hang up. Right, buddy? We talked about this. That’s what what’s-her-face told you.”

“Jill.”

“Yeah, Jill. It cost $180 an hour for her to convince you.”

“I know. Dad, I owe you guys. You two really came through for me.”

“Zeke, I’ll bring you some gas, and then you’ll go back. You have to watch Bandit, remember?”

“I will, Dad, absolutely, but here’s the thing. It’s not just that I’m out of gas. Millie’s threatening to kill herself.”

Michael paused. Jill, the therapist, brought the family in for a few sessions, and most of what Michael remembered involved breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth to calm himself. With one hand on the kitchen counter and the other cradling the phone, Michael took a few seconds to fill and empty his lungs. “Where are Millie’s parents? Phil and whatever.”

“Joan.”

“Phil and Joan.”

“They’re on vacation. A cruise or something.”

“So, you’re telling me that these two adults left their clearly mentally unstable daughter —.”

“Please don’t, you know, make Millie out to be crazy.”

“I didn’t say crazy. I said ‘unstable.’”

“She’s gone through a lot, Dad.”

“I know, buddy. I know. But they left her, and what I’m hearing is that you need me to help out. Is that what I’m hearing at two in the morning the night before we’re leaving for our own trip — the one we’re hoping will pull our own depressed daughter out of her funk? Is that what’s happening, Zeke?”

Another motor howled behind him. “I’ll clean the attic,” Zeke offered.

Michael turned the stove burner on and off absentmindedly. “Okay,” he said. “Let me put my shoes on.”

Before he stepped out the front door, Michael peeked into his bedroom to confirm that his wife hadn’t stirred. She hadn’t, which was a relief and also a real bummer, he had to admit. This was his moment now.

He drove slowly because he was tired and because he could feel the tickling fingers inside his chest. He didn’t like to call it anxiety because he resisted the fashion of the day to pathologize the human impulse to sense danger from the dark void of the future. But whatever the word, the sensation was there, a slight buzz just beneath his sternum and inside his stomach.

When Ezekiel was born and then three years later with Juniper, Michael had morphed into a captain of a fishing vessel. He could ride the high waves and withstand the whipping winds and then haul in the treasure, the flopping and chaotic treasure. He liked the role and didn’t even look at the weather forecast.

When did it change? He couldn’t tell you. There was no moment, but there was a shift, and he no longer was a captain of a fishing vessel; he was a spectator at a very expensive sporting event he didn’t care about and whose rules he did not understand.

There was also the matter of the hopelessness that crept in through the screens he couldn’t avoid. Blurry and imprecise, the picture of the future was fundamentally bleak. It worried Michael daily, hourly, in equally blurry and imprecise ways. We are a broken people, Michael had concluded. And by “people,” he meant everyone he knew and didn’t know.

When he reached Millie’s house, Michael found Zeke on the curb next to the Ford Focus. Lit blindingly in the beams of Michael’s car, Zeke shaded his eyes, and Michael saw that his son wore his summer uniform: ragged shorts, flip-flops, and a hooded sweatshirt.

“Where is she?” Michael asked even before he shut the car door.

With his thumb, Zeke pointed towards the house behind him. Michael looked in that direction and saw a distant figure on the second-story deck that wrapped around the top of the house like the brim of a hat. There Millie was, lit from the living room’s lamps behind her, a specter.

“What is she doing?”

“She says she’ll jump if I leave,” Zeke said glumly.

“Jesus.”

“I know.” Zeke blew out a breath. “Did you get the gas?”

His eyes on Millie’s still figure, Michael nodded. “It’s in the trunk.”

“Cool,” Zeke said.

“You don’t seem upset.”

Zeke shook his head. “I’m just disappointed in myself. I should have listened to Jill and you. And mom. I’m trapped because I crawled into her web.”

Michael gazed at his love-dumb son, a held breath warming in his lungs. He found it odd where his pride came from in this peculiar family. This was one of those moments, here in the chilled black night on a curb in an expensive stretch of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He loved his boy so deeply that it rang in his bones like a cancer might, like the lingering vibrations of a struck bell.

That said, Michael did not care at all about the particulars of this drama. He just wanted it to be done. He was so tired. “Why don’t you fill the tank while I go talk with her?” He grinned at his boy and tried to will him to stand up.

Pushing himself up from the curb, Zeke nodded repeatedly like a convert. “Will do,” he said.

The walk up Millie’s driveway had the feel of a horror movie due to the late-night silence and the totality of the black air. As he stepped through the pools of butter tossed up from the recessed in-ground lights, Michael felt a belly full of bees — that’s what his own father had called this sensation. The source material certainly involved the ticking clock of their flight — seven hours and approaching — but, if he were honest with himself, it had more to do with his daughter, the inscrutable Juniper, who was probably one rupture away from standing on a balcony herself, daring the trees below to catch her falling body.

He was glad they were doing something, but he had a hard time believing that a trip to Michigan would be enough to call her back to the safety of her admittedly befuddled and inarticulate parents.

“Hey Millie,” Michael called as he approached the house. He had his eyes cast on the wrap-around balcony, waiting for seventeen-year-old Millie to step towards him. “It’s Zeke’s dad.”

“I’m not talking to you,” she called from the darkness.

Michael surmised she was pressed against the exterior wall, out of range of the recessed lighting of the balcony’s overhang. He couldn’t help but feel slightly envious of Millie’s house. It was an adult house — carefully constructed, tasteful, and expensive.

“Well, I need to make sure you’re okay before we leave,” he half-shouted.

“I’ll be dead before you get in your goddamn car.”

“Okay. Understood. But suicide seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“Don’t shame me for having feelings.”

“Nope. Nope. No shame. Just, uh, proportion,” he explained. He had his head craned while he spoke into the empty stage above him. “I know that Zeke moving away to college was hard, but don’t you think there are worse things that will happen to you that will make this experience feel small?”

“Jesus, Michael. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Mr. Jones is fine, but, yeah, maybe I didn’t say that right. But you know what I mean.”

Millie stayed quiet. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a dog began to bark, its sounds echoing through the trees. “I know,” she said finally, a note of resignation in her voice.

“Is there someone you could talk to?”

A wrenched sob bubbled up from above just as Millie, naked, stepped into the light. Michael sealed his eyes until they sparked. He felt ill at the thought that he could now be accused of looking at his son’s girlfriend’s naked body. “I have no one!” she cried. “No one! That’s why I love Zeke. He always picks up when I call.”

“He’s a good egg,” Michael agreed.

“Do you know what it’s like to have no one?”

Michael opened one eye because it was beginning to feel rude to have a conversation with his eyes shut. She was a thin, almost emaciated girl, with a nose that didn’t quite fit her face, but Michael could see why Zeke might pick up the phone when she called. “I do know what it’s like to have no one. It’s scary.”

“It’s a nightmare.”

“Hey, Millie.”

“Yeah?”

“We have to catch a plane in a few hours. Would you mind getting dressed and going to bed and calling your folks in the morning?”

He watched her nod to herself while she scratched her clavicle. He clenched his eyes. He didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to be there at all.

“Where you guys going?” she asked lonesomely.

“The Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We’re trying to help Juniper with her own troubles.”

“That’s sweet. You guys are good parents.”

Michael grinned with his hand on his aching neck.

“There’s a bridge out there that’s supposed to be amazeballs,” she said.

“Maybe we’ll check it out.”

Millie paused to squint into the darkness. Michael figured she was searching for Zeke on the curb across the way, but he was obscured by the inky night and the trees and he was far enough away to be invisible to her. Once he heard the sliding glass door open and then close, he started his walk back to the car.

Hands deep in the throats of his shorts, Zeke shifted his weight back and forth. “How is she?” Zeke called to Michael as he stepped off the driveway.

“She’s fine. I got her inside.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Michael offered his son a water-under-the-bridge-type smile and started fishing for his keys in his front pocket.

“I got bad news,” Zeke announced sheepishly.

“Don’t say that, buddy. Please don’t say that.”

“I know, Dad. I’m so, so sorry.”

“I gotta get to the airport in a few hours. And you gotta get to Bandit.”

“Dad, I’m sorry.”

“What is it, Zeke? What are we looking at?” Michael could hear the alarm in his own voice and, despite the dark night, he saw Zeke’s face shift. “It’s not your fault,” Michael said reflexively.

“It wasn’t the gas. I think it’s the battery.”

“The battery?”

“I think it’s shot.”

“Did you notice a light, Zeke? Did you see the warning light?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I was worried about Millie.”

Michael swallowed a gasp. “You gotta be kidding me, bud.”

“I know,” Zeke said, a bit of defense in his tone that faded almost instantly into resignation.

“You gotta grow up, man. Right? Like, enough of this. You know?”

“I know. I know.”

Michael swallowed, a bit ashamed that he’d shamed his son, but also vengeful towards the forces that made modern parenting such a minefield. Gone were the days, he knew, when a father could scold confidently. We’d lived long enough to learn that shame lingered and poisoned, and Michael agreed that he had to be careful, but he also felt nostalgia for and occasionally protective of the days when a person in his position could simply castigate his son and walk away feeling like he’d done his job and done it well.

 “Get in my car,” Michael eventually said. “I’ll drive you down. You can call Triple A tomorrow and have it towed.”

“You sure?”

“This is one of those no-choice moments, Zeke.”

“Right.” Zeke stepped towards the passenger door and swung it open. “She’s pretty fucked up.”

“She’s young. She’ll get better.”

“You sure?”

“No, Zeke. I’m not. But there’s always the choice to hope, so just, you know, choose it.”

The drive to Oberlin from Cleveland Heights usually took an hour in the day, but Michael felt confident that he could drive fast enough through the middle of the night to make it there in forty-five minutes. Hurtling towards I-71, he saw a workable plan forming. He could be back in his bed by five in the morning, sleep for two hours, and then catch another hour on the plane, and then once they arrived at the cottage, he could nap again and then he’d be ready to do whatever Natalie had in mind to help Juniper. Not ideal but manageable.

“Do you want to listen to music?” Michael asked.

Zeke shook his head. “I think quiet is better.”

“That works.”

The tires spun over the pocked asphalt, filling the car with a rumble. After some time, Zeke earnestly asked, “Do you remember being nineteen or twenty?”

“More or less.”

“What do you remember?”

Michael twisted his head to spy on Zeke, who’d pressed his forehead against the window. What did he remember? Not enough. He could extract events from the fluff of his memory but the exact form of nervous energy and dread and thrill and fear — he couldn’t conjure them — at least not precisely. He needed to say something though. Zeke had invited him in, and Michael knew better than to refuse the offer.

“I remember feeling alone. Like I’d outgrown my family but hadn’t found another home. I also didn’t know if anyone would ever love me.” Michael nodded mostly to himself. He hadn’t remembered feeling this way, but his brain had. This kind of confession always surprised him like discovering an undisclosed roommate in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Zeke said and left it at that. Eventually, Zeke synced his phone to the stereo and played Michael the new songs that he loved. They all reminded him of music he knew — drums and guitars and melodies. Michael found the familiarity unexpectedly comforting. He told Zeke that he liked each and every one of the songs.

Michael worried so much about his children. It was a daily, hourly preoccupation. He worried like his own parents likely had worried, but he had other concerns that swamped the ordinary ones about college prospects, drugs, self-harm, and the rest. He worried more that Zeke and Juniper belonged to the final generation, the ones who mistook the last plank of sunlight from a generous sun for the promise of sunlight forever when the science and the politics plainly suggested that the next sixty years would be a knife fight in a thunderstorm.

And so, Michael took small moments like this one to heart. He tried to memorize the way the headlights split the asphalt into thirds and the sounds of driving mixed with the sounds of unfamiliar songs.

They arrived at Zeke’s rental house just after three-thirty in the morning when the summer dew was already sleeping on the grass. Michael needed to use the bathroom and so stepped out of the car with his boy whose mood had perked up a bit on the drive. As they stepped towards the front door, Michael gripped Zeke’s far shoulder. “Love you, buddy.”

Inside, Michael stepped quietly through the dark to the bathroom that looked precisely as he expected a bathroom shared by three nineteen-year-olds to look. He used the stream of his piss to clean the toilet as best as he could. Looking up, he took notice of a photograph flimsily taped to the mirror above the sink. It was of Zeke and his sister, Juniper, laughing garishly at the camera lens, a beer bottle in her hand, Edison bulbs sagging over her head. She’d clearly felt happy when the shutter had blinked open. Was that the last time? Michael wondered as he zipped and then washed his hands. Where were they? And where was I?

The agonizing mystery of his children tore him up stitch by stitch from the inside, an extended bit of surgery without anesthesia. It hurt him to see what he’d lost and what he’d never have.

When he stepped out of the bathroom, he found Zeke standing in front of him with the strained face of a child who’d accidentally soiled himself.

“What now?”

“Bandit’s gone,” Zeke whispered.

Michael saw that his life had taken on the contours of a sitcom episode. He felt a stream of athletic blood blast through the submerged tunnels beneath his skin. “What do you mean, Zeke? What are you fucking telling me?”

“I think one of the guys left the gate open.”

“Jesus.”

“He’s probably not far, don’t you think?”

“How the fuck would I know? I can’t plausibly know, Zeke? Right, buddy? You understand the fundamental laws of the universe, right? I was with you. And Bandit was here. And Bandit is your responsibility this weekend. Right, buddy? So, would I, I mean, how could I have any usable insight into where my motherfucking dog is, Zeke? I mean, how?”

By the time he was done, Michael felt out of breath and warm. He saw in his son’s wrecked face the burden of living as a lost one, a disappointment with limbs and a heart, and Michael felt the urge to set about erasing the anger and disappointment he had just expressed. It was an instinctive necessity to return the listing boat to equilibrium, and he felt the apology forming, but almost as if it thrust its hand to clasp his elbow, his dignity stole his tongue. This strange new force explained to Michael that he would not apologize for saying what needed to be said: This boy-man had fucked up.

“Fuck it,” Michael exhaled and stepped past Zeke and outside.

He hadn’t run in years, but his legs and breathing fell into line quickly. It was dark still. He looked at his watch while his arm bounced mid-stride. Three-forty-seven. Jesus Mother and Christ, he muttered and huffed on. He called for Bandit in a half whisper, half shout. Bandit! Bandit!

Michael slowed to a walk. His skin burned as did his chest. He was sweating too, but the night air was cool, and so he felt that miraculous sheen on his skin when heat meets cold. There were no sounds except the rhythmic slap of his feet on the pavement.

He was surprised at how his body was responding to this bit of crisis. He felt thick with lactic acid and breathless, but he was doing it. He was moving with some speed. He was alert. The anger he’d felt moments earlier had morphed into something else, something unfamiliar or at least not recently accessed.            

He thought of Natalie still sleeping in their bed. Her slight snore. Her sour breath. He pictured her fellating him and then he pictured her mowing the lawn. It warmed him to consider her multifacetedness. There would be a time when it would be just the two of them alone again, freed from the hourly concerns about their children who would be out of sight and, temporarily, out of mind. With his chest burning, he wondered what that might feel like. He and Natalie could sleep in. They could sleep together. They could hike more often in the Cuyahoga National Park.

He called for Bandit again and thought he saw a rustling on a lawn in the distance, but as he approached, he found it to be a skunk digging for grubs. Michael moved to the other side of the road and began to jog again.

It was true they would be alone, and as that thought turned in his mind, it began to ring differently and a bubble of grief rose in his belly. Alone on a planet with people hell-bent on apocalypse. Alone with his children adrift in anxiety and metastasizing doom. They would land jobs that required them to pretend that the world as it was would persist. They would pantomime through the customs they’d inherited, but then what? How could you buy a house and choose an annuity when the militias in the forests are preparing their sieges and the planet was eager to start over with a new kind of air, an alternate apex predator?

By the time the sun’s first rays lightened the sky, Michael had circled the block five times and ventured down side streets, calling for Bandit the whole time. He hadhalf an hour before he would have no choice but to abandon the search to drive back home in time to shower, finish packing, and head, exhausted, to the airport.

A bark sounded in the distance and then repeated. Michael began to jog towards the sound, which quickly became a chorus of barks. There was more than one dog involved in this escalating conversation. The street angled upwards, and Michael huffed on, and then there he was on a stranger’s front lawn: Bandit with his tongue sliding out of his open jaw. He wasn’t the one doing most of the barking though. An early morning dog walker, twenty paces away, gripped the leash of her elegant Weimaraner, sleek and groomed as a sports car.

“Is that your dog?” the woman shouted towards Michael. She’d covered her body in a light plastic windbreaker and old-school sweatpants. She wore a visor.

Michael jogged until he was close enough to avoid raising his voice. “Yes. That’s Bandit,” he said finally. Bandit launched himself towards Michael and began dancing excitedly in circles around Michael’s aching legs. “I’ve been out looking for him for hours.”

“Well, Bandit has been terrorizing the neighborhood all night!”

“We’re sorry about that. He got loose.”

“That doesn’t matter, sir! He’s your responsibility!”

“I am aware.”

“Are you, sir?” Her dog yelped at Bandit who’d wandered happily onto another lawn, sniffing at the ground.

“I am.”

Pointing, she said, “He doesn’t even have a collar!”

“He usually doesn’t wander off.”

“That’s why you have a collar, genius. In case he does.”

Michael squinted at this woman who reminded him of his mother. “Leave me alone! I’m just trying to get my dog home. Okay, lady? I have a lot going on, you know? The dog got out. The dog will go in. It’s unfortunate, sure, but Jesus. Do you know how hard it is to be alive?”

The woman’s face curled into a question. “Just take care of your animal,” she said and began dragging her yelping dog in the other direction.

Michael waited until she’d marched away before calling Bandit, who trotted towards him with that dumb Labrador smile. He really was a solid animal. Dopey and filled with a yearning to see what was out there, but who was in the position to call that a flaw?

Bandit strolled right past Michael and onto the lawn he’d explored earlier and then squatted to shit.

Michael groaned. “Jesus, Bandit. Why?” He patted his pockets uselessly for a plastic bag that he knew he wasn’t carrying. He looked up and saw the woman and her polished companion glaring at him in the distance. He turned back to Bandit who was straining and grinning, his eyes locked with his father’s.

Michael peered back at the woman who had not budged. She tilted her head and waited.

Behind him, he heard the whir of a motor, the first car of the day. He looked back and saw Zeke driving down a cross street at the end of the block. In a slow crawling blur, Michael caught Zeke hunched over the wheel and could sense his boy’s anxiety and trepidation. Sons could transmit their regrets to their fathers through the air, Michael had learned, and he sensed his boy’s heartache now.

“So?” the woman finally shouted.

Michael blinked at her, the sun rising over her shoulders. Bending down, Michael scooped up in his bare hand what Bandit had deposited. It was solid enough to hold and, he assumed, to carry. He clenched his nostrils. That was really all it took. He started his walk back to Zeke’s house. Bandit followed. There was a plane to catch. There were hands to wash.

---

Over the last years, Terry Dubow has published more than 20 stories, most recently in Clockhouse (upcoming), The Sierra Nevada Review, Salamander, and Painted Bride Quarterly. He’s had five Pushcart Prize nominations in total and one Special Mention. His novels are represented by Lisa Grubka at the United Talent Agency. He’s presently empty-nesting in the Bay Area with his wife and old dog.