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Monty sat in the back seat of the SUV, bouncing down some back road that he didn’t know the name of. The Top 40 Hits of 2010 flickered with static on the radio, just on the cusp of losing signal. His brother Simon smashed the keys of his Nintendo DS angrily. His mother chewed the side of her cheek. Every once and awhile she would glance back at Monty and then flick her eyes away and pretend she hadn’t been staring.
Monty winced, stabbed with a prang of guilt. He stared at the plastic floor mats of the car and didn’t dare look up. He knew that she would just be staring at him again. A sob crawled in the back of his throat.
He wondered if he managed to open the car door right now, if he threw his weight against it really hard and rolled on the ground like all the cops did in the movies, if he would live. And then if he did live (which of course he would the heroes never die in movies) he’d walk across the rest of New York and go live with Uncle Peter and his pretty friend Emma. And they’d be happy to see him. And he’d have a family, a real proper family like he used to have but somewhere along the way he lost.
And he wouldn’t have to see his mom staring at him.
The car lurched to one side on the gravel road. Simon’s game was knocked out of his hand. He yelled something obscene. “Language.” Their mother said coldly, giving Monty a long look in the rearview mirror even though he hadn’t done anything. The red and orange autumn trees flashed past Monty’s window and he pretended that he didn’t see her watching him instead of the road. A pop song about dancing in a club blasted over Simon’s whining. Monty didn’t feel much like dancing right now.
He knew why she was watching him, of course.
He’d known ever since he and Simon had found an old picture of their father, tucked away in long forgotten and dust covered box, when they were visiting their grandma for Christmas. They had opened the box excitedly. They stifled their giggles so the adults down stairs couldn’t hear, hoping to find presents hidden inside. Of course he knew now with all his eleven year old wisdom that an adult wouldn’t put presents in a dusty box. Instead it had been…stuff. Old dusty stuff that looked like it hadn’t seen the light of day in nearly a decade. Tennis rackets, toy planes with worn off paint, and ticket stubs of ancient movies.
At the very bottom of the box, underneath all the junk, was a lone polaroid photo of a young teenage boy holding a tiny ball of blankets that was roughly baby shaped. His face was filled with sheer terror, his eyes wide and lips pursed, as he tried his hardest not to drop the little blanket ball.
“That’s dad, isn’t it?” Monty asked a little too loudly, differing to Simon.
Simon shushed him and then hissed so Monty could barely hear “Yeah.”
Monty had smiled a big stupid smile that made his cheeks hurt, he ran his fingers over the glossy paper of the polaroid. He didn’t like to admit it to anyone, but most of the time he couldn’t even remember his father. Of course Monty knew that he had been a congressman and that he was depressed and ‘simply unbearable’ as his mom like to tell it. Simon would blindly agree and that would be the end of that.
But that wasn’t how Monty remembered it, not at all. When he thought back to his childhood all there was were deep tight hugs that made his chest feel warm and full and laughter. He remembered laughter. And sometimes, when he really concentrated, he swore he could remember his dad’s face. But then right as he was about to grab ahold of the image it would slip back into his mind and he was only left with disappointment.
Simon had craned his neck to get a better look at the picture. “You kinda look like him.” The older boy decided.
“I do?” Monty had squinted at the picture harder, trying to see what Simon was seeing. Sure they both had the same dark brown hair and thick eye brows, and sure Monty always froze up in fear and made the same frantic face whenever a camera was pointed at him but other than that they didn’t look that similar. “I don’t see it.”
“Are you blind man? If I put you in some of Uncle Peter’s old cloths I bet you would look exactly the same.”
Monty chewed his lip, unsure what to do with this new information. Was he supposed to be angry that he looked like his dead father? Happy? Sad? He didn’t know. Nobody had ever told him what to do in this situation. His mind raced from one thought to the next looking for answers without finding any.
After a painfully long silence he finally said “Do you think mom would let me keep it.”
Simon sucked in a breath. “You know what she did to all the other pictures of dad.”
Monty had known what mom had done to all the other pictures of dad. They were stuffed into boxes. And then the boxes were stuffed into the attic, never again to see the light of day. One time Monty had tried to sneak up, just to get a look at one. At least then he could say he knew what his own dad looked like. He’d gotten yelled at for almost an hour.
He never tried to go up to the attic again.
“I’ll hide it.” He had decided, lips pursed in determination.
“You promise? And if mom asks where you got it from, you ain’t gonna snitch on me, right Mont’?”
“Course not.” Monty had grinned, gripping the picture even tighter, his first real secret.
The SUV bounced down the road. Monty felt the picture in his back pocket, he never went anywhere without it as though holding on to it was some strange connection to a past that the boy had never known. Sometimes he would take the picture out and go stand in front of the bathroom mirror and compare his face to the one in the polaroid.
It had only been a year since he found the picture but the resemblance was growing uncanny. It made his skin crawl.
The radio switched to a slow long about a guy crying over his girlfriend.
His mother watched him, her thin black eyebrows knitted together.
“Mom?” Monty piped scarcely louder than the music.
His mother’s eyes darted away, fixed on the road. “Yes Monty?”
“Do you hate me?”
Her eyes widen a little but she didn’t miss a beat “Monty, why would I hate you?”
Monty stared at the plastic floor mats again. His eyes stung and when he spoke his voice trembled “Because I look like dad. And you hated dad. So that means you hate me.”
“We’ve talked about this I didn’t hate—“
“Then why’d you put away all his pictures!?” the boy yelled, hot tears rolled down his cheeks. He wanted to open the car door now. He didn’t care if he died. He shouldn’t have said anything. He should have kept his mouth shut and pretended everything was okay then maybe he wouldn’t be crying.
His mother’s knuckles turned white, she gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Why do you think that I hated you father.”
“Because you always said that he was ‘unbearable’ and you don’t say that about people that you love you just don’t so if you didn’t love him you must hate him.”
His mother closed her eyes, like she was trying to force something down that she had kept in a cage deep within for a very long time. “That was when he was alive.”
“It doesn’t make a difference!”
His mother slammed on the breaks, the seat belt cut into Monty’s shoulder. Simon, who had been transfixed on his game, let out a shocked cry. His mother put the car into park, pressed the flasher button harder than she needed to, and turned around to look her eleven year old son in the eyes.
“Yes it does. It makes all the difference in the world. I was being selfish, I know that now. He needed me, he had just lost his brother and oh god—“ she took a deep breath and Monty realized that his mother had been crying, the corners of her eyes puffy and pink. “I made a mistakes, Monty, you have to understand that. Your dad did too, of course. He made so many mistakes I don’t think I could even count them. But that doesn’t mean that I hated him, you understand that.”
The boy felt more tears falling from his eyes, too fast for him to stop them. The world blurred. “Then why do you hate me?”
His mother managed a smiled and reached into the back seat and whipped the tears from her son’s cheeks with the back of her hand. “Monty I don’t hate you.”
“Then w-why’ve you been staring at me?”
His mother’s smile strained on her thin lips. “You’re looking more and more like your father every day. I miss him sometimes, when I look at you. Do you miss him Monty?”
Monty nodded and tried to stop himself from crying again.