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There’s something wrong with Beth's father.
This isn’t anything new. There’s always something wrong with Beth’s father. Ever since their family moved into the more affluent part of Muskegon about a year ago, all the neighbors’ tongues have been wagging about “that Sanchez family” which has quickly refocused itself to “that Dr. Sanchez”. At least, everybody assumes he’s some sort of doctor when he’s got experiments going at all hours of the day. Nobody’s ever seen some sort of degree on him.
“I swear, it’s amazing how not even one neighbor has complained about the noise,” Mom says as she has a last smoke in the setting sun.
“Maybe the neighbors like him,” Beth volunteers.
Mom scoffs. “They like him, all right. He’s a freak. A sideshow they can all laugh at and gossip about.” She flicks the cigarette on the sidewalk and stamps it with her foot. “Nobody takes your father seriously,” she mutters. “Nobody takes anyone in this family seriously.”
Beth knows her mother is just upset, has been since Dad locked himself away in his lab about six days ago. But Beth doesn’t understand how she can be so casually cruel.
“It’s not true,” she whispers, fingers twitching with each breath she takes.
***
“Honey, dinner!”
Mom knocks on the door of Dad’s lab. There’s a creak, then the clatter of several bottles, then nothing.
She knocks again. “Rick!”
Still nothing.
“I swear to Christ, Rick, if you don’t give me some sort of sign that you’re alive in there in the next minute, I’m phoning the police and telling them you’re currently wrapping a noose around your neck.”
Dad mumbles something. Then, louder, “I’m f-fine. Just—I just wanna be alone.”
Mom huffs and then goes to sit down at the dinner table, starting into her food without so much as a glance at Beth. Beth herself just stares at her plate. She isn’t very hungry.
“Mom,” she says abruptly. “Is…is Dad gonna be okay?”
Mom lets out a forced chuckle. “Your father is going to be fine. He just likes making beds that he has no plans to lie in.”
Whatever that means. Beth stirs her potatoes but still doesn’t eat. “Did Dad do something…bad?”
“It’s more like what he didn’t do, Beth. Remember how your Grandpa Rodrigo passed away several weeks ago?”
Beth nods her head. The phone call. Her grandfather had gone to sleep one night and never woken again. Aneurysm. Blood clot in the brain. Completely random. Mom’s tears and sympathy. Dad’s emotionless response of, “Er, okay. I’ll be in my lab if you need me.”
“And then your father went on one of his ‘trips’, remember?”
Beth does. Went to another dimension with his portal gun as he’s so keen to do with no explanation.
“Well, whether he meant to or not, your father missed his father’s funeral and now he feels bad about it. So instead of dealing with it like a normal person, he has to lock himself in his lab and get so drunk he pukes everything out, and then start the cycle all over again.”
Mom rolls her eyes, pulling back a strand of reddish hair that’s now slowly turning silver. She always likes to say she gets a silver hair every time Dad does something stupid.
Beth wonders why her parents got married in the first place. She knows the story: it has something to do with Mom and Dad working together at the university, working on “infinite knowledge” or whatever dumb phrase Mom puts it in. Then Dad got fired for “inappropriate use of resources and students” which was code for “he used a bunch of his students as guinea pigs”. Nobody pressed charges but that was because Mom fought not to, as did a few of his students who thought he was a certified genius. She was furious at him though, refused to speak to him a month after he lost his job.
Yet there is something strange about the entire thing. Somehow their family has more money than ever before; been able to move into a better neighborhood and live a life with no financial concern, even if Mom and Dad are hardly ever in the same room for long.
Beth wonders if there’s something else that makes them not want to talk to each other, that might have something to do with where Dad gets all his money, that might explain why his disappearances take precedence over his own father’s funeral.
She gets up from the table without eating anything.
***
“Daddy, are you a spy?”
She had whispered this confidently to him one night when she was six. It made sense. That’s where he went on all his excursions. Why he couldn’t tell anyone where he went and what he was doing.
Her father smiled. “Y-yeah, that’s right, sweetie. I’m a spy. That’s, you know, that’s why I always gotta go away.”
He said it so plainly, she couldn’t even tell if he was joking or not. Even still she can’t.
She smiles at the memory, at her father working on yet another inane invention which he claimed would “solve everything”. She spent so many of her early years there, just playing dolls or doctor while he worked, his black hair bobbing up and down to some unseen melody. She used to watch with horror and fascination as he’d stub out his cigarettes right on his forearm without even flinching, flicking them to a rare unused corner of his desk.
But then had come the day when Mom had knocked on the lab door and he hadn’t answered. When she had busted down the door through some burst of pure terror and screamed at what she’d seen. Beth hadn’t been allowed to see into the lab but couldn’t help but watch as an ambulance arrived and her father was brought out on a stretcher.
Beth didn’t see him for several weeks after that though Mom went to see him every day. When Beth asked where he was, Mom just said vaguely, “You’re father’s ill. The doctors are trying to make him better.”
And when he did finally come back, Mom put her foot down. “Beth doesn’t go with you in your lab. You do whatever the hell you want in there to yourself and those so-called “inventions” that aren’t going to make us a lick of money but don’t you dare involve Beth.”
Beth didn’t like this version of her father, who didn’t even argue, who just meekly nodded his head with eyes that were bloodshot and dulled.
After that every time Dad had to watch her while Mom worked, he did so in the front of the house, away from the lab. But even seven year old Beth could see his gaze wander back to the lab with longing, how he practically ran there every time Mom finally came home.
It’s only now, more than five years later, that Beth finally realizes what happened with Dad and the lab and the locked door. It makes her have a drop more sympathy to her mother. No wonder she always rags on Dad, she must constantly be in a state of fear that he’ll do something again in that lab of his.
Realizing she’s not going to sleep anymore for the foreseeable future, Beth gets up and plods down the stairs, almost without even thinking to Dad’s lab. She can hear him working on something beyond. He always was more a night owl.
She knocks on the door.
The noise stills. “God, Celeste. I-I-I-I don’t want to talk, okay?”
“Dad, it’s me.”
A click and then the door opens. Dad is far more reminiscent of his post-psych ward days then Beth would like with his bloodshot eyes and shaking hands. But, really, what’s she expecting? It’s not like he’s going to be overjoyed his father’s dead and he missed the funeral.
Dad goes back to his worktable and takes a swig from the wine bottle there. “What-whatcha doing here, sweetie? Your mother doesn’t like you in here.”
“I don’t care what Mom thinks,” Beth says, shutting the door behind her with a little more force than necessary.
Dad shrugs his shoulders. “She’s just trying to-to-to keep you safe.”
from me, goes unsaid.
Beth walks towards the table. She can see a photograph sticking out of the end of some sort of machine, edges of the picture torn and dust sticking to places. The time when Beth informed her father quite importantly that she was going to become a world famous surgeon so he brought home some sort of dead alien creature for her to dissect, coaxing her through the entire process.
All these years he had this photograph in this lab and she didn’t know. It springs tears in her eyes and she has to quickly blink them away before turning to Dad.
He’s trying to mix some sort of…something, but his hands are shaking so badly that he can hardly get a correct reading.
“You want me to do that?”
She thinks he’s going to refuse, but to her surprise he says, “Yeah, why don’t you. My—your father’s hand aren’t what they used to be.”
Listening to his careful instructions, she pours the correct amount of ingredients, watches as they bubble and fizz.
“Now we gotta—we just gotta wait a minute.”
They both lapse into silence.
The liquid makes strange patterns on the ceiling. Beth watches them as they reflect and refract, casting a strange light on her father’s now blue hair.
Okay, that was one of Dad’s experiments that was actually kind of funny. He was hoping to perhaps make something that would reverse aging effects and one day after these experiments he just walked in to dinner with blue hair like he didn’t look a bit different.
“Rick!” Mom had fairly screeched. “What the hell happened to your hair?”
Dad wasn’t even phased. “Well it turns out I can’t re-re-really reverse my age. I did manage to permanently change the genetic makeup of my hair coloring, however.”
Beth laughed aloud at the memory.
“Beth?”
She snickers, “Sorry, Dad. I was just thinking about that time you made your hair blue.”
“Well I’m glad you enjoyed it. Your mother, on the other ha-aurp-nd, did not.”
“Can you do it again, Dad? I want to dye my hair too! I’ve always, always wanted blonde hair.”
“Really. B-b-but I like your hair like this, Beth, it looks just like your…”
Your grandfather’s.
Beth winces.
He’s silent again. More alcohol, he can never have enough alcohol.
“Dad…” Beth hesitates, then plunges forward, “is Grandpa Rodrigo in heaven?”
He pauses mid-drink, puts down the bottle. “As I’ve told you many times before, Beth,” he says in a tired voice, “there is n-no concrete evidence for any sort of afterlife or deity if our world happens not to be a simulation and if it-it-it turns out to be one, well…well we’ve got a very different problem on our hands.”
Before he even finishes talking, she hugs him. He stiffens in her grip, then relaxes.
“That’s it then, Dad,” she says quietly. “You’re just gonna have to live forever. Because I’m not losing you forever.”
He’s quiet for a moment, just hugging her back. Then, with voice thick, “Beth, h-honey, just…I just want you to know that I love you. No matter what I say or do or what I don’t say or do, I…I love you. I will always love you.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
They’re like this, happy and content, for the briefest of moments. Then he jerks out of her arms, saying, “Oh, Beth, it’s ready.”
He goes forward, pouring out the liquid before it hardens into a device he easily pulls from his pocket. Beth notices with horror what it is.
His portal gun.
She…she just helped him to charge his portal gun. She just helped him leave her.
He doesn’t notice her expression, maybe she doesn’t even have one, has already buried her feelings so deeply inside herself. He smiles, “Thanks, sweetie!”
Beth hugs him again, fiercely. She hopes that if she hugs him hard enough, he’ll never leave. She hopes that if she hugs him hard enough, he’ll cracks one of his ribs.
“I love you,” she whispers again. And maybe that will be enough.