The Birdcage

The birdcage sat empty in the far corner of the front room in the redwood farmhouse that was willed to me by my father many years after his death. The estate was in probate and hung up for a while and I made no real effort to settle the matter despite knowing the property would be mine once it was. Father is such a rigid word, one filled with starch and stiff like the collar of a new dress shirt, but I never knew him, and in so being, I couldn’t ever call him dad. But that fact doesn’t take away from how much I wanted to call him dad all my life. How much I wanted to know him and understand where he went and why he was never in my life. I had some suspicions and a cast of suspects like those in Clue. But nothing was ever confirmed. Only that he did time in prison for something I don’t know that he did or didn’t do.

I had such an eagerness to the point of obsession to know him that I cannot describe it rightly because my mind is in chaos whenever I think of it, despite myself being a writer and supposedly proficient at organizing chaotic thoughts and wildfire imagination. A damn good writer, my wife reminds me. She toots my horn about how many copies my last novel sold, which matters to everyone but real writers, and she rarely introduces me without prefacing the introduction with “New York Times best-selling author Charlie O’Dell.” My God, I love my wife and appreciate her support. I held her hand as we walked into the beautiful home together, like two kids walking into an old haunted house. The hair on our legs and arms stood on end and our palms were clammy.

Of all the curiosities, including my father’s collection of forty-seven strange and operable cuckoo clocks, a legion of dangling marionettes of various fashions, and twenty-seven paintings of Christ in different stages of crucifixion, along with rich, colorful paintings of brokenhearted love scenes with abstract kinds-of-people in obvious states of emotional distress, and an array of antiques that range from carnival art banners to old war relics, the birdcage caught my eye and seemed to be something more meaningful, something metaphoric, but in how I did not know. I was sure though at some point it would inspire a story and I put it in that writer’s pocket we writers all share and I smiled at it. But I knew I couldn’t write a good story about my absent father because it was too personal to me. And my stories involved things from out of this world. Very far-fetched and impersonal things, like other worlds that don’t exist, society in a thousand years, galaxy-hopping aliens, werewolves, vampires, things you can never really get too close to. That which solely lies in the pages of a book or on a movie screen and nowhere else. I was never able to write anything personal other than love letters to my wife which were never published, nor ever would be.

My wife didn’t seem to notice the birdcage at all and went on into the kitchen to assess what she had to work with, likely envisioning Thanksgiving dinners and Christmases. We were moving in in a month so to raise our kids in the country near where we both grew up. The house sat on fourteen mostly wooded acres out Ireland Road between Lancaster and Bremen, both very small towns. Bremen, though, was hardly a town at all. New York was fun, but New York was never home for either of us, and unless you were born to it, I cannot see how it could be home to anyone. It changes so frequently; the New York of 1980 is certainly not that of 1990 or that of 2020. But it is different in a small town. There are always the same frogs and owls at night and quiet country back roads to get lost on if you ever want to get lost and the same faces at the same places.

I was staring at the birdcage when my wife called out to me to come quick. When I went to see her she was standing in an open doorway smiling like a goof. Off the kitchen there was a room, presumably once a large pantry, that my father had turned into a study. There was a handmade bookcase with old books, classics like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and a roll-top desk and a small but comfortable wood chair that spun around. I sat down and the chair croaked and my wife smiled at me. I must have looked like a giddy-little schoolboy spinning around with my feet pushing me before finally lifting them up and letting myself complete the 360 rotation. I stopped myself by putting my hands on the front of the desk and smiled back at her. She was a beautiful woman, but I could hardly describe her as well as I ought.

The sliding door on the roll-top desk was closed and locked and I couldn’t find the key. Annie said I could pick it with a nail file, but I looked up at her suspiciously and shook my head. “I think I need the key,” I replied calmly.

She shook her head and smiled and went back into the kitchen. “We’ll need to update the appliances, but I love it, Charlie!”

“I do to,” I agreed, spinning around again like a boy. I got up and walked back to the birdcage across the creaking wood floors. The door was open as though it were stuck, but I didn’t touch it as though I were afraid. But I wasn’t afraid. I don’t know what I was. The cage was flat black and looked like an antique by the aging of the metal and the gothic design of it. The cathedral top sort of shaped into a tear drop and dripped from the stream of an ornate black chain that clung to a fancy large hook in the ceiling that resembled a crooked finger. They don’t make things like they used to, I thought. Not like this. This old house. These cuckoo clocks. These marionettes. Or my father. I was happy that I shared my father’s weirdness and love of peculiar things, apparently. His love of eye-catching antiques. And though Annie said we had to get rid of the creepy marionettes, I managed to negotiate with her and save the lives of half of them which we agreed to leave hanging in the front room. The other half were put up to be sold online, but in the meantime, I hung them in the pottery shed which would serve as a good writer’s retreat when I was writing about mummies, or bigfoot, or mermaids. Annie wouldn’t know that I jacked the price up on Ebay so they would never sell and their presence would keep the girls out so I could write in peace, I thought with a playful grin.

There was no paper on the bottom of the birdcage, or feathers, and it looked as though a bird had never been in it, but my father had been gone for a long time so maybe time just made everything new as it sometimes does. Maybe a patient and persistent cat got the bird. Or maybe time erased the feathers and newspapers the way it does memories if you let it. Maybe the bird died and someone cleaned it out. Or maybe my father never put a bird in it at all. We changed very little of his decor, and after a while we seemed to get used to the marionettes and the cuckoos, and Jesus being crucified over and over, and the carnival art, and scenes of heartbreak. I would sometimes sit in the front room and stare at that cage and imagine my father hanging it there, the way I saw him from a photograph my uncle smuggled to me when I was 12 in the pages of a book he said my father would want me to have. I asked him how he knew what my father would want me to have and he smiled and patted me on the head and walked away.

My Uncle Clarence first made himself known to me when I was 10. He stood outside of my school passing out Gideon’s Bibles, but instead of a Gideon’s, he said to me with a grin, “You’ll like this one better, Charlie. You look just like your father.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said sounding smarter than I was. “How do you know?”

“Because I’m your father’s brother. I’m your Uncle Clarence.”

I looked at him for a while holding the book. He was tall and gray. Everything about him seemed gray. “What happened to my father?”

Uncle Clarence shook his head sadly. “Unfortunately, that’s a secret I cannot tell. I’ve promised your father. But he wanted you to have this book.”

The first book that first year was The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. There was no picture in it, but there was a queen of hearts playing card which I used as a bookmark and flipped around through my fingers as I read it. Over the years I read it so many times the binding wore out. My mother asked me where I got it and I claimed the school library, but when I didn’t return it, she asked again. Any talk of my father was off limits and had been off limits all my life. He was a dark secret and I knew by the way she acted when the subject came up, it was a conversation we would never share, at least when she was sober. I also could not tell her my Uncle Clarence gave me the book because any extension of my father was prohibited as well. I ended up telling her I bought it at the Scholastic book fair. There was nothing better growing up then that day at school, other than no school.

I never met my father because I never had the chance to. One night she was drunk and came home from a dinner party and told me he was a deadbeat, on drugs, and in prison, then he died in prison. I was 8 or 9 then. I remember her sitting on her bed and taking off her heels as she said those caustic words. I remember the room was dark but for a dim bedside lamp that lit off her angry but sorrowful face. But across the years her drunk stories of my father often changed. Sometimes he left us, other times she left him. Sometimes he beat her, other times he cheated. Sometimes he was the love of her life and she wept for him, other times he was her worst mistake. By the time I was sixteen I gave up ever expecting her to tell me anything, especially the truth. I gave up on her altogether when I went to college. Everything was always about her, the way it was with my grandmother, her mother, when I was growing up. They shared a form of narcissism that was disgusting to me. They conspired to cheat me out of a dad. I didn’t even know his name and growing up my last name was Graham, her name.

My uncle gave me two more books after The Wizard of Oz. When I was 12, he was outside of school again passing out those Bibles and gave me what would quickly become my favorite book, The Great Gatsby. In the middle of the book was a picture of my father. He was in tight jeans and a t-shirt wearing a baseball hat that sat high on his head and with a catcher’s mitt on his hand, smiling at whoever was taking his picture. He looked fit and happy. He looked handsome and young and there was no evidence of anyone unscrupulous. I could see myself in him. When I was 14, Uncle Clarence gave me Shoeless Joe, which is the book that inspired the film Field of Dreams. In that book there was a small key but I never knew to what. I put it on a chain and wore it around my neck and have never taken it off. My mother asked me what the key was to and I told her it was to the truth. She scowled at me. I could always tell she resented me, though she said she loved me to compensate for all the times her mother never said she loved her. But my mother was never a mom, and I could never get close to her the way I should have been.

I never saw Uncle Clarence again until a letter came to me when I was a freshman in high school saying that he died. Clarence Michael O’Dell. I finally knew my last name, though I didn’t know my father’s first until I read the obituary which said Clarence was survived by two younger brothers, Thomas and Andrew. I went to the funeral expecting to meet my father, but he wasn’t there. I met my other uncle, Thomas, and his family. Uncle Thomas introduced me as Andy’s son and everyone looked at me and smiled sympathetic smiles that led me to believe my father was dead without anyone saying so. I didn’t ask. I don’t know why I didn’t ask, but I just shook everyone’s hand and said I was sorry for their loss and they said with their eyes that they were sorry for mine. Maybe I didn’t want to make Uncle Clarence’s funeral about me the way my mother or grandmother would have made it about them. I had seen them at funerals. My father’s family said good things about my father, which made the things my mother said all that much harder to believe. My mother didn’t know that I went to the funeral. She might have killed me if she did, or cried hysterically about how I betrayed her.

When I was a kid I asked why I didn’t have my father’s last name. My mother didn’t respond. All the other kids at school had their father’s last name, but I had my mother’s. My grandmother made my father synonymous with drugs, abuse, prison, womanizing, and stalking, as though he were a monster. The way she said “he” when referring to him was even hateful. But even when I was little I didn’t believe them. Looking up at my grandmother’s cold face, I didn’t believe anything she said, nor did I ever want to talk to her. There was evil in her eyes and her voice and I could feel it. Despite her gifts, her money, her lavish vacation home, I knew she was lying to me. I liked to believe that my father was a good person and that he was out there somewhere thinking of me the way I thought of him. Maybe he waited for me somewhere. I thought wild thoughts. Maybe he was working on a fishing boat and saving his money and would show up at a birthday party, or at Christmas, and he and my mother would work things out someday. Maybe I would watch them from the front door window glass as they kissed in the night snow with the Christmas lights glowing all over them. Something like It’s a Wonderful Life. And in those dreams, maybe, that is where I was born as a writer. I armed my delusions and imagination with words.

I also hoped that maybe he would be at one of my baseball games. A thousand games passed and with every one I looked up into the stands to see if I saw his face, though I didn’t know what he looked like until I got that picture at 12. I saw my mother and my grandfather and my mother’s boyfriend then husband, but never my father. But maybe he was there and I just didn’t know it. Maybe my father was anonymous. I made up wild stories about him and wrote them out in notebooks that I hid from my mother. He was once He-Man. G.I. Joe. He was a spy. A superhero. He was a cowboy. Indiana Jones. He was an alien and a ghost. Or my favorite of all, he was a time traveler and had to go, but would be back when he can. 

My mother eventually adopted the idea that it was better not to talk about it and when I would ask about my father, she wouldn’t say anything at all. Not even when she was drunk. Father’s Day was a day she wanted me to appreciate my brother’s father, but he was not my dad. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t mine and I was not his. The contradictions and negativity of it all ended with her moratorium, but the mystery of him grew in my mind and he became something of what Bigfoot is to some people, or aliens to those nerds on TV. I wanted to know. I had a right to know. I wanted to sit down with him and talk about life. About baseball. Who were his favorite players growing up. His favorite wrestlers. About who he thought shot JFK. I wanted him to throw ball with me in the backyard and hear the pop of the glove and feel the burn in my soft palm that had yet to harden. I wanted him to teach me how to throw a curve and a change-up. I wanted him to be with me for donuts with dad at school, not my grandfather, or my brother’s dad out of obligation. But my mother didn’t want me to have that because of how she felt about him, whatever hatred she held against him and for whatever reason why, was greater than her understanding of my need to have my dad in my life.

We had lived in the house a month before my mother came to visit. She of course had a fit about moving into “that house,” saying we could do better for ourselves. She was the most material person I have ever known and she judged each dollar of a house’s market value to be the worth of the people who lived in it. Image was everything to her. Image was based upon status and status came from income and how much you had in the bank. When I told her I wanted to be a writer, she cringed. But when I sold my first million books, she cried tears of joy and saved the newspaper clippings.

She came to see her grandkids, she said, something I heard her mother say many times when she was angry or on the downswing of her bipolar disorder. My mother was never diagnosed, but some things are obvious. She stayed for several hours and played with the girls. She left without saying goodbye to me or Annie as though such a slight would anger us and register her disapproval for us moving into my father’s house. We looked at each other and smiled when the kids came in and said grandma left. I watched her pull down the gravel lane in her overpriced SUV and her perfume hung in the air pungently like her reluctant ghost. It was alright. I had given up on having the sort of relationship with my mother that I should have when I was 5 or so. I didn’t hang on too long as she had hung on too long to her mother because in that way she became her. I didn’t want to be my mother. She played a role she never really wanted. It wasn’t her fault, I told Annie. She was raised that way and I had to accept it.

The old farmhouse had several more curiosities other than the cuckoo clocks and marionettes inside. After I did some gardening outside I realized there was a path that was overgrown with a blanket of grass that led from the backdoor to a large field. It wasn’t just any path underneath. It was a yellow brick road. My daughters who were 7 and 4 helped me tear up the grass and expose those yellow bricks over about a week or so of summer labor. We had a good time doing so and though it was quite a bit of work to uncover them and clean them off, the girls worked hard and their faces were covered with dirt. I knew it was never something we could have done in New York. Delilah, the youngest, said “Look daddy, just like The Wizard of Oz.” And Aubrey said she hoped it led to Oz, but Oz was nowhere in sight from where it started. I smiled at them and in gratitude to my father who made this possible. I wondered if he knew I would be doing this with his granddaughters. I like to think he did. Somehow. And when we watched The Wizard of Oz at night as they fell asleep, I thought of him when Toto pulled back the curtain to expose an old Kansas man. I could never see the Wicked Witch and not think of my grandmother.

I smiled and thought of the first book that Uncle Clarence gave to me. It couldn’t be a coincidence, I told Annie that night in bed. She was half asleep and she smiled looking at me through the dark lying on her side. She whispered that she believed my father was talking to me and I agreed. I couldn’t sleep and went downstairs and looked out at the yellow brick road path that led to that large field which was several acres and full of tall grass. It ended there. Right at the field. And though me and the girls dug and dug, there was no more yellow brick road. Maybe I’d rent a tractor and clear the field. Or maybe we would get horses. Aubrey suggested horses of a different color, smiling a toothless smile.

I sat out one night on the back porch swing and looked out the path. Then across the field I noticed a green light, maybe 500 feet away. It was faint from the distance, but impossible not to see. Annie came out and sat by me. “Do you see that light?” I asked her.

“The green light out there?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I see it.”

“I have never seen it before,” I confessed to her. “We’ve been here a month or so and I never noticed it. Strange.”

“Well, maybe that’s because I flipped a switch when I turned on the back porch light. There are three and I flipped all three.”

I walked inside and stood by the back door, still looking out, and I flipped the third switch off. Sure enough, the green light went out.

“Why would there be a light way back there?” Annie asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her. But I did know. I knew what my father was trying to say to me. The first book, The Wizard of Oz, is all about appearances and nothing being as it seems. The Scarecrow is smarter than a brainless scarecrow, with or without a brain; the Tin Man is loving, with or without a heart; and the Cowardly Lion is not so cowardly at all; nor is the Wizard so great and powerful, yet he is. But the Wicked Witch was just as evil as she seemed. Forget Wicked, the Broadway musical my mother dragged me to as a kid, which was the absolute worst written piece of garbage musical I have ever seen that completely bastardized the legacy of The Wizard of Oz. The yellow brick road was the road to Oz where Dorothy needed to go to get home. And the green light in the distant field was the light in East Egg on the dock of Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s sprawling estate that Gatsby stared at from his estate in West Egg across the harbor. And the field, that field between, was the field in Shoeless Joe. The field of dreams. My father wanted me to build a baseball diamond, I knew. The yellow brick road would lead to it and the green light would be just beyond the center field wall.

It sounded crazy when I finally told Annie. One of those things that sound perfectly normal when you think them, but when you say them aloud they make you sound nuts. “So if you build it, he will come,” she smiled.

My eyes lit up and I tried to downplay it. “Well, I don’t really know about that, but you know, I think its what he wanted me to do. Don’t you?”

She smiled and gave me a hug. It was no surprise to me when I found old canvas bag bases buried in the pottery shed. Nor an old catcher’s mitt and ball. Nor a half dozen large antique signs for tobacco, oil, and soda, which I thought would be nice on an old-style home run fence. I have long been a baseball enthusiast and the thought of building my own diamond was thrilling to me. No matter who played on it. No matter if it sat empty. I wasn’t expecting Shoeless Joe to come out of the corn or anything, or the Babe, or Joe, or Jackie, or Lou, but I was expecting my father, I have to admit. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t. Then I could ask him what happened. Where he had gone and why he wasn’t in my life. I was sure there was a logical explanation. I was sure there was more than I knew. 

The girls helped me clear the field, riding on the new tractor I bought. I think they just went for the ride, but they were fun company and it made me happy to see how excited they were, though I don’t think they understood exactly what we were doing. Although they didn’t share my love of baseball, they were happy that I was building a baseball diamond and both of them said they wanted to learn to play. We watched Ken Burns’ documentary on baseball every night until they fell asleep in my arms. I wanted them to have a sound knowledge of the game. Annie carried them to bed and I wandered up the stairs eventually. The work of building a field was greater than what I expected. I was exhausted at the end of the night for three weeks and I only had the girls to help me. I didn’t yet finish the novel my publisher was waiting on and requested a delay. My next book seemed to hardly matter as all I cared about was the reality of this field, and the reality of my new life.

Setting the lights and the home run wall were the last steps. The center-field wall butted up against the light post with the green bulb. I was raking the infield dirt when a lady walked up the yellow brick road and out onto the field. She was an older lady but looked very well kept and fit. She smiled at me and stood there near home plate. Then she walked towards me holding something in her hand.

“I’m Allison Riley.”

“I’m Charlie O’Dell. Good to meet you.”

“You look so much like him,” she smiled.

I smiled back knowing who she meant. “Did you know my father?”

“We had supper. Now and then,” she smiled a little wider.

“Supper?”

“Yes,” she said looking around. “I like what you’ve done to the place. Andy would have liked it, too.”

“I like to think so.”

“He loved baseball, you know. We watched a lot of games. After supper.”

I smiled at her. She was a peaceful woman. Then I noticed what she held in her hand.

“I come to change the light. Once a year. Whether it’s blown or not. I promised your father I would. It was important to him.”

“You change the light?”

“Yes. I’m the keeper of the light, you can say.”

“How long have you been doing so?”

“Since he passed.”

I waited for her to say more but she didn’t.

“So for the past 10 years or so you’ve come to change the light?”

“Yes. I wasn’t sure if you were ever going to move in, or if you would sell it. I was hoping you wouldn’t sell. It’s such a beautiful place. I think your father knew that you would someday come home. I’ve tried to keep up the property as best I could, but it was a little overwhelming for a woman my age. Still, I loved coming here because I remembered all the suppers your father and I shared. He was a lawyer later in life. I don’t know that you knew.”

“No. I didn’t know. I don’t know much about him.”

She smiled but didn’t reply.

“Thank you, Allison.”

She handed me the bulb. “Well, I think you got it from here, Charlie, don’t you?”

I shook my head and she started to walk away.

“Would you like to stay for supper?”

She turned and smiled. “Yes. Of course.”

“Come on. Let me introduce you to my wife and kids.”

Allison was very gracious and her and Annie got along very well. She stayed well past dinner and helped the girls catch fireflies after dark. I could see how my father must have liked her. I had resisted the urge to ask her a million questions about my father, though I wanted to very much so. She talked a little more about him being a lawyer later in life, but not much. I never knew how he died, but wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I was hoping maybe she would say something more though, or maybe she would come back and we would talk later. At dinner with the girls didn’t seem like the right time. Not as the crickets chirped peacefully. Not as they caught fireflies and lit sparklers. Not as Annie sat next to me on the porch and we swung slowly on the porch swing that creaked gently in the night over the sound of our daughters’ giggles as they ran about the yard barefooted with glass mason jars in their small hands.

The field was finished and we named it Oz O’Dell Field, at the request of Aubrey. It was beautiful. The home run wall was my favorite, a stained 8 foot tall wood wall with my father’s antique advertisements hung across it. I carefully painted the distance from home plate to the centerfield wall and the green light was just beyond it. 400 feet. Exactly. I bought a pitching machine and sat it up and hit balls for much of the next two weeks, but I never cleared the wall. I got closer everyday, especially when I was able to catch up to its max setting of 85mph, and when I got the barrel of the bat on the ball. They did a write up in the local newspaper and a reporter and a camera woman came out and took pictures of the field and my family and talked to me. New York Writer Charlie O’Dell Builds Own Field of Dreams, the article was titled. 

Annie smiled and read it to me on the porch.

It wasn’t long before people began to play on the field. Sometimes they called ahead, other times they simply showed up. The local high school team played an exhibition game there and an old time baseball league played a few games and asked if they could do a tournament next year. I built a door in the outfield wall that mimicked a bullpen door, but there was no bullpen beyond it. Only a vast and empty field. Sometimes at night I’d leave the lights on and watch that door, as though I expected Shoeless Joe, Babe, and Ty Cobb to walk through and play a game, followed by my father, of course. For months I sat there and that door never opened. I even sat there and read Shoeless Joe again, hoping it had the effect of a Ouija board in conjuring spirits, but it did not. All there was were the bugs that orbited the lights and an occasional racoon that was confused by the strange wall that was in the middle of the field. The door remained closed. Annie sat next to me knowing that I watched it, though I never talked about it, and she never asked. But I knew she knew and I knew she wanted it to open as much as I did, crazy as the hope was.

My mother didn’t come back to the house. Annie occasionally met her for lunch with the girls and went to visit her at her house, but she never came and I never went. There was nothing left between us and I didn’t care anymore. All I cared about was my wife and girls, this old farmhouse, and that baseball field that was seldom used but very well-kept. Allison came back for supper many more times over the next few months and told me that my father was also a writer like me. Only the things he wrote were very personal and they were all on a blog. After a little research, I discovered the blog and read all of my father’s stories. It was only then that everything made sense. I knew what happened to my father and what happened to me. I knew my journey to get here and that my life wasn’t always a given.

I sat one night late summer in the study pantry. The roll-top desk was still locked and I didn’t bother to pry it open. But then I realized the key I wore for all those years around my neck was a match to the desk. I put the key in the lock and started to turn it and it clicked but then I stopped. I don’t know why I stopped, I just did. I realized that inside the desk were the answers I always wanted, in some form, in some way. I left the key in the lock and didn’t open it. I left it there for several weeks. I guess I have always been afraid of finality.

A month later I opened the desk. There were three books inside. Books that my father wrote and self-published sometime before his death. They were published by a self-publishing company and after some looking into them, I couldn’t find any trace of them on the internet. I read them all in a few weeks. It thrilled me to know that he was a writer. His novels were so personal and full of love I knew that he was not the monster my mother or grandmother said he was. I knew he was the man I read of in his writing on his blog, which made me sorry that he wasn’t in my life all the more.

The contents of the desk also included a very nice engagement ring and wedding band which I presumed he gave to my mother and which I also presume she gave back. I don’t know what I would do with the rings. Maybe one day I’d give them to one of the girls.

His last novel, Charlie, was all about me. It was about a father who was locked up in prison for eight years and was never allowed to be in his child’s life, though he loved the child more than the child ever knew. The mother of the child wanted to divorce the father and abort the baby, but the father opposed her vehemently on the latter and she alleged fictitious crimes against the father in order to rid him of her life, angry that his threats to expose her for having an abortion and blaming it on a miscarriage forced her to carry the child to term and “have a child she didn’t want with a man she didn’t want.” I knew this to be my mother without her being named. And I knew the father to be my father. I imagine he wrote it in prison. I imagine he sent it to Uncle Clarence and Uncle Clarence sent it to the self-publisher who published it. I have to imagine a lot because I don’t know. Nothing is truly black-and-white.

It was a good book by any standard based on a great story. My story. I sent it to my publisher and asked if they would give it a read and of course they did. My liaison, Erica, called me back and said it was good writing and asked who the writer was. I said my father. There was a long silence between us. I told her I wanted it published and whatever legal loops there were to jump through being that my father was deceased, I would take on. I also demanded that the money from the book go to National Right to Life or any other Pro-Life organization. She cringed being a standard New York liberal who supported killing babies up to birth these days. Then I told her it was my story. And I was one bad choice from never being born.

Allison left her number with us and I called her up and asked her to dinner again. I asked if she had ever read any of my father’s novels and she said she had read the first two, but never heard of Charlie. She asked to read it and I gave her the copy I had and a week later she came back in tears and gave me a hug. “It all makes sense now,” she said. “Your father never said what happened or why he went to prison. Or why he lost you.”

For some reason I began to think about the birdcage. I asked Allison if my father ever kept a bird in that cage and she looked at me and smiled. “No,” she said. “He always said if he found the right bird he would keep it, but he never did. I don’t ever think he would have put a bird in that cage, though. That wasn’t his way. Especially being that he was in prison for all those years. I think that cage made him feel free with it being the way it was. With the door open and all.”

There was one other thing in that desk. A baseball. A plain official major league baseball. It looked as though it had been used and I thought that maybe my father got it at a ballgame he went to. Maybe it was fouled back and he caught it by chance. Of all the games I had been to in my life, that had never happened to me. Nor had I ever thrown out a first pitch as I had wished. I thought maybe if I someday wrote something so wonderful and popular that I would be invited to do so, but even after I had become a New York Time’s best-selling author, blah, blah, blah, the invite never came. It wasn’t something I wanted to lobby for or invite myself to do. I sat in the chair and spun around a little and gripped the ball. Split, change, curve, two-seam, knuckler. My fingers shifted across the ball. 

Admittedly, I was a little disappointed there was no letter from my father to me in the desk. Nothing more personal than what there was. But then I felt badly because I knew there could be nothing more personal than the novel he wrote for me and the baseball left intentionally because he knew I would come and I would build the field. Some people have an indirect way of saying things, but what they say is no less loud or important than someone speaking directly and explicitly to the person they wish to speak. Sometime in the night, I kissed my daughters as they lied in bed and rubbed their heads. I kissed my wife, as well. I don’t think of success as the novels I have written, or how many I’ve sold, or the fan letters about how I changed someone’s life, or how my book inspired them to do this or that. My success is my wife and two girls. My family. And I owe that to my father.

I flipped on the lights to the field and went out holding the ball. I stood on the pitcher’s mound for a while and watched the bugs orbit the cannister lights high in the heavens above me. I stood there and looked in at home plate that was barren and the wall behind it with an advertisement for Redman Chew. The Indian stared back at me. I went through the several different grip changes on the ball. It was quiet and there wasn’t a sound until I heard the click of the outfield door open. When I turned to look, there was my father in the same jeans and shirt with the hat that sat high on his head from the photo Uncle Clarence gave me. He had a catcher’s mitt in his hand and walked out looking around as he came closer. He pumped his fist into the glove several times as though to break it in and he smiled as he walked passed me without saying a word. I was stunned and couldn’t speak. I followed him with my eyes and watched him until he crouched behind home plate and said at last, “Well, let’s see what you got, Charlie.”

I nodded and muttered, “Okay,” like a little boy. I dug my right foot into the dirt in front of the pitching rubber and went into my wind up and delivered a strike.

“That your change-up?” he grinned.

“It was my fastball.”

“You got more than that, Charlie. Come on. Give me the gas.”

I pumped another in and the mitt popped and I could tell it stung his hand a little as he grimaced before he smiled and said good. He called my pitches and complimented my curve. I dropped a forkball on the plate but he scooped it up on the bounce with such adroitness that I knew he must have had been a ballplayer like me. Maybe he was a catcher. We didn’t talk about anything other than pitching. Not one word about my mother, or prison, or law, or writing. He did say I made a fine field and that he would like to come back sometime after he finally stood up and took off his mitt a hundred or so pitches in. He walked to the mound and stood in front of me and I stepped down towards him. I shook his hand and said I would like it if he came back. He smiled and put the ball in my glove and patted me on the shoulder. He tucked his mitt under his left armpit like a newspaper and walked slowly to the door in the outfield wall. I was frozen on that mound though I turned to watch him walk away. There was so much I wanted to say and ask him but there were no words, at least, I couldn’t find them.

“Goodnight, Charlie,” he said as he paused and looked back at me by the door.

“Goodnight, dad.”

I went inside and up to bed. Annie was still asleep and I realized it was past 3am. I didn’t bother to change and I went straight to sleep as content as I had been in a long while. The next morning Aubrey woke me up asking me if I would take her to town to buy her a turtle. “What are you reading?” she asked. I realized she was talking about the book that was on my chest. It was my father’s book. “That’s your name, daddy!” she said pointing at the cover.

“Yes, it is, sweetheart.”

“Is it a book about you?”

“Yes. It is.”

On the cover there was a baseball in a catcher’s mitt. And in the book I built a diamond. In the book I had two girls and a wife and I was a New York Times best-selling author who moved home to rural Ohio from New York City, just as I had in real life. And in the book, meeting my father for a game of catch was only a dream. I told Aubrey to go get dressed and I read the ending where I had left off as I fell asleep. “He closed the door, but didn’t latch it shut. There was a crack in the outfield bullpen door that would remain open, optimistically.”

I smiled and shut the book, a little disappointed that it had only been a dream. I went outside and sat on the porch and looked down at the field. I smiled as the wind blew over the field and cool upon my face. I sipped a cup of morning coffee and sat in the rocking chair waiting for Aubrey so we could go get her turtle. I figured Delilah would want to come, too, and would tail after Aubrey when she came through the door with a fist full of dollars. I knew I wasn’t going to leave the pet store with just a turtle. There would be a rabbit or a guinea pig. My dad might have only returned to me in a dream, but he is here. He is the wind in the grass beyond the outfield wall, the sun upon the dirt, and the rain upon the field. Dads don’t ever die. They live on in sparklers, in foul balls, and catcher mitts. They become everything and are greater than life and are never imprisoned by death. The truth set me free as it does and I was a dad richer but a mother poorer. Maybe she would come back, too. Maybe the water would melt her and in a puddle beneath a black hat she would be all that she never was. But I wasn’t going to be the one who threw the bucket on her. She’d have to throw it on herself.

Annie came out with the girls and gave me a hug and a kiss. “No ferrets,” she warned playfully. “I don’t like those things. And no snakes, either!”

“No one likes snakes,” I smiled. Delilah grinned mischievously.

“Oh,” Annie said. “You left the lights on last night.”

“What lights?”

“The field lights. Who were you throwing with?”

“What?”

“I saw you from the window playing catch with someone. Was it Josh or Jim? Figured a friend dropped by.”

“No. No friend.” I rubbed my shoulder realizing it was a little sore, but I had excused it to the way I might have slept on it. I smiled and picked up Delilah and walked out to the field and Annie and Aubrey followed us. It was hot and sunny but a nice breeze blew and a wind I knew to be my dad swept over us and blew their hair about wildly like the fingers of a playful hand. I walked far enough to see the bullpen door. It was cracked and I smiled at the opening. It hadn’t been a dream at all. Some doors are simply never to be shut and some lives are never simply bound. A beautiful blackbird perched on the green light in center field and it remained there until sometime after we walked away. I might get a tattoo of the birdcage with the open door on my arm. Maybe I will get a tattoo of the bird on the other. My father was the cage with the open door and I was the bird. Maybe my mother was the miserable cat caught in the fixation of her own persistence. But it is God’s patient finger that holds the steady chain of time. I get so ridiculously drunk on metaphors and thoughts of tattoos I never get.