Cracks
He knew that grief did a lot of strange things to people, but he was sure that he was not going crazy. The cracks had been emerging for the last four days now, taking on one different face after another and always appearing on the bare wall beside the antique Florentine dresser.
The first of a series of webbed cracks outlined the recognizable form of his late wife’s face. Leinster noticed it while he unplugged the TV from the electrical socket. Substandard building material might have caused it, and he hoped that the insurance would cover the repair. It took him a while to figure out that if he looked closely at the cracked surface of the concrete wall, he could see Sheila’s face. The eyes, the thin lips, and yes, the smile!
His older brother’s face materialized on the wall the next morning. Dave, who had always been different, always misunderstood, always in search of their father’s love underneath his cold paternal veneer of tyranny and womanizing, died of AIDS he had contracted from a loud-mouthed movie director.
Weeping, Dave told Leinster when he visited his dying brother at the hospital: “Only met him once, Tom. Maybe, I was born to fuck up my life from the very beginning. Dad was right. Everything about me was very wrong.”
“That bastard,” Leinster said, feeling the ever familiar hatred course through him. He reeled at the memory of his father, the crummy tenement housing he had known as home, the neighborhood that turned their backs on dead bodies dumped on the creek and the thrash can as if nothing happened. “Beating up mom made him less than a man, Dave. I’d have killed him myself if I had the chance. I’d have given that wino who stabbed him a grand just to do him slowly.”
Staring at the gnarled root-like cracks on his wall, Leinster was a kid once again.
He was unaware that he was crying while he showered.
He missed them so much. He could not even stand getting inside his son’s bedroom except to air it out once a month. Sheila, his wife, left her green bathrobe hanging on the stainless steel rod the day before she and their son left to visit her parents. She had a week of paid leave then, and they had planned it months ago for Jake to spend the whole summer with his grandparents.
Once in a while, Leinster had her robe washed, and he always carefully hung it back the way she had left it. He draped the robe with the sash twined to the left.
He went downstairs and called Boyd, his closest friend whom he also roomed with in the college dorm.
~*~
In Boyd’s office, Leinster shifted on the leather seat as he tried to find a comfortable position, one where his weight squished nicely like an old homely couch would do.
“Man to man, Tom, I won’t say you’re just imagining it.” Boyd twirled the Coke can. His right hand was rolling a pen across the blotter. Boyd could not keep his fingers still, and that annoyed Leinster for years.
“I’m probably cracking up,” Leinster said laughingly. “Seeing faces of dead people in cracks on the wall, that’s not too original, is it?”
Boyd, who explained to him all about repression and the things that a human mind could conjure months after his family’s death, made him talk some more until Leinster felt better.
They played tennis at the end of the work day. Leinster went home and was not surprised to discover that the cracks outlining Jake’s face were still there and did not morph into a different face.
~*~
Leinster checked the wall beside the dresser as soon as he woke up. Again, he forgot to draw the shades, and the opposite apartment building’s wide glass sidings caught the sun’s glare and reflected it right across his windows, straight down to his upturned face. As usual, the square glass windows of his three-bedroom apartment gleamed, resembled oversized white teeth. He forgot to call the plumber who was supposed to fix the kitchen sink. He forgot to close the windows across his bedroom to, at least, muffle the restless sound of traffic two floors down. But this time, he was surprised that the glare and the noise comforted him.
The cracks sketched Leinster’s face in those ever familiar black, thin and gnarled tendrils. It was a mocking caricature. He recognized his narrow forehead. The lopsided grin painted on his face was a pair of looped spidery lines of cracks.
He was calm, rational. He took pictures of the cracks. Good close-ups and encompassing snapshots that involved the dresser for perspective. This would show Boyd that there was more to this. On his way to work, Leinster dropped the film off to a downtown convenience store for processing.
He returned late in the afternoon to claim the developed negatives.
“Can you see that?” he good-naturedly asked the cashier while he proffered the pictures at her. She was a young girl, about fifteen or sixteen, with curly brown hair and a big-city girl’s look of grim determination.
“What, sir?” She smiled back.
“Can you make out something from those cracks?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“See, those are the eyes, right?”
“Sir, that’s just a bare… a table, right? Something flat, with beige paint.” She was starting to look scared.
“It’s a wall, with cracks on it.” He saw her eyes. She thought he was crazy. He forced himself to smile as if he was only humoring her. “How about this?” Leinster, now in a panic, handed her the picture taken a few feet away from the cracks. It included the dresser.
“Yes, that’s the wall. A dresser. The mirror where your reflection was when you took the picture.”