The Night of the Casserole Bringer

You no longer can tell if it’s night or day in our house. We now dwell like shadows in it, oppressed by a damp-wood odor. We had taped all the shades, mother and I. All we needed now was Aunt Mattie Fae to come rescue us from the dark (We’ve just seen August: Osage County on TV and we both cried). I don’t expect mother to break her silence one night, when the two of us are at the dinner table, to give me a ‘truth-telling’ speech. My mother is no Violet. How I hunger for the truth even if it means hurt.

“The cruelest torture you could inflict upon someone is making them wait at a tableful of comestibles,” my mother said before the doorbell rang one fateful night, a year ago today (she always said that if she had to endure even a minute of waiting when food was present). Something in the house busied my father; made him late to table. Mother and I picked at the gloriously roasted duck with our eyes. Father finally made it to prop his chair to sit. He stumped his big toe against one of the chair’s legs when the doorbell rang. Bad omen? I don’t know. But his encounter with the person that delivered the casserole of lasagna that evening had changed him in many ways.

“Who was at the door?” mother entreated him as he joined us again at the table with the carrousel in his shivering hands. Next thing I heard two weeks later that my father had molested a minor in some dark alley, and I never saw him again.

You see, father was a top stage actor in college. “It changed me in many ways,” he said to me the other day encouraging me to not be hesitant to participate in a school’s production of Peter and the Wolf. What he regretted in life, most of all, was that he didn’t pursue acting but took to a teaching career. That evening when he brought the accursed carrousel of lasagna to our table, it signaled the unfurling of his long-dormant actor self. I’m guessing he never summoned that persona to manifestation since college.

The night of the arrival of the accursed casserole, my father didn’t go to bed immediately but rushed to the attic after dinner. My mother knew when to just let him be, so she went to their bedroom. The clitter clatter in the attic told us how desperate my father was to find something. And he did… because the noise in the attic stopped.

Then we were on TV. The evening news report, with the picture of my father, on our local station ran like this:

“Police authorities in Spring Meadows are searching for a male adult who molested a child of fifteen in an alley earlier this afternoon. The child recalls that the molester lured him and started pulling and tearing at his sweatpants ‘like he was hypnotized,’ the boy said. His pleading for help frightened the molester, who’s now on the run. The fifteen-year-old identified the molester as Serhan Mahfouz, an Arab who got his green card sometime in the 1990’s, renounced his original nationality and has been living in the US ever since. According to police records, Mahfouz’s clean with no priors, and the police’s conducting a series of interviews…”

What gnawed at me was the later news reports that started to call my father ‘predator’. How could the boy identify my father? But what came upon me like a shellshock was the evidence that stank to high heaven, which was the boy’s sweatpants, ripped from one of the side pockets to the thigh. I didn’t buy into any of that. It could’ve been any man at all. Not my father.

In the nights preceding father being on the run, I’d always heard my parents argue the nighttime away. It was when I knew that mother knew what father knew and I didn’t know. It tortured me and I decided to eavesdrop during one of their arguments. It was hard to decipher anything they said as they cloaked their words in whispers, except that my father raised his voice one time saying birdmark or birthmark, I don’t know. That was the only word I heard.

I had to fight the whole school the first day after those horrendous news reports. Students and teachers alike. And school became a torment as I was shamed by the general public. “Did your father molest you too?” and “Will you grow up to follow the footsteps of your father?” Such and such hurtful comments haunted me in the corridors and in washrooms. They knew no end. I never showed up to school after that day. I, we, mother and I, had stayed home ever since. How I hated to think of father as a criminal on the run. I bet he's somewhere in stark disguise the devil can't get his hands on him. He's an actor after all.

I don't know when it was, but a glint of light came into my room through a slit in the tape of my window that was beginning to wear. The Golden Pothos in the room craved light as I craved truth.

Soon the scandal caught up to social media, and I was dragged through the digital mud, or 'digimud'. I'd become a taboo version of an internet meme. Everyone shared THE CHILD OF A CHILD MOLESTER meme over and over again. Boys and girls started sharing their photos with me in them. “Little did we know,” a lot of the posts copied. The digimudding went too far despite police making teen arrests and issuing warning statements to protect our privacy. They'd interrogated my mother and me multiple times. They tried to drive us out of our house, but my mother fought. They patrolled the neighborhood all the time.

Spring Meadows was no longer the town where nothing happened.

Mother and I used to be visited in the dead of the night by some relatives who brought us food and ration. Some even helped us fix things around the house. And that damned casserole, the food went bad and mother asked one of her in-laws to dump it somewhere. Those visits became less frequent, for when those relatives were discovered entering our house in stealth, they were attacked shamelessly. I told mother we must leave here, but something kept her stalling. A hope of some sort, she mumbled one evening.

“Mother. Let’s leave here. There’s nothing for us here anymore.”

“Wait, maybe your father finds a way.”

“A way to do what? I don’t understand!”

Then she’d seal her lips and she’d stay silent for the rest of the day. It’s a year ago today that the casserole bringer sent some evil waves to the universe to torture us for the rest of our lives. We never saw the molested child, nor his mother. The authorities had kept them anonymous, probably at their request. We wished, mother and I, that they'd pay us a visit. We demanded so many answers as the indoor plants demanded light. Now the once green things sit withered around the once happy domicile. With it withered our hopes and dreams. And there was no sight of father. And the social media buzz died out. And at one of my stubborn entreaties:

“What’s with the birthmark?” I exploded when I couldn’t bear her silence.

The question startled her. It triggered tears that gushed in abundance. She couldn’t but narrate a short wild story that stupefied me. It went like this:

“Little Mahfouz, darling, you used to have a brother, our first born. Evening came, three years before you were born, and your brother had been crying that day because your father refused to buy him the latest gaming console he wanted. So, he cried and cried and went on to continue his crying in the toilet when nature called. He cried like hell. And suddenly the crying stopped. Your father and I thought your brother saw sense enough to quit crying. “Wash your hands after, son,” your father shouted through the door, and we went to bed. The next morning when we woke up, we didn’t find your brother in bed. We looked around the house. Your father saw that the toilet door was still locked and he shouted your brother’s name, which I don’t dare to say, but no answer came from the other side. Finally, he brought the door down with heavy blows from his shoulder and there… we didn’t find your brother. I don't even dare to say his name. It was as if he disappeared into thin air. And he did. The djinn took him away for their child… No, don’t look at me like that, son. I told your father not to…”