The Inheritance

The Inheritance

Jet watched the steam rise from his coffee cup through his drooping eyelids. There was something fundamentally different about the smell of the same cup of bargain pods of Folger’s in his childhood home than anywhere else he had laid his head since switching to his thrift store Keurig. He could only imagine that it was a product of cohesion. The smell was more potent here because it became a part of the growing soul of what must have been ten-thousand pots of the stuff that had been brewed here over his lifetime.

The smell was childhood to him, and that just made him much sadder today. It was his first day home after becoming aware his father had passed and this place was his. This was the perfect intersection of a thing that he truly needed happening at the best possible time, but a thing that he never would have wished for, even if it meant having to sleep in his car, his credit card freshly cancelled, while his father sat disgusted by the thought of him in his blue easy chair every night.

The heat of the beverage, a burn he wasn’t ready for, cut into his awareness.

“You’re a ghost in this house! You don’t even talk anymore. Remember when we used to laugh? Remember when you cared about being nice to me?” Jet’s wife’s voice penetrated his mind, a reminder of the divorce papers that sat in a satchel in the front seat of his car.

“Dammit, Jet. What have you done?” He articulated into the room, giving voice to the imagination of his father.

Jet is the name a proud father bestows on his son, at least it was in this case. Jet’s mother wanted Birch, neither of them were too high on the idea of adding to the endless list of Josephs, Johns, Jacksons, Michaels and Pauls in the public school system. Jet’s father was a pilot in the Air Force, a rigid and passionate man. Jet’s mother was beautiful, nurturing, and sweet, and succumbed to a rare, aggressive cancer when Jet was twelve. This was the point where Jet’s father lost his patience for the world, and particularly his son.

Looking around the kitchen, now his kitchen, Jet saw the cobwebs and floors crunchy with crumbs and plastic waste fragments. Handprints were on the walls, mouse droppings. A space that probably hadn’t been cleaned since he left it last at the age of 17, and by his recollection long before that. The front rooms reflected the same level of care, with one exception, the living room.

The living room was immaculate. Even with the house having been vacant for a week, it looked freshly dusted and vacuumed. All through the rest of the house the paint on the walls was faded by the filmy residue of neglect and the dullness of passing decades. There were holes from being punched. An ecosystem of insects not allowed to thrive in most populated homes had been running wild and unchecked here. By contrast the rich indigo walls in the living room were alive and vibrant, leaving the appearance of a fresh coat having been applied within the last year or less.

The royal blue easy chair, at least thirty-five years old that Jet could quantify and who knows how long before that, looked fresh from the factory floor. The chair that Jet’s father died in. The restored antique glass top table that sat next to it, the place where his last scotch had sweated to its new, room stable stasis, seemed to leave the only evidence of any habitation through an easily Windexed spot of water staining.

As much as he grew to hate his father, he came to recognize that, as is the case with a high percentage of children who despise their parents, they were quite the same in those meaningful ways. He had learned this watching his marriage erode into the piercing silent screams of deep resentment that finally found a volume knob. Jet was the ghost she accused him of being, and all the warmth that his charm promised ran into dead ends before they hit substance. Like his father, he hid in plain sight, making his outsides look inviting, passionate, and alive while his insides couldn’t fathom absorbing any more pain and sealed off below the surface with a coating of steel.

He stared at his father’s chair, and a rush of anger met a regretful tear, and the reaction made him a little lightheaded. He wanted to sit down, but that shrine to a poisonous façade that smothered his life in shame and in an act of perfect symmetry, X-marked the site of his father’s passing was the only seat remotely nearby. Jet chose the floor and after relaxing the muscular armor of standing the choking and vomitous force of his emotions seized their moment. There was no concept of time, but Jet would later guess that this movement of his inner concerto was at least 20 minutes long.

Jet didn’t cry for his father’s absence, those tears were spilled throughout his twenties in reflection of a relationship that felt unchanged as day to day passing under a single roof turned into special occasion phone calls from his East Coast to his father’s West. Jet cried for the trajectory of his own existence. His lost career that came in the same packaging as his father’s.

“You told us over and over that your clients were on proper course. Now I have collection letters on four different accounts with just cause and penalties totaling tens of thousands that can’t be reversed. Have you done any work in the last six months?” Mr. Brown, Jet’s supervisor’s boss yelled as Jet got smaller and smaller in his chair. His perfectly knotted tie folding upward upon itself and his smart blue suit crumpling around him. Would Jet be the subject of a negligence suit? This was being calculated and debated behind closed doors. There would certainly be no resignation and severance package.

It had been such a long day, such a long year, Jet’s eyes became too heavy to manage and what he planned to be only a couple of moments of laying on his back on the living room floor turned into a full, deep sleep.

“Hey kid. Hey…” A gentle voice was pulling Jet into consciousness. “Hey Jetty. Open ‘em up, kid. We were going to have a talk, remember?”

The blackness of Jet’s view slowly started to give way to a soft, off-white blur, and then some shapes slowly started taking focus. It was his bedroom from when he was a kid. The toy chest that was covered by a soft, rubbery green, blue, and red stripe design. The bookshelf featuring posed action figures and pre-teen grade novels about sleuths and spies. His father, young and tightly bearded. His hair was all brown, no real estate had been lost to the grays of age yet. A polo shirt that was colored a lively, youthful green and blue jeans. He looked so… healthy.

“Hey buddy. That’s more like it.” Jet’s mind caught up and this was the father he knew before mom’s diagnosis. “Look, I’m seeing where things are going for you and how lost you are. I get it, man. We hit hard times and we can lose ourselves, but every day is a new chance to…”

“Oh give me a break. What do you know? You have no clue what it was like here after Joan.” A curmudgeonly voice cut in from the doorway. He shifted his focus, pouring a full vat of sarcasm on his tone. “Helloooo my little precious Jetty.”

The stern, gravelly voice from beyond the room let out a disgusted scoff before continuing. “You can’t listen to this idealistic moron. All he sees is you before. The you hiding behind what you could have been. He didn’t have to face disappointment after disappointment, failure after failure. He doesn’t know the real you. He didn’t have to see what I saw. That potential that makes his eyes all starry, I got to have that shine dull out over years of you coming up short, and then you have the nerve to blame me for all of it. You are nothing but an entitled piece of trash.”

A figure appeared, half obscured by shadows and the doorframe. Old, hunched, bitterly gray, but still proud. Unfortunately, all one could gather this figure had pride in was the amount of suffering he could hang inside the closet of one body.

“Look what we’ve done to him! It wasn’t losing Joan that screwed him up, it was us.” The young father rose from the bed, righteously furious. “We were supposed to teach you how to be a man, not fold inward and blame you for everything wrong inside of us. These were my failures. OUR failures.”

“Our failures? Me? Spare me the after school special psych report. The boy is the one who underperformed in every respect of his life. School? Disaster. Home? Gave me absolutely nothing. Socially? I don’t know, maybe you’ll still find evidence of how successful he was balled up at the bottom of his sock drawer. Then he blamed the angry old man and ran away across the country to prove himself. Can you imagine, the kid who barely passed algebra goes into accounting? If you need proof of stupid and self-fulfilling prophesy… And that wife of his. He goes hunting for a mother and finds a wife. Can’t imagine why that one failed.” The old man coughed out cruel laughs.

“I kept the trains running on time here. I kept food coming on the table. I gave him a home and did it all by myself. This pathetic mess was incapable of getting above a C and wiping a goddamn countertop. What a waste. What a ridiculous burden for a grieving man to be saddled with.”

“Son.” Jet’s younger father turned to him and grabbed his son’s hand, a tear drifting down his face. “We showed you the wrong way, but there is still time for you. You don’t have to be him. Just let go of it. We couldn’t, but you can. I’m sorry I got so lost, my dear boy.”

With that, the two versions of Jet’s father charged into each other and exploded into a burst of light, and that light faded into a clear afternoon sky on a Vermont winter day. The trees were powdered sugared and the ground was stacked up about eighteen inches high with snow. In front of Jet there was a lake with a paved dirt path around it and benches, the nearest of which was about thirty yards ahead of him.

“Hey, you.” A woman’s voice entered his space from behind him, along with the intentional steps of boots.

“Olivia? Where are we?” Jet had a sound of awe in his voice. Her skin was glowing in the high midday sun. She looked more peaceful than he had seen her look in years.

“You remember this day, right? C’mon. I know your memory sucks, but you have to have this one.” She spoke plainly, but there was still a sweet playfulness in her voice.

“This was where I proposed. Right over there, by that bench. No coffee cart today though.” Jet smiled, but it was solemn. It wasn’t lost on him that he was at the beginning and the papers in his car marked the end. “What happened to us, Olive?”

She gave a sad smile of her own, sighed and took his arm in hers, pulling him to start strolling diagonally to meet the path around the lake. “It wasn’t just you, you know? I know you and how you think. That said, it was a lot you.”

“Reassuring. Thanks.” He said with one of those hard, short breaths that is like pushing out a laugh that doesn’t really belong.

“Look. Stepped back from everything, it makes sense. I saw it at the start and thought about the risks, but I honestly believed that time and space from your old life would change you. If you had the space to grow and happiness to nurse it, maybe you could get past it all. Either I was wrong or something was missing, or maybe I was a little too broken too. Regardless…” She stopped and turned to him with kind eyes but a beg for full attention. “We’re just people. I tried. You tried. It didn’t work because you’ll never accept just how much you blame yourself for what happened to him.”

Olivia pivoted back to facing forward and the pair began walking again. Jet’s head dropped with shame, and she quickly let out an “oh, stop that.”

“I would say though, your goddamn denial that I kept warning you about, that thing that you’re dreaming your way through realizing right now, that revelation would’ve helped about six months ago, but… Que sera, sera.” Playful again.

They walked in silence for a couple of minutes while Jet decided how he felt and worked up the nerve to speak. Then it was his turn to stop and face her for emphasis. “Is there anything I could have done? Am I just doomed?”

Olivia smiled and patted his cheek gently with her palm. “The first part, no. Not really. Not without not being you. The second part… We’ll see.”

With that Olivia reared back and said, “Get to work!” She gave him a hard shove which caused Jet to fly back into the lake, upon hitting it his eyes shot open and he was again on the living room floor of the house he grew up in.

As Jet rose from the ground he felt the pressure rise in his face. It was somewhere between another cry, and a building need to scream. Without asking it of himself his breaths started to come out like grumbles, then he proceeded with the latter.

“It’s all so simple, right? Just let go of everything? Is that all I’ve got to do?!” He screamed at the ghosts of his dream and harnessed everything inside of him into a punch on the perfect purple wall in front of him.

Jet stumbled back from the effort and stared at the hole his hand had made in his father’s world facing sanctuary. He looked at his knuckles which were a little bit swollen and bleeding from the skin scraped aside by the contact. He then went to the chair and kicked it over with so much force that the momentum flipped him over on top of it and he let out a wordless scream that seemed to begin at his toes. For the next five minutes he wept and occasionally pounded a blow or two upon it with the little strength he had left.

“Forty years living like this. Why? What do I do now?”

Jet got back on his feet and stumbled his way to the bathroom. The floors were stained with urine and shoe scuffs alike. The mold and red/pink bacteria had overtaken a wide ring around the shower where the tub met the wall. There were at least four daddy long legged spiders set up in various upper corners. Jet’s shoulders sank and he bent forward and turned on the sink. He washed his hands and splashed water on his face, but he was completely dead inside.

With the only presence of mind that he had left, he realized that he would not be able to exist in any room in this house with any level of comfort aside from “dad’s shrine” so he returned to that agonizing space. A brief smile came over him at the notice that somewhere between the kick and his flailing atop it the back of the easy chair had become disjointed from the rest of it. That smile grew a little when a lightbulb went off in his mind and he pulled to separate the back entirely and dragged it over to make a pillow. He grabbed a blanket that was hanging on a small rack in the corner of the room and made a little bed for himself and began several hours of dark, dreamless sleep.

The sun hit Jet’s face to wake him. He was completely drained, hollowed. It was the kind of exhaustion that very distinctly resembles a hangover. Slowly and clumsily, he found his way into that disgusting kitchen, grabbed a mug and another Folger’s pod and added another ghost to the growing, earth scented soul of the home, and turned to examine the disgusting mess around him.

His life was in shambles, and something had to give. Maybe he could build something here. Anything was better than this. He didn’t know if he even had the strength to make it to his car to get his bag for clean clothes, much less make significant progress with some spray and a rag. He was only sure of one thing.

“I have to figure out a better way than this.”