Endgame
       Chapter 8
 

Ray’s father...Dante Santos.... a phantom.

As he sat at the desk in his small office, shaking, beads of perspiration undying, Ray went back to the night of his 18th birthday--the night that defined him, his past, present, and future. Ray had shut the closet door to that memory, desperately hoping that the revelation of his father had been some nightmare, a hellish dream only. But he had proof it was not. There were more than skeletons in his closet....

It was two weeks after graduation from St. Michael’s Academy that Carmen threw a gigantic party for Ray’s birthday as well as for Danny’s and his mutual graduation. They had both attended the private school together since kindergarten, but each knew their paths were about to diverge. Ray was headed for Notre Dame in the fall; Danny was staying home but had signed up for a few classes at Springfield U.

Carmen had allowed practically the entire graduating class to attend the party; quite an extension of hospitality for her. Looking back, Ray remembered thinking at that party of how he wasn’t even remotely prepared to let go of the safety and security present in high school life; He didn’t know who he was or where he was headed. The mantra had always been, get good grades, score well on SAT’s, get in the top 10% of the class, and excel in sports. He had spent all of his life up to this point pursuing such goals. Well, now what, because all of that was the past. Ray knew a lot of his classmates were wrestling with this same realization. The party kept going until early morning if for no other reason than that leaving this party meant stepping into the unknown.

But not for Danny, never for Danny.

Ray did not return to his room above uncle Salvador’s restaurant until after 3 in the morning. He couldn’t sleep, though. In his tiny cot of a bed, he lay staring at the ceiling.

Who am I?

Both of his parents were gone within a year of each other, gone by his 7th birthday. His uncle Salvador, at age 49, had taken Ray in as his own. Carmen was his only mother figure. No matter how benevolent Danny’s mother was to Ray, and she had always been so, he could not shake the uneasiness he felt when he was around her.

"There’s something not right about her. I can’t really define it, but don’t you see it, too," he had asked his uncle not long ago. Salvador would always say nothing but that Ray had a gift.

"The gift to read souls," his uncle had told him with Ray trying not to laugh. But his uncle would persist, "One day God will use you. He already has, but He wants more."

Truthfully, Ray had always heard the call of God, always known he would be doing His work in one capacity or another. But priesthood? Maybe, instead, he could disappear into the sea of need that existed in third world countries and become some anonymous missionary. Ray’s following thoughts were abandoned at the sound of a light rapping upon his door.

Why would uncle be up this late, he wondered.

Maybe he’d been too loud coming in and had woken Salvador; although, air-raid sirens would have a difficult time raising his hearing aid-less uncle out from slumber.

There it was, again.

"I’m coming uncle," Ray shouted as he threw off the covers.

He answered the door to no one. He quickly looked up and down the vacant hall, and then he saw it. Looking down, Ray studied the plain, brown shoebox.

Well, has uncle got one last gift to give, he wondered.

But instinctively, he pressed his ear against the box before opening it. Silent.

Unknowing, he was carefully opening Pandora’s box. And his reality came undone.

Within the box laid two items: a letter from his father who was supposed to be 11 years dead by suicide and a baseball glove.

The letter detailed Ray’s life as if God, Himself, had written it: the day of Ray’s birth, his christening, specific toys on specific Christmases, academic and athletic awards from beginning to present, and then the truth... The tone of the letter darkened as the explanation for his father’s absence began to take form....

The deception, the betrayal, the monsters in human form, the death of his mother, the life of his cousin, the plan for vengeance, and the resulting threat all laid bare in the trembling hands of a boy/man.

The second item in the box was the worn out baseball glove his dad wore when playing catch with Ray. He held it tight to his heart, laid back in his bed, and wept. For the man who wrote this letter was worse than an impostor, this was his father devoid of conscience, destroyed by bitterness and hatred, bent on revenge. And as he read and reread the letter, his despair deepened. He fought in vain against the sleep reaching for his exhausted mind, body, and soul. He began to drift and dream.........

........dream that the phone was ringing.....

The unending peal of the phone brought Ray into reality, and squinting at the early morning sun already piercing the room, he finally reached to answer it.

"Hello," Ray voiced thickly.

"Hello son."

Ray’s eyes opened.

"Were you sleeping?"

"Yes. Starting two and a half hours ago," Ray said, allowing a hint of anger to manifest.

"Do you believe I am who I say I am?"

"Who else would you be?"

"Indeed," his father replied as if impressed. Over half a minute of silence passed between them.

You called me, you talk, Ray thought.

His father broke the silence with an offering empty of so much, "Please do heed my warning in the letter son."

"You mean your threat."

"It is merely a statement of fact. Really quite inescapable if you go against my wishes. You know I am right."

With that, Ray hung up. He didn’t know why he reacted in such a way. His back-from-the-dead father was the first person Ray had hung up on in his entire life. He should have absorbed all the information he could, but he was so angry to have been placed in this position. Ray was cognizant of the fact that the gift of the baseball glove was actually no gift at all. Ray’s father had given him that glove in the manner of a snake shedding dead, unneeded skin.

Ray could not wrap his brain around all of this; a letter from his undead father explaining that he would have never abandoned Ray, especially after Maria’s death, if he could have helped it; and yet, as the words continue down the page of the letter, his father, perhaps unknowingly, discloses the death of the father from Ray’s childhood.

The man that Ray had too briefly known and loved as his father was truly dead after all.

He had to get out of that claustrophobic room. Once on the street, he began running. He felt so stranded and alone. He wanted to find a crowd to drown out the solitary confinement of his newborn knowledge. He wandered into the park and collapsed onto a bench.

Where am I to go with this, Lord? Is there no way to fix this? I wanted my father back, you knew that, but not like this........not like this!

His face fell into his hands as he tried to mask the tears that eagerly came. Finally, he arched his neck back to stare into the sky, but his eyes fell upon his father instead. On this beautiful late-spring Saturday, the park was besieged with joggers, couples, baby strollers, children running, and yet Ray could see him about 50 feet away staring back.

For 11 years, Ray had studied the face of the man in the one family picture he had. It was taken on his 6th birthday. His mother, his father, and him. From the distance that now lay between the two of them, Ray was shocked at how time had changed nothing on his father’s face. Neither made the effort to approach the other, and after a solid minute of mutual eye lock, his father broke the spell, turned, and walked away, never looking back.

There, in those moments, Ray’s path became chosen. He wanted no part of a life that could cause a father to gaze upon his son so coldly, absent of emotion. He wanted no part of a life that would destroy his soul and the lives of everyone he touched. Ray knew he had beheld the gaze of a dead man walking. Ray decided to take the only escape that would allow for his soul’s continued existence; priesthood.

And so here he was, sitting behind his priestly desk in his priestly office of his parish.

I should have gone with that third world missionary idea.

He got up and began to pace. "God? Am I going to have to just wait and let all of this happen before I can do something? What, what am I supposed to do? Bringing in the police is only going to save Danny for jail. You know I can’t do that. You know I can’t. Show me, Lord. Please, show me a different way, any other way."

A knock came from the other side of the door.

"Come in," he said, half-embarrassed, wondering if whomever it was had heard his Apostle-style rambling.

Drew opened the door.

Michelle stood in the dark, behind the stairwell, ready.

After her first week of living in basement captivity, she was notified by Dietz that "the boss" had been impressed with her good behavior and was going to grant her TV privileges.

What an idiot, cruel, but still an idiot, she had thought.

She discovered she was still in Springfield. She saw her loved ones suffering because of her and her supposed death. She had feared Danny’s death and cried with relief at learning otherwise. But her relief was short-lived as the anchorwoman reported on the burns he had suffered. All of this did nothing but upset and infuriate her. She was apparently right under everybody's noses.

By week 3, she knew she had to act. She was losing her strength, her sanity.

In the mornings, Dietz would bring her food to last the day, but she was afraid to eat or drink much of anything and would not have been able to keep it down if she had. The two changes of clothes provided for her were becoming alarmingly oversized.

Something, someone was holding Mick in check, but he still enjoyed finding ways to torture her and get away with it. He would scream from the other side of the door that he was coming down to get her, rattling the locks, saying that Dietz was gone, and it was only her and him. She would scream back that if she didn’t kill him, someone would for anything he did to her. She would then hear his hyena laugh fading as he walked away. Michelle vowed she would not die down there.

And so, now, she waited...

"I’m coming to get you Michelle," Mick finally, predictably, taunted. Laughing, he continued, "You hear that?" He was unbolting the locks as he always did. But instead of Michelle yelling back at him, as usual, she stood silent.

"Micheeeeeelle?"

Silence.

"You better answer me. You know what I’ll do if you don’t."

Silence.

"All right, you can just keep your mouth shut," he shouted furiously as he swung open the door and lumbered down the stairs. As he left the last step and went forward, he sneered, "You always did like playing hard to get, didn’t you, Miche-" and never knowing what hit him, he fell face first into the broken glass. He never saw Michelle jump onto the second step from behind him to get a better angle of his vulnerable neck/head area and wield the 13 inch TV at him with all the adrenaline strength she had left. The screen shattered over his skull, and Michelle watched him fall, moaning, then silent. The shock of having to do this again to Mick was nearly unbearable.

Snap out of it ..... GO!

She took the steps two at a time, quickly reaching the doorway.

"Leaving without saying good-bye," said a voice too familiar.

Startled, Michelle, looked up to see the face of her husband with 20 extra years etched