=Strange Gifts=

When I was nine years old, I was kidnapped. Maybe I was ten. It’s hard to be specific about those years. It was before puberty. I’m relatively certain of that much. But I began puberty early so that confuses the issue again. 

In any event, I was kidnapped, although I didn’t think of it as being "kidnapped" at the time.

I was walking home from school with a disassembled school project. A lot of sticks, hard for me to handle, that’s how I remember what I was carrying. They kept slipping out of my grasp. Something like tent poles, but I can’t imagine what kind of project I would have been making with tent poles. A teepee, maybe?

Anyway, I was struggling with these poles and it had begun to rain. A car pulled up to the curb. Inside was a man who seemed old to me, by which I mean, “adult.” All adults seemed the same amorphous age back then. Now I realize he must have been relatively young, younger than I am now. Maybe he was thirty-three, something like that.

He leaned across the seat and smiled and said “Come on, get in. I’ll give you a ride home. Don’t worry. You know me. I’m your dad.”

I think I know at least one of the things you might be thinking. But the fact is that he might have been telling the truth. I didn’t remember my real father, but I knew he and my mother had split up a long time ago, not long after my second birthday, and that the man married to my mother now was not my "real" father. My real father hadn’t been heard from ever since he went away.

I was wet. I was unhappy for unspecified, undefinable reasons. I was living in the kind of foggy daze that kids that age often live inside, a heavy weather that lifts as you get older, and most adults forget, except my foggy daze has never entirely cleared away.

I got into the car. But we didn’t go home, at least not straightaway.

We went to a motel. Although I didn’t call it a “motel” at the time.

It was a room with two beds in it. A brown room with a brownish painting of a farm on the wall. It smelled like the bottom of a closet where shoes are kept.

Across from the beds was the biggest television I’d ever seen up to that point. I thought, I’d really like to see it when it was turned on.

He didn’t turn it on.

He told me to take off my wet clothes.

Something about this request penetrated even my foggy daze, raised an alarm. This, I knew, was wrong. I hesitated. He saw my hesitation.

“It’s okay,” he said and smiled. “I’m your father.”

I took off my damp clothes.

When I was naked, he had me sit on the end of the bed. It felt heavy and damp that bed, like a towel someone had used in the shower. I didn’t like that bed. I was hoping he didn't make me lay back on it.

He didn't. 

He knelt in front of me on the floor and took the heel of my bare foot in one of his hands. Then, very carefully, with infinite patience  one by one, he painted my toenails. He did the same with the next foot. 

I stared down at my newly decorated toes. My foot, resting in the palm of his hand, didn't look like my foot anymore, which made me feel even further away from what was happening, like it was happening, whatever it was, to someone else.

Then he proceeded to do my hands, painting each nail in turn. He painted them a red, red color.

Finally, he put red lipstick on my mouth. It tasted of cherry Lifesavers.

"Don't lick it all off now," he said, smiling again.

Between smiles, he didn't look very happy. But I don't know what you'd call the expression on his face. I don't remember it too well. "Concentrated," I guess I'd call it, if I had to call it anything.

He backed up to take a better view of me. He reached into the pocket of the jacket he was wearing. It was a big canvas jacket, with a lot of deep pockets. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but now I think of it as an Army jacket.

He’d been in the Army once, I came to learn later. Maybe I knew it then, but it was one of those details that didn’t connect with the jacket he was wearing. Not at the time, anyway. He wasn't a topic that came up much at home. I'd never seen so much as a picture of him. 

He took a camera out of the pocket.

He took photographs of me. That’s what he did. That's all that he did. He didn’t do anything else, I promise, not that I can recall, anyway.

When he was finished, he had me get dressed and then he drove me home.

My parents weren’t back from work yet. I hurried upstairs to the bathroom and removed the polish from my nails, the waxy coating on my lips, because it was something not allowed me at the time. And because I wanted them back: my hands, my feet, my lips. I wanted them to look familiar again.

I flushed all the stained tissues down the toilet.

I never told anyone.  He didn’t tell me not to tell. I just knew not to, that it was something…well, how can you explain it? Something that was part of the foggy world that I lived in back then. Something that was part of that world and that belonged there and only there and that could survive nowhere else, like a fish in a fish tank.

I mention it now only because I recently received an email from that man, my "father." He wrote to tell me that he didn’t have much time left to live. He didn’t know if I remembered him from that day or not. He supposed I probably did. But just in case I did and was wondering or tortured or haunted or whatever by what did or didn’t happen, he wanted to assure me that nothing bad had happened. As proof, he attached the portfolio of photographs he had taken of me that day to his email.

And I have to say, they are beautiful photos in a disconnected, spooky way. They are a record of a me I have otherwise forgotten. A me not me at all anymore. An innocent child lost in a fog, perched on the end of a bed in a motel room one rainy afternoon a long, long time ago.