Three days had passed since she had
learned of the death of her estranged father. Three days she had spent
remembering... the family holidays they had shared... the card games he had
taught her... the silly jokes at which they had giggled together... Three days
had brought ever-shifting sensations: of dry-throat shock that she would never
see him again; of incurable regret that their last words had been an argument;
and of bewilderment that she should be moved to such sorrow and sleeplessness
after so many years without him.
He had abandoned the family when she
was a mere teenager, and she had spent the two decades since then wondering -
from time to time - whether he was alive or dead. Now she knew for sure. The
letter to her mother about a long-forgotten insurance policy was official
enough, but it gave no hint of where he had lived or what had become of him.
Only that he had died about a month ago. And that is where her mother wanted to
leave it. End of story.
Except that it was now Day Three,
and she was being overwhelmed by a restless urge to find him. She left her
mother in charge of her small daughter and retreated upstairs to spend the rest
of the evening on the Internet... searching. As she began tapping his name into
the first of countless dialogue boxes, the futility of trying to find Alex
Smith made her smile. Undaunted, she buzzed through the online obituaries from
newspapers across the country, zapping between directories and electoral
registers in the area where he was born. Only now did it occur to her that
today was Dad's birthday.
Her shoulders were hunched and her
eyes parched by the time she gave up. She switched off the computer and glanced
at the clock - ten minutes to midnight! Yet she could still hear her wee girl's
voice chirping away with Nanna. She was glad the little one was awake, as she
knew she would get a big hug when she went downstairs.
Instead she found the pair of them
searching for something. They were trotting excitedly between the lounge and
kitchen trying to track down an odd noise. It was an electronic sound -
persistent and repetitive - and they were convinced that it was one of the
child's battery-operated toys. She quietened everyone so that she could trace
the source of the pulsations. She was drawn to the top shelf of a cold larder cupboard.
Her hand trembled as she grasped something that had lain untouched for decades;
It was a heat-activated, novelty candle which played "Happy Birthday"
continuously once lit. But tonight the flameless candle was singing merrily in
her hands.
In that instant she found him. The
quivering on her skin transformed into a warm embrace and a safe and secure
thought from her childhood settled in her brain: Daddy's home.
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