FAMILY CURSE

FAMILY CURSE
by Anne Marie Lutz

“I only missed one call, Dad.” I’d been swamped yesterday with the new implementation. It had been 10 pm before I realized I’d missed the daily call, and by then Dad must have been asleep.

“You don’t understand, Ellie.” Dad’s voice quavered over his home phone line. “Old people get forgotten. The world moves on.”

“Come on, Dad. I’m not going to forget you.” I rolled my eyes. “I bring you your groceries twice a week. All your bills get sent to me. And hey, Mrs Hernandez checks on you, doesn’t she?”

“Rosa’s a little busier now,” Dad said. “Her daughter just had a baby. Besides, it has to be family.”

“I call you, Dad. I’ve been calling you every day for a long time now. I only missed one day.”

“I know, Ellie. Just … don’t forget again, that’s all. I can feel it happening. I don’t get any mail, and no one stops by. Now that I’m old and retired, and with your mother gone, you’re the only one who keeps me here.”

“All right, Dad.”

Bob, the customer service manager, waved his arms frantically at me from my office doorway. Althea from tech support peered over his shoulder. Crap. Another problem with the new system?

“When you get old, things go on without you. In the end, the whole world forgets you. You have to hold me here, Ellie.”

“Dad, Dad – I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Don’t forget.” His voice sounded a little weak. He was eighty, after all.

+++

The new system was down for eight hours, and then operated in a half-assed buggy fashion for days. Customers called, frantic and irate. Programmers stayed all night, and managers who wanted to keep their jobs did too. Someone brought in granola bars, bagels and cream cheese, and a tired-looking fruit tray from the local market, which remained untouched while people drank pot after pot of coffee.

I read the last message in the queue, looked away from my computer screen and noticed the late-afternoon light slanting through my window. I closed my laptop and remembered Dad. I’d gone home and crashed for five hours and then driven back to work in a haze of exhaustion. I’d hugged little Jackson and reassured him I’d be back soon, and told him to be good for the sitter. I hadn’t thought of calling Dad.

I picked up my phone. No new messages. He hadn’t called.

Panic nipped at my nerves. I tapped “favorites” and prepared to touch Dad’s number. Surely I’d called yesterday after the conference call? No, Bob had interrupted me. It had been … three days? I scrolled down the list of recent calls, but there was no record of the calls I made every day, the calls I’d been making for the last year. The calls had vanished.

All of them.

Technology was so unreliable. I had to call right away – what would Dad be thinking? Forgotten, I remembered him saying.

I’d do it the hard way, scrolling through every contact. But there was nothing there. My phone had forgotten that Dad had ever existed.

My heart skipped a beat. I could barely remember his number, had just touched “Dad” as long as I could remember, ever since college. I dredged it out of my memory and dialed.

The call connected.

“Hello?” said a strange voice. “Sorry, there’s no one here by that name. Yes, we’ve lived here for years now, you have the wrong number.”

I grabbed my keys and ran for the elevator to the parking garage. This was crazy, there must be a mistake. I drove the fifty miles fast, in a haze of disbelief. Please let everything be okay.

Dad’s story flashed through my mind. The story that had been passed down through the generations.

No. It couldn’t be true.

Sweetwater Street looked the same. White-sided houses, some with fences along the property lines. Flowers along driveways, petunias in red, white and blue. An Ohio State banner on a pole. Cars in driveways, an SUV parked on the street.

There was no 429.

I braked and backed up, tires screeching, and drove the block again. There was Johnson’s house, there was Hernandez. The house with the green shutters, the house I’d grown up in, should be right there.

It wasn’t.

How could it be gone?

I knocked at Hernandez’s door. Rosa answered, salt-and-pepper hair, house dress and slippers. Same as always. But her smile was uncertain.

“Yes?” Rosa said. “Can I help you?”

“Rosa? Do you know what happened to my dad?”

Her dark gaze swept up and down, evaluating.

She didn’t remember me. A chill of fear ran through me. “Will Hazelton? He lives next door?”

“I don’t know any Will Hazelton.”

“At 429. Next door. An old man?” Oh my God oh my God.

Rosa shook her head. “Are you all right, dear? Do you want me to call anyone?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine.”

The same result on the other side. Cal Johnson didn’t remember Will Hazelton or me. His gaze was suspicious. He clutched his phone, ready to dial 911.

I drove away before they could call the police. Cal and Rosa stared after me out their open front doors.

Around the corner, I pulled over in front of Schmidt’s gray-sided ranch. The rusted swingset was still in the side yard. I would call after all. My hand jabbed the emergency button.

“9-1-1. What is your emergency?”

“My Dad. Uh, he’s missing.” My voice shook.

I told them he’d vanished, that he was old, that he was frail. They took all the information. I drove to meet the township police cruiser where it pulled up in front of Rosa’s house. Another pulled in behind it, lights flashing.

The officer leveled an appraising stare at me. He asked me if I knew there was no 429 Sweetwater Street. He took the information I gave him about Dad and climbed back into the cruiser with the other officer, and they did something with the onboard computer and a staticky conversation with the dispatcher. After a few minutes the first officer came back and told me they couldn’t find a record of a Will Hazelton in any of their databases.

“Do you have a picture?” the officer asked.

I’d searched my phone while I was waiting, but there was not one picture of Dad left on my phone. I shook my head. Poor Dad. He must be distraught, wherever he was.

“Call again when you find the right address,” he said. “We need the right information to look for him. In the meantime, you might try calling the hospitals.”

I climbed back into my car as the police pulled away, drove to a local parking lot and started calling. He wasn’t at the nearby hospitals. I had the bright idea of stopping at the local bank – they knew me there, I had power of attorney. But they made me drag out the wrinkled legal papers again, looking at me with disinterested eyes, and then told me there were no accounts in Dad’s name. His modest savings had vanished into the ether. The same at the post office.

The cousin who lived in San Jose, the only family who might remember him, hung up on me.

I can feel it happening, Dad had said. You don’t exist at all. Don’t forget, Ellie.

But it had only been a story. The kind Dad used to tell as we huddled big-eyed and blanket-wrapped near the campfire, the taste of burnt toasted marshmallows on our tongues. The story of how some ancient great-great-great-aunt, solitary and forgotten, had been left out of my ancestor’s christening because no one could remember her name. Or that she was even still alive. The ancient relative had cast a curse on all my line.

We’d thought he was riffing off of Sleeping Beauty, in a Dad sort of way. Telling tall tales around the campfire.

There was only one more place I could think of looking. To make sure this was really happening, a human being vanished, wiped from memory.

In a state of shock, I drove to the city park along the river. There was a dedication plaque there for the park. It listed the name of the park, the mayor, the city planner, the main architect. Dad’s name was on the plaque; I’d always taken a secret pride in the mark of history, Dad’s name stamped in bronze along with the others on the rock.

I left the car idling against the curb, with someone honking angrily behind me, and jogged over to the dedication plaque. I knew what I’d see, of course, but it still struck me down to my knees.

Will Hazelton’s name wasn’t there.

+++

August 2060

“Every day,” I said.

“You want me to call every day?” Jackson scrubbed a hand through his thinning hair. “Mom. Isn’t that why we’re moving you here?”

He waved at our surroundings. Plush blue-and-white carpet, a potted palm plant near the staircase I would never use. Glazed pottery sat on the floor next to the low wooden table. A picture window let in filtered light from a clear blue sky and a ribbon of beach, a generated image since I knew this place was in the middle of the city. The nurse’s desk sat off to the side, near the front door with its ID scanner, trying to be unobtrusive.

I looked around me and couldn’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia. Shades of soothing white on white. This style was far out of date, but its presence here was clearly meant to remind the residents of the homes of their youth.

A smiling aide stood nearby, tablet in hand, waiting for us to notice her. A personal care bot stood behind her, arms extended in gentle welcome. The bot would handle the real care; the aide was for the human touch.

“You’re moving me here so you can forget me.” I lifted my chin and stared up at my son from my wheelchair. Laying on the guilt – yes, but this was important.

“No, Mom, of course not! But you fell. And I’m not close enough to be there for you, you know that.” His forehead was furrowed with anxiety.

I took a little pity. Jackson was a good son, he just had a lot of other things on his mind. He had his own kids, and a job that had warned him twice already about taking off mid-day to make sure his elderly mom was all right when the house had notified him I’d fallen.

The aide stepped forward. “Eleanor? Can we get you settled, and then after lunch we can go over all your paperwork.” She cast an uncertain glance at Jackson. “Can she …”

“Yes, yes, she’s perfectly capable.” Jackson touched his wrist to check the time. “Mom, I have to go.”

“Every day,” I reminded him. “Don’t forget. It’s important, now that I’m old. Remember what I told you.”

He rolled his eyes. He remembered, all right, just didn’t believe. He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, and he was gone. No promises.

And I knew what would happen.

+++

The aide’s rubber-soled footsteps squeaked right past my door without stopping. I heard her knocking at Karen’s door, heard the aide’s voice calling. Dinnertime.

No one had called me to go downstairs for dinner.

I fumbled for my phone, checked it again. No calls. There had been a voice mail four days ago, and no calls since.

He’d told me he was traveling out of the country. Call me anyway, I’d said. Don’t forget, Jackson. Maybe have Marcy call –

He’d snorted. He and his ex-wife didn’t speak.

“Jackson.” I heard my voice quavering, tried to steady it. “You know what happened –”

“It’s just a fairy story, Mom.” He’d laughed. “A good story, but a story. Things like that don’t happen. There are people there to speak to you, you know. And I love you.”

“It has to be family.” I closed my eyes, felt the fear closing in.

I glanced at my phone again. It shone back at me, cold and blue. No calls. No messages. I looked up and realized I couldn’t see the corners of my room anymore, couldn’t see the walls. A dark shadow spilled toward me from the doorsill.

A fuzzy noise, like static from a television of my youth, filled my ears. Obliterated the noise of the other residents, the clink of pots and pans from the kitchen just down the stairwell from me. I looked at my phone again, jammed my thumb down on the button, but the screen was black.

Something growled. The room shook. An unreasoning terror filled my mind; I was struck dumb, couldn’t even scream. I noticed I was gasping for air; was the air gone too, now?

The floor tilted at an angle, exposing the black pit that lay where the second floor should have been. I couldn’t see the bottom; this was the place my great-great-whatever aunt had cursed us with, if family forgot to speak our names. The story said my long-ago ancestor, flushed with youth and joy at the christening of her child, had laughed at the ancient aunt. “No one remembers you, you old hag. You don’t deserve to be here at all!”

My wheelchair began to slide as the floor tilted at an angle, spilling me and my chair forward. I leaned back – as if that would help – but horror filled my mind. I screamed as my chair’s locked wheels slid forward through the portal into the featureless black.

The fall was long, and I had time to notice my awareness fading. Something howled in laughter as I fell.

I wondered if Jackson would be able to make his daughters believe.