The stranger wearing my father's body
A ghost story.
When Liv returned home for the first time in five years, she found a stranger wearing her father's body. That was where it all started. A stranger was wearing her father's body, and that was why she killed him.
Before she even reached the house, she knew something was wrong. The flagstone path, maintained so diligently by her father for thirty years, was being overrun by the dandelion lawn. The rose bushes, her mother's pride and joy, were brown and brittle. The bright red door looked the same as ever, but that just served to highlight the blemishes.
Her father always opened the door gently after three knocks, as though he had been waiting patiently in the foyer the whole day. The rest of the family joked that he must have been a doorman in another life.
Her father always dressed as though he was about to head out to dinner with someone important, and he always demurred whenever he felt his children were not doing the same. "It isn't pretentious," he would insist. "It's self-respect."
Her father always greeted everyone formally, except for his children and grandchildren. They were the only ones who got to hear him ask "Who's this then?", as he frowned and pretended not to recognise them. They were the only ones that got to see the soft smile and quick wink that put lie to his feigned ignorance.
The stranger wearing her father's body did none of those things.
As she reached the end of the path, Liv had barely raised her hand to knock when the door jerked open. A stranger stood on the other side, dressed in a loose shirt and sweatpants. A medical mask obscured most of his face, a pair of angry eyes glaring at her over the top of it. With a start, Liv realised this stranger was her father.
"Who's this then?" he demanded, and Liv smiled in relief. But the silence dragged on, and the stranger didn't move and his expression didn't change. Her smile faltered.
"Dad, it's me… Liv," she said.
The silence continued for a few heartbeats, and finally the old man snorted and turned to walk back into the house. Liv stood stuck on the flagstone, watching in bewilderment. It suddenly felt like her stomach had moved up into her throat and was fighting to escape.
After a few moments, she followed him inside.
The only thing more bizarre than the changes in her father was that absolutely no one else in the family acknowledged them, or even seemed to notice.
When Liv enquired about the face mask, her eldest brother just shrugged. 'He's paranoid about catching the flu, you know how dad can be.' But Liv remembered her father as a man who had never seen a doctor, who insisted he'd never been sick a day in his life.
The stranger, wearing the body of the man who had built the house they stood in, would become lost in the linen closet. Her mother would suddenly decide she needed a different tablecloth for dinner and hustle him out of the way. The stranger, wearing the body of a man who treated everyone with kindness and respect, would begin ranting about 'those people, all gangsters and thieves'. Her brothers would abruptly start talking about football, the only topic her father couldn't help but give his opinion on. It was like a choreographed routine, with everyone dancing flawlessly around the one thing that just didn't belong.
But after a while she began to understand. They set the table as they always had, and they sat for dinner at the same time they always had, and they made the same corny jokes that they always had, and if Liv concentrated on ignoring it hard enough it was almost like it always had been.
And half an hour after dinner, her mother wondered aloud what time it was (like she always had), which meant it was exactly 7:00 and time for tea. And like they always had, Liv and her father stood up to go and prepare it.
Liv smiled as she retrieved the kettle. Preparing the tea had always been a little ritual between just the two of them. As a child she would hold his trouser leg and watch as he meticulously went through the routine, humming the same little nonsense song to himself.
First, fill the kettle and pop it on to boil. Next, retrieve the teapot and three mugs (her brothers didn't have tea), then rinse each with warm water. Add four teaspoons of loose-leaf tea to the teapot - one for mum, one for dad, one for Livvy, and one for the pot - and add the hot water. Wait three minutes. Spin the teapot slowly three times, wait another minute, then pour into the mugs. Finally, add milk to two and stir.
One evening, when she was finally old enough to reach the counter, her father had stepped back and nudged her forward. It was her turn to prepare the tea. It had felt like the first step towards becoming a grown up.
It had started disastrously. Whenever her father had done it, it had always been a slow, calm process. But somehow when she was doing it she felt like everything was going too fast and she was rushing and she missed something but she didn't know what and it was wrong, everything was wrong, and she felt herself on the verge of tears.
Without a word, her father had stepped forward and softly placed his hand on her elbow.
'Just breathe, little one,' he said quietly, 'You're doing fine'. And she grew calm.
That became their signal. Whenever she was getting stressed, or becoming upset, or about to make a particularly bad mistake, her father would just softly touch her elbow. Sometimes he didn't even say anything, but she knew what he meant — just breathe, little one. You're doing fine.
"That's wrong!"
The growling voice ripped Liv out of her reverie. Something strong and heavy suddenly gripped her wrist and yanked down, hard. She yelped as a sharp pain shot up her arm. Her father stood beside her, furious eyes scowling at her over the mask. His fist tightened around her wrist, knuckles whitening in effort.
"That's wrong!" he insisted again in that same hateful growl. Liv froze. This wasn't her father.
The next few weeks were a blur of arguments and tears.
She started with her brothers. She told herself it was necessary, that they needed to have a plan in place before she approached their mother. But the truth was she was scared. She needed someone else to see it first. She needed backup. And surely her brothers could see what she saw.
But at first Liam and Lucas laughed off her concerns, their eyes looking everywhere but at her.
"He's just getting a bit forgetful," Liam said when Liv told him their father hadn't recognised her.
"He was just trying to help," Lucas said when Liv revealed the angry red imprint of their father's hand on her wrist.
"For fuck's sake, he's walking around the house in nothing but a diaper!" she finally screamed, and her brothers looked shocked.
"Olivia!" Liam said crossly, "The… underpants are nothing to be ashamed about. You're being—"
"Pretentious?" she demanded. She didn't need to finish the sentence. Her brothers flinched as they remembered what their father would have said to that.
Then came her mother. Liv was prepared. She would start small. She would be persistent. She was ready for days, even weeks of arguments and screaming matches. But what she wasn't prepared for was her mother immediately bursting into tears.
"I'm so sorry," she ended in heaving sobs, "It's just been so hard."
And just like that they were all hugging and crying, trading pity and apologies, guilt and forgiveness. All the while the stranger in her father's body sat in the chair beside them, staring vacantly at the television.
From there everything seemed to somehow get even faster. There were doctors to see and care homes to view, rates to study and insurances to arrange. Lawyers and wills and real estate agents, everyone with their own pile of papers to read and file and sign and return and date and sign again. To Liv it felt like her first time preparing the tea; everything was moving too fast. She was sure she was making mistakes, but she didn't know what mistakes, and it was wrong, everything was wrong. And this time there was no hand on her elbow. This time there was no voice saying just breathe, little one. You're doing fine.
And then it was done. Her parents had been ripped apart, her family home had been put on the market, and her father was in a home. It had only taken her five weeks. Five weeks from when the stranger in her father's body had first answered the door.
Every morning as she stepped into the shower, Liv tried to think of all the things she could have done differently, all the ways she could have stopped it turning out the way it had. Every morning she stepped out of the shower a little surer it had to be this way. After a week it still hurt, but it hurt less, and she was certain. It wasn't fair, but she had done the best she could.
Then the phone rang. Her father was dead.
The blur of days began again, but it was different this time. Before, everything seemed to go too fast. Now, all the days all seemed to stretch into one long nightmare that didn't end.
"We think he was trying to get home," the doctor explained. "He got out of the care facility during the night and became disoriented. It was cold. He would have just sat down on that bench and drifted off to sleep."
So Liv had killed the man wearing her father's body. No one said that, of course. Probably no one would ever say it. But she was the one that had put him in that care facility. She was the one that had taken him away from his home. From his family. And he had died trying to get back.
The doctor wore a medical mask, the same kind her father had started wearing. For a moment their faces blurred together, and she felt her breath catch as her father's eyes stared back at her from the doctor's face.
She looked down, and when she looked back up she was at her brother's place, dozens of photographs of her father spread out on the table before them. An entire life, captured from start to finish in little 4x6 inch cards. Her father had started wearing the mask over two years ago, she realised dully. How had she not noticed that?
She looked down for another moment. The wooden floorboards of Liam's kitchen were replaced with cheap grey carpet. She looked back up. A podium, a coffin. People. Words and hugs. Her brothers spoke for her. She couldn't speak.
She looked down for a long time. She didn't want to look back up. She wanted to just go to sleep. But there was an annoying hacking noise that just would not stop.
A man was clearing his throat in the disingenuous way of someone trying to get another's attention. He was wearing pressed black trousers and a stiff white button-up shirt with a tie. A small red name tag sat on his breast pocket, but she couldn't read it.
They were at her place, she realised. And there were others; her mother and brothers, all arranged in a semi-circle around her. They were sitting on her dining chairs.
'I've only got four chairs,' Liv thought idly, 'What am I sitting on?' She tried to look down and almost toppled over. Everyone pretended not to notice.
Someone was speaking. Her mother perhaps, or maybe her brother. She found it hard to focus on anyone in particular — it felt like catching mist. Whenever someone started speaking it took her a moment to turn and feel the shape of them in her mind. And just as she had it someone else would start speaking and the first speaker would evaporate.
They loved her, they said, and they were worried about her. They were worried about how much she was drinking.
"But I don't drink," she said, confused. The others all exchanged glances, and Liv looked down to find a glass of whisky in her hand. When had she started drinking?
"Your family wants you to know that if you need help, they are here for you," the name tag man was saying. "They want you to- know you can talk to them about anything."
But she couldn't. She couldn't tell them that all her memories of her father were slowly being replaced by the stranger. She couldn't tell them her heart started pounding in her ears every time she saw an elderly man. She couldn't tell them that she stopped looking in the mirror, because every time she did she saw the stranger's masked face glaring back at her. She couldn't tell them that her father was dead, and it was all her fault.
So she lied, and said she was fine. She promised to consider the name tag man's offer to join his group one night. There were hugs and crying again, but she didn't really cry because she couldn't cry anymore. They asked if they could take away the alcohol, and she agreed, and helped them bag up all the bottles in the apartment. And then they left.
After a few moments, Liv remembered the whisky in the back of the cupboard.
She hadn't lied about it. She'd just forgotten. And she knew she shouldn't, that it was a mistake, but it seemed like such a small mistake compared to all the others she'd made. She opened the cupboard.
And just as she reached towards the whisky, Liv felt a warm hand placed gently on her elbow.
She whirled around, but the kitchen was empty. She was alone. But her elbow still tingled from where the hand had just been resting. Liv felt her whole body begin to tremble.
It was just a memory, she told herself. But it had seemed so real. She could even smell his old cologne.
And then the soft pressure on her elbow returned, and she heard her father's voice, clear and gentle, as though he was standing right behind her.
"Just breathe, little one," he said quietly. "You're doing fine."
She closed the cupboard door.