Seizure (Part VI)

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The Delta of Confidences

Amanda got back to the hotel room around three a.m. and she had the exaggerated, giggling stealth of the intoxicated that created more noise than it prevented. Both Maggie and Tess had known that Amanda’s promises to stay dry during this trip were worthless. The main reason behind her father allowing her to go on the trip was largely the confluence of three factors: Maggie’s promise to keep her dry, which was farcical; the attractive idea, proposed by a neighbor, that the three sisters would “bond,” helping to ease the pain of their mother’s death, six months past but still an open sore; and simple distraction, fallout from a confession to Tess after his return from Malaysia, a conversation that revealed either pronounced schizophrenia on his part, or dark portends indeed for his daughter.

A few days after his return from the mountains and jungles of Southeast Asia, David M. Murphy took his daughter Tess aside for a serious talk on the veranda on the secluded south side of their mansion. The purpose of his trip, as everyone had been led to believe, had not been pharmaceutical research, the foundation on which his company and the house they lived in had been built, at least, he clarified, in the strict terms of his shareholders. Because similar jaunts in the past had met with wild success, there was no reason for anyone to doubt him. In response to a rather impertinently unfunny quip from Amanda (about the quality of “weed” he had brought back), David boasted to the homecoming reception that their stock was getting ready to “crap diamonds.” But, even then, Tess could tell that this swagger was false. Her sisters insisted that Dad had found the magical plants as he had done so many times before, that he had once again gone out into the savage places and seized its mysteries, and in doing so, as was their habit, they were confident that their lifestyles were about to soar upward once again. Sensing when her father was lying, or even simply concealing something, had always been a singular skill of Tess’s and one that assured that she would be the delta toward which all confidences flow. Now, as he poured himself a snifter of brandy, Tess noticed with foreboding that her father only looked at her indirectly and fleetingly.

Such shiftiness in expression always appeared foreign to David Murphy’s face. Like Maggie and Amanda, David was tall and prepossessing, and, like Maggie and Amanda, his eyes were the color of Arctic seas. His skin was weather-beaten and coarse, reminding one of a leather basketball left out in the yard all winter. Except for the uncanny similarity of their facial shape, there was little to link Tess to her father or sisters physically (making her, it seemed, an orphan of sorts when her mother died). Perhaps these dissimilarities, because of the distancing that always seemed to occur when they were brought up, were the basis on which Tess’s amazing insights were built. Moreover, her similarity to her mother prompted David to treat her with an almost doting sentiment, a tendency, ever more pronounced since her mother’s death, that hardly escaped her sisters’ notice.

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