The image on the screen of my phone etched into my eyes. We had just come back, with the family, after a picnic at Greenfield Gardens. Cindy, in her yellow sundress, and David, our six-year-old son, in the middle of a laugh as he threw his arms around her waist. An ideal lifetime captured in pixels. Yet it was not the excitement that knocked me out. It was a smile of David. That scrunched up wrinkle about the corners of his eyes. The fact that his left eyebrow was elevated by an infinitesimal, as compared to the right. The slight groove in his chin, so slight no one could see the mark unless he knew to look. These were not my features that looked at me. And these looked like Frederick's.
"Daddy, daddy come play!" The spreading and swirling vortex of my thoughts was broken by the clear and bright voice of David, which brought me back to the present. Near the fountain, he was industriously constructing a sand-castle, and his little hands might have engaged a method which would have brought another spasm of horror to me. It was that very careful attention, the same singularly absorbed concentration, with which I had observed Frederick work when he had to rely on his chalk on large tablets in fastidiously correcting calculations of difficult financial estimates at the few business lunches we had reluctantly together in years past. The similarities were far too graphic, far too disturbing to be overlooked.
I could only get out, to say, "Pardon, old chap," but to my tongue I did so, it conveyed a sense of forced cheerfulness. I placed the phone in my pocket and felt the cold metal of the phone to remind me of the digital evidence I was holding now. But my legs were heavy, and I was walking with all the effort that I could towards them. All my moves would resound, and I would hear again pressing on me a question which I had mortally feared to ask myself during months, a question which now burst in my brain: How long have I been living a lie? I could feel the sand that lay below my feet wobbling like the faltering foundation of reality, as I perceived.
Cindy, with rising eyes, met mine, her soft, dark-brown eyes, the same eyes which had held me spellbound in that wedding seven years before, expressing a kindly worry.
"How are you, baby?" You are a trifle pale." I could usually welcome her touch as a light stroke on my arm; now it seemed like a probe, an inquiry into the depths of my agitation. I lied, saying, "Just tired of work", but the words were bitter in my mouth, and I did not look at her because I dared not; because I could see by the way she had turned to me that she knew I told a lie.
"The Lekki project is already draining me up more than I could have imagined." It was an easy thing to explain, a possible explanation of my instant paleness, a stockade against her simple solicitude.
She stretched her hand across and held mine a moment in contact so light that I had barely perceived it.
" Daniel, you work too hard. Perhaps, it is time to think of that elevation to project manager. Less ground work, more desk work." I absent-mindedly nodded that I agreed but I had been and would always be distracted by David. His fingers, tiny things, were almost artistic as he molded his damp grains into his sandcastle, which he was building with extreme care. He moved accurately and purposefully, as evidence of an emerging creativity. I recalled how Frederick had related to us the time when he was young and had an ambition in life to be an architect, but laudably had given up this vocation in deference to the encouraging cultures of his father to him to join the business world of finances which had paid him better but offered no fulfillment to him. The building he did--with blocks, or sand, or the very manner of placing the food about his plate--it had all the same constructive sharpness, that inborn knowledge of shape and design. The interrelation, which had to begin with a moment of thought before, became something unquestionable.
"Look, Daddy!" David shouted, with pride as bubbling out of his voice, as he heaped another final exultant tower on his sand construction. "Look! It's the castle from Mommy's storybook!"! His wholesome delight was very unlike the tempest that ran in my breast.
"What a lovely thing it is, son," I said, and I meant it. The doubts which puzzled me, the squirms which ulcerated my soul, had nothing whatever to do with my love to this child, which was as great, as steady. He was my boy, and had been during the last six years, and this could not be changed by similarities or happenings, by that inhuman turn of events which now threatened to cause a change in our relation. In all that was really important, he had been my son, and that at least, was incapable of being proved otherwise.
But as soon as we gathered our picnic, the loot of our perfect afternoon strewn about us, and went home, I could not resist feeling the unease that I was living in a house of sand, just as David was building his castle of cards. It was beautiful, of course, a sham of domestic bliss, and yet it was flimsy, naturally unsound, and was bound to fall, with the ebb of disclosure, when the inevitable flood should come. And the trip home, where one would ordinarily engage in some light-hearted talk, was darkened by a somber silence, with every mile, I began to feel that troublesome foreshadowing which one creates to himself, the bringing on of a confrontation he dreads as he desires it. The burden of the secret, which used to be somewhat less or something more, became now a burden, suffocating me in the enormous stress. It was getting dark, the shadows were growing long and menacing, the sun was going down, reflecting in my heart. The normal appearance with which the evening had earlier met was quickly turning into a pit of despair and worry. I knew with a freezing feeling that my life as I had seen it was to be transformed forever.