Waiting for a Call

This story is by Ryan Longley and won an honorable mention in our 2024 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Ryan is a clinical academic, currently working in the world of healthcare. He moonlights as a writer but wishes it was the other way around. When not plying his trade, he’s working on his first novel.

When you obsess over one thing your life narrows to a pin prick.

Right then, my tunnel vision was locked onto the payphone in front of me. The same payphone I’d been coming to for the last seven years. At the same time. Every night. Without fail.

The payphone was my gateway to put things right, even if things could never go back to the way they were. All I had to do was wait.

It’s hard to describe what can sustain a person to keep going for such a long time. Something that drove me to make the long walk from to the next village every night from where I was hiding out. Always the same two-hour window, as agreed in the plan I made before I fled over the border to Mexico. It takes a certain stubbornness. A quiet desperation.

I tore my eyes away from the phone, taking in the derelict parking  that were my surroundings. A place that even time seemed to have forgotten about. Everything here was broken and rusted. The weeds never seemed to grow, as if my presence somehow stopped their progression. The heat was too thick for the night to break, and cicadas droned into the surrounding scrubland.  I watched a vortex of insects boil in a cone of orange coming from a streetlight.

In my hand was a crumpled letter. My latest attempt at the same letter I’d been trying to write since I fled across the border. My way of explaining myself to the person that mattered most to me. I kept telling myself it was for his own safety, a life without a father but still a life, nonetheless. That reasoning held less power than it did all those years ago. Now I was left with more of a longing for something I missed. I opened the letter up to read it again.

To my dear Thomas,

I’m writing you this letter to explain why I left. A question with no right answer to it, how could there be? No father should ever abandon his son. But please know, I did it to protect you, not because I’m a coward who didn’t want to stay and fight.

Seven years ago, a man called Cornelius Adamson put a bounty on my head. This was done to stop my investigation into his criminal activities. He knew I was a threat, so he tried to have me killed. I was forced to make the most difficult of decision of my life, stay and put you in certain danger, or take myself away, leaving you with your godfather Elliott, to be raised an orphan, all be it a safe orphan.  

I have waited seven years for Adamson to resurface, so I can get to him, to finish this and put an end to my exile. To have the chance to see you again. I think about you a lot. I’m sure you’ve grown into someone I can be proud-

I crumbled the letter back up, frustrated that I couldn’t find the words to justify how I felt. Not knowing how to continue the letter.

Then I heard it.

The years of waiting became a blink. I couldn’t tell if time was playing a cruel trick or pitied me. My hands were shaking as I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear.

‘It’s happening. Be at the train station in exactly forty-eight hours.’ The metallic tone of the phone took away some familiarity from Elliott’s voice.

I put down the receiver. Something had punctured through my exile, and through the hole it left behind I could see the life I used to have before all this.

**

I was early when I first got the station. I felt three-dimensional now, so much more than what I used to be in Mexico, stuck in purgatory – waiting for a call. Trapped by my past and obsessing over the future, now the present was something I could control and influence, to shape it into what I needed it to be.

The shadows were on my side, as I glided through the station’s back rooms like a spector, avoiding any security guards. No one knew I was there when I took my position, hidden in darkness.

Then something that wasn’t part of the plan happened. A boy, barely a man, walked into the room. It was like I was seeing a ghost from my past, me from thirty years ago. Except this person was real. It was my son. A gun in his hand, down by his side. He waited. We were here for the same person, but our motives were different. His was revenge. Mine was redemption.

I didn’t dare breathe; he didn’t know I was in there with him, and I wanted to keep it that way until I thought of the best way of handling this.

I would never get that chance.

A colossus of steel and steam thundered into the station, the scream of brakes straining against a momentum that felt like it couldn’t be stopped. I could hear the geysers of steam escaping the train, like a huge racehorse trapped in the starting blocks, spitting and snarling, eager to bust out of its confinement. Then a sharp whistle cut through the air before the train heaved itself out the station, the shaking of the walls fading as it pulled further away.

Light spilled into the room as a door opened. The illumination didn’t expose me, as if the darkness I shrouded myself in wasn’t prepared to reveal its secret yet. A tall figure stood in the doorway, the light behind him concealing his features. He walked into the room, each step slow and cautious. Like he knew he was being watched.

‘Mister Adamson…’ Thomas said.

‘Who goes there?!’ Adamson said.

My son stepped out from the shadows, the light illuminating him from where Adamson stood, but turning him into a silhouette from where I waited.

‘My name’s Thomas Reynolds. And you, Mister Adamson, are a dead man walking. You’ve been one for seven years now.’

‘Reynolds… of course – you’re John Reynold’s boy? Very misguided of you to threaten me, that didn’t end so well for your father.’ Adamson seemed remarkably unphased, the arrogance of a man who hadn’t been told no in a very long time.

Thomas raised the gun from his side, levelling it with Adamson’s head. He was shaking. Fear. Rage. Anticipation. I couldn’t tell. ‘Don’t talk about my father.’ he breathed.

Adamson slowly raised his hands, doubt quickly shattering his calm façade. ‘Listen, it was nothing personal between me and your father. He just couldn’t see the bigger picture… and – if you fire that gun, the guards will come running. They won’t hesitate…’

‘I thought you were a smart man Mister Adamson? You’re in no position to be concerned about the future.’ He cocked the hammer back on the gun.

A shot sliced through the air, cracking time in a way where things could never be the same.

Adamson fell to the floor and was still. A crimson hole in his chest and a look of disbelief on his face. It wasn’t a face that would change, once rigor mortis set in, making up for all the times he never expressed it when he was alive.

‘It’s okay Thomas.’ I said, lowering my gun. Smoke drifting from its barrel.

‘Father?’ He turned to face me. Disbelief in his face.

I opened my arms and gestured him towards me.

‘He was mine to kill… I had to… he stole you from me.’

‘And your revenge will be living a good life.’

The gunshot was loud. The guards would be here soon. There was so much I wanted to say to Thomas. My heart wept for more time.

‘You’ve got to leave now son. Once you get out of this station you run and don’t look back. The rest of your life starts when you leave here.’

‘I’m not leaving you – I just got you back!’

‘I’ve not been a father to you for seven years now my dear boy. So please, let me do this for you.’

Thomas shook his head, tears in his eyes.

‘Go my boy, you must leave now. I beg of you.’

Thomas still wouldn’t go.

‘Go! Be a damn man and live a life fit enough for the two of us!’

I opened the door out for him and handed him the crumbled letter. It wasn’t ready, it wasn’t enough, but it never would have been.

I could hear men shouting now. They were close. I watched Thomas leave, the darkness swallowing him up as he fled the station. I chose to believe that he would escape and go on to lead a good life. A life we could both be proud of.

I could feel the narrowing of my life expanding to a full spectrum. It was so bright. I could hear the full orchestra now. It was beautiful.