Identity. Jeff MDiv Sieniewicz
of rain splashed on his face. The rain the weatherman had called for had started early.
Frank shook his head, as work had gotten the best of him again. Here he was standing outside, as it was starting to rain, staring at a rock of all things. Perhaps he should take up his manager’s advice and take one of his many unused vacation days.
Before he could tally just how many he had now accumulated over years of never taking one, he hurried inside, but not until scooping up the glowing rock.
Once inside, Frank set the aforementioned rock harmlessly to the floor in the corner nearest the door, not even knowing exactly why he had brought it in, except for the strange sense of intrigue it had triggered in him. Apparently that was enough.
Certainly intrigue was a change from anything he had experienced all day. Another mediocre day, with mediocre customers and mediocre tasks to perform for a boss whose level of disgruntlement could be described as anything but mediocre.
Yes, thought Frank, something thought provoking would be a refreshing change, however, that could wait a while. Because what he needed now was a beer, so he grabbed a cold one from the top shelf of the fridge and proceeded to kick off his shoes, push old magazines from the couch, and fall backwards sheepishly into its severely worn cushions.
“What’s today? Is it Friday?” he thought aloud to himself.
Yes, it is, he realized and then began to worry. “How could I have forgot that?” Heck, how could he remember? All the days had been blurring together lately.
Frank had now been the town accountant at his local office of Truth, Oregon for the past decade. At first the job had brought some needed stability to his life, earning him a role within the community, along with a small sense of personal pride. The job had been a step in moving past his old life while stabilizing a new one. Although, lately it had just been causing his head to ache while giving him an odd feeling. A feeling that reminded him of how old cheese stank: constant, unpleasant and only getting worse with time. Lacking, however, the distinct advantage of going well with any of Frank’s Cabernet Sauvignons.
Chapter Six
Two-seventeen was the number. The number that Frank stared at for almost an hour that autumn afternoon while never knowing why. The number that was burnt into his psyche and his soul, and is still synonymous with him to this day. The same way it remains synonymous with the day that haunts him and defines him still.
That day which made him into who he is now, and made who he was to be, never to be. Two-seventeen. The number that will always remind him of this haunting fact.
Frank had morphed into all the things that two-seventeen now represented for him. He had become two-seventeen and he is the only one to know that it is a miserable thing to be.
Only a day after his twenty-fifth birthday Frank had lost Sarah, his wife and the mother to their only child, Johnathon. Then several weeks later he had lost Johnathon as well, and there is now not a single day that passes in which Frank does not think of them and how his life would have been with them.
Frank’s life had once been anything but as mundane and stagnant as it now was, as it had certainly become after years of the ordinary. Qualities that had been unintentionally engrained into his life by the implementation of his fail-safe routine.
Frank had been deeply in love with Sarah. His relationship with her was an exciting one at the university of Berkeley. She had many of the same interests and passions as he did. She was someone who encouraged both his writing and him as a whole, all the while cherishing his mutual support for her.
Later she had given Frank’s life, not long out of school, an altruistic and unreal feel. Walking straight from the excitement of university life and a prevailing feeling of self-importance that that life carries with it, into a blossoming, going somewhere relationship. One with a woman whom he was fully in love with and who was just as in love with him.
Within two years of graduating they married and had a perfectly healthy child in their newly purchased home along the northern coastline of California. Frank had witnessed the birth of his son and now had a newly defined purpose to his life.
Besides the birth of Johnathon, Frank experienced a second miracle. He had published a fairly successful book with his first real attempt in the literary field.
He was left to feel as if life was all too easy, all too perfect. That certainly his current life was the thing of fairy tales, not of real life, and that it surely couldn’t last.
Surely, it didn’t.
Less than a year after giving birth to Johnathon, Sarah disappeared on a hiking trip while on a vacation with friends.
The trip up the side of the mountain was supposed to be simple for someone as athletic as Sarah, especially with a guide as experienced as the one they had. Nonetheless, she was said to have left the trail and was never seen alive again.
It was only a few days after the search party had been called off, and a couple days before her funeral, when Frank turned to drugs, heavily. In a way that would have made many a musician of the sixties proud. His life, however, was not one that would support this type of habit. Especially his new life.
A life drenched with despair and of awaking in his unkempt apartment, burnt out, not being able to remember what he had been doing the previous day.
Frank could not escape the loss of Sarah. It followed him everywhere, and not even the responsibility of caring for Johnathon could snap him completely from the grief. Instead, regardless of how much he tried, taking care of Johnathon felt like a burden, a fact that would later multiply his ensuing guilt endless times over. Yet at the time, Johnathon only stood to remind Frank of Sarah and how she was now gone. His life had suddenly changed so drastically, and all for the worse.
These circumstances continued for a few weeks until word of the situation reached child services. They intervened upon Frank’s second trip to the hospital for health issues stemming from drug use.
After assessing Frank’s current condition, the state promptly took Johnathon away from him. Losing his son like this served as the shock he needed to kick his drug habit. He immediately checked into a rehabilitation center in hope of one day regaining his son.
Even if he had lost Sarah, he still had a young boy he loved who was in need of his dad. To this day he could still remember holding Johnathon in his arms, an infinitely warm feeling, inside and out.
Nevertheless, as a result of what would soon happen, Frank could now not forget another feeling, one of a shivering cold wind along the nape of his neck.
It was of the cold wind that had blown through Main Street on that November day, blowing as he stood outside the courthouse in shock, staring at the side of the building for so long. Not wanting to move, ever again, he simply sat with the courthouse number there in front of him as he stared. It had read ‘217’, large and bold.
Earlier that morning inside the courthouse the judge ruled in favor of the state, taking custody of Johnathon away from Frank. This time it would be a permanent loss.
Two-seventeen was now left to remind Frank of losing his son. Two-seventeen reminded him that his life could now only be a doughnut of what it had once promised to be. Sure it could still contain some functional substance, yet what would shape it and always define it would not be what it has, but what it does not.
Once the grief of losing Sarah had subsided to a level he could handle, Frank was able to free himself of the drug habit, but losing his child before he ever got to be a proper father to him was something he knew he could never fully withstand.
As a result, to this day he could still feel the cold wind that blew down Main Street that November day. In fact the chill no longer resided purely on his skin. It had become part of his very being and now chilled him from the inside.
Many times since, Frank had awoken in a cold sweat, shivering, teeth chattering, disturbed by dreams of his lost son, repeating the number two-seventeen in agony.
Yet, it was