The Impossible Knife of Memory

  “I have second period free, remember? She wrote me a pass.”

  “Very funny.”

  I walked him to the end of the sidewalk. “See you tonight?”

  “Yep.” He stepped off the curb without looking back.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” I called.

  He raised his arm so that I’d know he’d heard me, then jogged to the far edge of the student parking lot, where his truck stood isolated from all other vehicles. He opened the passenger door, took off his blue wool jacket, and laid it on the seat. He removed his beret and his tie, unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. He closed the door, went around, and got into the driver’s seat, where he sat like a marble statue, his hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes focused on things that weren’t there.

  71

  The good soldier swears to kill. Fire the cannon, mount the barricade, lock and load. Smell your brother’s blood on your shirt. Wipe your sister’s brains off your face. Die, if you have to, so they’ll live. Kill to keep your people alive, live to kill some more.

  Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home. I try to ignore Death, but she’s got her arm around my waist, waiting to poison everything I touch.

  I wash and wash trying to get rid of the sand. Every grain is a memory. I scrub my skin until it bleeds, but it’s not enough. The named winds of the desert blow under my skin. I close my eyes and I hear them.

  Those winds blow sand across the ocean, turning into hurricanes, tornados, blizzards. The storms crash into me when I’m asleep. I wake, screaming, again. And again. And again.

  The worst of it is seeing the sand sweep across the deep sea-blue of my daughter’s eyes.

  72

  Showing remarkable maturity, I went to Mr. Cleveland after school to find out what I had missed by chilling in the library with my free pass after Dad left. He helped me figure out how to solve a problem about a kid on a spinning Ferris wheel with a bizarre formula that required the calculation of revolutions per minute to degrees per second, and cosines. I suggested that the carnie in charge of the ride could just hit the KILL switch and take all the measurements with a tape measure. Cleveland was not amused.

  I sat in the lobby and opened my math book, waiting for Finn to finish guarding the lives of the swim team. I couldn’t make sense of anything on the page. My dad in uniform, that’s what I kept seeing, his eyes wavering between confidence and panic. He’d tried something hard and he did it. It was a start.

  * * *

  “Your dad got in a bar fight?” Finn checked his mirror, then turned around before backing up.

  “It was a restaurant,” I said, “at six o’clock at night. I wouldn’t call it a bar fight.”

  “You don’t just get a black eye in a restaurant at six in the evening.” He shifted gears. “What really happened?”

  “Trish gave me her version of the story.”

  “What was your dad’s version?” Finn asked.

  “We haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet.”

  Finn grunted.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “No, really,” I said. “You have the judging face on. Why?”

  “I’m not judging. I’m observing uncritically. There’s a big difference.”

  I took my hand off his knee. “So what are you observing?”

  “It’s just that you’re blaming Trish again.”

  “Only because she deserves it. He was fine till she showed up.”

  He didn’t say anything until the next stop sign. “Not judging, Miss Blue,” he took my hand, “but you’re wrong.”

  I didn’t touch him after that.

  I forgot to kiss him good-bye when he dropped me off.

  * * *

  I opened the front door and walked onto a battlefield.

  * * *

  Trish stormed across the living room, stood in front of the television, and pointed at Dad. “Are you kidding me?” she yelled.

  “Nope.” Dad, dressed in old jeans and a flannel shirt, angled the remote so its signal would get past Trish and changed the channel.

  “Talk to him, Hayley,” she said.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Dad said, his face blank.

  “Why am I here if you don’t want her to listen to me?” Trish asked. “You haven’t done a single thing you promised. Hell, you won’t even talk!”

  “You’re not talking, you’re hollering.” Dad motioned with the remote. “Out of the way.”

  Bam! A punch in the gut, that’s what it felt like. It was my own damn fault for letting my guard down and believing that anything was different just because he decided to play dress-up for a couple of hours. Make no mistake, the signs were all there: a half-empty bottle of Jack on the coffee table, a second one at his feet, sweat soaking through the collar of his T-shirt though the house was cool, the fact that the dog was hiding. The hard, flat look in his eyes.

  Trish took a deep breath and spoke in a calmer, quieter voice. “Your father and I have been discussing his need for help.”

  “What kind of help?” I asked cautiously.

  “Anything,” she answered. “Therapy, medication, time with guys who understand, whatever it takes so that he can stop running away.”

  “I’m not running from anything,” Dad muttered.

  Time slowed to a cold honey pour, bitter spit flooded my mouth. I could smell his whiskey, the meat cooking in the kitchen, the tea she’d spilled on her uniform. The way she glared at him crashed into the anger that came off him in waves. Lightning could strike at any second. I still had my jacket on, backpack over my shoulder. I reached for the doorknob.

  Dad said, “It would only be for a couple of days at a time. Maybe a week now and then.”

  Time caught up to itself with a brilliant blue flash of light.

  I turned around. “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t tell her?” Trish asked.

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  Dad poured more whiskey in his glass, sipped, then crunched on a handful of pretzels. He tilted his head to look beyond Trish and see what was on the screen.

  “You promised you’d talk to her about this at least,” Trish said. “You swore!”

  “Tell me what?” I repeated, louder.

  Trish suddenly crouched and yanked the television’s power cord. The plug flew out, trailing a spark.

  Dad swirled the whiskey in his glass. “I’m following your advice, princess. I’m going back on the road. Short-haul mostly.” He sipped, watching me over the rim of the glass. “You’re not coming,” he said. “You have to stay in school.”

  “No way.” I put down my backpack. “You can barely get through a day here, where things are quiet. Besides, what are you going to do? Let me live alone?”

  He glanced at Trish and took another sip.

  “You lying son of a bitch,” Trish murmured.

  Shaking her head, she stormed down the hall to Gramma’s bedroom. Dad pressed the button on the remote twice before he remembered that the TV was unplugged. And I figured something out.

  “Did you bring her up here to babysit me?” I asked. “So you could leave?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Trish stomped back carrying her purse and unzipped duffel bag, clothes hanging out of it. She set the bag by the door and rooted through her purse.

  “Don’t go,” Dad said. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? I swear it, on my honor. Just not tonight.”

  She pulled out her keys. “Take your phone out, Hayley.”

  I hesitated, then pulled it out of my
pocket.

  “Here’s my number,” she said, rattling off the digits.

  I typed them in and saved the contact as “Bitch.”

  “What are you going to do,” Dad asked, “drive all the way back to Texas? After all the crap you fed me about facing demons instead of running away?”

  “I’m going to find an AA meeting, Andy.” She opened the front door. “After that meeting, I’m going to find another one, and another one after that until I’m sure I can make it through the night without drinking.” She picked up the duffel bag and looked at me. “Call me if you need anything.”

  She left without saying good-bye. The victory was so sudden and unexpected I didn’t know what to make of it. Cold air poured into the living room as she backed down the driveway and drove off, tires squealing. She hadn’t closed the door.

  “Shut that, will you?” Dad asked. “And plug the set back in.”

  73

  I hummed “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” and lined up plans in my head like shooting-range targets. Dad needed time to recover from Tsunami Trish. I wouldn’t bug him for two, maybe three days. After that I had to get him out of the house, maybe convince him to walk the dog with me, or tell him I was thinking of going out for track in the spring and wanted him to help me get in shape. The next step would be to call his friend Tom and ask him to help find Dad more painting jobs that he could work alone. The work plan was a little vague, but I’d figure it out soon. For right now, he needed to relax and recover.

  Two days after she left, I came home to find an envelope taped to the front door. Inside was a short note from Trish giving the address of the motel where she was staying and six twenty-dollar bills. I used the money to buy potatoes, onions, creamed corn (on sale, ten cans for eight dollars), bacon, bread, peanut butter, cheese, chicken noodle soup, and milk. I cooked a vat of mashed potatoes with bacon, but Dad said he was feeling crappy. Thought he might be coming down with stomach flu, he said.

  That night I burned Trish’s note, then lit a candle that I’d set on a mirror on the kitchen table. Didn’t think I’d see any spirits, but figured it was worth a try. The mirror showed an eruption of stress zits that made me seriously contemplate walking around with a knit cap pulled down to my chin.

  Dad wouldn’t cooperate. He didn’t want to walk the dog with or without me, even after I had given him a few days to chill. He thought getting in shape for track was a good idea, but he made excuses instead of taking me for a run. That Tom guy didn’t return any of my messages and I began to wonder how much of that story Dad told about the kitchen he painted was an exaggeration.

  We argued about everything: my attitude, the weather, how to boil eggs, the size of the phone bill, the smell of the garbage. He shot down my plans and then came up with some of his own, all of them stupid. One night he said that we were going to move to Costa Rica. When I brought it up the next morning, he called me a liar and said I was trying to make him paranoid. He said I should get my GED as soon as possible so he could send me to college in January. Twenty-fours hours later, he forbade me from taking the GED, but told me to start thinking about being a nanny overseas. There were the days when he’d disappear in his head without saying a word. He couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two at a time without waking up shouting or screaming. He always apologized for that, once he calmed down.

  The second semester started in the middle of all this, looking pretty much like the first semester, except with heavier jackets. They made us memorize and puke up more facts, write more useless essays according to a fascist essay formula and, above all, take tests to prepare for taking even more tests. My conscientious objection to most homework had put my grades in the toilet, but the only class I had outright flunked was precalc. Benedetti finally took pity on me and busted me down to trig.

  Then came the night of the phone call.

  74

  I was in the middle of a nightmare in which I’d sat down to a history final and couldn’t remember anything except my name. At first, I thought the ringing noise was the bell at the end of the period. As I crawled to the surface of waking up, I thought it might be Finn, but he hated talking on the phone and never called.

  I pushed the button to answer.

  “Is this Emily?” asked a woman’s voice. I could barely hear her over the loud music and shouting in the background. “What did he say her name is? Sally?”

  A wrong number. I hung up and fluffed my pillow. I had just closed my eyes when the phone rang again.

  “Hayley,” the woman said. “Your dad says to ask for Hayley. Is that you?”

  “My dad?” I sat up. “Who is this? What’s going on?”

  “Here, you talk to her.” The phone was fumbled and dropped. When it was picked up again, it was my father’s voice, but I couldn’t understand a single word he said.

  “Daddy, what did you say?” I went into the hall. The lights were all on. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  The phone was fumbled again, then the background noise faded. The woman spoke. “Your dad is so drunk he can’t remember where he put his truck, which is good because he’s too wasted to drive. He got in a fight and the boss is kicking him out. I checked his pockets; he doesn’t have any money left.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “You need to come get him, sweetie. This is a shitty neighborhood after dark. Got a pen?”

  “Hang on.” I ran to the kitchen and found what I needed in the junk drawer. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  She gave me the address and directions. “How soon till you get here?”

  “I don’t know. I have to find a car. Can you keep an eye on him until I get there?”

  She shouted, “In a minute!” to someone else, then said, “Hurry.”

  * * *

  There was no time to be embarrassed or angry or ashamed. I called Gracie while I was walking to her house.

  “Wha . . .” she mumbled.

  “I need your mom’s car.” I explained the situation, then repeated it until she woke up enough to understand what I was saying.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” I said. “Just put her keys on the front seat. I know the code to open the garage.”

  “Don’t open the garage door!” she said. “Mom always hears it, no matter what. If you try to sneak her car out, she’ll call the cops, I guarantee it.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Call Finn.”

  I stopped in the middle of the empty street. “I don’t want him to see Dad like this.”

  “Do you have a choice?” she asked.

  * * *

  Finn didn’t say anything when he picked me up. We didn’t talk at all as we drove. The fight on the phone—him saying I should let Dad wake up tomorrow morning in his own puke in an alley, me calling him a heartless bastard—had drained us both.

  (He’d only gotten in his car when he realized I was headed to the bar on foot.)

  He didn’t say anything until he parked in front of The Sideways Inn. “I can’t let you go in there alone.”

  “You have to,” I said.

  “It’s dangerous.” He pointed at a group of guys hanging out in a doorway down the block. “Look at them. They’re just waiting to pounce.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “They’re hoping that we’re stupid enough to leave your car empty so they can break in and steal the radio. This heap is old enough that they could hot-wire it. Then we’ll really be stuck here.”

  “But,” he said.

  I opened the door. “Keep the engine running.”

  * * *

  “Get out of here!” the bartender yelled as I walked in. “You’re not old enough.”

  The music was so loud that I could feel it in my fillings. The dark room was filled with shadows leaning against the wall, bending over the pool table, a
nd slumped into chairs around battered tables, all of them staring at me. I wanted to turn around and run, but I put my shoulders back and walked straight to the bar. “I’m looking for my dad.”

  The bartender scowled. “You got ID?”

  “My dad,” I said louder. “A woman called me to come get him.”

  An old guy two stools down looked at me with sad eyes. “She’s here for Captain Andy.”

  The bartender’s expression changed. “Did you come alone?”

  “My boyfriend’s outside in the car.”

  He nodded at the old guy. “Go get him, Vince. He’s in the john.”

  I kept my eyes on the beer taps. MILLER. BUD. LABATT’S. The music hammered at me, chipping off pieces that fell to the sticky floor. Most of the light in the room came from the television sets, all set to different channels. The couple sitting at the end of the bar stared at the hockey game, their mouths hanging open like they didn’t understand what they were seeing.

  “Here he is.” The bartender’s growl made me jump.

  Dad had a taken a couple punches to the mouth—his lips were swollen and bloodied. Blood stained his shirt, too, along with vomit and beer. His eyes were open, but nobody was home. He had no idea where he was.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I got it.”

  They stared at me, at us. All of them stared. Not because I was young and female, like when I walked in, but because my father was so wasted his little girl had to fetch him home. Total strangers—drunks, addicts, whores, ex-cons—pitied us. I could smell it coming off of them.

  Dad’s bad leg was useless and his good leg wasn’t much better. I put his arm around my shoulder and put my arm around his waist and dragged him through the door, outside to the car. Finn jumped out and helped me get him in the backseat. Dad crawled in and collapsed, his head hanging down in the foot well.

  “What about a seat belt?” Finn asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.” I slammed the back door. “Just drive.”