The Impossible Knife of Memory

  I jogged back down the walk. The rig was still in the driveway, hood down and doors locked. I peered through the dirty window into the garage. The pickup was parked inside. No tools that needed to be put away. No sign of Dad. The back door off the kitchen was closed and locked, too. I checked all the windows that I could reach. I couldn’t tell which were painted shut and which were locked, but none of them would budge.

  That’s when I smelled something burning. Saw smoke rising from the fire pit, which we hadn’t used in over a month. I walked over to it, thinking maybe he’d started a fire to cook hot dogs or something.

  He’d been burning his uniform. Scraps of his jacket and pants lay at the edge of the fire. The half-melted boots smoldered in the middle.

  I ran back to the living room window, cupped my hands around my eyes to cut down on the glare, and tried to see inside between the curtains. The living room had been trashed. The upside-down couch was blocking the way to the dining room. Stuffing from the couch cushions had been flung everywhere and looked like dirty cotton candy. The recliner had been chopped to bits. The ax handle stuck out from the gaping hole that had been chopped in the drywall. The cuckoo clock lay in a pile of splinters.

  My father was curled into a ball on the floor. Blood on his face. Blood staining the carpet under his head, Spock lying next to him.

  A girl screamed.

  !!!NONONODADDYDADDYNODADDYNONONONONONOOOO!!!

  Spock howled.

  The screaming girl slapped the window with her palms, pounded the window with her fists, bent down to grab her backpack. Spock ran to the window and put his front paws on the sill, barking. The girl threw the backpack at the glass and it bounced off. She was thinking, Why can’t I break it, how do I break it, grab a log, break the window, shatter the glass, a rock, a big rock, break it into a million pieces and get to him, crawl over the broken glass and get—

  The body moved. Uncurled. It sat up, wiped its face on the front of its T-shirt, and turned to look at the wailing girl pounding on the other side.

  79

  “He’s dead,” Dad said.

  I led him to a dining room chair and made him sit down. The blood was coming from his nose and a long cut on his chin.

  “Who’s dead?” I asked. “Who did this to you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  A burglary? I looked over my shoulder. The TV was still in the living room. Wasn’t that what burglars always took? Michael. I bet he owed money to a dealer or a shady friend and he didn’t pay so the guy came to our house to look for him. Dad had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  But he burned his uniform and he said “dead.” Had he killed the guy? Was there a body somewhere?

  “Daddy, look at me. What is going on?”

  He closed his eyes, moaned. I ran my hands over the scars on his head. “Should I call the police?”

  “No, no,” he said wearily. “It was over there.” He put his head in his hands and rocked back and forth, breathing hard, like he was in the middle of a race.

  The war. Another dead friend.

  “You have to tell me,” I said gently. “Who was it?”

  Dad gulped back a sob. “Roy.”

  Is there anything worse than watching your father cry? He’s supposed to be the grown-up, the all-powerful grown-up, especially if he’s a soldier. When I was a kid, I watched him work out, scaling walls, lifting guys bigger than he was, running miles in the heat wearing full gear and carrying extra ammo. My dad was a superhero who made the world safe. He went overseas with his troops and chased the bad guys out of the mountains so that little kids over there could go to school and to the library and use the playground the way I did at home. The first time I saw him cry wasn’t so bad because he still had metal rods sticking into his leg. He was in pain. I understood that. After they pulled out the rods, after Trish left, I’d wake up at night hearing him sob, sniff like a child, like me, tears coming fast and mixing with snot. He’d try to keep quiet, but sometimes the sadness came over him as loud as a thunderstorm. Scared the shit out of me, like riding a roller coaster and feeling your seat belt snap just as the track turns you upside down.

  I patted his back, waiting for the storm to pass.

  * * *

  It took more than an hour and a lot of whiskey before he’d say anything more. Roy’s platoon had been caught in an ambush. Rocket-fired grenades, Dad said. Everyone who wasn’t killed was injured.

  “They’ll never be able to complain,” he said. “How can you complain if you’re alive? Lose your arms, lose your eyes, a leg, or a foot; it doesn’t matter when you think about your brothers buried in the ground.”

  He was drinking out of a plastic cup.

  “Rotting in the ground,” he muttered.

  His tears made tiny streams down the dried blood on his cheeks. The stubble on his face was speckled with gray and white. The skin along his jaw sagged a little, making him look like he had aged ten years since breakfast. His hands were bruised, the knuckles oozing blood, probably from punching the holes in the drywall.

  The dining room curtains had been torn down and sunlight flooded the room, bouncing off the glittering glass shards in the carpet. He had broken all of our glasses, all of our plates and bowls, too, thrown against the walls. The silverware drawer was in pieces and one of the pantry doors had been ripped off the hinges.

  A monster had rampaged through the house.

  I picked up the dog and staggered to the door. It was a miracle he hadn’t cut his paws. The second he touched the ground, he started racing back and forth the length of our yard, from the house all the way to the cornfield and back, ignoring my calls to come, just running until he wore himself out and flopped by the fire pit, where I was able to hook him to the chain.

  Dad refilled his whiskey. I went for the broom to start cleaning. I swept up the big pieces of glass and china and drywall, hid the ax in my closet, set the couch back on its feet, and stuffed the guts of the couch cushions into garbage bags. I threw what was left of the recliner in the back of the truck. That would have to go to the dump. I cleaned for more than an hour and still he sat in that chair.

  “A shower might feel good,” I finally suggested.

  I crossed my fingers, hoping he wouldn’t start talking about how Roy would never shower again, Roy would never drink whiskey or love a woman or eat Thanksgiving at his mother’s house again.

  “Nothing feels good.” His red-rimmed eyes didn’t blink.

  I hesitated, not wanting to set him off. “How about something to eat. Eggs?”

  He shook his head.

  “Pancakes?” I asked. “Hamburgers?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat something. How about toast? I can make some coffee, if you want.”

  “I just want some quiet, okay?” He stood up and patted my cheek. “But thanks.”

  He grabbed the bottle and walked to the living room. The television was the one thing he hadn’t destroyed in there. He picked up the remote, turned it on, and clicked through the channels until he found a reporter talking about a late hurricane forming in the Gulf of Mexico. He sat on the cushionless couch, poured himself another shot, and tossed it back.

  80

  I spent the next morning picking out glass and broken dishes from the carpet. Thousands of slivers as thin as pins, sharp on both ends, pricked my fingers. Gloves made the job harder so I finally used a comb, inch by inch through the living room and the dining room. I saved the kitchen floor for last because it was small and easy; just needed to wipe it down with damp paper towels, my knees protected by a scrap of cardboard.

  By lunchtime, the floors were safe and I could let the dog out of the basement.

  Dad slept.

  In school, they were studying Homer, tangents, tonal systems, Dred Scott, and finger whorls. Finn was probably flirting and
studying and finishing his applications and saving the world all at the same time. I kept hearing him say, “You take care of him more than he takes care of you” over and over again.

  When Benedetti’s office called, I said my father and I had flu again.

  * * *

  When the sun went down, Dad woke up, chain-smoked, and ate two bologna sandwiches. After eating, he went outside to talk on his cell. I wanted him to start drinking again so he would pass out. I didn’t have to worry about him hurting himself when he was unconscious.

  He opened another bottle when he came in, sat me on the couch, and made me listen to stuff I’d heard a million times before: ambushed foot patrols, IEDs ripping open vehicles and bodies, suicide bombers living in ghost villages. The private who was shot in the neck. The guy who removed his helmet to wipe the sweat off his head, and the sniper who blew that head into a red mist that hung in the air for a moment before it dropped to the dirt and soaked the ground.

  The thing under his skin took over his eyes and made them look dead. The thing raged and paced, snapped at the dog, yelled at me.

  I tried to go to bed around two, but that set him off again. I stayed awake. I listened. Donkeys loaded with weapons. Bloated bodies. The smell of the dead. Flies.

  Around quarter after four, he puked all over the carpet and finally passed out. I laid him on his side, put a bucket by his head, and threw a towel over the mess so the dog wouldn’t eat it. I took a long shower to wash off the tears and the stench of whiskey puke.

  81

  The sound of submachine guns on automatic fire ripped me out of sleep, gasping. I tried to focus and fought my way over the line that divides asleep from awake. The guns sounded again, a heavy burst of artillery, and then a couple of men laughed. It was a game. Just another shooting game.

  I started to pull the blankets over my head and stopped.

  Men. Laughing. Men, as in “more than one,” as in my father had company and “laughing,” as in there was no way Dad could be laughing, so who was in my living room?

  I threw off the blankets and scrambled into clothes.

  The sunshine stealing through the narrow crack between the curtains sliced the living room into thick patches of darkness and slivers of light. Two men, Michael and some dude I’d never seen before, sat on kitchen chairs in front of the TV, controllers in their hands. Dad sat upright on the couch smoking a bong. His squinted eyes were swollen. The smoke that slipped out of his mouth was the color of his skin, like he was a miserable old dragon slowly disintegrating into ash.

  “Why are they here?” I asked.

  “He invited us.” Michael turned around. “Asked us to come over and cheer him up.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “He’s right,” Dad spoke slowly. “I called him. Why aren’t you at school?”

  “Make them leave,” I demanded.

  He set the bong on a stack of books. “They just got here.”

  “So?”

  Dad gave a half-baked smile. “Kept you up last night, didn’t I? Sorry about that, princess. Why don’t you make us some coffee, cook up a big breakfast?”

  The weed had driven the crazy back under his skin, but it was a temporary situation at best. “I don’t want them here.”

  “Listen to your elders,” Michael said.

  “Eggs would be nice,” Dad said. “An omelet, with lots of cheese.”

  “Scrambled,” Michael said. “How about you, Goose?” he asked the guy next to him.

  Goose paused the game and turned around. He had the scabby face of a tweeker, gaunt and haunted. “Not hungry.”

  I couldn’t move. Didn’t know what to say. The room looked like the backdrop of a PBS documentary: holes in the wall, messed-up furniture, smoke drifting from shadow to light, the green-lit battle on-screen holding the attention of everyone but me. Or maybe a cheap-ass cable supernatural horror show—the goons in front of the screen ready to morph into demons, the smoke easing in and out of my father really a spirit sent to claim him for the dark side.

  “Why, Daddy?” I asked.

  He reached for the bong. “I like having them here.”

  Michael chuckled, his fingers piloting the soldier on-screen through a massacre. “Hear that, Goose? He likes us.”

  That’s when I realized that I wanted to kill Michael. I knew I couldn’t, knew I wouldn’t. If I jumped him, he’d swat me away like a fly. Dad would come out of his stupor to defend me and then things would get bad and bloody. I could get out one of Dad’s pistols, no, a shotgun, and threaten them with it. Not that I’d shoot them—I sure as hell wasn’t going to jail over those two morons—but they wouldn’t know that. I’d scare them off by shooting over their heads. We were going to have to put up new drywall, anyway.

  As fast as that scene—me, shotgun, ceiling, boom—unfolded in my head, everything that could go wrong with that plan chased in on its heels. Dad would grab the gun or Michael would grab the gun or Goose would pull out a gun of his own and it would get scary bad and very bloody.

  “Do we have any bacon?” Dad asked.

  I crossed the room and unplugged the TV. “I’m calling the cops.”

  “No, you’re not,” Michael said.

  I pulled out my phone. “Wanna watch?”

  Goose stood up. “Dude.”

  “Andy,” Michael said. “Tell your kid to put the phone away.”

  “Come on, Hayley,” Dad said.

  I opened the phone.

  “They’ll arrest your dad,” Michael said. “Is that what you want?”

  I opened the front door and stepped into freezing, blinding sunlight. I turned on my camera and walked far enough down the driveway that I could get the plates of both bikes in a photo.

  “What are you doing?” Michael shouted from the doorway.

  I climbed into the cab of the big rig, locked myself in, dialed 911, and explained that my father was sick and two men were in my house and they wouldn’t leave. As the emergency lady took down my information, Michael and Goose jumped on their bikes and roared away.

  Yes! Score!

  I set the phone on the dash and high-fived myself. I sighed and picked up the phone. “They’re gone,” I said. “Those guys I just told you about. We don’t need the police anymore.”

  “An officer has to respond to the call, sweetie,” she explained. “Just to make sure you’re safe.”

  “No, really, you don’t have to send them,” I said, my voice tightening. “Me calling you, that scared them off. I’m totally safe. So is Dad.”

  “Is he going to need an ambulance?”

  “What? No. It’s . . . the flu. He needs chicken soup, not cops.”

  “We have a couple of officers who are sick with it, too. We’re a little shorthanded, but I guarantee you, a policeman will be at your house within the hour. Do you want to stay on the line?”

  I hung up.

  They’d find his weed. What else? Were all his guns legal? What if they brought in a drug-sniffing dog? Would it find hidden stashes that I didn’t know existed? What if Dad saw the uniforms and went ape shit? What if they arrested him for assault and possession, or worse because they thought he was a dealer? What if they took him away? Where would they put me?

  A wave of nausea hit me hard. I coughed, swallowed bile, and did the one thing I swore that I’d never do.

  I called Trish.

  82

  By the time she arrived, I had opened every window in the house, sprayed air freshener, and stuck Dad in the shower. I’d thrown the bong as far into the cornfield as I could and flushed his pills down the toilet. I’d cleaned up the now-solid puke from the carpet, poured baby powder on the mess it left behind and tried to vacuum it all away.

  Dad stepped out of the shower and was yelling at me to close the goddamn windows when Trish walked in. I explained
what had happened in a few quick sentences while she checked Dad’s pulse. He’d put on a baggy pair of sweatpants and an ancient sweater and looked more like a homeless man than a war hero or my father. She told me to shut the windows while she got him into bed. I finished a heartbeat before a squad car pulled in the driveway, lights flashing, no siren.

  “Can they arrest him if they don’t find anything?” I asked.

  “Depends,” she said. “Keep your story simple. You woke up, Dad was passed out, and you didn’t know the guys in your living room. You never saw them before.”

  “But Michael—”

  “No names. They wouldn’t leave. You were scared. Okay?”

  A cop knocked at the front door.

  “Feel free to cry,” she added.

  * * *

  Trish took charge, explaining who she was and why she was there, and then taking one of the cops, the skinny one, back to see Dad. The other one was built like a defensive tackle, massive shoulders, neck thicker than his head, and hands the size of baseball mitts. He was on guard, assessing danger with every step like Dad did, but by the time he’d checked out the whole house and sat down with me in the living room, he had relaxed a bit.

  I answered his questions. Dad had the flu. I stayed home to take care of him. No, he hadn’t been to a doctor. No, I didn’t know the guys. No, I couldn’t describe them, I was too scared.

  He wrote down my answers in a spiral notebook and then he asked me the exact same questions again. I gave the same exact answers. He wrote them down again and then he looked at me and smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. He had brown eyes, light brown like an acorn. He glanced above my head.

  “Who punched the wall?” he asked.

  “It was like that when we moved in,” I said. “Squatters.”

  He did not write that down. “Stay put,” he said.

  He walked down the hall, his keys and handcuffs and various chains jingling, sounding absurdly close to what I’d always imagined Santa’s sleigh would sound like. At the end of the hall, he and his buddy held a murmured meeting. The heat had kicked on and the air was beginning to smell like Michael’s satanic cologne. What if this kept happening, what if Dad wasn’t on a roller coaster, what if he was on a spiraling slide, turning down and down into the darkness? What would Michael do the next time?