The Impossible Knife of Memory

  Finn’s voice had been growing louder and louder until my ears were ringing and he was standing in front of me, his mouth moving faster than I could hear. He held a phone in front of my face and the words finally caught up to my ears, he was saying, “—Trish, stranded in Chicago, the storm, he hid a card in her bag, opened it, she has to talk to you—”

  Into one ear, Trish tried to talk, but her teeth clacked together like pearls from a broken necklace bouncing off the floor.

  Into the other ear, Finn yelled, “What should I do? What do you want me to do? Who should we call? 911? What about my mom? She’ll help. I’ll call her. And I’ll call 911. What is Trish saying?”

  91

  My sweet Patricia,

  I can’t do it anymore. It’s not fair to make her carry my bones on her back. She has to live her own life instead of worrying about me.

  You said you wanted to help. Here it is: Hayley needs you.

  If she ever stops hating me, tell her how proud I am of her and how much I love her.

  Faithfully yours, believe it or not,

  Andy

  P.S.—Tell her she looks just like her mother. Tell her she’s strong enough to take on the world.

  92

  I lost an hour.

  I closed my eyes to blink and when I opened them, there were two cops standing in our house talking into radios and phones and looking in every room, as if Dad was playing hide-and-seek. It took a few minutes to register how much time had passed and that a blanket was wrapped around my shoulders and Finn was helping me hold a cup of hot something.

  I had been talking, that was clear. The cop had written down Dad’s name, his favorite bars, and Trish’s phone number. That was her voice shouting from the phone the officer held. Another cop, a woman, was copying down the information from Dad’s prescription bottles. She set them back on the table.

  “Try not to worry,” she said. “Your father has only been gone a few hours. Technically, we can’t consider him missing until tomorrow morning. He probably got picked up by a buddy and is drinking in the guy’s basement right now.”

  “But that letter,” Finn said.

  “If I take that letter to my chief, he’ll say that it means nothing until Mr. Kincain has been gone for twenty-four hours. Then he’ll chew me out for not being on the road helping with the accidents that this snow caused.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” Finn asked.

  “Sit tight. We see a lot of this around the holidays, especially with vets. He just needs some time and space. Your stepmom says she’s on her way back, so I won’t call Child Protective Services, but you need to stay here.”

  The first wave of shock was wearing off. The edges of my mind were slowly waking up, tingling painfully.

  “So you guys won’t search for him?” I asked.

  “We can’t,” she admitted. “Not until this time tomorrow.”

  “What if he’s dead by then?”

  Her eyes were sympathetic. “He won’t be, honey. My guess is we’re going to get a call midafternoon about him being drunk and disorderly in a bar downtown. Not pretty, but he’ll be alive. Here’s my number.”

  Finn took the card from her and said something, but I stopped listening. The engine in my brain turned over. The police wouldn’t help until it didn’t matter. Trish was on her way back, but she’d be too late.

  Finn stood in front of the window, watching the police car drive away. “Want some more hot chocolate? A sandwich?”

  “Sure.”

  I blinked again, eyes so dry. Sunshine flooded the floor. Handfuls of fluffy snow blew off the edge of the roof and floated to the ground like feathers. The wind whirled snow devils in the yard, but the clouds had thinned and the snow had stopped.

  Daddy wasn’t at a bar.

  He wasn’t drinking.

  He was on a mission. He was sober, clear-thinking, and following a plan. He’d organized everything. He tied up the loose ends. He could not live anymore, so he’d gone off to die alone, like a wounded animal. But where?

  I tried to see him, tried to picture what he had been doing here after I left this morning, what he’d been doing when I was asleep. I saw him writing those damn cards, checking to make sure they were in the right order. Had he looked through the photo album before he put it in the box? Had he cried?

  The house was quiet except for Finn rattling in the silverware drawer and the distant roar of a snowplow.

  I’d always been afraid that he would kill himself at home, but now I realized why he wouldn’t do that: he didn’t want me to find him. I flashed on the way he had hugged me before I left: sudden and fierce, a true Dad hug.

  A good-bye hug.

  How was he going to do it? Where?

  When we were on the road, there’d been a couple of nights he’d gone on incredible rants when shit-faced drunk. He talked about the all the deaths, all the blood that had soaked him.

  (He didn’t take any guns.)

  He talked about the faces of dead soldiers. Eyes wide in terror. Mouths open in pain. He didn’t want their families to see those faces.

  (His meds were all here. Did he have an illegal stash?)

  What did he want me to see?

  Finn set a plate with bologna sandwiches and two steaming mugs on the table, and sat next to me. “I bet she’s right.” He took my hand in his. “I bet he’ll be back before dinner.”

  The furnace kicked on, making the curtains move like someone was hiding behind them and pushing smells around the room. Hot chocolate. The tang of mustard, lots of mustard. The smell of the swimming pool, overchlorinated, leeching out of our clothes . . .

  ripping . . . sun glaring off the pool grown-ups crowded I can’t find him music so loud nobody hears when I slip into the deep end water closes over my face I open my mouth to yell for Daddy and water sneaks in my mouth my eyes watching the water get thick and then thicker and grown-ups dancing . . .

  “Hayley?” Finn frowned.

  The whole room snapped into focus so sharp it made my eyes water. Finn had a smudge on the bottom of the left lens of his glasses. Dog hair on his jeans where Spock had rubbed against him. I could see everything: ghost squares on the walls where Gramma used to hang our pictures, a sliver of glass in the carpet that I had missed, the memory of Daddy under the water.

  “I know where he is,” I said. “I know how he’s going to do it.”

  93

  “We should call the cops,” Finn said.

  “You heard her, they won’t do anything.”

  “But you have a concrete idea now, a reasonable one. You could ask them to drive by, check it out.”

  I crossed the room and picked up his jacket. “What if they do? What if they find him and he hasn’t done it yet? I guarantee if he sees a cop car, he’ll end it right then and there. Boom.”

  “What if he does it when he sees you?”

  I pulled out the car keys. “You should stay here.”

  “You’re not going without me.”

  “I’m driving.”

  He smiled. “I knew you were going to say that.”

  * * *

  I didn’t know I was right until I turned off Route 15 onto Quarry Road and saw the bootprints that cut through the snow all the way up the hill. I turned the wheel and floored it. Finn grabbed the dashboard with one hand and pulled out his phone with the other.

  Ice lay under the fresh snow, making the car fishtail. I steered into the spin, overcorrected, turned the other way, kept my foot hard on the accelerator. The tires spun, then caught and shot us forward, then spun again. Finn shouted as we brushed up against the fence. I fought the wheel and got us pointed uphill again. The car moved forward a few more feet, snow flying in the air, and then it stopped moving, defeated by the physics of ice and incline.

  I put it in park, got out, and ra
n, slipping, falling, scrambling all the way to the top. He’d paced along the fence, north, south, north, south, long enough to beat the snow into a path and smoke a couple cigarettes. I shaded my eyes against the glare and looking along the other side of the fence until . . .

  There!

  . . . I found the boot prints on the other side and saw something in the snow near the quarry rim.

  Climbing up the fence was not hard, one blink, one breath I was on the top and from the top I saw him, my father, a dark lump sitting in a hollow of snow a foot away from where the earth ended. He was in a T-shirt and shorts. The snow had turned his hair white, his skin gray, like dirty ice.

  Had he frozen to death? Could it happen that fast?

  I wanted to scream his name but was afraid it might shatter whatever spell he was under. Another bank of low clouds rolled in. The flat light drained all of the color out of the world. The walls of the quarry looked like pitted iron, the water black as coal. Dad hadn’t moved. He had to hear Finn shouting, the jangle of the fence as I climbed it, but he sat as still as the rock beneath him, like he was morphing, his bones becoming stone, his solid heart buried forever.

  I launched myself off the top of the fence and landed so hard that it knocked the wind out of me and rattled my brains. When I stood up, left knee screaming, the world seemed tilted. Finn’s muffled voice sounded far away and the cold didn’t bother me anymore.

  I struggled forward, angling to the side, afraid of startling him. I didn’t know what to do next.

  “Daddy,” I called quietly. “Daddy, please. Look at me.”

  I thought I saw his head dip forward a tiny bit. But maybe not. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks. I gimped forward another step.

  His gray lips moved. “Stop.”

  I froze, waited, but he turned back into stone.

  “You have to come home,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “You have to stand up and walk with me to the car. Right now. Do you hear me?”

  Still nothing.

  My left knee quit on me and I pitched forward into the snow. Dad’s head snapped around.

  “You hurt?” he asked.

  “A little.” I pushed myself back up to my feet, putting all my weight on my right leg. “I messed up my knee, I think.”

  Dad turned away, staring straight out at the quarry again. Maybe it was the knife that felt like it was jammed in my knee, maybe the cold froze the part of me that had been afraid as long as I could remember.

  “Why didn’t you ever show me those pictures of Mom?”

  He inhaled slowly. “Thought I’d screwed you up enough already. Didn’t think pictures like that would help.”

  “And letting yourself freeze to death is going to make me feel better?”

  “I didn’t come out here to freeze.”

  “So why haven’t you jumped?”

  He didn’t answer. I limped another step.

  “Don’t!” His hoarse voice pulled me up short. “It’s not safe.”

  “Of course it’s not safe, you dumbass!” I scooped up a handful snow and threw it at him. It drifted, sparkling, over the edge of the cliff.

  “No, Hayley!” Dad turned around, tried to stand up. “Stop!”

  “Shut! Up!” I screamed so loud it felt like my skin split, starting at the top of my head, ripping down the front of me and down the back, unraveling the thin threads that had held me together for so long.

  (Out of the corner of my eye, swirling police gumdrop lights colored the snow. Out of the corner of my ear, Finn shouted and shouted, his voice breaking at the same pitch as the crunch of shifting snow.)

  I choked up and groaned because everything hurt so much, everything hurt so fucking much. “Daddy! I know you have nightmares and you saw horrible things, but . . .” I choked up again. “But I don’t care. I want my dad back. I want you to be brave again, the way you used to be.”

  “You don’t understand.” He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “You can’t do this, you can’t quit!” I yelled. “It’s not fair!”

  My voice echoed down the walls of the quarry and rippled across the water at the bottom. The clouds scuttled away from the sun and blinding light reflected off the fresh snow. We were standing in a sea of glass shards, millions of tiny frozen mirrors.

  “Nothing is fair, but this is better,” Dad said. “Trish will take care of you.”

  “She won’t have to. I’m leaving.”

  I waited for him to take the bait.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Following you. As soon as you jump, I’m jumping.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Wanna bet? I spent my whole life watching you leave. And then Gramma. And then Trish. Apparently, everybody leaves me. So I’m going to leave, too.”

  Car doors slammed.

  I struggled to step closer to him. I had to drag my left leg, then hop.

  “Go back.” Dad stood up straight, put his hands out to me. “Hayley Rose, baby, please. You’re too close to the edge.”

  “You first.”

  “You don’t understand.” His tight voice shook.

  The snow was blue, then red, then blue, then red.

  I tried to stand on one leg. The snow under me shifted and I felt it again, the tug of the quarry. The wind pushing.

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand. I’ve been standing on the edge with you for years.”

  Daddy said something, but his words froze in the air before I heard them. He pointed and pointed, his eyes going back and forth: me, the cliff, me, the fence, me, the quarry, trying to calculate something.

  The snow shifted again. I thought he was ready to jump and I suddenly realized that he was right. I wasn’t going to dive in after him. The past was about to end for us both and it made me sadder than I had ever been in my whole life. So sad that the spinning of the Earth slowed.

  My tears hit the snow, sizzling.

  “Hayley Rose, listen.” His voice caught. “You are standing on an overhang. Just snow. No rock.”

  “Sir!” shouted a voice behind me.

  I looked over my shoulder. Finn stood on the other side of the fence with a cop.

  “Don’t move,” the cop said. “Either of you. We’re getting some rope. Don’t move. Don’t speak.”

  “Listen to him, Hayley.” Dad’s deep voice rumbled across the snow.

  “You don’t want me to fall? Or jump?”

  He had moved toward me. “No, sweetie. Shh.”

  More voices came from beyond the fence: police, Finn, radios squawking, the metal jingling. The snow creaked under me.

  “That feeling you have, Daddy, that you want me to be safe, you want me to stay alive? I feel that way about you all the time.” I sniffed. “If you kill yourself, then every minute of your life has been wasted.”

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “How to live anymore.”

  “When I got stuck or confused, you used to say, ‘We’ll figure it out.’ I love you, Daddy. My mom did, too, and Gramma. I hate to admit it, but Trish does, your buddies do. With so many people loving you, I know we’ll figure it out.”

  Sirens wailed. “Just a few more seconds,” the cop said. “Stay still, both of you.”

  The wind picked up again. He looked too tired to stand. I could almost feel the quarry pulling him in.

  “You’re still alive!” I screamed. “You have to try harder because we love you!”

  Daddy fought a sob, reached for me. It looked like he had just limped off the plane, the band playing, thousands of hands clapping, mouths cheering, waves of tears raining down to wash away the years of heartache. I stepped toward him, ready to fly up into his arms so I could hug his neck and tell him that I missed him so much.

  The snow underneath me cracked,
crumbled, and then everything disappeared.

  Until my father saved me.

  94

  If this were a fairy tale, I’d stick in the “Happily Ever After” crap right here. But this was my life, so it was a little more complicated than that.

  Once the video of Trish begging the woman at the ticket counter to give her the last seat on the flight to Albany even though she was not a member of the frequent flyer program went viral, the airline decided not to press charges after all. The nurses said that when I opened my eyes and saw Trish standing over me, her nose packed with gauze (only her nose was broken in the scuffle, not her cheekbone, don’t trust everything you read on the Internet), I giggled and sang a song that didn’t make any sense. I think they are exaggerating. I don’t remember any of that.

  Finn had wrecked his vocal cords at the quarry, screaming the whole time that I was too close to the edge. I honestly didn’t hear any of it. He was in my hospital room when they brought me back from the MRI.

  “Tore my ACL,” I said.

  “You on morphine?” He sounded like a bullfrog with a three-pack-a-day habit.

  “Yeah, but it’s not enough. A kiss might help.”

  “Might?”

  “It would have to be a very good kiss.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I’ll try my best.”

  * * *

  The winds that had been blowing over the quarry for days had formed a fairly solid rim of snow that extended just beyond the cliff itself. That’s what I’d been standing on. That’s what collapsed. Dad broke three ribs and hyperextended his left elbow when he grabbed me. Rattled his brain again, too, but he didn’t let go. (My shoulder was dislocated, but I only fractured two ribs.)

  When I jumped from the top of the fence, not only did I blow out my knee, but I got a grade two concussion, which was why, the docs said, everything had seemed so weird out there on the edge.

  They were wrong.

  Out there on the edge, the spinning of the Earth had slowed to give us the time we needed to start finding each other again.