“I knew she was high-strung,” says Dad, “but she’s worse than that. She’s just plain crazy!”
She scares him. She scares all of us.
“When I said we needed a break from each other, she just went nuts,” Dad tells us. “She started throwing things. Books, bottles.” And then Dad looks down. “I was afraid she was going to kill me,” he says. Sarah might be small, but when she’s angry, she’s powerful and frightening.
The last thing Sarah said to him was that he had better come back and take away the whole workshop of tools he had been using to fix up her place. Grandpa suggests that Dad go get his things when he knows she’s not home.
“It’ll make it easier on everyone,” says Grandpa.
But Dad won’t do alone. “I want a witness,” says Dad, “because no matter what I take, she’ll accuse me of stealing from her. And who are the police going to believe, an ex-convict or a woman with three children?”
So Grandpa goes with Dad, and they come back before dusk with some of the smaller stuff.
“Thank the Lord that’s all over with,” says Grandma once the truck is unloaded.
But it’s not over with. In fact, as far as Sarah is concerned, it’s only just beginning.
• • •
It’s about midnight when we hear the first crash. We’re all sleeping at Grandma and Grandpa’s house because Sarah’s been threatening all week to come over and do all sorts of things. We figure we’re safer if we’re all together in a different house.
The first crash is the window. It wakes me out of a sound sleep. I know right away that it’s our place next door. Then more crashes. I hear things tearing, things thudding against the wall and hitting the ground in pieces.
“Dad!”
Dad is up, and I can hear him bounding down the stairs. Grandma and Grandpa awake from a deep sleep and don’t know what to do. It’s robbers, I think, robbers breaking into our place, looking for valuables to steal.
But it’s not robbers, it’s vandals. In fact, it’s one single vandal.
I look out the window and see it sitting right there, halfway up the curb—Sarah’s car.
“Call 911,” cries Grandma.
“No,” says Dad. “No police!” The last thing Dad wants is a run-in with the police now that he’s off parole. He races outside and to our house next door to do battle with Sarah, who seems to be very drunk and very, very angry.
“I want my key!” I hear her scream to Dad. “I want my key back now. You broke into my home. I want my key now, or I’ll call the police.”
And somewhere deep down inside me there’s a part of me that’s resting very comfortably and satisfied while the rest of me sits on pins. The demons aren’t huddling or waging war at the moment. Instead they’re sitting in the jury box, passing judgment, and they tell me that this is just what I wanted to happen, that Dad is getting a taste of what he deserves.
And I sit upstairs listening to Sarah rave like a madwoman, I can’t help but think that I was the one who wished this upon my father.
• • •
Round One ends. Sarah drives off, but Round Two begins even before Dad has a chance to tell us what happened. Sarah returns in five minutes with reinforcements. Two huge, scuzzy-looking men with arms as wide as my head drive up behind her in a beat up black sports car. She must have picked them up at the 7-Eleven down the street.
Their fists are already curled, ready to do damage to my father. My God! What lies did Sarah tell them to get them here? What are these men going to do to my dad when they find him?
If it was up to Sarah, they’d . . .
. . . they’d kill him.
Their heavy fists bash against the front door. Grandma’s hands tremble as she dials 911. But it will take too long for them to get here—we should have called before. Maybe we’ll get lucky—maybe the neighbors called.
Dad stands back in the foyer, pacing and waiting. The door bulges in. The whole house shakes with each pound of the door.
“I want my key!” screams Sarah.
This is all too unreal. If it weren’t so terribly awake, I’d think it was just another one of my awful nightmares.
Tyler stands safely at the top of the stairs, but Grandma stands downstairs, too close to the door. I grab her and force her back.
“They’ll hurt you, Grandma,” I say as I push her upstairs. “They want to hurt all of us. I don’t want them to hurt you!”
Now the two men kick at the door. The sharp crashes seem loud enough to crack the house in two. The lock won’t hold much longer.
And then finally we hear sirens.
They approach from the left and the right. They are outside our house in an instant. I can see the blue and red lights chasing each other around the living room.
The kicking finally stops, and then everything is quiet for a moment. And then there comes the politest of rappings on the front door.
• • •
Two policemen pace around my grandparents’ living room. The 7-Eleven thugs talk outside to a third officer, explaining their side of the story. The neighbors all stand outside and gawk, probably thinking that this murderer who moved in down the street just murdered someone else. Sarah sits in the kitchen, just beginning to calm down, and Dad sits in the dining room. Sarah’s anger turns to tears, which she blots away as quickly as she can. “We were going to get married,” she mumbles to a policeman. I begin to feel a bit bad for her.
“He has my key,” she says. “He broke into my house—I want my key back!”
“Do you have her key?” the policeman asks Dad—as if this were all Dad’s fault.
“Do you have Miss Walker’s key?” the officer asks again. Dad doesn’t answer. Is he going to lie to the police? I know what he’s thinking—if he gives back Sarah’s key then Sarah has won. Most of Dad’s tools are still there. She has the gym equipment, which is ours. She’ll never give it back to us.
“Do you have Miss Walker’s key?” says the policeman, about ready to slap the cuffs on Dad for not answering.
Dad looks up at him. “Yes, I have it.”
The policeman puts out his hand. “Then give it back.”
• • •
In Dad’s house it looks as though everything we own has been dropped out of an airplane. Our furniture is shredded and overturned. Pictures are broken—paintings taken off the wall and split over chairs. Clothes are torn and strewn everywhere. She went as far as to take food from our refrigerator and grind it with her furious hands all over our nice white carpet—and all this in a matter of a few minutes.
She even took my trophies and smashed them against the stone mantel.
Our whole lives are here, smashed about us on the floor. And Dad stands in the middle of it, looking around, helpless to really do anything about it other than collect the debris. Some of this stuff just can’t be saved. We all know it.
“I don’t have much luck with women,” he says. There’s nothing funny about it, but I smile feebly anyway. Next door Grandma and Grandpa put Tyler to bed and calm their own nerves. I’m glad they’re not here now. I’m the one who should be cleaning up with Dad. We’re in this together. We’ve been in this together ever since I first sided with him on the day he and Mom broke up.
“I’ve had this coming to me for a long time,” says Dad. “Maybe Sarah is possessed by your mother,” he says, only half joking, “and she’s trying to pay me back for what I did to her.”
I shake my head. “Mom wouldn’t have done something like this,” I tell him, “no matter how angry she was. She has more class.”
Dad bends down and picks up the ruined sofa cushions, gently putting them back into place.
“It’s better this way anyway,” he says. “Even if none of this happened, I couldn’t love Sarah the way she needs to be loved.” I can see Dad’s eyes getting moist. “How could I love Sarah when I still love your mom?”
A tear flows from his eye. He dries it quickly and hurries to busy himself with work. Ther
e’s so much work to do. He stands up a broken lamp and carefully puts on its shade.
I go to pick up an armless, headless trophy. Looking at it, I can see it’s only a cheap piece of plastic. I thought it would mean more to me, but it doesn’t.
It’s half past three in the morning now. At half past three, it’s easier to ask those questions that never see the light of day.
“Dad,” I ask, “why did you do it?” I swallow hard. “Why did you kill Mom?”
Dad puts down the lamp and sits on the floor. I don’t know if he’ll answer. Maybe he’ll just go on cleaning.
He rubs his hand across his face a few times, and it makes a slight scratching sound on his beard stubble. “I’m not sure if this is the right time to talk about this, Preston,” he says.
“There’s never going to be a right time,” I answer.
We both know that it’s true. And of all the wrong times to talk, maybe this time is the best we’ll ever get.
I sit down across from him, and Dad closes his eyes, as if to pray for the right words to come.
24
WHAT DAD DID
“I loved your mother, Preston,” Dad says as we sit in the middle of the ruined living room. “I know it sounds funny, but I did. I think she wanted to leave me for a long time—but she wouldn’t leave you kids, and I don’t think she had the heart to leave me while I still loved her. So I think she tried her best to just make me stop loving her.”
I watch his eyes as he speaks. I watch his every gesture, looking for lies or cover-ups—but everything he says has such a ring of truth, I have to believe him.
He tells me how they were each other’s first love—a fact I knew, but it never occurred to me that Dad met Mom when he was younger than I am now. They were going steady at fifteen, while I can’t even stick with the same girlfriend for more than a couple of months at a time. He was so young. “I remember I baked her a cake on her sixteenth birthday,” he says. “God, I was just a kid.
“You see, I never felt I was good enough to keep her,” says Dad. “I thought it was a miracle she went out with me, much less married me. And I treated her like a queen at first. Gave her whatever she wanted . . . but after a while she wanted so much, I didn’t know what to do. She started measuring us against all our friends who were richer than we were.”
I remember some of that. I always remember feeling that our house was big, but for Mom it wasn’t big enough—and our cars were nice, but they just weren’t as nice as they ought to be.
“And then after Tyler was born,” says Dad, “your mom finally made it clear I wasn’t good enough. After she had him, she decided she’d had enough, period.”
“Enough kids?” I ask.
“No, Preston, just enough. She wouldn’t be with me, Preston. We lived in the same house for five more years, but I knew she didn’t want to share it with me—and the more I told her I loved her, the more she pushed me away.”
I have to keep reminding myself that it’s my mother he’s talking about. How could my mother be cold toward anyone? All I can remember after four years are the good things about her. But yet I know that Mom couldn’t have been perfect, and I know Dad can’t be lying.
“Don’t get me wrong, Preston,” says Dad. “Your mother was a wonderful woman, but, you see, I pushed her into a corner, and she had to push back.”
“You guys should have just got divorced,” I tell Dad.
Dad shakes his head. “I can say that now, but then I would rather have died. I thought divorce was for other people. I thought if I loved her enough, it would be enough for both of us, and if I waited, she would love me again, too.
“But it only got worse, Preston. I was so frustrated, I started to smother her—and I would make a big deal out of everything she did that I felt was wrong. Pretty soon she started telling people she never did love me, that she married me just to get out of the house. I don’t know if she really believed that, but she said it—maybe to get back at me for how I was treating her.”
Dad grits his teeth, angry at himself now. “I was such a jealous bastard,” he says, and he tells me how he wouldn’t let her wear bikinis, and wouldn’t let her go out with her girlfriends for fear that she would meet another guy she liked better than Dad. It was as if Dad were trying to keep her locked away from everyone else.
“I would yell at her, and she would humiliate me,” says Dad, “make me feel like I wasn’t a man—worse, like I wasn’t a human being. I don’t even think she did it intentionally. She was just angry and confused, and she took it out on me. I just couldn’t take it.
“And we’d fight,” says Dad.
If there’s anything I can remember it was those fights. They would say horrible things to each other. “I would tell her she was a terrible wife and mother,” says Dad. “She would tell me that if we got divorced, she would make sure I would never see you boys again. We didn’t mean any of those things, but words like that, they stick in your head and don’t go away.”
Dad takes a moment to catch his breath and slow his tears. I can understand and accept all he’s saying, but still, it’s not enough.
“That’s still no reason to kill someone,” I say.
“Of course it’s not,” says Dad. “Don’t you think I know that?”
He wipes his eyes and continues. “You see . . . I think in some strange way, I started to hate myself, and hate her, too. I hated the way she made me feel. I hated the fact that she would never take anything I said seriously. I hated her almost as much as I loved her, and it drove me crazy.”
I can see it all coming back to him now—the craziness, the sickness that had gotten into his head that we all saw those few weeks before Mom died.
“Do you know what it’s like, Preston, to love somebody more than anything else in the world, but hate them, too?”
“Yes, I do,” I whisper, frozen by the question. “I know that feeling.”
“I borrowed the gun from Paul Talbert,” says Dad, “right after your mom started seeing Warren Sharp. I sort of tricked his wife into giving it to me. At the time I even thought Paul Talbert was seeing your mom. Can you believe that? I know she spoke to him the day she threw me out, and I blamed him for that.”
Dad stops for a moment. I can see how hard it is for him to talk about, but he’s making himself do it. He’s making himself talk because I asked him. I knew he’d find the courage to tell me if I asked him.
“Anyway,” says Dad, “I held the gun for a few weeks. I figured I’d show it to your mom and threaten to kill myself. I thought I might even do that, too—but mostly I just wanted her to see it so that she’d take me seriously for once. That’s all I really wanted with the gun—to get her to see that I was serious. . . . But she didn’t take me seriously. In fact, she said I was ridiculous. And then she turned her back to me and started signing checks like I wasn’t even in the room, and I remember feeling so small and so ridiculous that there was no reason for me to even live anymore. And I looked at her, and knew that all the love in the world wouldn’t make her love me. And I hated that. I didn’t know who I hated more for it—her or myself. I screamed this god-awful scream . . .
“And then the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital. I knew I must have shot myself—I could tell from the pain in my gut. I knew because I remembered having the gun, but that’s all I remembered. And I asked the nurse how your mom was . . . figuring she called the ambulance or took me to the hospital herself. I asked how she and you boys were . . .”
Dad can barely speak through his tears now. The words come out of his throat a raspy croak. “And I remember the thing that was going through my mind over and over again, before I found out that I’d killed her. . . . I kept thinking, Now she’ll take me seriously. . . . Now she’ll take me seriously. . . .”
Dad breaks down, giving in to the tears completely. There are no more words left in him. Nothing but sorrow. If he had a gun, I think he would finish the job right here and now and take his own life. But I won’t l
et him.
I put my arm around him and hold him close. It’s okay, Dad. Let me be the dad for a while, I want to tell him. Let me comfort you. Let me be there for you.
I feel like rubbing his head and scratching his hair like he used to do to me, but I know that it would somehow humiliate him even further. So I lean my head up against his chest.
“Rub my hair, Dad, like you used to.” He looks at me but doesn’t move. “Please, Dad, I want you to. I don’t care if I’m fifteen—I want you to.”
Gently my father begins to rub his tear-moistened hands across my scalp. After all these years, it still makes me squint my eyes like a cat being petted between the ears.
“You should have hated me, Preston,” he says. “You all should have hated me.”
“I know,” I admit. “I sort of did.”
“I can never give you back what I took away,” he says.
“I know that, too,” I tell him, “but it’s okay.” I close my eyes and give in to the calm feeling as he holds me like a father should hold his kid. I finally feel an invisible quilt wrapping around me.
“I forgive you, Dad,” I whisper. “I forgive you.”
And as I say it, I realize that in all these years—in all those dozens of times I’ve said those words—this time, sitting here in the wreckage of our home, is the first time I’ve ever meant it.
25
EPILOGUE: NORMAL PEOPLE
January—Five Years Later
I explode from the blocks with a perfectly controlled blast of energy. I will be relentless today. I will make this first meet of the season the best meet of my life.
Everything seems to have fallen into place for this meet, and as I take the lead, even before the first turn, I begin to think about how my life has finally fallen into place, too. The thing with Sarah seems like such a small part of our lives now. Our house was fixed, because things can be replaced, and Sarah packed up with her kids and moved to Seattle, because people go on with their lives.
So now things are normal. I go to school, we eat dinner, go to church on Sundays. Dad and I have arguments like most sixteen-year-olds and their parents. Normal.