“You didn’t fall in the pool at that party,” she said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“It was Fourth of July, at the Bigelows’. The docs had discharged Andy too early, but we didn’t know it then. He should never have been in a swimming pool by himself.” She shook her head. “We were all watching Jimmy and his girlfriend dance; they were good enough to be pros. The music was really loud and everybody was feeling good.”
“Was he drunk? Did I fall in because he wasn’t paying attention?”
She put her mug down. “He wasn’t drinking at all. He was showing off for you, I think. Must have had a tiny stroke or a seizure in the deep end. You were the only one who saw what happened. You didn’t fall in, Lee-Lee. You jumped in to help your father, but you couldn’t swim. You were, what? Seven? The Bigelows’ dog went nuts and someone went see why he was barking and oh my God.” She teared up and looked out the dark window. “Ten guys must have hit the water at once. One plucked you out, laid you on the deck, and started CPR. Your lips were this awful blue, but you came around fast. It took longer with Andy. Damn good thing there were medics at the party.”
“Did Dad go back to the hospital?”
“You both did. They kept you one night for observation. He was there a couple of weeks.” She cocked her head to one side. “You sure you don’t remember this?”
“I remember falling in and I remember opening my eyes underwater and seeing Dad. He had on red swim trunks with baggy pockets. Did he have a shirt on, too?”
She nodded.
“I always thought I was looking up through the water and seeing him on the deck.”
“No, you saw him on the bottom of the pool,” she said softly. “Do you know what he remembers?”
“He never talks about things like that.”
“I know.” She looked out the window again. “The last thing he remembers before he passed out was seeing you fly through the air like a little bird. Must have been the moment you jumped in.”
“So he knew I was in the deep end and I couldn’t swim?”
“He couldn’t move. Whatever it was, seizure, stroke. I don’t know if they ever figured it out for sure. But he said it was peaceful. He said drowning is not a bad way to go.”
I drained my tea. “I’m never getting in a pool again.”
“I think you will, as long as the right lifeguard is on duty.” She finished her tea, stood up, and put her jacket on. “Helluva day, huh? The docs gave him something to sleep. I’ll call to check on him tomorrow, before and after work.”
Spock followed her to the door, tail wagging. He whined a little when she closed the door behind her and nosed aside the curtain to watch her walk to her car.
“Wait!” I ran to the door and opened it. “Wait!” The light from the house barely reached the driveway. I could see where she was standing, but I couldn’t see her face.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you for helping us.”
87
The day after his hospital visit, Dad woke up at the same time I did. As the coffee was brewing, he lined up his new prescription bottles on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. He took his medicine with the first sip, then he went back to bed. He did the same thing the next morning and the day after that.
“Are you doing this to prove to me that you’re taking your medicine?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he admitted. “What’s-his-name is waiting in the driveway. Get going.”
I reached for my backpack. “What are you going to do today?”
“Thought I’d write some letters.”
“Letters? Like, on paper?”
“Old-school, that’s me.”
“You’re okay?”
“Get going. Stay out of detention for a change.”
* * *
Trish came to our house for Sunday dinner three weeks in a row. We ate, watched the late game, and then she’d go to work. When she got switched to the night shift, Dad switched, too, going to bed after I left in the morning and waking up in time for dinner. In those weeks, our house never smelled of greasy biker creep or weed. Daddy was down to one bottle of Jack every three days. He didn’t explode or cry. He spent his nights writing letters at the dining room table.
It was tempting to let my guard down, but I couldn’t, not until he started seeing that doctor.
The swimming lesson changed things with Finn and me, took us to a new level that was hidden from the rest of the world, one that made us laugh more and required a lot more kissing. Besotted: that was the word of the month. I went to class, did enough homework to keep me off the naughty list, counted the minutes until I saw him again (praying that he was doing the same thing). I learned to love the smell of chlorine because every day after school, I’d change into a T-shirt and shorts, sit in the visitor’s gallery that overlooked the pool, and read while Finnegan Braveheart Ramos valiantly guarded the lives of the Belmont Boys Swim Team.
When I was with Finn, the world spun properly on its axis, and gravity worked. At home, the planet tilted so far on its side it was hard to tell which way was up. Dad felt it, too. He shuffled like an old man, as if the carpet under his feet was really a slick sheet of black ice.
88
A tree turned up in our living room the morning of Christmas Eve, the base of its trunk jammed into a bucket of rocks. The bucket sat in the middle of an old tire. The tree leaned toward the window, shedding needles whenever Spock’s tail thwacked against it.
Finn and his mom were heading back to Boston that night, so we exchanged gifts in the afternoon. He gave me a coupon book. All the coupons were for swimming lessons.
“Okay, now I really feel like an idiot,” I said, handing over his gift. “In my defense, I haven’t had an art class in years.”
“Ah,” he said, ever the diplomat, when he’d removed the paper. “It’s an original. I love original things.”
I cringed. “You need me to tell you what it is, don’t you?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s a candleholder, see? No, turn it the other way. That thing at the bottom is supposed to be an owl, but it’s not supposed to have a giant tumor growing on its back.”
Finn tried to keep a straight face and failed. “My first thought was that it was Dromedary Man, the camel superhero. But you’re almost right, it’s definitely an owl. But that is not a tumor, that’s a backpack, loaded down with overdue library books. I love it.” He grinned. “It’s very you.”
* * *
I tried to decorate the tree after he left. I found a small box of old Christmas lights in the basement, but the thought of a flaming tree-sized torch in the living room made me put them back. I baked round sugar cookies and put a small hole in each one so that after they cooled, I could thread yarn through the holes and hang them on the tree. The trick was to hang them close to the trunk and high enough so the dog wouldn’t eat them. Too much weight on the end of a branch would snap it off, then Spock would eat the cookie, the yarn, and start in on the branch.
An arctic cold front rolled down from the North Pole Christmas morning. Our furnace ran constantly, but frigid air seeped in through the cracks around the windowsills and overwhelmed the crumbling insulation. I spent the day in suspended animation wrapped in a sleeping bag on the couch, sipping hot chocolate, watching Christmas movies, and waiting for Dad to wake up.
Long after sunset, he came down the hall coughing hard, his nose running. “No hugging,” he said. “You don’t want this cold.”
After a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a lot of Kleenex, I gave him my present.
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he protested.
“It’s Christmas, duh.”
He blew his nose again, carefully removed the wrapping paper and folded it, then flipped the gift over so he could see
the front.
“A map of the United States,” he said.
“Our map, see?” I pointed at the red lines that squiggled all over the country. “I traced as many of our trips as I could remember. There’s a hook on the back so you can hang it on the wall.”
“Thank you, princess. I suppose you want a present, too,” he teased.
“That would be nice.”
He went out to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and returned with a long thin box, covered in reindeer paper.
He hesitated, then handed it to me and walked away. “Hope you like it.”
“Where are you going?” I asked. “Don’t you want to watch me open it?”
“No, it’s okay,” he said, already halfway down the hall.
“Really? You’re really going to do that? What is it, a pair of chopsticks from an old take-out order? Did you wash a pair of my socks for me?”
I regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. He turned around, coughing, and shuffled back to the living room. Sat on the couch without a word.
“I didn’t mean that to sound nasty,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Just open it.”
Under the paper was the kind of box that fancy pens come in. “A pen? That would be way cooler than clean socks.”
He pressed his lips together and raised an eyebrow. I lifted the lid, unfolded the white tissue paper, and picked up a pearl necklace.
“Daddy?” I whispered. “Where—”
“That’s from your grandmother. Found it in the basement. I doubt the pearls are real, so don’t think you’re going to get much if you sell it. She wore it all the time.”
I rubbed the pearls on my cheek, smelling lemon and face powder and ginger cookies and hearing bees humming in her garden. “I remember.”
“Well, good.” He stood and patted my head. “She’d like that.”
* * *
For three days and three nights after that, it snowed. Our town had giant snowplows so the roads were more or less clear, but poor Spock grew so grumpy about having to stick his private parts in the snow to do his business, I finally shoveled out a potty patch for him and added it to the growing list of things I never thought I would do but did, anyway.
Dad was a dimly seen shadow, only leaving his room to use the bathroom or to make a sandwich or to dump more dirty dishes in the sink. I’d say “Hey” or “How you doing?” or “Want a cookie?” He’d grunt or say “Fine” or “No.” His cold was no better, no worse, and he snored so loud that paint was flaking off the walls.
Trish stopped by in the middle of the night on the twenty-eighth and left a card for me that contained a gift certificate for the mall. She scribbled a note on the envelope telling me she was flying to Austin in the morning to visit her sister and that she’d be back right after New Year’s.
I had baked her an apple pie for a present, but nobody told me when she going to stop in, and nobody told me she’d be spending the rest of the week in Texas, so I split it with Spock and the ghost of my father.
89
Why did I voluntarily wake up at seven o’clock in the morning on the fourth day after Christmas? Love messes you up and makes you do strange things, that’s why. Finn was guarding at a massive all-day swim meet and had bewitched me into saying I’d spend the day at the pool so we could hang out on his breaks.
It was still dark out, snowing even more heavily than it had been the day before. Frost was etched on the inside of my window, another sign that we needed to re-insulate the house. Finn had promised that the viewing section above the pool would be in the nineties. The thought of being that warm was the motivation I needed to get me out of bed.
I almost collided with Dad, freshly showered, in the hall.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, waving at the steam that poured out of the bathroom.
“It’s all right. Why are you up?”
“Swim meet, remember?”
“When do you leave?’
“Ten minutes. Don’t worry. He’s going to have his mom’s car. She just got new tires.”
“You’ll be back for dinner?”
“I think so.”
He leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re getting used to all this, aren’t you?”
Something in his tone of voice made me suspicious. “Define ‘this.’”
He rubbed his hand over the scraggly beard that was beginning to look like gray-speckled moss on his pale, worn face. “This school. This house. This what’s-his-name.”
The shower dripped loudly. He was laying the groundwork, getting ready to tell me that when Trish got back, he’d definitely be going on the road again and leaving me with her.
“You seem happier,” he continued.
“Maybe,” I said. “A little.”
The combination of the beard and the fatigue in his eyes made me uneasy, but we were miles past the place where I could ask how he was feeling or even what was wrong.
He startled me with a quick, fierce hug. “Get in the shower. I’ll make a classic peanut butter and banana you can eat in the car.”
* * *
The swim meet was delayed one hour, and then two as the buses from other districts crawled through the storm toward Belmont. It was finally canceled when state troopers shut down the Thruway. The blowing snow turned the fifteen-minute drive back to my house into almost an hour and shook Finn up so much I thought I’d have to pry his fingers off the steering wheel with a crowbar. His mother called while I was making hot chocolate to tell him that the snow would stop soon, but he should stay at my house until the plows got caught up.
We settled in on the couch with our hot chocolate, a bag of marshmallows, the game controllers, and the unzipped sleeping bag spread across our laps.
* * *
“Who are those presents for?” Finn asked as we waited for the game to load.
“What presents?”
“Under the tree.” He pointed. “Look.”
Two small boxes, wrapped in the reused Christmas paper that we’d thrown out days before, had been hidden deep under the tree in the drift of pine needles. One had my name on it, the other was addressed to Finn.
“Those weren’t here this morning,” I said.
“From your dad?”
“Must be.” I shivered. Even with the furnace running, it felt like the house was getting colder. “Let’s open them.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for him?” Finn asked.
“There’s a good chance that he’s given us something weird. We’ll take a peek and rewrap them.” I carefully slid my finger under the tape to loosen it. “That way we’ll know how to act when we open them in front of him.”
The paper on my gift fell away easily.
“Your father gave you a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?”
“Of course.” I shivered again. “Doesn’t your dad do that? Your turn.”
Finn’s small box clunked when he shook it. The wrapping paper practically fell off to reveal a box that used to hold four sticks of butter. The tape holding the ends together popped opened. A metal star made of bronze tumbled into his lap.
He picked it up. “What’s this?”
My shivering turned into shaking. I ripped open the top of my box and pulled out a faded blue bandanna that held two gold rings, one man-sized, the other a little smaller, and one Purple Heart.
90
Me, pounding on his bedroom door. “Daddy, open up! Open up now!”
Me, kicking the door, screaming.
Me, swinging the splitting maul, wood cracking, doorknob breaking off, door falling backward.
(Finn’s voice in the distance. Too far away to hear.)
* * *
The room was perfectly tidy, ready for inspection. The bed was made; one thin pillow in a clean pillowcase lay at the
head, an extra blanket, folded, lay across the foot. His clothes were neatly lined up in the closet. His ancient computer had been cleaned of months of grease smears and cigarette ash. The nightstand, empty except for a reading lamp, the desk, the bureau, all dusted. I checked the closet again; the clothes were still there, still hanging, still quiet. Gun locker closed and locked. I opened it; all guns were accounted for.
I shut the closet door and stood with my back to it. From this angle, the room looked like it could belong to anyone. No, not anyone. It looked like it belonged to no one at all.
* * *
Garage: pickup truck, engine cold, not running, not pumping out carbon dioxide, no hose leading from tailpipe to driver’s window.
Bathroom: empty. No knives. No knives, no blades, no blood.
Basement: empty. No rope. No rope hanging from the I-beam that held up the house, no body twisting, no feet dangling inches above the ground.
He wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room or the dining room. He wasn’t in my bedroom (he would never have done that, how could I even think it, he would not leave his body on the floor of my room, never that) so where . . .
Gramma’s room, which was Trish’s room for a little while. In there? In there?
Gramma’s room: empty. No fathers. No fathers overdosed on the bed or under the bed or in the closet. On the bed was a box. It was a big, red box that used to hold printer paper. On the box was an envelope addressed to Trish. The envelope fell to the floor. The top of the box fell to the floor. Inside was a photo album I’d never seen, pictures of Rebecca, pictures of Rebecca and me and him. Underneath the album were dozens of crisp, sealed, sharp-edged envelopes. Every envelope had my name on it. In the top-right corner was a date. Half of the envelopes were dated my birthday. The other half were dated December 25, and the years that followed those dates stretched for decades into the future.
This girl was crying again, and the dog was howling again because we could not find my father. A monster had my daddy in its teeth, only this time there was no blood on the floor and no footprints to follow.