Cures for Hunger (10 page)

But sometimes his antics didn't make me feel that good, as when he caught a long-legged spider on his dashboard. We were waiting at a light. It was summer, the windows down, and he said, “Look at that old goat!” In the car next to us, a geezer with thick glasses hunched over his steering wheel as if it were a book in the hands of a nearsighted reader. My father leaned past me and threw the spider onto his bald head.

Now I had to decide. I was sitting on the couch. Hinges creaked in the mudroom and footsteps crossed the kitchen. My father stood in the doorway, the skin on either side of his mouth slack, his gaze too still.

“Is that for school?” he asked.

A Jules Verne novel lay on my lap. It had enraptured me, the idea that a land existed beneath the earth—and why not? How could scientists know for sure? But I said nothing, seeing that this wasn't the father who wanted to travel and fish, but the one who cared only about his business.

“You read too much,” he said. “You should get some exercise.”

As I tried to think of what to say, a feeling of loneliness, still beyond words, dawned. I'd stopped talking about levitation and mental powers and invisible friends, but I hadn't considered there might be other things about me that he didn't like.

“I got in a fight today,” I told him.

“You did?” He raised his eyebrows, then yawned, lifting his forearm to hide his mouth. “That's good. I'm glad you're standing up for yourself.”

I'd been trying to be tough at school, using
fuck
and
goddamn
to swear kids to tears and run them off. When Matthieu had pulled on my jacket, I'd called him a fuck banana. He'd appeared so dazed that I'd taken the opportunity to punch him.

“Good. That's good,” my father said, eyeing me as if I might be lying. “You really let him have it, huh?”

“Yeah, I let him have it pretty good.” Hearing myself, I felt that my
victory was far grander than it had seemed in the moment, though I wasn't sure I'd used the swearword right.

My father leaned against the doorjamb, still looking at me, but yawned again. He went into the kitchen. The fridge door opened, bottles clinking.

“Goddamn it,” I heard him say, “there's nothing to eat.”

I closed my book. I had to make up my mind. Maybe I should leave with my mother. My father definitely wasn't as fun as he used to be.

He came back, anger all around him, like the smell of cigarettes on a smoker's jacket. He sat and put the peach-colored phone on the armrest, then lifted the receiver. He swallowed hard and pushed his jaw forward and began to dial.

Seeing his expression, I knew that he was going to swear at someone. The sadness eased from my throat, and an odd feeling of lightness came over me. What was it about words, or the way some of them could contain so much force? No one could swear like him! It was his gift. Each insult came from his stomach, not like a belch but like the sudden act of vomiting, a sound that catches in the throat and burns in the sinuses like bile.

The faint ringing from the earpiece reached me, and a tired tinny voice said, “Hullo.” My father didn't even introduce himself. He shouted, “Don't you fucking play games with me!” Then he took a breath so deep I could see all his teeth and the dark lines of his many fillings and the red of his throat. He yelled, stringing words together, “Motherfucking cocksucking piece of shit, I'll kick your stupid fucking ass!”

Wanting to sound like this, I forgot I had to decide, and without realizing it, I jumped up and danced on the carpet in victory. He grabbed his black book and threw it at me.

 

 

The end would be like a fishing trip, a long drive through the night, dark mountains and washed-out roads, to a dawn over a river where all that mattered began.

I went into the woods and closed my eyes and turned in circles with the intention of getting lost. I had to hone my survival skills. Wandering,
I looked for tunnels under bushes and imagined magic portals beneath the low branches of trees.

And then I just sat. There was something I couldn't understand, that made it hard to breathe, my throat thick with sadness. My father had always told me I was like him, and I did my best not to cry in front of him. But I noticed how my mother watched me sometimes, her brow furrowed, a wetness in her blue eyes, as if just seeing me race through the door might make her cry. She liked it when we talked and I read books, but what did my father want me to be? Crazy sometimes. Quiet at others. It was confusing. It wasn't fair.

In novels, something bad happens so that the hero has to travel and change, but my life just dragged on. Only when I read did the pressure in my chest go away. As I turned pages, I felt a rush of vertigo, tingling along my arms and face. Even telling stories at school, I became transfixed, sailing further and further into the air, toward the sky, more and more distant from the truth. And once I'd told a story, no matter how outlandish, how embroidered with magic, I knew it was true. I had only to glance at photos from my parents' first years together to see the past, and the scene that unfolded—that I told everyone—I never doubted.

To my classmates, I bragged about my father, the immense salmon and steelhead trout that he reeled from icy rivers, standing deep in the current, almost swept away. They listened, but at some point—when the salmon bit his leg or gashed his hand or wrapped the line around his boot and tried to drag him downriver—they snorted and called me a liar.

What they didn't realize was that their stories stank because they thought too much about time. There was too much walking, too much opening and closing of doors. They didn't see that two shocking events years apart, on opposite ends of the country, longed for each other the way a smiling girl across the room made me want to sit next to her. Hearing my father, I forgot the slow march of minutes. A dog had once tried to bite him, and he'd also reeled in a forty-pound salmon, so it seemed natural that the injured fish would bite him, too. Minutes and hours had to be done away with, the thrilling moments of life freed from the calendar's prison grid.

Soon, I told myself as I walked home through the forest, my life would be a story, and I'd be free.

 

 

School let out for Christmas. The autumn had been mild, but the weather finally changed. Snow fell in the naked forests and turned the ditches to ice.

We moved again, to a smaller farm, this time to be closer to my father's stores. My mother barely unpacked. She no longer paid much attention to food, making slapdash sandwiches and rushing off to meet friends from the psychic church. Though she still had two horses, the years of goat home brew were over.

On Boxing Day, she took us to the mall. My father had given each of us a hundred dollars in loose change. We'd spent Christmas counting, huddled like misers over stacks of coins, but at the mall I noticed that my brother didn't buy anything.

I sidled up to him. “What are you going to get?”

“Nothing. I gave my money to Bonnie.”

“You did? Really?”

“She needs it. It's important.”

I shuddered. In my backpack, I had rolls of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and I couldn't believe that my parents' stupidity might deprive me of the pleasure of spending them. As I bought a book of mystery stories, my mother stood off and watched, her expression that of tried patience, as if enduring some classroom humiliation. My heart went out of shopping.

As I walked back across the parking lot next to her, she stared into the distance, searching for something, an answer from her own invisible friends, a way to bridge the annoying, relentless minutes in which nothing at all happened, so that she could connect two pieces of her own story. I knew she'd need my money to do this, and that I'd give it to her.

When we got home, my father's new cargo minivan was in the driveway, and he was back on the farm preparing a burn pile. He'd been busy closing his lots and wasn't around more than a few hours on Christmas.
He began walking toward the house. I went to my room and lay on the bed with my new book.

The fighting began just outside, and I rolled off the bed and went to the window. I wondered what they'd said to start the argument, but I was getting angry, too, and yelling might have felt good.

“I'm sick of this nonsense,” he tried to bellow, but to my surprise, the dark fields and night silence didn't seem to care, and a wind blew through his voice, hollowing it.

“It's none of your business,” she shouted back, drowning his words. This startled me. She spoke with such force, his force, as if she'd put on his boots and jacket and glared at him with his dark eyes, and he stood naked in the field, wanting his things back but too tired to take them.

“I can't believe it,” he said. “You talk to . . . to some psychic and now you think Vancouver is going to be destroyed by an earthquake.”

“I'm sick of explaining myself!” she told him. The clouds cleared the moon, and the dark thinned so that the stars pulsed once, all together, and withdrew like barnacles.

She said a few more things, about him not respecting her wishes or giving her space to grow, and her voice remained loud, something exploratory in the way she raised it to new heights, as if only now discovering this could be done.

Her van started up, and its taillights flared and scorched off along the driveway.

The night lulled, and a fire began on the back of the property. He was burning hundreds of leftover Christmas trees, the light blurring in the frosted window glass. Ever since I could remember, he'd loved building fires: garbage on the property, tires and old appliances, wood from rotting sheds, and once a camper that fit on the back of a truck. He'd piled branches and dead pine and spruce on top, then doused it all with so much gasoline that he'd had to pour a long thin trail of it far away just to light it safely. We'd crouched together, and he'd dropped the match. The flame zipped like a shark's fin across the grass and the heap burst skyward, the air sucked in and up, sudden heat against my face. It got so hot that Christmas trees turned to ash before our eyes, and the metal
of the camper sagged and collapsed. He'd stood with his hands on his hips and laughed, and I had no idea why burning things felt so good, like yawning or stretching in the middle of class. Maybe he was trying to feel that way now, all alone burning trees.

I went to the mudroom and put on my boots and pulled the door from its warped frame. Frozen air spilled over me, and I followed the hard earth of the driveway back.

Halfway there, I came to a ditch, the spine of the buried culvert visible where big trucks carrying trees had passed. Beyond that was the tossing light of the fire. The cold stung my face, the night silent but for cars on the road. I hadn't had time to get used to this farm, the sheds and barn unexplored, the forest scant and far away, beyond a frostbitten field.

I glanced back. My heart clenched and thudded as the world came unstrung. The lights of the house drifted out toward the road. The rising moon slipped a little higher in the sky, bumping over the stars.

I took a few more steps and stopped, my rapid breath misting, the smoldering center of the fire a red eye. I couldn't see him. Sparks rushed up through the chill air, planing as they cooled and died. When the wind shifted, the heat warmed my face.

He called my name.

Fear released from my chest, and I continued over the baked earth. He was just beyond the fire, his arms crossed, and I stood next to him.

“She's upset,” he told me.

I made myself appear as calm as possible, and I was proud of how I stood next to him and watched the fire, asking matter-of-factly, “What are we going to do?”

“I don't know,” he said, as if he might want my advice. “Maybe we can all go on a trip. Sometimes, when you go on a trip and come back, things are better. Sometimes that's all it takes.”

I pictured this, a long journey, days and days looking out the window at trees and mountains, and then him saying, “This is far enough.” We'd turn around and return, ready to start over. But would he change?

Firelight shone on his cheekbones but hid his eyes, and though I worried that he might tell me to go back inside, he didn't.

“Things will be better,” he said, and in his voice I heard my mother's, the sadness and uncertainty and fear, and I knew that something had changed.

 

 

I lost track of the days. I read or played
Dungeons & Dragons
with my brother, my fears vanishing like fish descending through a dark current.

One night I fell asleep reading on the couch and I heard my parents come in the front door after arguing. They walked into the living room, and I didn't open my eyes. I sensed them above me, looking down, silent as if surprised that I existed. My mother said she'd take me to my bedroom, but my father told her that he'd do it. He lifted me, my cheek against the coarse fabric of his shirt, my arm hanging. I could have opened my eyes and said I'd walk, but I sensed in his gentleness that he wanted to carry me. I breathed the odors in his shirt, pine sap and coffee, gasoline and sweat, but I felt no comfort. My heart didn't slow. I didn't drift asleep in this safety. I watched, starting to get angry, surprised to be this little boy, one arm folded against his chest. I felt like I was remembering, as if this moment were a photograph and I were seeing how things had once been.

After he'd closed the door, I turned on my lamp and read. It was the only way to feel calm. In the novel, kingdoms clashed, and at some point I dozed and was swinging a sword at faceless, blurring enemies until I sensed danger and turned, a dark shape closing in. I woke, gasping, then lay awake until the sun rose.