Driving With Dead People (25 page)

“Of course not.” She was knitting the last corner of a pink afghan she’d been working on for my Christmas present.

“I can’t remember anything,” I said, watching her fingers push thick pink yarn around two knitting needles. “I’ve racked my brain, and I don’t remember what JoAnn remembers.” Becky didn’t even look up. “Aren’t you worried he might have done something to us?” I asked. “
I’m
worried.”

“I can’t think about it right now. I need to finish this or you won’t be able to take it back to Brooklyn.” She leaned down and grabbed her knitting bag.

“I’m scared something really bad is going to happen,” I told her.

“It already has,” she said, cutting and tying off the yarn.

“I’m going to confront Dad on Christmas night,” I told her.

“Good luck,” she said, getting up and gathering up her knitting.

“I’m not going near him.”

I watched her walk up the stairs.

In the kitchen, I loaded Mom’s dishwasher, and thought about one Christmas at the old house on Main Street when we were young. Becky and I were the first ones awake, jumping from her bed to mine, waiting for Mom and Dad to wake up.

“Peek downstairs and see if Santa came,” Becky dared me.

“They’ll kill me if I look.” I kept jumping. We weren’t allowed to go downstairs until Dad had the bright lights of the movie camera focused on the stairway. Christmas morning was the one time he filmed his children as meticulously as he filmed disasters. It took forever.

“Stop jumping,” JoAnn grumbled from under her covers.

“It’s Christmas morning,” I told her.

“It’s dark out,” she responded.

“But Santa came. Don’t you want to get up?” Becky said.

“NO!” She kept sleeping.

Becky and I jumped quietly. I hopped off the bed and put my face against the metal register in the floor to see if I could spot the Christmas tree down there. I couldn’t see it in the dark.

The register looked down into the living room and was perfect for spying or dropping small plastic animals through. If Mom or Dad were sitting on the couch below, watching TV or eating popcorn, we could see them, cut up into tiny squares through the intricate opening of that grate.

“I can see something,” I said.

“What?” Becky demanded, pushing her face close to mine over the grate.

“You got a gigantic dog poop from Santa.” We started laughing like crazy. She pushed me off the register and looked down.

“You got a moldy cheeseburger,” she said, and laughed.

“That’s exactly what I wanted,” I told her.

“Good, ’cause that’s what you got.”

Jamie’s room was downstairs next to the bathroom. He must have still been asleep. I whispered through the register, “Jamie? Jamie, wake up, it’s Christmas morning.” Nothing.

“He’s not getting up,” Becky said.

“We’re on our own,” I confirmed.

I poured detergent into the door of the dishwasher and closed it. I pushed the knob and heard the water pouring in. Jamie walked into the kitchen. He’d flown in from Salt Lake.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“A drink, if you know what I mean.” He winked. He knelt down and peered into the liquor cabinet.

“If there’s rum in there, pull it out,” I told him.

“Now the party’s finally gettin’ started,” he said, rubbing his hands together. After rummaging around in there, he came out with a fifth of Bacardi. “Is this what you had in mind?”

“Perfect,” I said. I wiped my hands on a dish towel and opened the fridge to get a Coke. Encouraging Jamie to drink was terrible. He had such a bad problem that there were warrants out for his arrest in at least one state because of the DUIs he’d accumulated. But I needed to relate to someone, and Jamie and I loved each other, even though he scared me sometimes.

“What are you mixing your whiskey with?” I asked, pulling down two glasses.

“I don’t mix whiskey,” he said. “It kills the taste.” He took one of the glasses and filled it with ice.

“For you,” he said, handing it over.

“Thanks.”

Jamie filled his glass halfway up and downed a big gulp. I was no different, filling my glass halfway with rum and chasing it with Coke. Jamie leaned on the counter and looked directly at me.

“So Dad really did this to JoAnn?” he asked. What a relief! Someone finally came right out and said it.

“Seems that way,” I told him.

Jamie began pacing around the kitchen, shaking his head.

“What a bastard,” he said.

“Pretty much.”

“I should go down there and take care of him with a shotgun.” Jamie stuck his arm out and acted out aiming a rifle.

“He’s not worth ending up in jail,” I told him. “He’s taken away enough of our lives already.”

“I thought I’d gotten the worst of it, but I guess not.” He downed another gulp.

“You had it plenty bad,” I said. “The way Dad treated you was unforgivable.”

“I guess,” he said, finishing his drink. “I just can’t picture him messing around with one of you girls. I really can’t picture it.”

“I know.”

I didn’t tell Jamie I was confronting Dad, because he’d insist on going with me, and someone would end up either shot or beaten to death—and it wouldn’t be Dad.

The phone rang and Jamie picked it up. It was our cousin Paul—which meant Jamie would be partying all night.

After he got off the phone, he went into his room, put on clean jeans, and a white button-down shirt with a turquoise bolo tie. “I’m going out with the guys. Be cool.”

“Yes, that’s me all right,” I said. He started toward the door, pulling on his coat. “Jamie?” I called. He turned around. “Be careful in the snow.”

“No problemo,” he said, heading outside.

The next night, as guests arrived for the Christmas Eve party, Christmas carols rotated on the turntable and the manger scene glowed on a cushion of spun glass near the front door. It was the first Christmas Eve we’d sing without JoAnn’s piano accompaniment.

Jamie had too many beers and told Granda about Dad. Grabbing my arm in the kitchen, she asked, “Did he use his fingers or his penis?” My mouth dropped open.

“I have no idea,” I snapped.

“If he used his penis—”

I stopped her right there. “Granda, I can’t discuss it like this.” I walked out of the kitchen. I had to get out of the house.

I threw on my coat and walked to the back fence. I had forgotten how black it got at night in Ohio farm country, especially with no moon. The myriad stars seemed to stretch into infinity and multiply the longer I stood there.

I glanced back at our house, with every window lit. People I’d always known—the Whitmores, Uncle Dale, Granda—walked past the windows with glasses of iced tea in their hands and smiles on their faces.

I knew, just as you know when someone you love has died even before you get the call, that I would leave this family, these friends, and my home forever. I was watching my last bit of life there. I was watching it from the outside in, and from then on, I always would.

I looked across the field and up again at the stars. The next day, I would confront my father.

On Christmas night Mom wanted to know why I was going to Dad’s. “Why waste gas to go see
him
?” she asked, wiping the counter.

“To find out what happened to JoAnn,” I said.

Mom looked skeptical. “I bet that’ll go over well.”

“I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to you to confront him. You’re the one who married him.” I turned on her.

“I’m not going anywhere near him,” she said. “One day, I stood in front of the washer and decided I was done with him. Just like that, it was over between us.”

“What about your daughter?” I asked.

“He’s a load of hot air and always has been,” she said. “He’s harmless.”

“Harmless?” I smacked the top of the counter. “Are you kidding me? Harmless?” I was flailing my arms around, trying to control the urge to smack some reality into the back of her head. “He wasn’t harmless. He was violent and mean to all of us.”

“You’re the great exaggerator,” Mom said, wringing out the sponge over the sink.

“I’m not the one who said Dad molested me. JoAnn said it, and I’m going down there for her sake,” I said.

“Well, everyone knows you’re the martyr,” she said. “The Truth Patrol.”

“I don’t live in a happy bubble, pretending life is bliss,” I assured her.

“No one would accuse you of that,” she quipped.

“If you and I really get into this whole thing, our relationship will NEVER survive.” I stormed out of the room.

Mom turned on the heat under the teakettle.

That night, it was snowing like hell and the pitch-black road to Dad’s lake house was winding and slick, which added to my feeling of danger.

As I slid up my father’s driveway, I noticed his house was decked out with Christmas lights, but not traditional lights like everyone else at Lake Hiawatha, and not like the strings of lights wrapped meticulously around the fourteen-foot wooden totem pole that greeted you at the entrance. Instead, Dad had hung enormous white plastic bells everywhere, with multicolored lights sticking out all over them like neon porcupine quills. They were swinging on the trees lining his driveway and swaying from the eaves of his seventies-style A-frame house.

As it turned out, he’d made them himself, out of Clorox bottles turned upside down with the bottoms cut off and Christmas lights stuffed through holes he’d punched with an awl. When I got a closer look, I could see the white plastic handles still attached.

I stopped the car and saw Dad coming to the door looking squat and wavy behind the frosted glass. I was mustering strength to face him, when he opened the door, happy to see me.

I waved and popped the trunk to gather Dad’s gifts, the last ones I would ever give him.

I walked toward the house, packages in hand, dreading what the evening would bring. Would he call me names, throw a chair against the wall, hit me? Maybe it’d be something I hadn’t thought of. My trembling legs could barely hold me up.

When Dad walked outside, I saw that his right arm was in a plaster cast from fingertips to shoulder. His arm stuck out at a right angle, his wrist supported by a pole that protruded from a small rubber support stuck in a wide Ace bandage wrapped around his thick waist.

“Broke it playing senior’s basketball,” he said.

“Looks bad,” I told him.

“It’s not good.” He laughed.

I hadn’t expected him to be injured; somehow it changed things.

As we walked inside, I scrutinized Dad’s profile, foolishly expecting him to look different now that I was about to bust him for the vilest crime any person could commit. But with his thinning gray hair combed to the side, his rectangular gold wire-rimmed glasses, and his narrow lips that hardly parted even with a smile, he looked just like Dad.

He took my red wool jacket and hung it on the coatrack in the sunporch. I walked into his warm kitchen that smelled of roast beef and fresh baked rolls. In the living room I could see a Christmas tree lit in the corner. This year he’d really made an effort.

The table was set for four. Clearly, Dad had been expecting JoAnn and Jamie like in past years. I felt ashamed, as if it were my fault the other kids weren’t there, but resisted the urge to make up a story to ease the moment. I couldn’t have come up with one anyway. Dad picked up their plates and glasses and set them back in the cupboard.

I made small talk, sitting at the kitchen table with my arms on the round plastic tablecloth, waiting for my plate of roast beef and gravy.

“I have a nice apartment in Brooklyn,” I said.

“That’s good,” he said, throwing the unused silverware back into the drawer. He was mad about the other kids. He was going to be even madder when I told him what I knew.

“The only thing is, a homeless man slept in my car one night. I must have forgotten to lock it.” No reaction from Dad. I crossed my hands to keep Dad from seeing them shake.

He opened the pantry door. I had a sudden fear he might pull out a shotgun and shoot me square in the chest. But he was just getting two paper napkins. He handed one to me. “Thanks,” I said, spreading it across my lap.

Dad served me and set his plate across from mine. A red-and-white-striped candle-in-a-jar surrounded by a green plastic wreath burned as our centerpiece. I didn’t know how I was going to eat with my mouth so dry, or hold a conversation the way my mind was shooting off in a million different directions. For JoAnn’s sake I needed to confront him, but I couldn’t. I sat there—useless.

“It was nice of the other kids to let me know they weren’t coming,” he said, scooping a fork of mashed potatoes and gravy into his mouth. “What am I supposed to do with all this food?” He waved his fork toward the kitchen. He sat sideways at the table because of the cast on his arm.