The Impossible Knife of Memory (14 page)

The gloaming had come and gone while we were in Friendly’s. Night had arrived, held at arm’s length by the bright streetlights and fast-food places. Finn started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot.

The quiet inside the car made things weird again. I couldn’t get comfortable. I kept shifting, looking out the window, checking the side mirror, staring at my phone, willing Gracie to call, and then looking out the window again, wondering what I should say, if I should say anything. The tension built the closer we got to my house until I found myself thinking about bailing out at the next stop sign, the way I had the first time he gave me a ride.
Finn checked his mirrors and put on his signal to turn onto my street.
“Don’t go in the driveway,” I reminded him.
“I have to,” he said as he turned the corner. “It’s dark.” He signaled again. “After a date, even an anti-date, I have to deliver you to your front door. It’s a Man Law. I screwed up last week because I thought your dad’s friends all had submachine guns. Can’t do that again.”
Before I could say anything, he turned into the driveway, the headlights running across the siding and stopping on a pile of logs in front of the garage. They hadn’t been there when I left that morning. The garage door was open and the lights were on inside, but the only sign of my father was the splitting maul leaning up against the stump he’d been using for a chopping block.
I relaxed. He was probably passed out on the couch.
Finn put the car in park and unbuckled his seat belt.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I have to walk you to the door.”
“I know how to walk.”
The hurt look on his face made me want to pinch myself. We were flirting again. Or were we? Maybe not. Why couldn’t there be a light in the middle of a person’s forehead to indicate flirting status and other confusing social behaviors?
Finn rubbed his thumb on the worn plastic of the steering wheel. He had strong hands, but no calluses. He bit his lip. I waited. (
I should leave
.) He opened his mouth like he was going to say something.
He didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything. (
I really should leave
.)
He put his hand on the emergency brake, turned toward me a little. Was he going to kiss me? Tell me I had chocolate sprinkles stuck in my teeth? Why was this so complicated?
It wasn’t complicated, I scolded myself. It was stupid.
I pushed the button on my seat belt. It retracted and smacked against the door, making us both jump. I put my hand on the door handle.
Finn cut the engine and turned off the headlights. The dim blue light from the garage barely reached us. Shadows fell under his cheekbones. He raised his eyes to look at me. To look through me. I finally figured it out, late as usual: I did not want him to kiss me.
I wanted to kiss him.
My heart pounded so loudly I was sure it was making the windows vibrate, like we had the radio on, booming heavy bass through the best subwoofers on the planet. I put my hand on top of his, horrified by the questions racing through my head. Eyes open or closed? What should I do with my tongue? How bad was my breath? How bad was his? Was I the only seventeen-year-old in America who had never kissed someone before? He’d know it as soon as our lips touched. Why did I care what he thought? And when in the course of the day had I turned into a babbling idiot?
I couldn’t stop the questions any more than I could stop myself from leaning toward his lips.
He brought his face close to mine.
And stopped.
His eyes grew wide. I hesitated. Had I made a mistake? Was being kissed by me so terrifying that it paralyzed him?
“Don’t move,” he whispered, staring over my shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
“Big guy. With an ax.” His voice was so hoarse I could hardly understand him. “By your door. I think he’s going to kill us.”
“Hayley Rose!” My scowling father knocked on the window and motioned for me to get out.
Shit
.
“We studied at the library,” I whispered to Finn. “And we ate ice cream. Not a word about the quarry.”
Dad knocked again. “Out!”
I turned and put my face to the glass. “Hang on!”
“Ask him to put the ax down,” whispered Finn.
“It’s not an ax, it’s a splitting maul.”
“I don’t care. Just ask him to put it down.”
“Drive away as soon as I get out.” I reached for the door handle. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s your father,” he said. “I have to meet him, right?”
“No, you have to leave.” I pointed at my father. “Back up, Daddy, and put that thing down!”
It took some arguing, but he finally walked to the garage, leaned the maul against the chopping block, crossed his arms over his chest, and watched as I climbed out of the Acclaim. Unfortunately, Finn got out, too.
“Man Law,” he whispered.
“Idiot,” I said.
“Who are you?” Dad growled as we walked toward him.
“Daddy, this is my friend, Finn.”
“Pleasure to meet you, sir.” Finn stretched his hand out to shake. “I’m Finnegan Ramos. I go to school with Hayley.”
Dad kept his arms crossed. “I didn’t give you permission to take my daughter out.”
I tried to smile. “He doesn’t need permission.”
“The hell he doesn’t,” Dad said, slurring.
It took a lot of booze to make him slur.
“Go home,” I told Finn.
“It wasn’t a date, sir,” Finn told Dad. “We were at the library.”
“Sure you were,” Dad said. “Did this boy touch you, Hayley Rose?”
Something was wrong with his eyes, too. They weren’t red, but pupils were tiny and he didn’t seem to be focusing.
“It wasn’t like that, Daddy. You’re overreacting.”
He glared at me. “So you let him touch you, is that it?”
“I didn’t touch her, sir,” Finn said. “Can I explain?”
Dad pointed at Finn. “You arguing with me?”
“Stop it!” I shouted.
“No, sir.” Finn’s voice got louder. “But you’re jumping to the wrong conclusions.”
I stepped in between them. “Finn’s the editor of the school newspaper. I have to write for that paper. Benedetti thinks it will help with my attitude. You’re the one making me go to this school. You can’t get upset when I follow the rules and try to act like the other kids.”
He grunted.
“Please go,” I told Finn.
He nodded and shuffled backward. “Yeah. I’ll . . . I’ll see you.”
I lifted my hand and waved good-bye as Finn backed his car down the driveway. He didn’t wave back.
Dad put a log on the chopping block.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said.
“What do you want from me, huh?”
Without waiting for an answer, he swung the splitting maul so hard that the two halves of the log flew off at different angles, one disappearing into the dark, the other one almost taking me out at the knees.
“It’s your own damn fault,” Dad muttered. “Stand that close and you’re gonna get hurt.”

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44
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Gracie showed up after noon on Saturday with a duffel bag and pounded on the door until I woke up. When I opened the door, she announced, “You have to let me stay here.”

I rubbed my eyes. “You don’t want to do that.” “If you don’t let me, I’ll sleep in the park.”
I yawned. “What’s going on?”
“Garrett is at Dad’s and I’m stuck with Mom. Blood will

be shed, I swear, but I don’t know if its going to be hers or mine. Maybe both.”
“My dad’s sick,” I said. “You can’t stay here.”
“Then come with me,” she urged. “My mom won’t lose it if you’re there, she’ll act like everything is normal. I’m begging, Hayley, please.”
I sighed. “Give me five minutes.”
I stood outside the door to Dad’s bedroom and told him I was going to sleep over at Gracie’s.
He muttered something, half hungover and half stilldrunk.
“What?” I asked.
“I said leave the door unlocked!” he shouted. “Michael’s on his way over.”
I packed fast.
Gracie talked nonstop as we walked to her house. Not only was her mom a wreck and her dad feeling guilty and her little brother angry enough to break his favorite toys, but Topher’s old girlfriend, Zoe, had been texting him and asking him for help on an English paper and other incredibly slutty things.
“How is asking for help on an English paper slutty?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? It’s Shakespeare! Look at
Romeo and Juliet
; they’re what, like, fourteen years old, and they meet at a party and
bam
, jump in bed. They hook up in her bedroom with her parents in the house, and then they get caught and everybody dies.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Slutty fourteen-year-olds and gang violence. I can’t believe they make high school kids read it.” She kicked a rock down the street. “I hate Zoe.”
I decided to wait for a less bitchy moment to tell her what happened when Dad met Finn. I had already decided not to tell her—or anyone—about what had happened at the quarry. I still hadn’t figured it out myself. If I’d been afraid of heights like Finn, it would have made sense: dizziness, followed by a drop in blood pressure brought on by anxiety. But heights didn’t make me dizzy, they made me laugh. Maybe there something in the rock, a weird magnetic pulse that messed with my brain or my sense of balance. Maybe nobody ever planned to kill themselves there. They’d just gone up to enjoy the view and the rock energy messed with their heads and they’d tried to fly.
At Gracie’s house, we baked cinnamon scones and chocolate chip cookies and bread that refused to rise. As the first batch of cookies went into the oven, her mom pulled into the garage, where she stayed for ten minutes, sobbing and yelling into her phone, before she backed out again and drove away.
Gracie told me to leave the mess that we’d made, but I couldn’t. I said that I liked washing dishes and then Topher called her and she walked up the stairs yelling into her phone at him, her voice sounding so much like her mother’s that it gave me goose bumps.
When we’d moved back to town, Gracie had taken me all over the place to help me remember living there: the church basement where we went to Sunday School (Gramma had played the organ, she said), the graveyard where we once played hide-and-seek and got hollered at by guys with shovels, the grocery store where we’d push our kidsized carts behind her mom, the park where the slide got so hot in the summer that it would burn the back of your legs if you went down it too slow. It was like listening to a fairy tale or the life story of a total stranger. It upset Gracie when I said I didn’t remember any of it so I started lying and pretended that, yeah, of course I remembered the time we made cookies with salt instead of sugar, and the time Gracie’s old dog got skunked and we poured all of her mom’s perfume on him to cover up the smell.
Gracie and Topher were still arguing when I finished the dishes. I wandered down the hall, past the school pictures of Gracie and Garrett hung in chronological order, and into the family room.
(
Is it still called a “family room” after your parents split up?
)
The photos on the wall and on top of the piano were of younger Gracie and toddler Garrett and Mr. and Mrs. Rappaport, all four of them at Disney World and a zoo and on a beach, always squinting into the sun. There were no photos of Gracie’s grandparents or anyone else. It was like the four of them had magically appeared and lived, happy for a while, in a plastic bubble with bright lights. I picked up a photo of five-year-old Gracie in an angel Halloween costume and carried it to the coffee table.
The house smelled like a bakery. Gracie was still arguing upstairs, but at least she wasn’t cursing anymore and her voice was quieter. I curled up on a couch and flipped through the shiny pages of Mrs. Rappaport’s magazines. The pic of little angel Gracie watched me. I kept looking up, half expecting her to flap her wings.
I didn’t like admitting it, but the truth was that my memories were starting to surface. First in Ms. Rogak’s class after I got Trish’s letter and then in the quarry. Maybe Gracie was right. Maybe visiting childhood places helped. Or maybe it was because I was older or angrier, or maybe because I was forgetting how to not-remember. It was also possible that we’d finally stayed in one place long enough for our yesterdays to catch up with us.
And now. Sitting alone in the not-family room, paging past recipes and haircuts and celebrity baby sightings, there, just out of the corner of my left eye, I was seeing myself playing with a cat, with a kitten, black and white. I kept turning the pages (fifty fabulous turkey recipes, whittle your middle like the stars) because if I looked at it head-on, the memory would evaporate. . . .
. . . a black-and-white kitten playing with yarn,
. . . yarn in my hand, the sound of needles clacking,
. . . clicking and the sound of women and the smell of lemons and face powder, clicking,
. . . clacking, the yellow yarn in my hand and the green yarn that went from the basket up to Gramma’s needles,
. . . her voice with other women chattering like birds in a tree, laughing, the laughter floated down to the floor like feathers and
. . . I leaned my head against my grandmother’s knee.
I went back to the kitchen to rewash the pans in very hot water.

When Gracie stopped fighting with Topher, I piled a plate with chocolate chip cookies, put it on a tray with a quart of milk and two glasses, and carried it up to her room.

“Well?” I asked.
“He promised never to speak to her again.” She blew her nose and tossed the tissue on the pile by her desk. “He’s mad at me for not trusting him.”
There was no safe reply to that. I bit into a cookie.
“Wanna watch a disaster movie?” she asked, picking up the remote. “Something where everybody dies?”
“Sounds perfect,” I said, pouring the milk.
As the movie started, she fished her mint tin out of her purse, swallowed one of the pills in it, then handed it to me. It had more pills in it than before, different ones: small yellow ovals and pale pink diamonds and white circles.
“Did you steal all these from your mom?” I asked.
“Bought them,” she admitted. “You want one or not?”
“What do they do?”
“Depends.” She pointed. “Those ones make you sleep, that one wakes you up, the rest of them make the world suck less. It’s not like they get you high or anything. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
She shrugged. “My parents started it; they put me on ADD meds when I was in fifth grade. You watch, by the time we have kids, they’ll have a pill for everything, even cheating boyfriends.”
“He’s not cheating, Gracie.”
“Everybody cheats.” She closed the box. “Want some popcorn?”
Her mom walked in without knocking an hour later, and stopped, confused to see me there. “Oh,” she said. “Hello, Hayley.”
“Hello, Mrs. Rappaport.”
“Hey, Mom.” Gracie smiled, her glassy eyes wide and innocent. “Hayley has to stay here tonight. We made cookies, want some?”
“I don’t remember giving permission for a sleepover,” Mrs. Rappaport said.
“I told you,” I said to Gracie. “I’ll go home.”
Gracie pushed me back down. “No, you won’t.” She turned to her mother. “Her dad went away for the weekend. We can’t let her stay alone, can we? What if someone breaks in?”
“Where did he go?” her mom asked.
I thought fast. “Hunting. With some army buddies. I’ll be fine, really. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
Mrs. Rappaport sighed. “All right, you can stay. Just keep it quiet. I have a migraine.”