The Impossible Knife of Memory (27 page)

When the sun went down, Dad woke up, chain-smoked, and ate two bologna sandwiches. After eating, he went outside to talk on his cell. I wanted him to start drinking again so he would pass out. I didn’t have to worry about him hurting himself when he was unconscious.

He opened another bottle when he came in, sat me on the couch, and made me listen to stuff I’d heard a million times before: ambushed foot patrols, IEDs ripping open vehicles and bodies, suicide bombers living in ghost villages. The private who was shot in the neck. The guy who removed his helmet to wipe the sweat off his head, and the sniper who blew that head into a red mist that hung in the air for a moment before it dropped to the dirt and soaked the ground.

The thing under his skin took over his eyes and made them look dead. The thing raged and paced, snapped at the dog, yelled at me.

I tried to go to bed around two, but that set him off again. I stayed awake. I listened. Donkeys loaded with weapons. Bloated bodies. The smell of the dead. Flies.

Around quarter after four, he puked all over the carpet and finally passed out. I laid him on his side, put a bucket by his head, and threw a towel over the mess so the dog wouldn’t eat it. I took a long shower to wash off the tears and the stench of whiskey puke.
The sound of submachine guns on automatic fire ripped me out of sleep, gasping. I tried to focus and fought my way over the line that divides asleep from awake. The guns sounded again, a heavy burst of artillery, and then a couple of men laughed. It was a game. Just another shooting game.

I started to pull the blankets over my head and stopped. Men. Laughing. Men, as in “more than one,” as in my father had company and “laughing,” as in there was no way Dad could be laughing, so who was in my living room?

I threw off the blankets and scrambled into clothes. The sunshine stealing through the narrow crack between the curtains sliced the living room into thick patches of darkness and slivers of light. Two men, Michael and some dude I’d never seen before, sat on kitchen chairs in front of the TV, controllers in their hands. Dad sat upright on the couch smoking a bong. His squinted eyes were swollen. The smoke that slipped out of his mouth was the color of his skin, like he was a miserable old dragon slowly disintegrating into ash.
“Why are they here?” I asked.
“He invited us.” Michael turned around. “Asked us to come over and cheer him up.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“He’s right,” Dad spoke slowly. “I called him. Why aren’t you at school?”
“Make them leave,” I demanded.
He set the bong a stack of books. “They just got here.”
“So?”
Dad gave a half-baked smile. “Kept you up last night, didn’t I? Sorry about that, princess. Why don’t you make us some coffee, cook up a big breakfast?”
The weed had driven the crazy back under his skin, but it was a temporary situation at best. “I don’t want them here.”
“Listen to your elders,” Michael said.
“Eggs would be nice,” Dad said. “An omelet, with lots of cheese.”
“Scrambled,” Michael said. “How about you, Goose?” he asked the guy next to him.
Goose paused the game and turned around. He had the scabby face of a tweeker, gaunt and haunted. “Not hungry.”
I couldn’t move. Didn’t know what to say. The room looked like the backdrop of a PBS documentary: holes in the wall, messed-up furniture, smoke drifting from shadow to light, the green-lit battle on-screen holding the attention of everyone but me. Or maybe a cheap-ass cable supernatural horror show—the goons in front of the screen ready to morph into demons, the smoke easing in and out of my father really a spirit sent to claim him for the dark side.
“Why, Daddy?” I asked.
He reached for the bong. “I like having them here.” Michael chuckled, his fingers piloting the soldier onscreen through a massacre. “Hear that, Goose? He likes us.”
That’s when I realized that I wanted to kill Michael. I knew I couldn’t, knew I wouldn’t. If I jumped him, he’d swat me away like a fly. Dad would come out of his stupor to defend me and then things would get bad and bloody. I could get out one of Dad’s pistols, no, a shotgun, and threaten them with it. Not that I’d shoot them—I sure as hell wasn’t going to jail over those two morons—but they wouldn’t know that. I’d scare them off by shooting over their heads. We were going to have to put up new drywall, anyway.
As fast as that scene—me, shotgun, ceiling,
boom
—unfolded in my head, everything that could go wrong with that plan chased in on its heels. Dad would grab the gun or Michael would grab the gun or Goose would pull out a gun of his own and it would get scary bad and very bloody.
“Do we have any bacon?” Dad asked.
I crossed the room and unplugged the TV. “I’m calling the cops.”
“No, you’re not,” Michael said.
I pulled out my phone. “Wanna watch?”
Goose stood up. “Dude.”
“Andy,” Michael said. “Tell your kid to put the phone away.”
“Come on, Hayley,” Dad said.
I opened the phone.
“They’ll arrest your dad,” Michael said. “Is that what you want?”
I opened the front door and stepped into freezing, blinding sunlight. I turned on my camera and walked far enough down the driveway that I could get the plates of both bikes in a photo.
“What are you doing?” Michael shouted from the doorway.
I climbed into the cab of the big rig, locked myself in, dialed 911, and explained that my father was sick and two men were in my house and they wouldn’t leave. As the emergency lady took down my information, Michael and Goose jumped on their bikes and roared away.
Yes! Score!
I set the phone on the dash and high-fived myself. I sighed and picked up the phone. “They’re gone,” I said. “Those guys I just told you about. We don’t need the police anymore.”
“An officer has to respond to the call, sweetie,” she explained. “Just to make sure you’re safe.”
“No, really, you don’t have to send them,” I said, my voice tightening. “Me calling you, that scared them off. I’m totally safe. So is Dad.”
“Is he going to need an ambulance?”
“What? No. It’s . . . the flu. He needs chicken soup, not cops.”
“We have a couple of officers who are sick with it, too. We’re a little shorthanded, but I guarantee you, a policeman will be at your house within the hour. Do you want to stay on the line?”
I hung up.
They’d find his weed. What else? Were all his guns legal? What if they brought in a drug-sniffing dog? Would it find hidden stashes that I didn’t know existed? What if Dad saw the uniforms and went ape shit? What if they arrested him for assault and possession, or worse because they thought he was a dealer? What if they took him away? Where would they put me?
A wave of nausea hit me hard. I coughed, swallowed bile, and did the one thing I swore that I’d never do.
I called Trish.

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By the time she arrived, I had opened every window in the house, sprayed air freshener, and stuck Dad in the shower. I’d thrown the bong as far into the cornfield as I could and flushed his pills down the toilet. I’d cleaned up the now-solid puke from the carpet, poured baby powder on the mess it left behind and tried to vacuum it all away.

Dad stepped out of the shower and was yelling at me to close the goddamn windows when Trish walked in. I explained what had happened in a few quick sentences while she checked Dad’s pulse. He’d put on a baggy pair of sweatpants and an ancient sweater and looked more like a homeless man than a war hero or my father. She told me to shut the windows while she got him into bed. I finished a heartbeat before a squad car pulled in the driveway, lights flashing, no siren.

“Can they arrest him if they don’t find anything?” I asked.
“Depends,” she said. “Keep your story simple. You woke up, Dad was passed out, and you didn’t know the guys in your living room. You never saw them before.”
“But Michael—”
“No names. They wouldn’t leave. You were scared. Okay?”
A cop knocked at the front door.
“Feel free to cry,” she added.

Trish took charge, explaining who she was and why she was there, and then taking one of the cops, the skinny one, back to see Dad. The other one was built like a defensive tackle, massive shoulders, neck thicker than his head, and hands the size of baseball mitts. He was on guard, assessing danger with every step like Dad did, but by the time he’d checked out the whole house and sat down with me in the living room, he had relaxed a bit.

I answered his questions. Dad had the flu. I stayed home to take care of him. No, he hadn’t been to a doctor. No, I didn’t know the guys. No, I couldn’t describe them, I was too scared.

He wrote down my answers in a spiral notebook and then he asked me the exact same questions again. I gave the same exact answers. He wrote them down again and then he looked at me and smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. He had brown eyes, light brown like an acorn. He glanced above my head.

“Who punched the wall?” he asked.
“It was like that when we moved in,” I said. “Squatters.” He did not write that down. “Stay put,” he said. He walked down the hall, his keys and handcuffs and

various chains jingling, sounding absurdly close to what I’d always imagined Santa’s sleigh would sound like. At the end of the hall, he and his buddy held a murmured meeting. The heat had kicked on and the air was beginning to smell like Michael’s satanic cologne. What if this kept happening, what if Dad wasn’t on a roller coaster, what if he was on a spiraling slide, turning down and down into the darkness? What would Michael do the next time?

“Excuse me, sir?” I called. “I took a picture of their license plates. Would that help?”

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In the end, they reviewed all the paperwork for Dad’s guns and to my amazement, they were all legal. Dude even complimented him for securing them properly. In the end, they looked through all the photos on my phone and sent themselves the one with the motorcycle license plates. Brown Eyes put the plate numbers in his computer and found something that he talked to his partner about.

In the end, they called an ambulance because Dad was so dehydrated. They put an IV in his arm, strapped him on a gurney, and loaded the gurney in the ambulance. Daddy asked Trish to follow the ambulance in her car. He made her promise not to bring me.

In the end, I was alone in a house that had holes in the walls and bloodstained carpet. I choked on the words stacked up floor to ceiling, all of them charred black, held over the fire too long, so many words that I could barely breathe.

I made a cup of tea, but when I poured the milk, it came out in sour clumps. We were out of bread and bananas. I ate a spoonful of peanut butter, then I mixed the rest of the jam into the peanut butter jar and ate it until my stomach hurt. I walked the house from one end to the other, back and forth, Spock following close behind me. It felt like the building grew smaller with every step, or maybe I was growing bigger, Hayley in Wonderland, maybe I’d shoot up twenty feet and my head would bust through the roof and my arms would stick out the windows.

Spock got tired of following me and lay down on the carpet in the same spot where Dad collapsed the day he found out that Roy was dead. I stretched out next to Spock and let him lick my face before he fell asleep. The carpet was itchy so I crawled into bed, but couldn’t get comfortable.

He was alive. I’d been afraid of a day like this forever, but he was alive. At a hospital, getting help. This was a good thing, right? It was all that mattered.

Except.
What now?
I closed my eyes, pretended I was twenty thousand feet

in the air, high enough to be able to see where we came from and where we were headed. Borders didn’t come painted with lines, but it felt like we’d crossed one. This was a new place with no signs or landmarks. In a land with a million questions, I only had one answer.

In the end, I stole Daddy’s pickup truck.

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By the time I got to school, found the only set of doors that were still unlocked, and made it to the swimming pool, the boys’ practice was ending. The swimmers each put their hands on the deck at the edge of the pool and vaulted out of the water like seals. Finn was in a bathing suit, too, but he was dry, walking around the pool collecting kickboards as the team filed into the locker room teasing one another loudly, shoving until the coach blew a sharp note on his whistle.

“Can I help you?” the coach asked me.
“Um,” I started. “I’m waiting for him. The guard.” “Ramos!” shouted the coach, before he, too, went into

the locker room.

Finn lifted his head and finally saw me. I wanted to bolt for the door, but was afraid I’d slip on the wet concrete and land on my face. He set the stack of kickboards by the door to the office, took off his glasses, put them on top of the stack, and walked over to me.

“Do you always break the rules?” he asked, squinting a little.
“What?”
He pointed to the sign that read no shoes in pool area.
“Oh, sorry.” I kicked off my left sneaker, peeled off my sock, and stuffed it in the toe. I stood on my left foot to take off my right sneaker, but slipped and would have crashed in an undignified heap if he hadn’t reached out and grabbed my arm.
“Thanks.” I kept my gaze down as I finished removing the sneaker and sock.
I’d driven to the school with the windows rolled down even though it had dipped below freezing outside. The cold wind numbed me from all the nightmares that popped up every time I replayed the image of Dad in the back of the ambulance. But here, instantly, I was sweating.
I unzipped my jacket. “They always keep this place so hot?”
“When the principal isn’t paying attention,” he replied.
The team was still hooting and hollering in the locker room. Showers were running, too. The loudspeaker crackled with static as an announcement was made, but I could not understand what the voice said.
“You need a ride or something?” Finn asked. “Wait, were you even in school today? I didn’t see you.”
“I have Dad’s pickup.”
“Hayley, you don’t have your license yet.”
“Oops.”
He looked ready to make a smart-ass comment, but instead he twisted sideways and dove into the water. He swam all the way to the far end, turned around—still underwater—and surfaced, his arms moving like paddle wheels as he swam butterfly back to me, creating a wave that sloshed over the pool’s edge and soaked the bottom of my jeans.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He bobbed under the water briefly, arching his head back so that when he came up, his hair was slicked back. “What are you doing?” he echoed.
The speech I’d memorized in the pickup melted into the chlorine-scented fog. “Um, how’s it going?” I asked. “I mean, how’s your sister and mom? And everything.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” he pointed out.
“You noticed that, huh?”
The voices in locker room faded. Metal lockers slammed.
“Chelsea didn’t show up for Thanksgiving,” he said. “Mom cried all day. Dad went for a drive that lasted seven hours. How about you?”
“We didn’t have Thanksgiving.”
Could he hear my heart pounding?
The locker room had grown so quiet that the only sounds were the buzzing of the overhead lights, and water lapping against the sides of the pool. Finn cupped a handful of water and splashed it over my toes.
“It’s warm,” I said.
“There’s a water aerobics class here in an hour; they get wicked upset if the water is below eighty. Ever had a bunch of scary old ladies wearing swimming caps with plastic flowers on them yell at you? Terrifying.” He splashed more water over my feet. “So. Why are you here, Miss Blue?”
I took a deep breath. “Remember that day at the quarry? When you went to the edge? I never paid off that bet. And,” I pointed my toes and drew a circle in the puddle I was standing in, “I don’t know how much longer we’re going to stay here. Everything’s changing and, well, I thought I’d tell you that I always pay up when I lose. And your damn phone is turned off or you blocked me or something, and so I decided to come over and tell you in person.”
“That you’re going to pay off the bet?” He seemed almost surprised.
“Yeah.”
The water lapped at the edge of the pool.
“What’s your bra size?”
“Excuse me?”
He stared at my boobs. “Thirty-six B? Or maybe C. They don’t make a B-plus, do they? I wonder why.”
Instead of waiting for an answer he pushed himself up and out of the pool (warm water running down his chest, his abs, dear God, those abs) and walked into the office. I reviewed the conversation, trying to figure out how it had gone off course so badly, but before I could, he emerged holding a girl’s bathing suit in each hand.
“No time like the present,” he said.