In Case of Emergency (4 page)

“Already? She’s worse than a gay boy.”

But I’m not listening to him, because a new employee has emerged from the back stockroom. She stops to take inventory of the citrus about twenty feet from me and I can’t stop staring. I envy the crate of oranges wedged between her hip and the fruit display. Her presence makes me feel hot and magnetic. A little shorter than me, with strong, round shoulders, she has an athletic body that moves with an androgynous sway, and feminine hands with long fingers. The pensive tuck of her chin causes her short dark hair to tumble into her face. As she refills the mountain of fruit, she looks powerful and elegant, despite the fluorescent lighting, despite her earth-toned apron, despite the sweaty bald man who bumps into her left shoulder and almost yells his apology.

“Pipes,” Ryan says softly. “Go talk to her. Do it already.”

But I just stand there.

Ryan is the keeper of our visits to Dad. About once a month he’ll call me up and tell me it’s time. That’s how he always says it: “Pipes. It’s time.” I resist as long as I can. It’s not that I don’t love our father, but all he ever wants to talk about is our mother, and I don’t see why we should talk about someone who ran off when Ryan and I were kids. To make matters worse, she died two years ago. Since then, Dad’s nostalgia has felt especially unbearable. I barely remember her, there’s nothing to reminisce about, and even if there were, what would be the point?

We arrive at Dad’s place, and as usual he pretends not to know who we
are. “I’m not interested,” he says, one blue eye peering out from the cracked-open door. “Go bother the neighbors.”

“Already did.”

Ryan spreads his empty hands. “We sold everything.”

The door opens wider. The strong hand wrapped around the edge of the door looks older than the rest of him, the knuckles gnarled and veiny. “Well, what was it this time?”

“Porn,” I say before I can stop myself.

“Kittens,” Ryan says.

He lets us in. “Porn and kittens! Your pockets must be heavy with wealth.” He waves for us to follow him to the living room. “Come in, come in.”

We file down the hallway. Even from the back, Ryan and Dad look nothing alike, but they move alike, chins lifted, broad shoulders swinging lightly. My father is stocky and barrel chested; Ryan is tall and graceful, no freckles but the same blue eyes, the same unwieldy light brown hair as I have, only Ryan’s is cut short and somehow made stylish, framing his open face. I’m long and wiry, only slightly curvier than I was in my adolescence, and my late twenties have stripped the last traces of baby fat from my narrow features.

“Well?” Dad asks, sinking into the dimpled black leather of his favorite chair. Crossing his meaty forearms over his chest, he looks at me, then at Ryan. “How’s work, you two?” Hooded light blue eyes turn to mine. “Piper?”

“Work’s fine. I got that ambulance operator position. It’s all kind of new still.”

Dad makes a humming noise. He’s trying to remember if I told him about this new career path. I did. The last time I was here, I told him about my upcoming interview at A & O. He was sitting in the same chair.

“I’m surprised,” he says, “that you thought to take up a job like that. But you never know, do you? In fact, your mother—”

I want to say to him, “Mom
left
, Dad. She left. Stop talking about her already. And especially stop talking about her affectionately, like she was a good person or something.” But I don’t.

“…which is why you’ve always reminded me of her,” Dad finishes, patting my shoulder with a thick paw.

Ryan clears his throat. “Dad, the restaurant job is going really well.” He tells us about working as a line cook at a family-run Mediterranean restaurant, how he hopes to work his way to head chef. But after a brief congratulatory exchange, Dad turns back to me.

“Are you making money doing this ambulance work?”

I try to laugh. “Not at all. It pays minimum wage.” Fearing he’ll launch into a lecture on his second favorite topic, money, I’m quick to add, “I mean, with the overtime and 24-hour shifts, it works out to—”

“What’s the point?” he barks. “How’s this job going to help you in the long run? One of these days you’re going to have to pick a career and really stick with it, Piper. You can’t just keep—”

“I’m thinking about becoming a nurse,” I say. “Or a firefighter. I don’t
know
yet. I need to be at the job longer than a day before planning the rest of my life.”

“You want to be a fireman?” My dad makes his humming sound again. “You’re not strong enough for that.”

“How do you mean?” I have the brief hope that he is talking about emotional strength. Maybe what follows will be a sermon on how to take the severity of the job in stride, and keep going.

He leans forward and squeezes my relaxed biceps, like he’s testing a pear for ripeness. “Have you been working out? You’re going to have to lift weights if you want to be a fireman.”

Ryan smirks at me from the couch, his relaxed, interlocked fingers resting in his lap. My brother figured out long ago how to let these visits be exactly what they are, and I envy him that.

I decide to back down. Playfully, I poke Dad in the shoulder and chest and down the length of his arm. “What about you? Huh? Have
you
been working out lately?”

He makes a few bodybuilder poses. “Finally made it back to Wild Card last week.”

The only thing really Irish about my dad is his love of boxing. His gym, Wild Card, is the dive bar version of a fitness center. Two boxing rings frame the footwork and bare torsos of shadowboxers and spar mates, and the stereo system gets drowned out by the pounding of heavy body bags and the drumming taunt of the speed bags.

“That’s funny, you don’t look any different.”

He pretends to have a heart attack, grabbing his chest and heaving. “How dare you,” he gasps.

“She’s just jealous,” Ryan says. “Don’t mind her.”

Dad shifts in his chair. “My trainer told me a funny story when I saw him. His elbow is all bandaged up, like it should be in a sling—and this is not the kind of guy to fool with first aid. He’s missing teeth and covered in tattoos of big-breasted women. So I say to him, ‘What’d you do to your elbow?’ And he gets all embarrassed. Turns out he was riding his nephew’s Razor scooter—you know those skinny metal things?—and fell right off. Hard to picture a guy like that on one of those. He’s gotten a real hard time about it.”

Ryan picks up one of the beer steins from Dad’s collection on the coffee table. The steins make a circle around a large silver platter that looks so untouched I wouldn’t be surprised if time had glued it to the table. Ryan turns the stein over in his hands, tracing the Celtic knot on the side.

“Those old things.” Dad sighs. “One of these days I’m going to get a smaller place, and then I’m going to get rid of all this crap. Too much stuff.”

“Sure,” says Ryan, though we all know he’ll never move. Even though not a trace of her is visible, her absence is on every wall, in every room, a void so present it’s like a roommate.

“Tell you what.” My father’s eyes light up. He slams his hand on the armrest and leans toward me. “I challenge you to an arm-wrestling match.”

Not for the first time, I wonder if it ever bothers Ryan that I’m the one Dad treats more like a son, but he jumps up with a grin on his face and before I know it, the three of us are dragging Dad’s chair down the hallway and into his dining-room-turned-office.

The dining room table is covered with stacks of paper, computer wires, a laptop, and two dusty candles that have never been lit. Dad works as a software engineer for some big company; he often brings his work home with him. I have no idea what being a software engineer means.

Dad drops his elbow onto the table and holds out his hand. “Shall we, my dear?” Placing my elbow on the table with a soft sigh, I pretend for a moment to be more feminine than I feel, as if that will throw him off somehow. He might be stronger, but I have more endurance. If I can just hold him in place, I should be able to force his hand down once he’s gotten tired.

My thin fingers disappear as we wrap hands. His palm feels dry and feverish. I keep my arm loose and relaxed, with just enough tension to maintain the place-hold. My dad flexes his biceps and puffs up his chest. When we’re settled and ready, we swivel our heads to look at Ryan, standing to the side and between us.

“Go,” he says.

It lasts only a few seconds. I slam Dad’s hand down, barely sensing his resistance, almost disappointed by how easy it is. His face registers disbelief and then warps into an unrecognizable expression. Leaning forward, almost panting, I feel the exertion only now that the match is over. My eyes widen with a daughter’s guilt; my ears are pricked and nervous. Was that the sound of his robust Irish male ego shattering? But no. He looks bewildered and—can it be?—proud.

“Good!” he says. “Very good.”

6

The clock says 0238.

After I got hired, I took Vincent’s advice and got a watch that could be set to military time. I switched the digital clock in my room to the 24-hour setting. It’s been strange these last few days, to see times like “1330” or “1645.” So it’s oddly comforting to look at a clock in the middle of the night and know exactly what time it is.

0238. No math required.

I lie in bed, still, staring at a dark ceiling I can’t see but know is there. It feels like I’m waiting for something. I’m not hungry or sick or anxious; I don’t have to pee; I didn’t have a bad dream. I’m just awake.

Across the room, in the back of my closet, behind sliding doors thick with too many coats of white paint, a small cardboard box rests on the highest shelf. Each time I move I don’t bother to unpack it; the label just says
STUFF
in faded black marker. Somewhere in the stratified contents lives a postcard that arrived in the mail when I was twelve years old, Ryan fourteen.

She’s wearing a Santa hat and khaki shorts, my mother. She has water shoes on. Behind her, looming, the black and red crests of Westwater Canyon, the expansive Colorado sky.

The postcard arrived two years after she left. Back then, everything was separated into before and after, and Ryan and I still talk in this way sometimes.

I memorized it a long time ago. Every detail. A matte-finish photograph, sort of a Christmas card, the postcard serves as an advertisement for the river rafting company my mother and her boyfriend, Sergio, operated for over a decade. They probably sent out a hundred of those things; I don’t know why I kept it. The gold cursive along the bottom edge reads:
SEASON’S GREETINGS FROM WESTWATER’S DISCOVERY TRIPS
! My mother with her Santa hat, one arm wrapped around the waist of the gangly youth
standing next to her, the other hand holding an oar with a wreath hung on it. She offers it up to the camera like it’s a fish she’s proud to have caught. Sergio is fifteen years her junior and he looks it, standing by her side flashing a peace sign. I hate those fingers, their skyward-facing twin points. That one detail I have fixated on for years.

At 0402, I decide to go swimming. I dig through drawers until I find my dark blue T-backed swimsuit. Not wanting to wake Marla in the next room, I’m conscious of every amplified sound. Stripping down, I pull over my reluctant body (sluggish legs first, uncoordinated arms next) what feels like a rubber band. But when it snaps into place it feels like home.

Before Mom left, the thing I wanted most in life was to grow up to be her; I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. My mother’s wavy brown hair hung all the way down to her waist; she had a singsong laugh and always drank out of a bowl-shaped blue mug, whether it was coffee or tea or water or beer. She wore bright, flowing clothing, and I would play dress-up in her hand-me-downs, in skirts and blouses that didn’t move the way my clothes moved, that barely seemed to exist between my fingertips and settled gently on my skin. We read together almost every night,
The Phantom Tollbooth, The Happy Prince
, but there were also the stories she made up, like the one about the underwater castle a few miles west of Manhattan Beach, so perfectly camouflaged along the Pacific Ocean floor that sailors and scientists had never spotted it. I discovered later that some of the stuff she told me was true—how an octopus grows a new arm if it loses one, how an earthworm has five hearts.

After she left, Dad could barely look at me and Ryan. He lost himself in long work hours, turned on the television as soon as he got home. Mom called us about every two weeks, then once a month, then once every several months. Her inability to know what to say was obvious in her too-cheerful tone and its shifting lightness. Like a tightrope walker who knew it would be suicide to look down.

I shut the front door softly, click the deadbolt into place, and leave the key underneath a potted plant. I set off down the hall, passing the other apartments. Marla and I have lived here about eight months. She never uses the heated pool, but I go at least twice a week, either early mornings or late nights. Never this early.

After Mom left, swimming was instinctual, a survival mechanism. Ten years old and I thought of my gear, that flower-print suit complete with cap and goggles, as a superhero’s outfit. I practiced stances in the mirror. The save-the-world stance was obvious enough: feet spread apart, hands on hips, a determined gaze looking up and past one shoulder. The save-the-world-and-look-sexy-at-the-same-time stance, at least according to my prepubescent brain, was to lower the gaze, bring the feet together, bend one knee, and rest one hand on the propped-up hip.