The Impossible Knife of Memory (15 page)

Finn never called. Never texted, either.

Some time during the second movie, the box of mints that were not mints placed itself on the bed next to me and opened its lid and before I knew it a pill was in my mouth and I washed it down with milk.

I thought I had taken the waking-up pill, but soon my eyes started to close themselves and I drifted off as Gracie talked about going to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. I curled up under a quilt on her bed, her ancient cat perched on my hip and purring, and I sank into a heavy, soft sleep as Gracie’s voice faded. The rumbling purr of the cat sounded like a well-tuned diesel engine, and I was on the road again, at night, safely buckled into the passenger seat as Dad’s truck shot through the dark, the driver’s seat empty, the steering wheel too far away for me to reach.

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45
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We drink tea made with dirty water over an open fire near the village, far from the mountains. The radio cuts in and out; we can’t account for the interference. We swirl the tea in metal cups, waiting. Not sure what we’re waiting for.

Then the screaming starts.
Fire boils in the desert-colored sky, breathing poison down his lover’s throat and eating her children. A moving mountain, alive, hungry, thundering toward this village, our tents:
simoom.
We throw the tea in the fire. Shout in seven languages, guns, arms, fingers all pointing to the wind coming for us. We race. We hide. Pray.
The crippled camel-girl limps. The hungry wind is coming and all she can do is limp. I turn around. Someone grabs my arm, pulls me inside, screams in my head, but I watch her. The red scarf is torn from her hair. She limps. The village disappears. The wind is a lion, jaws open wide. He swallows the crippled camel-girl and scours the color from her eyes.
Sand fills my mouth, stuffs my head with the stench of the lion. Pours into my ears the screams of every corpse. The winds of the desert have names. They feed on the bodies of broken children and rip out the beating hearts of men.

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46
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Gracie’s mother woke us up on Sunday morning and said that Gracie had to go to church with her and that I could join them if I was in the mood. She didn’t want me tagging along, I could tell, so even though Gracie looked like she wanted to strangle me, I said I had too much homework and, after a small bowl of cereal, packed up my stuff.

“We never go to church, this is ridiculous,” Gracie said as we stood on her driveway.
“Maybe she wants to ask God to help her get back together with your dad.”
“As if He cares.”

I went to the park and sat until I saw Mrs. Rappaport’s car speed away, Gracie slumped in the front seat, staring at her phone. I walked back to their house and keyed in the entry code that opened the garage door. (This took no skill; I’d seen Gracie do it—112233—at least a dozen times.)

I set the alarm on my phone to make sure I’d be out of there long before they returned.
Back in the not-family room, I paged through the magazines again and then the photo albums that stood in a neat row on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, but saw nothing out of the corner of my eye. The pages stayed flat and shiny. The room didn’t share any secrets or replay scenes that happened more than ten years earlier.
The person who went upstairs to Mrs. Rappaport’s bathroom looked a little bit like me. I saw what she did, watched it in the mirror. She opened the medicine cabinet, took out each pill bottle, and read the label, then put them back. Except for one. She poured the pills into her hand. They looked like generic vitamins or allergy medicine, something ordinary. Could it be this simple? She spilled the pills from one palm to the other like they were coins or cheap pearls. Her father swallowed pills to make the hurt go away. A long time ago they came in white bottles that had labels printed with the pharmacy’s phone number and the doctor’s name. Now they came in empty cans of chew or old baggies. It didn’t matter where he got them. They didn’t fix anything. They blurred the lines and turned the voices into ugly static.
Her face in the mirror melted, morphed one centimeter at a time the way pictures in a flip book do when you slide your thumb down the edge of the pages. She waited to see what or who she’d turn into. Her skin lightened. The freckles vanished. The color drained from her lips and then her hair. Her eyebrows and lashes turned white, then transparent, and then they no longer existed. Her chin faded away next, then her mouth and her nose. The eyes smudged like they were being wiped off with a fat pink eraser, and then they were gone, too. The mirror was empty.
I blinked.
When I opened my eyes she was gone and I was back. My eyes. My freckled nose. My absurd hair. My sweating, shaking hands that poured the pills back into the bottle. I ran out of the house before I turned into someone I didn’t want to know.

Our living room smelled a lot like chicken wings and pizza and a little like weed when I walked in the front door.

Dad looked up from the television. “Hey, princess,” he said with a grin. “Have a good time?”
I hung up my jacket in the closet.
“Giants are playing,” he said. “Philly, first quarter. I saved you some pizza. Double cheese.” He frowned. “What’s that look for?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“You love double cheese.”
“I’m not talking about the pizza.”
“Is it the wings? You gave up being a vegetarian two years ago.”
“Are we going to play ‘pretend’?”
“Vegetarians can eat double-cheese pizza.”
“It’s not the food,” I said.
“Are you still upset about the cemetery?”
“What?”
Dad muted the television. “I was thinking about what you said. I’ll call the cemetery and find out how much those special vases cost. Mom didn’t like cut flowers, but she hated being outdone by her neighbors, and that headstone looks awful. Good idea?” He let Spock lick the pizza grease off his fingers. “Why are you still wearing the pissy face?”
“Did you run Friday night through the Andy-filter so instead of looking like a total ass, you can feel like you were a hero or something?”
He turned the television off. “Andy-filter?”
“You don’t think I have a right to be upset?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Friday night I split wood and fell asleep reading about the Spartans.”
“What about when I came home?”
“You never went out,” he said.
“You don’t remember?”
He frowned. “Remember what?”
When we first hit the road, I’d been clueless. I was twelve, confused and brokenhearted about the way we left home and about Trish. Getting by minute to minute was my strategy. It was at least a year before Dad started to take unapproved “sick days,” and a year after that before I connected the dots that led from him spending the night in a bar to him waking up, puking, and moaning. He got fired a couple times for it. That always led to months of clean living and on-time deliveries until he’d stumble again and fall down the rabbit hole. But he’d never gone this far. He’d never forgotten what he did the night before.
“This is stupid.” Dad picked up the remote. “I’m not going to be interrogated by my own kid.”
I snatched the remote. “You blacked out, Daddy.”
He pressed his lips together.
“When I got home you were waving the splitting maul around like the crazy bad guy in a horror movie. You humiliated me in front of my friend.”
Spock jumped off the couch, shook himself, and fled for the kitchen.
“What did I say to her?” he asked.
“To who?”
“Your friend.”
“It was him, not a her. Jesus, you don’t remember any of it. Was it just booze or did you take pills, too?”
He paled, but narrowed his eyes. “There’s no law against a grown man getting a little shit-faced in his own house.”
“There’s a difference between getting drunk and getting so drunk you black out,” I said. “That’s a bad sign, Dad. A really bad sign.”
“Pack the attitude away, young lady. I drink. Sometimes I don’t remember. That’s how it works.”
“This has happened before?”
“We’re done talking. You want pizza?”
“Give it to the dog,” I said.

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47
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I’d been at Gracie’s for only one day, but dirty dishes filled the sink, and the trash can smelled like sandwich meat gone bad. Directions to Roy’s camp still hung on the wall, stuck on a nail. In the living room, the Giants scored and the crowd went nuts.

I was hungry for pizza and wings, but wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. The peanut butter was in the cupboard next to the stove and the bananas and bread were on the counter. After I made the sandwich, I opened the fridge for something to drink and stopped. On the top shelf, next to a cloudy jar of pickles and a tub of expired cottage cheese, sat a stack of mail.

Another first. Dad never left mail lying around anywhere, much less in the refrigerator.
The catalogs for garden supplies and special tools for arthritic hands still arrived monthly, even though my grandmother had been dead for more than a decade. Dad got a couple of credit card applications and a VFW magazine that I knew he’d throw out without reading. The last two envelopes were addressed to him, too. I poured myself a glass of milk.
It’s wrong to open another person’s mail, right? Especially if that other person is your parent, because parents are supposed to be in charge and they’re supposed to make all the decisions, and there might be things in the mail that are none of your business, because even in high school you’re still a kid. Or at least sometimes, you want to feel like you are.
I carefully opened the first envelope, from the bank. Dad had overdrawn the checking account by $323.41, plus fees. I took a bite of my sandwich and a sip of milk and opened the second envelope, a note from the VA that listed all the appointments he’d missed and “strongly urged” him to call their office. I wasn’t so hungry after that. I washed the dishes and emptied the garbage. After I put a clean bag in the trash can, I dumped the catalogs in it. That’s when the third envelope, addressed to me, fell out of the gardening supply catalog.
Roy sent it.
He said that he’d talked to Dad on the phone a couple times, but he didn’t think it would help. He apologized for not being able to do more. He apologized for how short the letter was, but his unit was leaving earlier than planned.
I know it’s not fair, but you have to be the strong one
, he wrote.
You have to be patient with him, even when you don’t want to be. He’s still wounded, don’t forget that. I’ll call when I can
.
Gotta hop
.
“Uncle” Roy

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I made Spock sit between us on the couch, the demilitarized dog separating Dad and me like the zone that keeps the peace between North and South Korea. I ate a slice of pizza and three chicken wings. That made him happy. I stared at the screen and tried not to wince when Dad yelled at the refs. The teams crashed into each other, helmets hitting helmets, necks snapping backward, bodies falling. Dad twitched and jerked with every hit. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a mirror, and in the mirror we were sitting on that couch, me twenty years old, thirty years old, then forty, then fifty, and Dad, always the exact same age, timeless, unshaven, dirty, eyes bloodshot and empty. The Eagles quarterback was sacked at the beginning of the third quarter and taken to the locker room. From that point on, the Giants scored at will.

After the game, I took Spock for a walk, the envelopes in the pouch of my hoodie, resealed as best I could. We walked until night fell and the safe, little houses on our side of town had all closed their curtains. Our curtains were still open. Dad was asleep on the couch, beer bottle in hand. I put the mail back in the mailbox and hoped the next day would be a better one for him.

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48
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I took the bus Monday morning. Finn was never going to drive me anywhere again.

I didn’t see him in the cafeteria first period. Didn’t actually go to the cafeteria. Went to the library. The Genocide Awareness table was gone. Nothing had taken its place. Tried to fall asleep in a corner where no one could find me. Couldn’t sleep. Counted the holes in the ceiling tiles, decided they were probably made of a chemical that was causing cancer to bloom in my lungs.

Each tile had 103 holes.
I trudged through the day. Classroom. Locker. Hall. Classroom. Caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the tall windows along the corridor to the B wing. I was shuffling, books weighing down my arms. Defeated, like a zombie who’d been dragged from the grave and bitten, but who didn’t feel the hunger yet. Wasn’t quite assimilated into the hivemind of delirium.
Ms. Benedetti stopped me in the hall, complained about playing phone tag with Dad, and shoved SAT paperwork into my hands, babbling away about the need to shift my paradigm and look over the next horizon. I threw the paperwork away as soon as she was out of sight. In English, Brandon Something pegged me with spitballs every time Ms. Rogak turned her back. I picked them out of my hair before she noticed. I really didn’t care enough to do anything else. Found out in gym class that Gracie had gone home sick. I told the aide that I was going to puke and spent the next two periods staring at the tiles above the cot in the nurse’s office. They were smaller than the ones in the library. Maybe they didn’t leak as much cancer.
I had let down my shields, that was the problem. The crazy inside Dad had infected me, weakened me so that when Finn smiled, I’d been vulnerable. I’d dropped my shields and let myself pretend that somebody like Finn would want to be with somebody like me.
I was an idiot.
In history, Mr. Diaz misstated so many facts about the issues that led to the Civil War that I was sure he was baiting me. He stopped me when I was headed out the door at the end of the period to ask if I was okay.
“I’m fine,” I told him.