Once, when I was younger, he was in such a spell that he came after me and my mother with a wooden baseball bat. He said he would kill us. He thought that we were somebody else, some other person or people who had hurt him. I think he’d hoped we were.
The two of us ran into my parents’ bedroom and locked the door. My mother screamed, rocking me to her chest. He beat the door with the bat until it splintered, and fell asleep on the tile floor outside the bedroom, the handle still in his hand. He woke up and yelled, Who broke this bat? I paid for this!
That night, I asked my mother why he even owned a bat—he doesn’t play baseball.
He bought it to protect us, she said.
The next day, when I asked my father, he denied the incident.
I didn’t break the bat, he said. You did.
When my mother gets out of the bath, I wrap a towel around her from behind. I dip cotton swabs into the mouths of ointment bottles and make her wounds look glossy. I pull a T-shirt over her head, lift rose-patterned pants up and over her skin. Her face is still, staring. I help her into bed, right foot, then the left, walk to the freezer, drop fistfuls of ice into a grocery bag. I spin the bag, knot it, pass my father’s body on the way back to her room.
I press the cool to her cheeks, her eyes.
I say, It’s okay, MomMom.
My mother holds my hands against the ice against her face. She says, You want to get out of here?
My mother packs her bag, and I go into my room, pack my own. I don’t have much to take: my diary, a Wiccan spell book, Drew Barrymore’s memoir Little Girl Lost, my stuffed tiger, Tia, my riding boots and spurs. I spill out a drawer full of underwear, silk pajamas. I snatch my strawberry-flavored gas mask from my nightstand—the mask used for anesthesia when I got surgery for my nosebleeds—a mask that still makes me feel sleepy, relaxed, cared for, when I press it into my face hard enough and breathe. I drop all my things into a black garbage bag. I have always wanted this rush, the swing of my arms around objects that I will pack to remind myself of the way things used to be. This was my life, back then. More than anything, though, I have always ached for the runaway’s return home, like in the movies—parents with their outstretched hands, heavy blankets with which to wrap you, the home-cooked meal with plates warmed in the oven, the tired, grateful faces. I have always wanted the reunion.
My mother carries our bags to the car. She doesn’t even look into the living room as she passes. I walk to the couch, scoot my father’s body over. The back of his neck is hot to the touch. I run my fingers through his sandy hair. I say, You made a really big mess this time, Daddy. My mother honks Big Beau three times. I kiss my father on the back of his skull, set the alarm, and run.
My mother says little in the car. She looks strong, her jaw clenched, her chin up. She gets like this when things are at their worst: upturned, dignified. She hands me a map and a new highlighter from the dash, says, Find the best route out of here. She is strong in ways I won’t comprehend until I am much older.
An hour later, she calls up my half brothers, those other two boys, leaves a message: You’re on your own for the intervention. I’m gone. I have never heard this word—intervention—and I ask her what she means. It’s something that could save your father, she says, something they were planning for this week. My brothers were going to fly all the way to Boca Raton for this. They wrote parting speeches about missed T-ball games, flute recitals. They have what she calls Bottom Lines to offer. She repeats herself, over and over, like she’s trying to believe it herself—This will save his life, it will save him, it will, and this explanation shocks me because I never knew he was dying.
We make one stop on our drive to Seven Devils, North Carolina, where we will hide out on a mountain for one month. Somewhere around Jacksonville, my mother feels too tired to go on, but I am awake. She pulls into a motel. She tells me to hush. She finds a metal gate to the swimming pool, lifts the peg from its hole. My mother says, Go ahead, jump in. You have more clothes in the car. Tire yourself out, she says.
Even though I don’t know how to swim, I have always loved the water. I like it here in the shallow end with my T-shirt bubbling up in a tie-dye dome. In the water, I can be a dancer, a gymnast, an astronaut, anybody else. I can do things like balance on my toes. I swish around and flick the surface until my mother falls asleep on a lawn chair. She looks like she’s sunbathing even though it’s still dark out. Ripples of aqua light flick across her bare legs, her bruises.
I wonder if my father has woken up. If he has checked the bedrooms, the car.
I kick my legs as hard as I can in the water. Take a breath. There is nothing I love more than to sink to the bottom of a pool. See how long my body can keep itself from rising.
REWIRED
In rehab, my father has a heart attack playing water polo with dope addicts. His body was in too much shock coming down from all that. His heart too excited; rewired. So the doctors say.
My father calls us from rehab, after this incident. His addiction therapist is on the line to listen in on our call. My father asks about our day, my horses, what am I going to do for school? His words are clear and precise. No sleepy drag. He asks me questions and waits patiently for answers, and this makes him sound like somebody else’s father.
Are you somebody else’s father? I say. Because I don’t look like you, and I’m not cruel like you, and we have such different voices and hands, and I don’t even feel that Jewish, and no father of mine has a heart attack in a goddamn swimming pool, and I am really starting to question.
But what are you doing about school? he says. How will you do well in school from North Carolina? Some things are important, according to my father.
My teachers send homework in the mail. Yellow paper packets. Fat clips. Periodic tables. I tell each and every one of them somebody died.
Somebody died, I say on the phone, because my mother is too superstitious to say it.
My teachers have always called me a liar. You play sick, they’ve said. Nobody skips like you. Nobody is sick so much. Sick in your head, maybe. What do you do all day at home?
Absent again, Queera? Clarissa will ask me on AOL. Cheater.
What I do all day when I’m at home: I watch Bob Ross flutter his paint strokes on the television in my room. I listen to him describe the world—the cockeyed birds, the fuzzed-over face of a rock. I want to shape my own planet this way, color it the way I want. I boil soup; I practice making coins disappear between my fingers; I call psychic hotlines; I wait for my parents to wake up.
Somebody died out here, I tell my teachers, so we’re burying them all up.
Them?
Nobody ever believes me.
Plural?
What I do all day here in North Carolina: More soup. More magic tricks. I practice levitating playing cards, spinning them between my outstretched hands. I breathe into my gas mask and pretend that I’m dying. I ask my mother to drive us past the local orphanage so I can be dropped off and live like Little Orphan Annie. This always hurts her feelings. Do you know what I’ve gone through to keep you? she says. My mother is drying out here, too, but she doesn’t have help like my father. Mostly, she sleeps. We listen to Tammy Wynette and watch a movie about Tina Turner having her face smashed in by Ike Turner. There is so much we’re both trying to understand.
You’re exactly like me, my father says into the phone. Carbon copy.
I am not.
My mother stands in the corner of the living room. She stands stiff and blank-faced as if in a crowded elevator. She’s always in this elevator lately—arms by her side, waiting—and I wonder where she goes in her mind. Which floor. Which new view.
She looks at me on the phone, the curls of the cord warping my fingers bloodless. She says, You have his canker sores. His bad hip. His receding hairline. You are both sharp when it comes to giving directions, but neither one of you can stand being left alone.
My father says, You’re wrong, you have my hands.