I’m visiting New York—a teenager—and there’s a concert in Brooklyn. Blake is playing in the show, and Shawn wants us to come out and watch. Shawn takes me down into the subway for the first time, and I scream when I see a rat on the tracks. He laughs at me, covers my eyes with his hands. Perhaps, I think, this is the first thing he’s learning about me as a person removed from a mother or father. I am a girl who is afraid of rats.
We make it to a dark Bushwick living room where my brother plugs at the bass. He’s wearing a silver tie, and everyone in the room is screaming, cheering him on. Shawn nods his head to the music. He is mostly quiet, listening, sipping on a beer. Blake shreds the strings. He hooks his arm around my neck when he sees me. This is my sister, he says to his friends.
We all have our own languages.
As adults, in a hotel room, I tell the younger brother the truth about the pantry incident. The way my mother’s skin tore like a piece of overripe fruit. The purple of it.
That’s why we left town, I say. We didn’t mean to leave you two with the mess.
Blake looks at me, blinks hard.
I didn’t know, he says, any of that.
Sometimes it feels like we are only this: moments of knowing and unknowing one another. A sound that is foreign until it’s familiar. A drill that’s a scream until it’s a drill. Sometimes it’s nothing more than piecing together the ways in which our hearts have all broken over the same moments, but in different places. But that’s romantic. Sometimes it’s realer than that.
My older brother speculates that my father knew he would die before we did. Just days before, my father wanted a shave. He’d been in a coma for two weeks, and a beard scrabbled out of his face—unnatural, patchy—the color of his old cigarette ash. My father was obsessed with the shave, the right razor, a smooth finish.
The best sign! I said. He cares about the way he looks—he must be coming back.
But my brothers had seen this before—their mother wanted lipstick, a compact, the day before she died. A dazzling exit. My older brother’s face became a gray wedge in his hands as Blake and I shaved my father’s cheeks. Nobody said a word as we moved the blade above and below every last tube, humming a song. Children being dutiful children. All that brutal love.
We were so careful not to cut.
When I file that restraining order against Chad, Shawn takes me to Whidbey Island, to a residency, where I will feel safer. My brother rides the Mukilteo ferry with me, buys me swirled cones of ice cream, takes me out on the deck to look at the sea. I’m proud of you, he says. After the court hearing, I arrive back to his house in Seattle, where he blends smoothies for me, makes my bed, picks up my favorite kind of crab for dinner. Remember how Dad made them? I ask. We don’t, but we make up a new recipe of our own.
There are three of us in a photograph. One of us, me, does not look like the others. I am always in the middle of these two men, who are tall, handsome, protective in their postures. We do not fit, but I can tell you that we have the same fat toes, the same predisposition to canker sores, the same ability to mimic accents; we land impersonations. We drink when we are lonely, sometimes when we’re together, but mostly alone in our separate cities. We chew the same. We laugh with our eyes closed. There are thousands of ways to love men, Lidia Yuknavitch once wrote, and when I watch my brothers button their shirts, or body slam my niece, or dance with their lips puckered, I think I know all of them.
There are two men in my life. Their names are Shawn and Blake. The older, more serious one, pushes his daughter on her bicycle as she lifts her feet from the pedals. The younger one has three different colors of hair—dark on top, graying at the hairline, red in the sideburns. Every word from him sounds like jazz. They are beautiful, good men.
The three of us take a walk through a park in Seattle. It’s spring; we are all still grieving the same father; I am twenty-nine. The leaves of a tree glow bright and then darken as the clouds pass, as if the tree has a pulse. When will we see you again? my brothers want to know, and I believe them. I believe that they miss me for every year we didn’t have, the way I miss them, too. Sometimes I miss them most when we’re all together, when we’re already looking back at the moment, wondering how it will ossify with time, how much more we will know and unknow about each other.
That little girl on the beach. I was yours.
BIG HAIR, BIG HEARTS
Daphne Beauregard can smoke an entire pack of Parliaments and drink a liter of vodka in one night, just watch. She does lines of cocaine like they’re pixie sticks, huffs keyboard cleaner spray into her nose, gulps pills, sucks the bong, and still, she is beautiful, regal even, a Dixie queen from Kansas with the best rack you ever saw. Daphne Beauregard lives with me. At least until my mother comes back.
Daphne doesn’t have parents, either. Not really. Her father’s back in Kansas and her mother’s usually traveling for work, reviewing hotels across America. She’s got no siblings, and calls me her sister—The bumpkin and the Chink, she says. Perfect match for this place. Her drawl is thicker when she drinks. I ask her to read receipts aloud to me sometimes, pages from my books, magazines, alien romances from the National Enquirer. Talk, just talk, I say, in bed at night. When I close my eyes, I pretend we live in the country, just the two of us, back in Kansas where a lightning storm has just cracked the sky open.
Daphne has a grandma in the Florida panhandle, and one weekend we decide to drive up and visit. We drink vodka sodas and puff on joints the whole way, bare feet out the window. Her grandma isn’t home when we arrive, but we’re thrilled to find a tanning bed in the middle of her living room. We strip naked; I climb inside the glass bed and pull the hood down. I light a cigarette and let the buzz drill through me. I ask Daphne to take my picture like this on her disposable camera, the filter slanted out of my mouth, ribbons of smoke glowing under the light, my nipples purpled in UV. I tell her this portrait will be my masterpiece, the photo I want blown up and framed when I die. I will call it Human Cancer on Cancer on Cancer.
Daphne is too mature for boys. They don’t make ’em like they do back home, she says. To hell with these polo and sweater vest chumps. She wants a real cowboy and she tells me so. A man who will spit dip into a plastic bottle. A man who can two-step. I come from big hair and big hearts, she says, not this rah-rah money crap. One night, during a party at my house, I smoke weed laced with angel dust. I hallucinate beetles are digging into my skin; I need to be held down to keep from scratching. A boy named Stratton from math class puts my head in his lap and smooths back my hair. You’re too good for this, he says. Stratton believes in God and I don’t. You’re too smart for this; you could go to college, get straight. Daphne does not approve of this boy, though he’ll be the one to save my life, the first boy to ever love me.
Daphne and I start drinking first thing in the morning, to dull out the throbs. We skip school and sit on my back patio and smoke—tell stories about her first boyfriend (Glenn), my first drum set (a red Pearl), her first road trip (Kalamazoo), my favorite nostalgic smells (strawberry gas mask, hotel sheets, Vegas casinos, pine). We only sit down with the past.
I think before I was born, before this life, I was an artist, she says.
I dab out my cigarette.
Once, I was a horse.
I’M STILL HERE
It took my mother ten minutes with a chain saw to get us out of the house. Now she, my Grandma Sitchie, and I are sitting in the lobby of a Marriott, playing cards on the carpet.