“What was he like when he drank?” I asked.
“What was he like?” Sophie repeated my question carefully, as if she had to reach back and retrieve the memory from an old, dusty place without disturbing anything else around it. “Drunk, obviously. But not always the same kind of drunk. Sometimes he’d just sleep. Other times he’d sit on the sofa for the whole weekend, without moving, and just stare at the television. He wouldn’t even get dressed. He was there physically, but the rest of him was gone. Completely gone.”
I’d never once seen Dad inactive. If he wasn’t at work, he was out in the yard or hammering something in the upstairs bathroom or installing a new light fixture above the kitchen sink. He’d built the deck that led out into our backyard one summer, and he had transformed the basement into a finished room, complete with carpeting, new wallpaper, and furniture. At night, if he felt restless, he took a walk. And not just around the block. Sometimes he would be gone for hours, walking for miles, returning only when the sky had darkened and the moon had settled itself in for the night.
“Mom made herself scarce whenever he got like that,” Sophie continued, “and she’d take Maggie and me with her. We’d go to the mall or the movies, eat lunch at some dumpy restaurant, and then go shopping some more. We’d sometimes be gone the whole day. At night, we’d tiptoe back inside the house as quietly as we could. Mom always slept with me on those nights. Always. I figured things out eventually, but before I did, whenever I’d ask her what was wrong with Dad, she’d just say something like ‘He’s not feeling well. We just need to leave him alone right now.’”
Sophie turned around again and began to drag the paintbrush over the wall.
“Sometimes, though, we didn’t leave. Sometimes we stayed home, and the two of them would argue. It’s funny. I never heard or saw them argue about anything else, ever. It was only when the blue cans came into the house.” She paused, leaning back to examine her work. “You know, he hurt her once. During one of those arguments.”
I lay the paintbrush down on the drop cloth next to my shoe. Tiny pinpoints of heat bloomed along my neck. My hands, which continued to quiver, had turned icy cold. Muscles I did not know I had—in my shoulders, my stomach, my throat—constricted themselves into tiny, tight knots.
“Hurt her?” I repeated.
“It was before Maggie came,” Sophie said. “I saw the whole thing, because I used to hide behind the couch when they fought. Part of me really believed that I could jump out and make them stop whenever I wanted to. And another part of me was just scared. They were so fucking loud and they said such horrible things to each other—words I’d never heard of, but could just tell, by the way their faces looked, that they were mean, you know? Hateful.”
I’d witnessed a few of Mom and Dad’s arguments growing up, but they were so infrequent that I could barely remember them. Once or twice they had bickered at the dinner table, but neither of them had raised their voice, and no one had uttered a curse word. In fact, the only times I’d ever heard them really disagree with one another was when I was in bed and they were in their bedroom—and even then, they made it a point to keep their voices hushed. Strained, but hushed.
“Anyway,” Sophie continued, “they were in the living room and Mom was following Dad around, bugging him about the blue cans. She kept poking him in the back for some reason, because he wouldn’t turn around, he wouldn’t acknowledge her. And all of a sudden he just turned and shoved her. With both hands. Right in the middle of her chest. Mom flew back—I remember she was actually airborne for a second or two—and then she hit the corner of the coffee table in the middle of the room.” Sophie reached up with her fingers and pressed them against her left ear. “She hit the side of her head, right here…”
I stood up quickly, and then steadied myself as the room began to sway around me. “Jules?” Sophie asked. Her voice was far away.
“I need some air.” I forced my legs to walk out of the room and concentrated on steadying my hand so I could turn the doorknob. The rain was coming down in sheets, but I stepped out anyway, shutting my eyes against the torrent, taking short, shaky breaths. A loud buzzing noise sounded somewhere inside my head. The cold drops pelting my eyelids and my cheeks stung like pieces of ice, but I lifted my face up and did not turn away.
Once, in tenth grade, I had come back from studying at the library and heard Mom and Dad talking upstairs. They weren’t yelling, but their voices were loud enough that I stopped in my tracks, listening.
“If I could take it back, I would, Arlene. You know I would.”
“I don’t want you to take it back.” Mom was crying. “I want you to make it right!”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Dad’s voice was pleading. “What do you want me to do?”