“No. This was the middle of winter. She was in the kitchen, stirring the soup. Her hair was loose and I asked her what if she got some in my food and she laughed and she said we’ve got bigger problems, you and me.”
This is nothing I’ve heard before. I wait for him to correct himself. The way the story goes, my dad saw some chewed-up alcoholic, whose hands were shaking so bad he could barely keep hold of his cup, hitting on my mom at the shelter, complimenting her hair. My dad saw what a saint she was and swooped to her rescue.
But he goes on with this new version. “She must have seen something in me, because she put her hand on mine and told me I was gonna be all right.”
This is backward. It was my father who, moved by a message God sent straight into his heart, crossed the street to her.
Except that all at once I know that this story is the truth. The one I heard my whole life was the inversion. He was the alcoholic. He was the one who needed saving.
“You know I never touched a drink again after she put her hand on me like that? That was God touching me, too. I felt it. It’s like her hand weighed fifty tons but didn’t weigh a feather.”
I cycle through a hundred different questions, trying to land on one that makes sense. I’m sweating and freezing all at the same time, like even my body can’t tell what’s real.
My father is the no-name, gutted drunk of his own stories.
I don’t know what it changes, exactly, and at the same time everything feels different. I feel like I did the first time I found out that every time we played ring-around-the-rosie we were calling up a plague of cholera and miming people drowning in their own blood, chanting for the smell of their ashes. I have feared my father and hated him and, only recently, begun to pity him.
But I have never, before this, felt sympathy for him.
I think he might be sleeping again. His eyes are closed, and his head nods with the rhythm of the car. But then he says, “I’m not afraid to die, you know.”
It reminds me of Kaycee.
“And don’t say I’m not dying,” he adds, before I can. “I heard what the doctor said.”
“There is no death,” I say. “Just God.” It’s a line he often fed me.
He sits there, rocking, eyes closed. Like he’s listening to music I can’t hear.
“Two Septembers ago I found a cat in the old shed. Pregnant to the point of bursting. She was in bad shape. I put a blanket on her, gave her water and some milk. The kittens came—six of them, smallest things I’d ever seen. Some of them could’ve passed for bugs, except for the fur.” He shakes his head. Still squeezing his eyes shut. “I made a little nest for them, just some cardboard and old blankets.”
I expect him to finish but he goes silent. We’re passing into Barrens now. And even from here, from the other side of town, the smoke from Optimal’s chimneys is visible, like fingers splayed into a gesture, but I can’t say what it means.
“What happened to them?” I say finally.
He opens his eyes. “Big storm came through. Overnight the temperature dropped forty degrees. There was no warning, nothing on the reports. Just a change in the wind and a freeze knocked all the leaves from the trees and made it winter overnight.” He brings a hand to the window and presses it to the glass, then pulls away to watch his prints disappear. “They were all dead by morning, every one of them, six tiny kittens and the mother, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am, but puzzled, too: out here you get used to things dying. There are farms buzzing with flies, cows and pigs and chickens slaughtered to fill deep freezers. Deer hunted in the winter, cats killed in the road, and birds dropped from the sky.
“I don’t know if there’s a God,” he says. We’re still moving, punching through a great big hanging picture toward nothing. “I used to think it was a plan. And even the bad things that happened, your mom getting sick, a kid getting mowed over, it was all part of the plan. But what kind of plan is there for kittens to freeze like that? They meant nothing to nobody. What kind of God would do that. Why not leave them unborn in the first place?” For a second, anger tightens his face, and he looks like the man I remember. “There’s evil in this world, Abby. You remember that. You look for it. You look so it can’t look for you.”
The world exhales. This sounds like the father I know. Smoke unwinds against the clouds. “I’ll remember.”
He leans back in his seat, satisfied. As we pass the clutter of tire shops and fast food outlets and new restaurants, Optimal lurches out from the distance again, an ugly sprawl between the trees.
“Look at that,” he says. “All that smoke. Chemical spew. Disgusting.” He shakes his head. “They killed her, you know,” he goes on. “Oh, I know everyone says they didn’t. But they did. They killed her with all their filth. Poison and greed, that’s all it is.”
Mom died right before Optimal finished construction. The day we buried her, the first bit of smoke came up from the chimneys, and I remember thinking at first it was a kind of celebration.
“They didn’t kill her, Dad,” I say, though I’m not sure why it matters. “Mom got cancer before.”
“I’m not talking about your mother.” He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes again. “I’m talking about that girl, the one everyone always fussed about. Kaycee Mitchell.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Only when morning comes do I realize that it must have been night. I remember drinking. My dreams were full of bright-colored bodies. Shades of blue and orange and red. There was fire. It smelled like paint.
In my living room, a girl deformed by terror is leaning on the armchair, screaming: and then I startle up and I realize that I’m the one who screamed. The girl is Kaycee, embalmed in oil on one of her canvases. A self-portrait.
I look around. On the table, another two stacked canvases, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, and cigarette butts floating in a filth of dirty liquid.
I haven’t smoked since college. But I can taste the smoke in my mouth.
I try to shuffle back through my memories, but all the images feel like balloons, slipping out of my grasp. I don’t remember going back to Frank Mitchell’s unit at the U-Pack but I must have: I don’t remember why and whether I was seen, whether I was careful, what on earth could have compelled me to steal the paintings and bring them home with me. I’m moved by a desperate, enormous desire to hide them, to burn them, to get them out. But they are staring back at me, refusing to be moved.
I fall onto the couch.
Ten years, and my dad never said a word to me about Kaycee’s disappearance. I tried to press him for information but he had little to offer: only that he turned up Kaycee’s bag down by the reservoir, half concealed by overhanging brush, and thought she must have forgotten it there after a bonfire. He expected her to come looking for it, only to learn everyone was saying she’d run off.
Who runs off and leaves a wallet, cell phone, and driver’s license behind?