My parents died before I was twenty-five. I’ve been alone in the world from long before that, though. I’ve been busy. Too busy to listen to my own heartbeat. Too busy to look at my own hands. Too busy to figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’m doing a lot wrong.
I just want to listen for a while. Stop lying. Stop talking. Stop pretending. I just want to listen for a while and see if I can hear my heart beating.
Chet provides the noise. Even when he’s not here, his noise is in my head. Sometimes it’s so loud I scream and when I sleep I can’t escape it and I clench my jaw and bite my cheeks until they bleed.
I never get to listen. I never get to stop and figure out this puzzle. I don’t have a table big enough to fit the puzzle.
If I could listen to the quiet for just a day. If I could listen closely to the quiet for just an hour, I could figure everything out. I’d make a plan. I’d know what to do.
A complete stranger looked at me today and said, “You are living a lie, Helen.”
Why did it take a complete stranger to get me to hear this? The noise. The noise. The noise.
A Rat
My father is not who he seems. He’s a complicated man.
Last week, he was processing insurance claims in a cubicle in a skyscraper. This week, he is an unshaven, greasy man who locks himself in his room. He doesn’t even come out for baseball. He doesn’t say hello.
Mom says that he goes inside of himself but Mom doesn’t know that I remember. Not everything, but I remember enough.
Dad has been a grizzly bear. A prizefighter. He’s been a bully. A rat.
Outside of that, he’s been a blank space.
He’s some sort of time bomb—Mom and I can feel it every time he walks by us and we can smell his two-day beard and his anger. You can smell anger. That’s what they say. They say you can smell anger and danger and I smell it now.
It smells like trash day in mid-August.
It smells like burning rubber.
It smells like the day before the end of the world.
Bruce texts me when he’s in the B&B. Unpacked. Where do you want to go to dinner?
I reply. I’ll come to the B&B. We can decide from there.
Bruce: I have stuff to tell you. I want to know why you left school, too.
Me: We can talk about that.
Bruce: I want to get it out of the way. So we can just hang out.
Me: Sure. We can talk first if you want. I’ll come early.
Dad is back in his room. Mom is taking a nap. I leave a note on the study table. I say I’ve gone to Katie’s house for dinner and that I’ll be home later. Of course there is no Katie. Katie was invented for Dad’s sake on the night we ate tacos.
I bet if Bruce came to dinner for tacos, Dad would pretend not to see him, either, the same as he didn’t see ten-year-old Sarah.
He might call him Jimmy. Might crack a joke about how me choking on my taco shell was drama to imaginary Jimmy. Imaginary Jimmy wouldn’t laugh, either. Do you know why? Because anyone can see through Dad’s complicated-man shit. He’s just a big hole. A big hole who takes up space and doesn’t mind being a big hole because he doesn’t know what else to be since he stopped being a rat.
MEXICO—Day Six II: Finding Bruce
We couldn’t find Bruce anywhere. It was lunchtime and I’d been sufficiently steeped in my tea bath and Mom put aloe vera on me and helped me put on the most comfortable shirt I packed—a loose-fitting thing with tiny straps.
When I saw myself in the living-room-wall mirror I said, “Holy shit!”
Dad said, “Sarah! You can’t say that.”
“Did you see my back?”
“You still can’t say that!” Dad said. “You’re ten!”
“I have blisters on my shoulders,” I said.
Mom said, “It’s okay. They’ll drain.”
The idea of draining blisters was not what I wanted to think about.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Can we go to the restaurant? I want some of those tacos.”
“We need to find Bruce first,” they said.
“Bruce can get lunch by himself. He has all week.”
They talked again in hushed tones and Dad said he was going to find Bruce on his own. Mom said we could go to the buffet. I ate the soft corn tortilla tacos again and Mom had some, too. She didn’t talk much. She just kept asking how I was feeling.
“You’re not dizzy, are you?”
“No.”
“Do you have a headache?”
“No.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
I didn’t know if that meant it wasn’t good. She had her mystery nurse face on.
I just ate more tacos because if I was going to die of Mexican sunburn, I wanted to at least eat more tacos before I died.
She kept looking at the entrance of the restaurant as if Dad and Bruce would walk in any second, but after an hour they still weren’t there.
“It’s our last day,” I said. “I still want to do stuff. It’s just a sunburn.”
“They have a siesta movie today. Finding Nemo. We should go!”
“I want to be outside,” I said.
“You need a break from outside until at least after three or four,” she said.
“I wanted to bungee jump at the kids’ club. That’s at four.”