I cannot get this right. I can never get it right.
When you were little, before you would remember, our next-door neighbors’ son drowned in a plastic play pool in their backyard. He was two and had wandered out of sight for only a minute. As if that were not terrible enough, there was a babysitter there that night. A young man, sixteen years old, a family friend. Whenever I think about that night, it is always the babysitter’s screams I remember. Ghastly, high-pitched. Otherworldly. A banshee wail.
That is the sound I think of when I think of how I hurt you.
We are no longer the same people, you and me. I am still your father, yes, but I am not that man. You are still my daughter, yes, but you are no longer that teenage girl who could not look me in the face. Perhaps you still cannot look at me, but it is as a woman now, one deep into her life and career, her own loves and mistakes and regrets. A woman I wish I knew. You are so far away, Dani. I know who you were—every image of your childhood hangs in my mind like this morning’s moon, a crooked eggshell of a thing, so luminous I cannot stop staring. But I want to know who you are now.
I would like to be a different man. I would like to be a different father, one you would visit. I would like to find a new shape.
I have never asked because I thought I knew the answer, but I know now how little I do know. And so I ask: Dani, will you come see me? Will you come see your old father?
I would like to show you my view.
Love, Dad
A Ride Home
December 22, 1991
Jess pushed through the side gate of Dani’s house, and when she hit the driveway, she began to run. On Pi?on Drive she ran straight down the center line, splashing through ankle-and shin-deep puddles. Her knee and palms throbbed from her falls, but she didn’t slow down. She had no idea what time it was, how long she had been out wandering. She had been so cold, but now she was growing hot inside her coat. The rain had mostly stopped, though fat drops splattered down from tree branches. When she reached College Drive, with the gates of the Syc across the street, she paused, trying to decide which way to go. Left would take her home, up the hill, almost a mile away. Two blocks to the right was the District, where she could see the lights from the gas station. She jingled the change in her front pocket. She’d call her mother from the pay phone there. She’d say, Come get me, Mom. And her mother would—she’d come get her, let her slide inside the warm car. She might yell, say Jess was stupid to go out in the rain, but to Jess even that was fine. She could get a hot cup of coffee and wait for her mom to pull in.
At the intersection of Main, she spied a lone car in the distance. As the car drew closer, its headlights foggy, the earlier apprehension returned, a strange hand clamping down on her shoulder: Got you. She darted into the street. Her pant legs dragged in the pooled water as she raced to the gas station. She reached the door at the same time that she realized the store lights were dimmed. A sign in the window read “Closed due to storms.” Jess cupped her hands to the window and peered in. No one there. She smacked her palm on the glass.
The pay phone was on the corner of the building, and she shuffled to it, feeling in her pocket for change. As she did, she heard the squeal of brakes. In the street a car swerved. As if in slow motion, its tail slid sideways, and it went over the curb and up on the sidewalk before it shot across both lanes. The car stopped with a jerk, its front end facing Jess, its headlights illuminating the station.
Jess let out the breath she was holding. The car reversed and then pulled into the lot of the Woodchute, across the street. She turned and dropped change into the pay phone. After she punched the buttons, she listened to the phone ring, tracing hatch marks on the metal box.
No answer. Her mother was either still asleep, or in the shower, or had the TV up too loud. She hung up before the machine picked up, before she would hear her own voice, too: You’ve reached Jess—and Maud—Winters. You know what to do and when to do it, so do it. Her laugh at the end—her father’s laugh. The returned coins clanged in the dish, and she fished them out through the metal flap.
She stared at the buttons, thinking of her father’s cards in her desk drawer. Call if you need anything. What could she say? Come get me. I need a ride home. His home was not hers anymore. He lived five hundred miles away, with a new family, a little girl who was probably walking now. His beautiful girl. Soon he would walk her to school in tennis shoes he’d bought just for her. Soon she would learn to cross-country ski and keep her eyes on his back. Soon she would swim in the ocean and look for him on the shore.
She dropped in the coins and more from her pocket and then punched in the numbers she’d memorized.
Her father answered on the second ring. Even after all this time, she knew his voice instantly.
“Hello?” he said. “Hello?”
She breathed into the receiver, the words stuck in her throat. It’s me. It’s Jess.
“Hello,” he said. “Is anyone there?”
I am. It’s me. I am, you are, she is.
An automated voice interrupted, asking her to deposit more money.
She hung up the receiver, cutting both voices off.
She slumped against the wall. She was so tired, so sleepy. She wanted to climb into bed. She touched the torn denim at her knee, pressed against the scrape on her skin. She was hot, too hot. A mile home. She’d have to walk.
Across the street at the Woodchute, the door of one of the rooms opened, letting out a slash of light. To Jess’s surprise, Angie Juarez and Rose Prentiss came out. Jess looked at the car that had pulled into the lot—Angie’s Impala. She hadn’t recognized it through the mist. Rose said something and laughed as they shut the door and walked toward the car.
Angie. Her old friend. Her first friend. Angie would give her a ride home. Jess bolted through the gas station lot and across the street as Angie and Rose climbed into the passenger side.
“Wait!” she called out. “Wait for me.”
The Hunger Year
At four in the morning, Roberto Navarro climbed out of his bed but paused as the springs creaked. The young woman tangled in his sheets kept snoring softly, hugging her pillow. The stove light cast a glow around the small studio apartment. His footsteps muffled on the carpet, he went to the closet and pulled out a milk crate of old school folders and carried it into the bathroom. He sat on the side of the tub under the buzzing bulb and the whirring exhaust fan. Though he smelled of a stranger’s sweat and stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, he didn’t turn on the shower. He riffled through the folders, stuffed with loose-leaf paper, finding the ones scrawled with humanities on the covers. “Beautiful,” Esther had said a few hours ago at the bar. He scanned pages for the line she’d mentioned, from an assignment she’d given.