But that’s a story my mother tells me later, one that becomes family lore, her face always looking slightly bewildered as she tells it, her tone always a little too light. What I remember from those years is standing next to my bed, the smell of spring grass clippings and the growl of my father’s mower coming in through the open window, sunlight that feels far away filtering in through the glass. I climb onto the mattress and stand tall on it, something I’m forbidden to do. I push my bare feet into the soft blanket for balance. I ball my small hands into fists that I jam into my sides, arms cocked out akimbo, imagining myself a fighter, and in this pose I swear allegiance to myself. I’ll never fall in love, never do any of that froufrou stuff all the girls I know seem to want. I won’t lose my edge. Not ever. I hardly know what I am promising myself except this: a different life. I carry this knowledge of what I am heading for like a secret inside me, a debt privately carried, a future owed.
To hold it doesn’t seem strange. All around me are unspoken secrets. Beneath what can be said is still the thrum of a world that belongs only to darkness. My sisters and I do not talk about the nights of the past five years, which have vanished as though they never happened. If at night, my father sometimes wails and throws himself on the bed, I understand that this is a life separate from the one my parents live in their office at the center of town. If at night, when I come down to the kitchen he’s not sweet anymore but angry, angry at me or angry at life, and he curses me or tells me he wants to die, I understand that that has not happened, nor have the nights the wheels of his car spin out of the driveway as my mother stands at the front door in her bathrobe and sobs. Always, the next morning, when I find my mother darkening her eyebrows at her vanity table with the bulbs all around that light up her face, she says, “I’m sure your father didn’t say that.” Or “You must be misremembering.” I am, I understand, to be as expressionless as the careful face I arrange for myself when the doorbell rings on Saturday afternoons and it’s my grandparents, dropped off on the porch as my father finishes parking the car in the driveway. If at night, sometimes I can’t sleep because I watch the crack of light around the door and listen for the creak of the stairs, I know better than to mention this in the morning. At twelve I still wet the bed, and though I don’t have the words to say why, if I did I would say that it makes me feel safe. That when I feel the bed all warm and wet around me I know: Nothing will come for me in the night. Nothing will want to. In the morning I scoop up the smelly sheets, fold the mattress cover over the wet parts so they won’t touch me, turn my nose away and carry the bundle down to the basement steps, where I can throw it into the air and let it fall to the foot of the steps, where the maid my parents have hired will deal with it. She is the one who, in the morning, cleans up the empty wine bottles and ice cream wrappers my father has left at the kitchen table. Each morning, through careful ministrations taken while my family slumbers upstairs, the house is erased and begins anew.
So maybe this, too, is why I come to love the objects in my father’s office: Whatever secret they hold locked inside can’t be erased. The evidence is there, solid. Waiting for the future to come looking.
Thirteen
Louisiana, 1965–1983
After the crash, the house the young family makes for itself is a haunted one, but it lasts. Bessie stays in the hospital for months after Ricky’s birth. Then she is allowed to come home, and she and Alcide live with Lyle and Luann in their two-bedroom house. Luann tends to the four children, Lyle brings home his pay, and Alcide goes out on the road for his trucking job. Nights he’s home, Lyle and Luann sleep in the living room, giving Alcide and Bessie their marital bed. It’s a hard arrangement. They were used to living on their own in California. Now Luann has an opinion on everything where the children are concerned, and who can blame her when she’s the one raising them? It’s all Bessie can do to navigate the house on her crutch, navigate the day through the layers of pain and the shots Luann helps her with. It’s easier not to chafe. Bessie’s always been wilder than Luann, but now she bends to her Pentecostal ways. No music. No television. No booze. Luann fills the silence by talking of God. She must smell the alcohol on Bessie’s breath; she must guess at what Alcide carries back for her from his stops on the road. But Luann tries, too. She bites her lip to keep herself silent, turns her cheek the way the Bible tells her to. The women will never be friends, but in silence they make it through.