This is the logic I will never find an answer to, the way in my family a hurt will always be your hurt or my hurt, one to be set against the other and weighed, never the family’s hurt. Is what happens in a family the problem of the family, or the problem of the one most harmed by it? There is a cost to this kind of adversarial individualism.
But then, I’m the one who’ll grow up to wear cowboy boots and a big belt buckle, even though I live in Massachusetts. I’ll chase after this love he tried to show me.
*
Eighth grade begins. Not going to school seems more normal now than going. I spend my days in the slow haunt of the staircase, the room where we played as children, my bedroom. Every week my father drives to Queens and ferries my grandparents back over the bridge to see us. Each Saturday, my sister Nicola plays checkers with my grandfather on the porch like I used to. I can’t anymore. I can’t even watch them play. I’m too aware that I watched him touch her in our bedroom. Too aware that he touched me. The knowledge crawls across my skin. I can’t even use the bathroom without thinking of his hands around himself there, the motion I didn’t understand. But I know I’m not allowed to say that, just like I’m not allowed to tell my friends at school what happened. My mother has said that I will hurt my father’s political career if I do so. My father has said that I will hurt my mother. Both of them forbid me from telling my grandmother, because it would hurt her, and my brother. He’s close to my grandfather and, as the only boy in a house of girls, needs him.
So the hurt feels like it’s just mine to carry. Every Halloween, when ghosts and witches start to appear in decorations around town, I become jumpy and sleepless, as though my subconscious believes what my grandfather used to tell me—that he’s a witch, that someday he’ll get me.
I start to hide. I dye my hair fire-engine red, sometimes purple, once green, and adopt a style of long, loose skirts of bright, clashing colors and oxblood Doc Martens so oversize that when I start high school the other kids call them “clown shoes.” It’s how I can disappear now: by giving people something else to look at, the clothing I wear instead of me. I cut class, missing so many days the high school won’t give me grades. My friends have noticed that I can’t be easily touched. If someone surprises me with a hug my body bucks and they get a swift, automatic elbow to the stomach—or else I am suddenly vacant, my body rigid. On my grandmother’s birthday my family goes to a restaurant in New York and there—my grandmother seated to my left, my grandfather’s hot breath on my right—what is inside me and cannot come out finally becomes unbearable. I go to the bathroom and make myself vomit. To feel empty is delicious relief, and from that day on, I have another secret. My parents must see the empty food wrappers in the kitchen, the mess I sometimes leave in the bathroom. They must see the way their daughter has gone sullen and silent. But we don’t talk about it. The same way we don’t talk about the slash my brother carries on his stomach, the missing sister, the way the phone is turned off sometimes and when it’s on creditors call day and night, nipping at this life my parents have built like the pasts they’ve both run from, now that my father’s rages have gotten so bad even the law firm is in trouble. If we acknowledge only the happy things, maybe that’s all there will be.
One night, my parents call us to a family meeting around the Formica kitchen table. The room is still wallpapered in bright slashes meant to look like crayon marks that my mother chose when we were children. The clock overhead is made of wooden crayons. Over the table hang three cone lights on pull cords: one red, one blue, and one yellow, the colors bright and friendly. Each cone casts a circumscribed spotlight, like in an interrogation scene.
“Grandma and Grandpa are moving to Tenafly,” my mother announces. “We’ll be able to see them so much more this way.” Writing the memory, I find myself searching for her face, frustrated with the shadows—but she sits outside the cone of light, and the memory is sealed tight. My grandparents move to downtown Tenafly, to the apartment building marked by a magnolia tree that is on the one main road into town and the one main road out. Weeks after the move, my grandmother slips in the bathroom. Recovering in the hospital, she suffers a stroke. Three days later, she dies. He is left, sitting alone in that apartment.
*