In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(59)

It was enough. The black hole burst, and the memories cracked open.





Chapter 26


December, senior year

Memories are powerful things.

But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.

Until the day they’re not.

The day before Christmas, senior year, the morning my father overdosed, I woke from a terrible dream that I was trapped, held with a gun to my head. The gun kept going off, over and over, and the last thing I saw each time was a pair of eyes so dark the pupils drowned in them. When I jerked awake, heart hammering, I lost the thread of the dream, but gained a memory. It rushed back, all at once: I was eight years old, a dreamer. A naive kid with her head in the clouds. More than anything, I loved to write and draw stories. And I loved my parents—worshipped them. My angelic mother, always there when I needed her. My handsome father, an important man, someone everyone looked at with a shining admiration.

They said he was better than the steel company where he worked, a temporary job to make ends meet. He was a Harvard man with promise, after all, and eventually he’d find his way to where he belonged. Even his friends whispered it, even my mom—he’d go to Washington like he’d planned, work among the important dealmakers, use the economics degree he’d worked hard for. It was his destiny. He was so smart, so valuable. Any day now, he’d do it. Any day.

The thing about my father was—he was getting sick. At eight years old, I noticed it, even when no one else did, even as they kept whispering about where he’d go (up, up, up) and when (any day now). He’d started spending hours alone, turning the lights off in the living room and staring at the ceiling, arms hanging off the sides of the recliner like deadweight. Sometimes he nodded off, but a lot of nights, he just stared and stared at nothing.

Finally came the day when everyone else noticed. My dad arrived home first, red-faced, beelining to his bedroom and slamming the door. My mother followed minutes later, eyes bloodshot, held by her best friend—back when she had a friend, the wife of a man my father worked with. No one said anything to me, as if I didn’t exist. So when my mom went into the kitchen, I hovered at the door like a ghost, listening.

I couldn’t understand what they were saying—He betrayed me, from my mother. Threw himself at the boss, no one can believe it, from my mother’s best friend. Told her he was better than this, that he belonged at the top, with her. Everyone’s talking about it. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I knew my mother was crying, and it had something to do with my dad. Suddenly, I realized what it had to be: they’d discovered his sickness.

I knew what to do. I’d been thinking about it for a while. Whenever my mother was sick, I drew her pictures and told her a story, and it always made her feel better. I went to my room and took out my pencils—precious things I’d gotten for my birthday, the kind real artists used—and drew for an hour until I had the perfect thing. I gathered my drawings and slipped into my parents’ room.

My dad lay slumped on the bed in the dark, an arm hanging limp. I climbed up and perched next to him, sitting close to his face so he could see better. Then I took a deep breath and shook his shoulder.

He woke with a gasp. Immediately, my stomach clenched, instincts whispering, bad idea. His eyes were cloudy as he struggled to focus, his dark hair sweaty, breath shallow, rapid, like he’d just run a race. For a second, the face that stared back at me was a stranger’s.

“Dad?”

His voice was garbled. “Who are you?”

My heart squeezed painfully. “Jessica,” I whispered.

His gaze listed to his nightstand. He extended a clumsy hand, groping for an orange bottle just out of reach. It fell to the floor, top popping off, white pills scattering.

“Goddammit.”

“I’ll clean it, I promise.” I held up the drawings. “I drew you a story.” I peered around the paper. “Once upon a time, there was a king, see—” I pointed to the picture. “He had a beautiful wife who was the queen and a daughter who was the princess.” I pointed out the drawings of my mom and me, which I was proud of, as I’d done very good noses. “One day”—I switched to the next piece of paper—“an evil witch cast a spell on the king, and he fell into a deep sleep. It was up to the princess to break the curse. She—”

“Get off.” My dad’s voice grew sharper. “I need to rest.”

I moved closer to him, lifting the drawings. “Dad, see? It’s you and me, and Mom, in the story. I made us into kings and queens. Your wife and daughter—”

“I don’t have a wife or daughter.” He rose abruptly and I lost my balance, tipping off the bed to land, sharp, on my knees and elbows. My father stumbled from the bed and dropped beside me, sweeping the spilled pills into a pile with shaking hands.