Long Bright River(20)

Soon, the tension between them grew unbearable, and our father moved out. Abruptly, we became Gee’s responsibility. And about this, Gee was not happy. I thought I was done with all this, she said to us often, mostly when Kacey had gotten into some nonsense or other. When I picture her face, I mainly recall that her eyes were always elsewhere: she never looked at us, but above or beside us, glancingly, the way one might look at the sun. As an adult, I have, in more generous moments, wondered whether the loss of her daughter, whom she clearly loved feverishly, caused her to hold us always at a distance. To her we must have been small reminders both of Lisa and of our own mortality, the potential we held for the infliction of further pain, further loss.

If Gee often seemed annoyed at us, most of her emotion was in fact directed away from us, at our father, for whom she reserved a kind of incredulous, powerful rage, a disbelief at the depths to which he could sink when it came to shirking his familial responsibilities. I knew it the first time I saw him, she told us, in a monologue that she delivered once a month when the child-support payment failed to come. I told Leese that I never saw a shadier character in all my life.

The other thing that I knew about our father also came from Gee. He got her hooked on that shit, Gee said—never directly to us, but frequently on the phone, loudly enough so that we would be certain to hear. He ruined her.

After our mother died, this Daniel Fitzpatrick became Him and He. The only He in our lives, aside from a few uncles and God. When we saw him, we called him Daddy, which seems unthinkable to me now: almost like a different person was saying it. Even at the time, it felt strange to use the word if he hadn’t been by in a while. But he called himself that too. I’m their daddy, we heard him say to Gee, often, arguing a point. And Gee would say, Then act like it.

Eventually, he disappeared completely. We did not see him for a decade. Then, when I was twenty, a former friend of his told me casually that he had died, the same way everyone does in the northeast quadrant of Philadelphia. The same way I thought Kacey had died, the first time I found her. The second time. The third.

My father’s friend thought I’d known already, he said, noticing my reaction.

I hadn’t.

As for our mother: after her passing, Gee referred to her only infrequently. But sometimes, I caught her looking at our mother’s smiling and gap-toothed grade school photograph—the only whisper of her that remained in the house, one that lives, still, on the wall of the living room—for longer than she ever would have, if she’d known she was being watched. Other times, in the middle of the night, I thought that I heard Gee crying: a hollow, eerie wail, a stuttering childlike keen, the sound of endless grief. But in the daytime, Gee gave no indication that she felt anything, aside from resignation and resentment. She made bad choices, said Gee, about our mother. Don’t you go choosing the same old shit.



* * *



—

In the absence of our parents, we grew.

Gee was still young when our mother died, just forty-two, but she seemed to us much older. She worked constantly, often multiple jobs: catering, retail, house cleaning. In the winter, her house was permanently cold. She kept the heat at fifty-five, just barely warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We wore our jackets and our hats indoors. Are youse gonna pay the bill? Gee asked us, when we complained. The house seemed ghostly when she was gone: it had been in her family since 1923, when her Irish grandfather bought it, and then her father inherited it, and then Gee. It was a little rowhome, two stories, three tiny bedrooms in a line off an upstairs hallway, a downstairs that ran straight through from front to back. Living room, dining room, kitchen. No doors between them. Half-hearted thresholds here and there to designate the purported boundary of every room.

Back and forth and back again, from the front of the house to the back, we moved, generally as one unit. If Kacey was upstairs, so was I; if I was downstairs, so was Kacey. McKacey, Gee often called us, or KaMickey. We were, in those days, inseparable, shadows of one another, one of us taller and thinner and dark-haired, the other small and round and blond. We wrote notes to one another that we secreted in backpacks and pockets.

In one corner of our bedroom, we discovered that the wall-to-wall carpeting could be lifted to reveal a loose floorboard, and beneath it, a hollow space. In it, we left secret messages for one another, and objects, and drawings. We constructed elaborate plans about the way our lives would go in adulthood, after we’d escaped that house: I would go to college, I thought, and get a good, practical job. Then I would get married, have children, retire someplace warm, but only after seeing as much of the world as I could. Kacey’s ambitions were less reserved. She’d join a band, she sometimes said, though she never played an instrument. She’d be an actress. A chef. A model. Other days she, too, talked about going to college, but when I asked her what college she wanted to go to, she named schools she had no chance of getting into, ever, colleges she’d heard mentioned on television. Colleges for rich people. It wasn’t in me to disillusion her. Today, I wonder if perhaps I should have.

In those years, I watched over Kacey as a parent would, trying unsuccessfully to protect her from danger. Kacey, meanwhile, watched out for me as a friend would, drawing me out socially, coaxing me toward other children.

At night, in our shared bed, we put the crowns of our heads together and held hands, an A-shaped tangle of limbs and loose hair, and bemoaned the indignities of our schooldays, and named every crush that we had.