Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(22)

I’ve been learning about some of this stuff from Whitney Houston on the news. I ask my mother about this, but she says it’s not the same thing. Sometimes she buys a white powdered ibuprofen from the pharmacy and mixes it into her iced tea. She says, See? Look. Read the package, it’s harmless. This is what you saw, she says.

My mother’s black truck grumbles up around the corner. Her truck is not fancy. It has dents all over; a few of my horse ribbons, sun-bleached, hang from the rearview mirror. My mother likes to call her car Big Beau, petting the dashboard affectionately.

I roll my suitcase over, yank the handle of it when the wheels snag on the sidewalk cracks. I open the backdoor of the car, chuck the suitcase in—It’s about time—and slam the door. I open the passenger door and scoot in.

My mother’s face is battered, blue. Her bottom lip drags down as if an invisible hanger were hung from it. Both eyes are almost entirely sealed shut. Dark marks the size of boxed chocolates cover her arms. She reaches for my hand and holds it.

There was a fight, she says.

He’s asleep on the couch when we arrive home. My father has never been a bedroom father, a kitchen father, a backyard father, an office father, a roof father; he is a father of the living room couch. I wonder if he was always this way, with his other family, that other life none of us are supposed to mention. He keeps a worn photo of two boys in the slip of his wallet, boys in the sun, playing ball. Even though their faces are crinkled as petals, I can see that they have his nose and eyes.

Now my father is facedown on the pink leather cushions, and I sit down next to him. His left arm dangles. I lift it and let it drop. He feels dead to me. Even like this, I love him.

Beneath his arm, on the floor, is his crown-sized ashtray overflowing with orange filters. It’s almost beautiful this way, like an exotic flower, or a Bloomin’ Onion from Outback. When my father is too drunk to walk or drive for more cigarettes, he lights each and every butt in the ashtray, one at a time. He sucks at them between his fingers like he’s drinking a milkshake through a cocktail straw. Around the couch are several empty vodka bottles, a cracked cobalt glass, rolled-up hundred-dollar bills, a smashed mirror. My father doesn’t move no matter how much I touch him.

I watch my mother fill a cup with water from the kitchen sink, holding steady to the counter. We’re rich—at least I think we are—but everything in our home has begun to smell. Our sulfurous well-water smells like cheese gunk, the kind that collects in the refrigerator drawers, so we plug our noses to drink. My mother points to our pantry, and I walk over to it. The wooden door hangs off its hinges. The shelves inside are split perfectly in half—that’s where my face went—all the screws yanked from the walls. I lift a can of Campbell’s soup from the pile of them on the floor, Chicken & Stars, twist it around and around in my hand. It is easier to look at your favorite soup than it is at blood. Campbell’s soup, my every meal, the first thing I learned how to make for myself—that thermos necklace I always keep at my chest—mine. A large can of Campbell’s is exactly 1 lb., it says so on the label, and this is the measurement by which I weigh everything else in the world. I weigh 81 soup cans. My pony Nicky weighs 705 soup cans.

My mother stares into the pantry, shaking her head. She sips slow and gently from her glass, careful not to spill. There are noises now—words coming out: Money, investment, snapped, pushed, and then, the soup cans, the money. I ask her to slow down. She says my father has been binging on his special stuff and hasn’t slept in over three days. The Other Place, she says. The fight started in the kitchen, simple at first, before he took her by the wrists and didn’t know what to do with all his love. She says things like this all the time lately, words like love to describe our suffering. She doesn’t know if I’m old enough to hold the truth in my hands, to measure that.

I know, I say, you don’t have to explain more.

I wish you didn’t have to know so much, she says.

I know.

I hug my mother at the kitchen sink and let her cry into my shoulder. She leaves black and red marks on my white, crisp uniform. I am only five foot two, but we’re the same height by now. From a slight distance, people mistake us for sisters.

I tell my mother I’ll heat up two cans of Campbell’s for dinner. I pluck them from the top of the pile. Wipe the blood with a paper towel. I crank the can opener till the aluminum exhales. I smash the pots and pans around, bang them into one another like gongs. The stove coils throb red. The stars boil. I open and close the dishwasher in a crashing swing, like I’m bowling. I want my father to wake up so badly, to tell me his side of the story, to bury his head in his hands, apologizing, changed. He doesn’t move.

What are we going to do? my mother says, in the bathtub. It’s one in the morning, and my father is still asleep. The water’s gone cold, and I turn the hot lever every few minutes. What do we do now?

I wash my mother’s body with a sea sponge. I can see every vertebra of her spine like this, curled over, her head down. She holds her shins close to her chest as if to give the water more room. There are no more wounds to clean, nothing I missed, but I can tell the sponge is comforting to her. It’s a quiet touch.

Please don’t cry anymore, I say. We don’t have to do anything.

Has he ever hurt you? she wants to know.

He hasn’t. He has never touched either one of us before today. Not like this, exactly.