Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(23)

Once, when I was younger, he was in such a spell that he came after me and my mother with a wooden baseball bat. He said he would kill us. He thought that we were somebody else, some other person or people who had hurt him. I think he’d hoped we were.

The two of us ran into my parents’ bedroom and locked the door. My mother screamed, rocking me to her chest. He beat the door with the bat until it splintered, and fell asleep on the tile floor outside the bedroom, the handle still in his hand. He woke up and yelled, Who broke this bat? I paid for this!

That night, I asked my mother why he even owned a bat—he doesn’t play baseball.

He bought it to protect us, she said.

The next day, when I asked my father, he denied the incident.

I didn’t break the bat, he said. You did.

When my mother gets out of the bath, I wrap a towel around her from behind. I dip cotton swabs into the mouths of ointment bottles and make her wounds look glossy. I pull a T-shirt over her head, lift rose-patterned pants up and over her skin. Her face is still, staring. I help her into bed, right foot, then the left, walk to the freezer, drop fistfuls of ice into a grocery bag. I spin the bag, knot it, pass my father’s body on the way back to her room.

I press the cool to her cheeks, her eyes.

I say, It’s okay, MomMom.

My mother holds my hands against the ice against her face. She says, You want to get out of here?

My mother packs her bag, and I go into my room, pack my own. I don’t have much to take: my diary, a Wiccan spell book, Drew Barrymore’s memoir Little Girl Lost, my stuffed tiger, Tia, my riding boots and spurs. I spill out a drawer full of underwear, silk pajamas. I snatch my strawberry-flavored gas mask from my nightstand—the mask used for anesthesia when I got surgery for my nosebleeds—a mask that still makes me feel sleepy, relaxed, cared for, when I press it into my face hard enough and breathe. I drop all my things into a black garbage bag. I have always wanted this rush, the swing of my arms around objects that I will pack to remind myself of the way things used to be. This was my life, back then. More than anything, though, I have always ached for the runaway’s return home, like in the movies—parents with their outstretched hands, heavy blankets with which to wrap you, the home-cooked meal with plates warmed in the oven, the tired, grateful faces. I have always wanted the reunion.





My mother carries our bags to the car. She doesn’t even look into the living room as she passes. I walk to the couch, scoot my father’s body over. The back of his neck is hot to the touch. I run my fingers through his sandy hair. I say, You made a really big mess this time, Daddy. My mother honks Big Beau three times. I kiss my father on the back of his skull, set the alarm, and run.

My mother says little in the car. She looks strong, her jaw clenched, her chin up. She gets like this when things are at their worst: upturned, dignified. She hands me a map and a new highlighter from the dash, says, Find the best route out of here. She is strong in ways I won’t comprehend until I am much older.

An hour later, she calls up my half brothers, those other two boys, leaves a message: You’re on your own for the intervention. I’m gone. I have never heard this word—intervention—and I ask her what she means. It’s something that could save your father, she says, something they were planning for this week. My brothers were going to fly all the way to Boca Raton for this. They wrote parting speeches about missed T-ball games, flute recitals. They have what she calls Bottom Lines to offer. She repeats herself, over and over, like she’s trying to believe it herself—This will save his life, it will save him, it will, and this explanation shocks me because I never knew he was dying.

We make one stop on our drive to Seven Devils, North Carolina, where we will hide out on a mountain for one month. Somewhere around Jacksonville, my mother feels too tired to go on, but I am awake. She pulls into a motel. She tells me to hush. She finds a metal gate to the swimming pool, lifts the peg from its hole. My mother says, Go ahead, jump in. You have more clothes in the car. Tire yourself out, she says.

Even though I don’t know how to swim, I have always loved the water. I like it here in the shallow end with my T-shirt bubbling up in a tie-dye dome. In the water, I can be a dancer, a gymnast, an astronaut, anybody else. I can do things like balance on my toes. I swish around and flick the surface until my mother falls asleep on a lawn chair. She looks like she’s sunbathing even though it’s still dark out. Ripples of aqua light flick across her bare legs, her bruises.

I wonder if my father has woken up. If he has checked the bedrooms, the car.

I kick my legs as hard as I can in the water. Take a breath. There is nothing I love more than to sink to the bottom of a pool. See how long my body can keep itself from rising.



REWIRED

In rehab, my father has a heart attack playing water polo with dope addicts. His body was in too much shock coming down from all that. His heart too excited; rewired. So the doctors say.

My father calls us from rehab, after this incident. His addiction therapist is on the line to listen in on our call. My father asks about our day, my horses, what am I going to do for school? His words are clear and precise. No sleepy drag. He asks me questions and waits patiently for answers, and this makes him sound like somebody else’s father.

Are you somebody else’s father? I say. Because I don’t look like you, and I’m not cruel like you, and we have such different voices and hands, and I don’t even feel that Jewish, and no father of mine has a heart attack in a goddamn swimming pool, and I am really starting to question.