Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(72)

Sometimes he says the things I wrote the way I wrote them. We play out the scenes. We have our script. Other times, he says, No, not quite, it didn’t happen like that. My dead father is always moving. I follow him.

I wasn’t standing in the living room for that part, he says. The night of your middle school dance, I was standing right here, by the hall. He brings me to the mouth of the hallway; the light is on. He walks me back and forth through it, buttoning his shirt, tucking it in, rushing, getting ready for something. He disappears into the wall and reappears on the living room couch.

You must get it right, he says. Remember the details, he says. He smooths a comb through his hair. It’s still wet from a shower. I sit down next to my dead father. No one prepares you for the dreams. I want to breathe in the shoulder of his shirt.

I want to breathe in the shoulder of your shirt, I say, but I can’t remember it right. It’s all gone now, I say. The house. The details.

He lights a cigarette. My father is never sick in my dreams. He is not plugged into tubes; he has no oxygen mask. Here, we are both breathing.

What’s missing is always there, he says. He taps the center of my forehead three times.

Relax, he says.

There are so many ways to lose a person. There are so many revisions.

But wait. There’s something else, Hannah says.

We’re sitting in her truck in her driveway upstate. It is midnight, just after my twenty-ninth birthday, and the engine is turned off, the air soured with hay.

It’s not what you think, she says. She rubs at the back of her neck.

Hannah, who’d spent the past month with my family, housing two of my teenage cousins while I’d traveled through July. Hannah, who’d overheard something she should not have heard while I was gone, who’d jerked across a freeway to the side of the road when she’d heard it; she’d stopped and listened again. Hannah, who’d wanted to wait until after I came home to tell me herself, my hands in hers; she’d wanted to wait until after my birthday.

I’m glad she found her sister, is what she’d heard, but where is the brother?

What are you talking about? I say.

I’m still trying to figure it out, she tells me.

That night, in her driveway, I punch the truck’s window until I feel bone.



Let me try this again.

My family, we began with a mannequin.

He was a full-bodied jewelry mannequin: fancy, distinguished. Those were the words we used. When I was two years old, my mother and I lived alone in a canary-yellow apartment in Coconut Grove, Florida. See my mother, single, the crimson-mouthed mistress of my father, a white man in downtown Miami who has been promising to leave his artist wife, his two handsome boys. We needed a man in our home, a figure bigger than us, to scare off all the other men who would come.

This is the story I know.

But let me go truer.

Before my father arrives at our apartment, my mother sits the mannequin in a rocking chair near the front window. My mother and I like to change his socks together. We pull the bright patterns over his club feet, roll the bands up his calves. We’ll do this again years from now, for my father, just before he dies.

Merit cigarettes, orange juice and vodka, money. I miss the grind of his voice. I miss the word when it was still golden: father.

This here is your father.

Hello, little one, I’m your father.

My mother, a Chinese, Hawaiian, pocketknife of a woman, shot a man once. She’s already lost her own father, her islands, Samuel, a daughter, the gift of naming that daughter and holding her and tossing her into the air, the joy in that suspension.

But then, there was another.

There is always the point at which a story changes. A good story must always change its terms.

I’m glad she found her sister, but where is the brother?

Another missed period. Another month of nausea. Another month. Another talk on the living room floor between my mother and father as I squirmed in a crib.

You can’t keep him, my father says. We’ve done this before.

I can.

We can’t.

That’s how I imagine the scene going. That’s what I’ve been told.

My mother kept carrying that baby. She thought my father would change his mind. The mannequin—he’d had a greater purpose. He protected me and he protected my mother as she grew, as she listened for noises at the window. I don’t remember pressing my ear to her stomach, saying Hello, but I did that.

Sometimes we choose what to believe, sometimes we know it.

Like this: Uncle Nuke was left on our curb one Christmas wearing a Santa hat. I was six. My mother went back out for him, the trash bags still waiting for pickup, but he was gone already. Off to another family, or little girl, who needed him. The truth is, I hadn’t missed him till now. I never even knew he was gone.

I thought your father would change his mind once the boy was born, says my mother. I’d waited for that.

These hushed years. These secrets of the body. To whom did they belong first? I want to find where it began and say, I’m here now, listening. I want to reach through the years and tell the women I’ve been lonely.

My father stopped breathing on a cold, clear afternoon. October. The sun was out.

My mother was making him soup.

The story I’d rather tell: I make it out to the beach that day. My half brothers are there. And my half sister. My baby brother, too. We are all familiar to one another. We’re a family.