The Impossible Knife of Memory(26)

Dad roared, “I don’t like the woods, damn it!”

Oxygen swooped into the gap he’d opened under the logs. The bonfire flared. For a second, I wished the grass was still long and dry so that the fire would catch and burn everything—the house, the truck, everything—and force him to see what a jerk he was being.

I started to walk away.

“Get back here,” Dad ordered.

“Why?”

He cold-stared at me without answering until I walked back and sat on an upturned log. The phone vibrated again. Either Finn was texting me an entire novel, or Topher and Gracie had just broken up.

“You looked like you were having fun last night,” I said quietly.

“I was,” he admitted. “But when I went to sleep, the nightmares were still there, bigger and badder than ever.”

He sipped from the can and stared into the fire as if he’d forgotten me entirely. I took a chance and checked my phone. The messages were from Finn, asking if I wanted to go skydiving, if I wanted to hunt for gold, if I wanted to ski down Mount Everest. Part of me wanted to go in the house, call him, gossip, flirt, do anything except talk to my father. I wrote back quickly, told him I’d call when I could.

Dad put out his hand. “Give that to me.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I’m tired of listening to it buzz.”

The fire crackled. I fought to keep my mouth shut because if I said what I wanted to say, the nuclear fallout would kill everything for hundreds of miles.

I put the phone on the ground. “I won’t answer it. I promise.”

“I want to see who you’re talking to. I’m your father. Give me the phone.”

“You?” I stared at him through the shimmering waves of heat. “Act like a father?”

He stood up. “What did you say?”

Something inside me boiled. “You’re a mess, Daddy,” I blurted out. “No job. No friends. No life. Half the time you can’t even take the dog for a walk without freaking out.”

“That’s enough, Hayley. Shut it.”

“No!” I stood up. “And now you’re all ‘I’m the dad’ but it doesn’t mean anything because all you do is sit on your ass and drink. You’re not a father, you’re—”

He grabbed the front of my sweatshirt. I gasped. His jaw was clenched tight. The bonfire danced in his eyes. I had to say something to calm him down, but he looked so far gone I wasn’t sure he’d hear me. He tightened his grip, pulling me up on my tiptoes. His free hand was balled into a fist. He had never hit me before, not once.

The wind shifted, swirling the smoke around us.

I braced myself.

The smoke made him blink. He swallowed and cleared his throat. He opened his hand, let go of my shirt, and started to cough.

I let out a shaky breath but didn’t move, afraid to set him off again. He turned his back to me, bent over with his hands on his knees and coughed hard, then spit in the dirt and stood up. The smoke shifted direction and I breathed in. Breathed out. On the inhale I was angry. On the exhale . . . there it was again. Fear. The fear made me angry and the anger made me afraid and I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Or who I was.

High above his head, an arrowed flock of geese was flying south. The sound of their honking moved slower than their bodies, floating down to the bonfire a few heartbeats after they moved out of range. A cloud moved in front of the sun, dimming the light and shrinking the shadows.

My phone rang and Dad jumped up as if it had given him an electric shock. Without a word he grabbed it and pitched it into the fire.

good morning want 2 go 2 paris? “Who’s that?” Dad asked.





_*_ 34 _*_

Small, ancient men lead us up the mountain to their village. I can’t speak their language. My interpreter claims he can.

Yesterday, the enemy set up grenade launchers on the flat roof of a house here. They fired at our outpost, corrected the angle and fired again. And again. Every shot looked like a small, red flower blooming across the valley. They rained destruction on our heads, distracting us so that we weren’t ready for the men who poured into our camp, weapons blazing.

Nine of my soldiers had to be evacuated. Two died before they made it back to base. We killed four insurgents and captured four more.

At the end of the battle, our air support fired missiles through the front door of the house, turning it into a hole in the side of the mountain.

The old men take us there. A tiny hand, stained with blood and dust, pokes out of the rubble. The old men shout at us.

“What are they saying?” I ask.

“We got the wrong house,” the interpreter says.

We blew up a house filled with children and mothers and toothless grandmothers. The insurgent house sits empty, a stone’s throw away.

The ancient men yell at me and shake their fists.

I understand every word they say.





_*_ 35 _*_

“Fifty people saw you at the game,” Topher said. “Stop lying.”

The first-period cafeteria was quiet, everyone in mourning for the death of another weekend.

“I’m not lying,” I repeated. “The whole thing was weird. He’s weird. Isn’t he, G?”

Gracie nodded, absently chewing on a fingernail. Something was up with her; she had no makeup on, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and it smelled like she hadn’t brushed her teeth.