The Impossible Knife of Memory(42)

“Sounds perfect,” I said, pouring the milk.

As the movie started, she fished her mint tin out of her purse, swallowed one of the pills in it, then handed it to me. It had more pills in it than before, different ones: small yellow ovals and pale pink diamonds and white circles.

“Did you steal all these from your mom?” I asked.

“Bought them,” she admitted. “You want one or not?”

“What do they do?”

“Depends.” She pointed. “Those ones make you sleep, that one wakes you up, the rest of them make the world suck less. It’s not like they get you high or anything. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m not looking at you like anything.”

She shrugged. “My parents started it; they put me on ADD meds when I was in fifth grade. You watch, by the time we have kids, they’ll have a pill for everything, even cheating boyfriends.”

“He’s not cheating, Gracie.”

“Everybody cheats.” She closed the box. “Want some popcorn?”

Her mom walked in without knocking an hour later, and stopped, confused to see me there. “Oh,” she said. “Hello, Hayley.”

“Hello, Mrs. Rappaport.”

“Hey, Mom.” Gracie smiled, her glassy eyes wide and innocent. “Hayley has to stay here tonight. We made cookies, want some?”

“I don’t remember giving permission for a sleepover,” Mrs. Rappaport said.

“I told you,” I said to Gracie. “I’ll go home.”

Gracie pushed me back down. “No, you won’t.” She turned to her mother. “Her dad went away for the weekend. We can’t let her stay alone, can we? What if someone breaks in?”

“Where did he go?” her mom asked.

I thought fast. “Hunting. With some army buddies. I’ll be fine, really. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

Mrs. Rappaport sighed. “All right, you can stay. Just keep it quiet. I have a migraine.”

Finn never called. Never texted, either.

Some time during the second movie, the box of mints that were not mints placed itself on the bed next to me and opened its lid and before I knew it a pill was in my mouth and I washed it down with milk.

I thought I had taken the waking-up pill, but soon my eyes started to close themselves and I drifted off as Gracie talked about going to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. I curled up under a quilt on her bed, her ancient cat perched on my hip and purring, and I sank into a heavy, soft sleep as Gracie’s voice faded. The rumbling purr of the cat sounded like a well-tuned diesel engine, and I was on the road again, at night, safely buckled into the passenger seat as Dad’s truck shot through the dark, the driver’s seat empty, the steering wheel too far away for me to reach.





_*_ 45 _*_

We drink tea made with dirty water over an open fire near the village, far from the mountains. The radio cuts in and out; we can’t account for the interference. We swirl the tea in metal cups, waiting. Not sure what we’re waiting for.

Then the screaming starts.

Fire boils in the desert-colored sky, breathing poison down his lover’s throat and eating her children. A moving mountain, alive, hungry, thundering toward this village, our tents: simoom.

We throw the tea in the fire. Shout in seven languages, guns, arms, fingers all pointing to the wind coming for us. We race. We hide. Pray.

The crippled camel-girl limps. The hungry wind is coming and all she can do is limp. I turn around. Someone grabs my arm, pulls me inside, screams in my head, but I watch her. The red scarf is torn from her hair. She limps. The village disappears. The wind is a lion, jaws open wide. He swallows the crippled camel-girl and scours the color from her eyes.

Sand fills my mouth, stuffs my head with the stench of the lion. Pours into my ears the screams of every corpse. The winds of the desert have names. They feed on the bodies of broken children and rip out the beating hearts of men.





_*_ 46 _*_

Gracie’s mother woke us up on Sunday morning and said that Gracie had to go to church with her and that I could join them if I was in the mood. She didn’t want me tagging along, I could tell, so even though Gracie looked like she wanted to strangle me, I said I had too much homework and, after a small bowl of cereal, packed up my stuff.

“We never go to church, this is ridiculous,” Gracie said as we stood on her driveway.

“Maybe she wants to ask God to help her get back together with your dad.”

“As if He cares.”

I went to the park and sat until I saw Mrs. Rappaport’s car speed away, Gracie slumped in the front seat, staring at her phone. I walked back to their house and keyed in the entry code that opened the garage door. (This took no skill; I’d seen Gracie do it—112233—at least a dozen times.) I set the alarm on my phone to make sure I’d be out of there long before they returned.

Back in the not-family room, I paged through the magazines again and then the photo albums that stood in a neat row on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, but saw nothing out of the corner of my eye. The pages stayed flat and shiny. The room didn’t share any secrets or replay scenes that happened more than ten years earlier.

The person who went upstairs to Mrs. Rappaport’s bathroom looked a little bit like me. I saw what she did, watched it in the mirror. She opened the medicine cabinet, took out each pill bottle, and read the label, then put them back. Except for one. She poured the pills into her hand. They looked like generic vitamins or allergy medicine, something ordinary. Could it be this simple? She spilled the pills from one palm to the other like they were coins or cheap pearls. Her father swallowed pills to make the hurt go away. A long time ago they came in white bottles that had labels printed with the pharmacy’s phone number and the doctor’s name. Now they came in empty cans of chew or old baggies. It didn’t matter where he got them. They didn’t fix anything. They blurred the lines and turned the voices into ugly static.