The Impossible Knife of Memory(57)

I waited, hoping the owl would come back.

“Tell me something about her,” he said.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something fun. Something you never told anyone else.”

I pulled a long feather out of my shawl, slowly thinking over the tiny handful of things I knew about my mother.

“True story about Rebecca,” I said. “She jumped out of an airplane when she was pregnant with me. She didn’t know she was pregnant, of course. Teaching people how to parachute was her job. She had to give it up when she realized I was on board, too.”

I dipped the tip of the feather in a pool of melted wax and dragged a shiny thread of it across the mirror. “I swear I can remember that jump. That’s impossible, right? But I do: the falling, the rush of air, the jerk of the parachute, and then the sound of laughing, her laughing. I think she gave me the memory, like it was the first thing she wanted me to k now.”

Finn put his fingertip in the cooling wax and carefully lifted it, leaving a fingerprint behind. “So who is Trish?”

They were coming, on wings from far away, all the pictures and voices, smells, tastes, all the everything from the past was flying toward me as fast as it could.

I passed my hand through the flame.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll get burned.”

“So?”

Finn blew out the candle.

“I told you a secret,” I said in the dark. “It’s your turn.” “Only if you tell me about Trish.”

“Only if your secret is true.”

“True,” he echoed, playing with his lighter. He rolled the striker wheel slowly, sparks leaping out like miniature fireworks, the flame never quite catching. “You already know I have a sister, Chelsea. The secret is that she’s an addict. She’ll smoke or snort anything she can get her hands on.”

“Wow, really? I . . . I don’t know what to say. Where is she?”

“Boston.” He set the lighter on the mirror. “That’s why Dad took that job and why Mom drove there this morning. Chelsea is claiming she’s had another ‘big breakthrough.’ Woo-hoo.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she wants to screw my parents over again. They burned through their retirement money to pay for her first two rehabs. She ran away from both. The third time, they took out a second mortgage to pay for a clinic in Hawaii. She didn’t run away from that one. She came home with a great tan and stayed clean for eight whole days.”

His voice sounded older in the dark.

“Now she says she wants to ask forgiveness so we can all start the, quote, unquote, healing process. Such bullshit. She’ll guilt Mom into giving her money and then she’ll take off again.”

The lighter flared, breaking his face into waves of light and shadow.

“True enough?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

He lit the candle. “Your turn, Miss Blue. What’s so awful about this Trish beast? Why did you freak out?”

She put me on the bus, lunch box packed with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, crusts cut off. She coached my soccer team. She fired the babysitter who spanked me. Took me to work with her for a week until she found a new sitter. She drank wine, not vodka. Sometimes forgot to eat. She only smoked cigarettes when I was asleep. She forgot to answer the phone when I called for a ride home. She forgot to lock the door when she left.

“She used to be my mom,” I said. “And then she quit.”





_*_ 61 _*_

So I told him . . . most of it.

Rebecca, my biological mother, was T-boned by a drunk driver when I was a baby. Dad was fighting insurgents in the mountains, but the army gave him a couple of weeks to come home and sort things out. Battle zones don’t have day care, so he took me to his mother’s. Gramma raised me until she died, just before I turned seven. That was when Trish took over. She was Daddy’s base bunny, his stateside girlfriend who said she loved babysitting.

(I skipped the part where I really loved her and I used to call her Mommy because it sounded so dumb and pathetic.) “What about your mom’s relatives?” he asked. “I don’t remember meeting them. At some point they died. My grandma was all the family I needed.”

I glanced in the mirror. No one was waiting there. “What happened to your dad?”

The kindness in his voice almost sent me over the edge. I took a moment to clear my throat, then gave the short, clean version: two tours in Iraq, two tours in Afghanistan. How he earned the Purple Heart. Talked about the number of stitches in his leg, visiting him in the hospital, watching him in physical therapy. The drinking, the fighting, and how happy I was when they sent him back overseas again and how bad I felt about being happy. The IED that blew up his truck and his brain and his career. More months in the hospital, then the big welcome home, dog tags turned in, army days over. (That was before we knew about the fraying wires in his skull. Before we knew that he could turn into a werewolf even if the moon wasn’t full.) Trish drinking wine at breakfast. Trish walking out. “Did he get a new girlfriend after she left?”

I shook my head. “That’s when he became a truck driver. He couldn’t figure out anything else to do with me, so I rode with him.”