The Impossible Knife of Memory(78)

I spent the next morning picking out glass and broken dishes from the carpet. Thousands of slivers as thin as pins, sharp on both ends pricked my fingers. Gloves made the job harder so I finally used a comb, inch by inch through the living room and the dining room. I saved the kitchen floor for last because it was small and easy; just needed to wipe it down with damp paper towels, my knees protected by a scrap of cardboard.

By lunchtime, the floors were safe and I could let the dog out of the basement.

Dad slept.

In school, they were studying Homer, tangents, tonal systems, Dred Scott, and finger whorls. Finn was probably flirting and studying and finishing his applications and saving the world all at the same time. I kept hearing him say “You take care of him more than he takes care of you” over and over again.

When Benedetti’s office called, I said my father and I had flu again.

When the sun went down, Dad woke up, chain-smoked, and ate two bologna sandwiches. After eating, he went outside to talk on his cell. I wanted him to start drinking again so he would pass out. I didn’t have to worry about him hurting himself when he was unconscious.

He opened another bottle when he came in, sat me on the couch, and made me listen to stuff I’d heard a million times before: ambushed foot patrols, IEDs ripping open vehicles and bodies, suicide bombers living in ghost villages. The private who was shot in the neck. The guy who removed his helmet to wipe the sweat off his head, and the sniper who blew that head into a red mist that hung in the air for a moment before it dropped to the dirt and soaked the ground.

The thing under his skin took over his eyes and made them look dead. The thing raged and paced, snapped at the dog, yelled at me.

I tried to go to bed around two, but that set him off again. I stayed awake. I listened. Donkeys loaded with weapons. Bloated bodies. The smell of the dead. Flies.

Around quarter after four, he puked all over the carpet and finally passed out. I laid him on his side, put a bucket by his head, and threw a towel over the mess so the dog wouldn’t eat it. I took a long shower to wash off the tears and the stench of whiskey puke.

The sound of submachine guns on automatic fire ripped me out of sleep, gasping. I tried to focus and fought my way over the line that divides asleep from awake. The guns sounded again, a heavy burst of artillery, and then a couple of men laughed. It was a game. Just another shooting game.

I started to pull the blankets over my head and stopped. Men. Laughing. Men, as in “more than one,” as in my father had company and “laughing,” as in there was no way Dad could be laughing, so who was in my living room?

I threw off the blankets and scrambled into clothes. The sunshine stealing through the narrow crack between the curtains sliced the living room into thick patches of darkness and slivers of light. Two men, Michael and some dude I’d never seen before, sat on kitchen chairs in front of the TV, controllers in their hands. Dad sat upright on the couch smoking a bong. His squinted eyes were swollen. The smoke that slipped out of his mouth was the color of his skin, like he was a miserable old dragon slowly disintegrating into ash.

“Why are they here?” I asked.

“He invited us.” Michael turned around. “Asked us to come over and cheer him up.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“He’s right,” Dad spoke slowly. “I called him. Why aren’t you at school?”

“Make them leave,” I demanded.

He set the bong a stack of books. “They just got here.”

“So?”

Dad gave a half-baked smile. “Kept you up last night, didn’t I? Sorry about that, princess. Why don’t you make us some coffee, cook up a big breakfast?”

The weed had driven the crazy back under his skin, but it was a temporary situation at best. “I don’t want them here.”

“Listen to your elders,” Michael said.

“Eggs would be nice,” Dad said. “An omelet, with lots of cheese.”

“Scrambled,” Michael said. “How about you, Goose?” he asked the guy next to him.

Goose paused the game and turned around. He had the scabby face of a tweeker, gaunt and haunted. “Not hungry.”

I couldn’t move. Didn’t know what to say. The room looked like the backdrop of a PBS documentary: holes in the wall, messed-up furniture, smoke drifting from shadow to light, the green-lit battle onscreen holding the attention of everyone but me. Or maybe a cheap-ass cable supernatural horror show—the goons in front of the screen ready to morph into demons, the smoke easing in and out of my father really a spirit sent to claim him for the dark side.

“Why, Daddy?” I asked.

He reached for the bong. “I like having them here.” Michael chuckled, his fingers piloting the soldier onscreen through a massacre. “Hear that, Goose? He likes us.”

That’s when I realized that I wanted to kill Michael. I knew I couldn’t, knew I wouldn’t. If I jumped him, he’d swat me away like a fly. Dad would come out of his stupor to defend me and then things would get bad and bloody. I could get out one of Dad’s pistols, no, a shotgun, and threaten them with it. Not that I’d shoot them—I sure as hell wasn’t going to jail over those two morons—but they wouldn’t know that. I’d scare them off by shooting over their heads. We were going to have to put up new drywall, anyway.