The Impossible Knife of Memory(79)

As fast as that scene—me, shotgun, ceiling, boom—unfolded in my head, everything that could go wrong with that plan chased in on its heels. Dad would grab the gun or Michael would grab the gun or Goose would pull out a gun of his own and it would get scary bad and very bloody.

“Do we have any bacon?” Dad asked.

I crossed the room and unplugged the TV. “I’m calling the cops.”

“No, you’re not,” Michael said.

I pulled out my phone. “Wanna watch?”

Goose stood up. “Dude.”

“Andy,” Michael said. “Tell your kid to put the phone away.”

“Come on, Hayley,” Dad said.

I opened the phone.

“They’ll arrest your dad,” Michael said. “Is that what you want?”

I opened the front door and stepped into freezing, blinding sunlight. I turned on my camera and walked far enough down the driveway that I could get the plates of both bikes in a photo.

“What are you doing?” Michael shouted from the doorway.

I climbed into the cab of the big rig, locked myself in, dialed 911, and explained that my father was sick and two men were in my house and they wouldn’t leave. As the emergency lady took down my information, Michael and Goose jumped on their bikes and roared away.

Yes! Score!

I set the phone on the dash and high-fived myself. I sighed and picked up the phone. “They’re gone,” I said. “Those guys I just told you about. We don’t need the police anymore.”

“An officer has to respond to the call, sweetie,” she explained. “Just to make sure you’re safe.”

“No, really, you don’t have to send them,” I said, my voice tightening. “Me calling you, that scared them off. I’m totally safe. So is Dad.”

“Is he going to need an ambulance?”

“What? No. It’s . . . the flu. He needs chicken soup, not cops.”

“We have a couple of officers who are sick with it, too. We’re a little shorthanded, but I guarantee you, a policeman will be at your house within the hour. Do you want to stay on the line?”

I hung up.

They’d find his weed. What else? Were all his guns legal? What if they brought in a drug-sniffing dog? Would it find hidden stashes that I didn’t know existed? What if Dad saw the uniforms and went ape shit? What if they arrested him for assault and possession, or worse because they thought he was a dealer? What if they took him away? Where would they put me?

A wave of nausea hit me hard. I coughed, swallowed bile, and did the one thing I swore that I’d never do.

I called Trish.





_*_ 82 _*_

By the time she arrived, I had opened every window in the house, sprayed air freshener, and stuck Dad in the shower. I’d thrown the bong as far into the cornfield as I could and flushed his pills down the toilet. I’d cleaned up the now-solid puke from the carpet, poured baby powder on the mess it left behind and tried to vacuum it all away.

Dad stepped out of the shower and was yelling at me to close the goddamn windows when Trish walked in. I explained what had happened in a few quick sentences while she checked Dad’s pulse. He’d put on a baggy pair of sweatpants and an ancient sweater and looked more like a homeless man than a war hero or my father. She told me to shut the windows while she got him into bed. I finished a heartbeat before a squad car pulled in the driveway, lights flashing, no siren.

“Can they arrest him if they don’t find anything?” I asked.

“Depends,” she said. “Keep your story simple. You woke up, Dad was passed out, and you didn’t know the guys in your living room. You never saw them before.”

“But Michael—”

“No names. They wouldn’t leave. You were scared. Okay?”

A cop knocked at the front door.

“Feel free to cry,” she added.

Trish took charge, explaining who she was and why she was there, and then taking one of the cops, the skinny one, back to see Dad. The other one was built like a defensive tackle, massive shoulders, neck thicker than his head, and hands the size of baseball mitts. He was on guard, assessing danger with every step like Dad did, but by the time he’d checked out the whole house and sat down with me in the living room, he had relaxed a bit.

I answered his questions. Dad had the flu. I stayed home to take care of him. No, he hadn’t been to a doctor. No, I didn’t know the guys. No, I couldn’t describe them, I was too scared.

He wrote down my answers in a spiral notebook and then he asked me the exact same questions again. I gave the same exact answers. He wrote them down again and then he looked at me and smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. He had brown eyes, light brown like an acorn. He glanced above my head.

“Who punched the wall?” he asked.

“It was like that when we moved in,” I said. “Squatters.” He did not write that down. “Stay put,” he said. He walked down the hall, his keys and handcuffs and various chains jingling, sounding absurdly close to what I’d always imagined Santa’s sleigh would sound like. At the end of the hall, he and his buddy held a murmured meeting. The heat had kicked on and the air was beginning to smell like Michael’s satanic cologne. What if this kept happening, what if Dad wasn’t on a roller coaster, what if he was on a spiraling slide, turning down and down into the darkness? What would Michael do the next time?