The Impossible Knife of Memory(87)

The first wave of shock was wearing off. The edges of my mind were slowly waking up, tingling painfully.

“So you guys won’t search for him?” I asked.

“We can’t,” she admitted. “Not until this time tomorrow.”

“What if he’s dead by then?”

Her eyes were sympathetic. “He won’t be, honey. My guess is we’re going to get a call midafternoon about him being drunk and disorderly in a bar downtown. Not pretty, but he’ll be alive. Here’s my number.”

Finn took the card from her and said something, but I stopped listening. The engine in my brain turned over. The police wouldn’t help until it didn’t matter. Trish was on her way back, but she’d be too late.

Finn stood in front of the window, watching the police car drive away. “Want some more hot chocolate? A sandwich?”

“Sure.”

I blinked again, eyes so dry. Sunshine flooded the floor. Handfuls of fluffy snow blew off the edge of the roof and

L A UR I E H A L S E A N D E RS O N

floated to the ground like feathers. The wind whirled snow devils in the yard, but the clouds had thinned and the snow had stopped.

Daddy wasn’t at a bar.

He wasn’t drinking.

He was on a mission. He was sober, clear-thinking, and

following a plan. He’d organized everything. He tied up the loose ends. He could not live anymore, so he’d gone off to die alone, like a wounded animal. But where?

I tried to see him, tried to picture what he had been doing here after I left this morning, what he’d been doing when I was asleep. I saw him writing those damn cards, checking to make sure they were in the right order. Had he looked through the photo album before he put it in the box? Had he cried?

The house was quiet except for Finn rattling in the silverware drawer and the distant roar of a snowplow.

I’d always been afraid that he would kill himself at home, but now I realized why he wouldn’t do that: he didn’t want me to find him. I flashed on the way he had hugged me before I left: sudden and fierce, a true Dad hug.

A good-bye hug.

How was he going to do it? Where?

When we were on the road, there’d been a couple of nights he’d gone on incredible rants when shit-faced drunk. He talked about the all the deaths, all the blood that had soaked him.

(He didn’t take any guns.)

He talked about the faces of dead soldiers. Eyes wide in terror. Mouths open in pain. He didn’t want their families to see those faces.

(His meds were all here. Did he have an illegal stash?)

What did he want me to see?

Finn set a plate with bologna sandwiches and two steaming mugs on the table, and sat next to me. “I bet she’s right.” He took my hand in his. “I bet he’ll be back before dinner.”

The furnace kicked on, making the curtains move like someone was hiding behind them and pushing smells around the room. Hot chocolate. The tang of mustard, lots of mustard. The smell of the swimming pool, overchlorinated, leeching out of our clothes

ripping . . . sun glaring off the pool grown-ups crowded I can’t find him music so loud nobody hears when I slip into the deep end water closes over my face I open my mouth to yell for Daddy and water sneaks in my mouth my eyes watching the water get thick and then thicker and grown-ups dancing . . .

“Hayley?” Finn frowned.

The whole room snapped into focus so sharp it made my eyes water. Finn had a smudge on the bottom of the left lens of his glasses. Dog hair on his jeans where Spock had rubbed against him. I could see everything: ghost squares on the walls where Gramma used to hang our pictures, a sliver of glass in the carpet that I had missed, the memory of Daddy under the water.

“I know where he is,” I said. “I know how he’s going to do it.”





_*_ 93 _*_

“We should call the cops,” Finn said.

“You heard her, they won’t do anything.”

“But you have a concrete idea now, a reasonable one.

You could ask them to drive by, check it out.”

I crossed the room and picked up his jacket. “What if they do? What if they find him and he hasn’t done it yet? I guarantee if he sees a cop car, he’ll end it right then and there. Boom.”

“What if he does it when he sees you?”

I pulled out the car keys. “You should stay here.” “You’re not going without me.”

“I’m driving.”

He smiled. “I knew you were going to say that.”

I didn’t know I was right until I turned off Route 15 onto Quarry Road and saw the bootprints that cut through the snow all the way up the hill. I turned the wheel and floored it. Finn grabbed the dashboard with one hand and pulled out his phone with the other.

Ice lay under the fresh snow, making the car fishtail. I steered into the spin, overcorrected, turned the other way, kept my foot hard on the accelerator. The tires spun, then caught and shot us forward, then spun again. Finn shouted as we brushed up against the fence. I fought the wheel and got us pointed uphill again. The car moved forward a few more feet, snow flying in the air, and then it stopped moving, defeated by the physics of ice and incline.

I put it in park, got out, and ran, slipping, falling, scrambling all the way to the top. He’d paced along the fence, north, south, north, south, long enough to beat the snow into a path and smoke a couple cigarettes. I shaded my eyes against the glare and looking along the other side of the fence until . . .