When the Lights Go Out(35)

I don’t cry about it because my eyes are done crying. They’ve dried up. And so instead I think things like, if Mom isn’t here, then I don’t want to be here either. It’s grim, and yet it’s true.

My thoughts go on like this for what feels like hours because it probably is. Eventually they turn into a guilt trip, where I loathe myself for sleeping through Mom’s death. For getting testy with her when she puked for the sixth time in a row, missing the toilet by a mile. For not speaking to her for weeks when she wouldn’t come clean to me about my dad. For not holding her hand the time she chaperoned my fifth grade field trip to the planetarium, or bothering to thank her for the embroidery thread she got me in middle school—a half dozen colors to make friendship bracelets with. I’d only huffed and stomped off to another room, thinking how stupid could she be. Didn’t she know I didn’t have any friends? These memories haunt me now.

In truth, Mom and I hardly fought. The only arguments she and I ever had were mostly over my father. Mom never wanted to talk about him—she refused to talk about him—and so I snuck around her back to try and learn more.

I was six years old when I first realized I didn’t have a father. Until then I was too oblivious to see that other kids did and I didn’t. Mom and I lived alone. We kept to ourselves much of the time. I didn’t go to preschool and I didn’t have friends. I didn’t know much of anything outside of my world with Mom, not until school began, and then my world grew exponentially larger, though still, in comparison to everyone else’s, it was small.

It was my first day of kindergarten when I realized that all of the kids in the class, aside from me, had both a mom and a dad. I remember that day, organizing our belongings inside the bulky metal cubbyholes, while our moms hovered in the classroom, talking to the teacher, talking to other moms. Everyone except for my mom, because she stood there alone, talking to no one. This confused me. Why didn’t Mom talk to the other women?

But what confused me even more was the huddle of men in the classroom. A whole busload of them. Not just moms, but moms and men. Who were these men, and what were they doing here?

I asked one little girl. I pointed at the giant of a man standing by her side. Who is that? I asked, eyes wide, looking skyward. She said it was her dad, and though I’d heard that word before, it wasn’t one that was readily in my vocabulary.

I tallied up the men in the room, realizing that every single child had one but me.

The mention of my father didn’t come up again until later in the school year, when some kid asked where he was. We’d had a music performance and, while everyone else had a mom and dad in tow—grandma and grandpa too—I only had Mom. And things like that, when you’re six, are big news. How Jessie Sloane doesn’t have a dad.

Where’s your dad? the kid asked, all dressed up in a sweater-vest and pants.

I don’t have one, I said, thinking that was the end of it. But he came back with some comment about how everyone has a dad, and others started to laugh.

I asked Mom about it that night at home. I had to know. Where’s my dad? I asked, standing in her bedroom doorway while she lay on the bed, bare feet crossed at the ankles, reading a book. Even at six years old, I could see that she was tired from a day spent cleaning someone else’s home.

I didn’t wait for her reply. Joey Malone said everyone has a dad, I told Mom as she uncrossed her ankles and set her bookmark between the pages of her book. So where’s mine? I asked, feeling aggrieved all of a sudden. As aggrieved as a little kid can be.

Mom was keeping something from me.

Mom had a secret that she wouldn’t share with me.

Mom’s face turned as red as hot coal. Joey had no right to say that, she told me. Not everyone has a dad. Not you.

But her answer came with no explanation.

Maybe he was dead. Maybe they were divorced. Maybe they were never married in the first place. Or maybe I never really had a dad.

Still, I started snooping around the house to be sure, in case there was something hiding there that I might find. Evidence. A clue.

A few years later I became more tenacious about it, more annoying. I asked Mom again where my father was. What had happened to him. Is he dead? I wanted to know. I said that word with the testiness of a preteen. The exasperation. Dead.

But she wouldn’t say. Time and again, she changed the subject; she pretended not to hear me ask. She had a brilliant way of mincing words, of making me forget what I had asked. Of clamming up and saying nothing.

And yet, again and again, I asked. A hundred times after that. But never did she tell me.

I became ruthless about it.

When I was twelve I set a place at the dinner table for him. Whoever he might be. Just in case he decided to show. Mom swiped his silverware from the table post-haste. Flung it back in the drawer.

Let’s not do this, Jessie, she said.

I searched city streets for his face. Never sure what I was looking for, but always looking. I wondered if he had blondish hair and dimples like me. Or if he was a brunette, a redhead, maybe even some other ethnicity.

Maybe we looked nothing alike.

Or maybe we were the kind that could pass for twins.

I learned that dimples are inherited. A dominant trait. Meaning only one parent would have to have them for me to have them. And seeing as Mom had none, I easily reasoned that they came from him. From Dad. That, barring some sort of genetic mutation, I’d inherited them from my father.