He Started It(46)

“Krista can be . . . difficult,” he says.

I choose my words with care. “She’s a little emotional.”

“More than a little.”

We both smile.

“Is there more to the story?” I say.

Another shrug. “She might have looked at my phone. Maybe she saw Tracy called.”

Tracy. The girlfriend he blew off to marry Krista. “Jesus Christ.”

“She called me,” he says. “I can’t control that.”

I walk away, refraining from calling him an asshole. Again.

An hour or so later, our new arrangement feels normal. Almost like Krista was never here.





Any idea what you would like to be when you grow up?

Not a parent. Seriously, what a pain in the ass. Everybody’s bored and hungry and someone always has to go to the bathroom.

Grandpa’s still pretty out of it, because the only water he gets is the kind with pills in it. On our last stop, I also bought some NyQuil, so if he gets extra thirsty he can have some of that.

Once or maybe twice I’ve looked at him and wondered if I’m doing the right thing. Then I think of when Grandma told me about Christmas a couple of years ago. She got mad about how much he spent on presents, and he got mad because she was telling him what to do. And physically, he was the stronger one.

She didn’t win that argument.

The way I remember that Christmas is different. Mom and Dad always had a big Christmas thing with a bunch of food and presents, and Grandma and Grandpa always came over for it. I didn’t even run away during the holidays. But two years ago, Grandma and Grandpa didn’t come because she was sick. The flu, they said. It wasn’t that. She just had too many bruises to show up.

When she told me the real story, I asked her why she stayed, because that’s what didn’t make sense to me. Who stays for that? Who doesn’t hit back? It was crazy.

She said she knew that. Grandma also said she had no idea why she stayed, she just did.

That made me hate him so much more. It’s the whole reason why I agreed to come on this trip, because from the start I knew it was all about him.

Except now I’ve got a new problem. One I don’t want to fucking deal with and I sure as hell don’t want to write about.





PART 2





It seems we’ve reached the middle of this story, and given the recent fight between Eddie and Krista, this seems like a perfect time to tell you about my parents.

I’ll start by saying my father is dead. We don’t talk about him and we don’t talk about our mother either, because she’s the one who killed him.

When it happened, I was going to school in Florida, Eddie had already graduated from Duke, and Portia finished high school a year early. She left for New Orleans before her first semester at Tulane even started—that’s how badly she wanted to get away from home. My parents were living alone together for the first time since Nikki was born.

The story, as Mom told it, goes like this:

They were in the kitchen, making dinner, when Dad brought up Nikki. My parents had been searching for her ever since she disappeared. They had hired private investigators to hunt down every lead, and they even paid a computer specialist to create pictures of how she might look today. Every year. They had a new picture made every single year.

If you met them, you wouldn’t know this. You wouldn’t know that all their money was gone, their house was mortgaged, and they had nothing in retirement. You wouldn’t notice anything unusual about them at all.

Nikki’s room upstairs was left intact, right down to the nineties rock band posters she had plastered all over her walls.

The evening our mother killed our father, he’d had enough. He walked into the kitchen and said, Honey, we have to stop. We’ve spent years looking for her, we’ve spent everything we have trying to find her, and we can’t keep doing this.



* * *



–––––

I don’t know if that’s how he really said it, but that’s what Mom claimed in her confession. The thing is, I can imagine it. I can see Mom in the kitchen, preparing dinner, still in her work clothes but wearing slippers instead of her heels. I can see Dad, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his slacks wrinkled from sitting all day. Maybe even the beginning of stubble on his cheeks. Grey stubble. His hair had turned completely grey by the time he died.

Mom didn’t answer him, so he tried again.

We have to move on, he said. We have to accept she isn’t coming back.

Still, Mom said nothing.

Paulette, he said. We have to face the truth. Nikki is dead.

She had been standing at the kitchen counter, slicing bell peppers. She turned around, the knife still in her hand, and she swung it at him. The blade grazed his stomach, slicing his shirt open, but the wound didn’t kill him.

The next nineteen did.

Someone next door heard him yell and called 911. The police found her sitting at the table, drenched in blood, eating raw bell peppers.

Was it wrong? Who’s to say? What’s the right way to act when your child disappears?

This is why we never talk about Mom.



* * *



–––––

Grandpa disowned her. Not just verbally, but legally. He didn’t help with her defense, didn’t try to get her committed instead of sent to prison. Instead, he claimed she was never his.