Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(14)

My dad and I spent the morning playing Mario Kart. I won again and again and again. I couldn’t lose. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he was letting me win, but it does now. My mom wasn’t around during all this. I don’t remember what she was doing. Maybe making my cake. Maybe she was still in bed. She was going through one of her dark times, and when that happened, she didn’t get out of bed much. It must have been one of her bad days. She couldn’t simply decide not to have one of her bad days on my birthday. My dad said he wanted a daddy-daughter day. Maybe Mom was why.

But even without her and just my dad, it was still a perfect day.

We played Mario Kart until we got hungry, and then he took me to Cicis for pizza. He challenged me to a contest of who could eat more. He told me I could eat whatever I wanted, so I think I got one slice of cheese pizza and then six slices of dessert pizza. I won this game too. Again, I suspect he let me win.

After seemingly hours of feasting like depraved Roman emperors (who were at Cicis for some reason), we returned home. With great ceremony, Dad began picking out videos. These were the forbidden fruits. The ones he and Mom watched only after I was asleep. The scary ones. The ones he’d promised I could watch when I was old enough. On that birthday, I was old enough.

We’re not talking Rob Zombie or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre here. For my first foray into horror, we watched a bunch of episodes of Dr. Gangrene. The gentle, silly humor of the segments interwoven with the movie diluted to a manageable degree what few frights the cheesy movies held. Still, I spent hours in a haze of delicious adrenaline, tension and release, snuggled up tight to my dad. He smelled like dryer sheets and cigarette smoke. We sat like that for hours, gorging ourselves on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, gummy worms, and grocery-store-brand grape soda, my favorite.

I loved every second. I knew even then something was writing itself onto my heart, changing me. Making me.

I dozed off at some point. I don’t know how sleep overcame the excitement of the day and all the sugar I’d eaten. I finally crashed, I guess. I woke up and I was in our front yard and it was crisp and dark. We didn’t have Mom’s palm-reading sign then. The air smelled like the sweetness of fallen apples right before they turn. I felt the sky yawning above me. But I wasn’t afraid because I could still smell my dad too, and I was in his embrace. I didn’t feel small because somehow all that emptiness above me made me feel large and protected.

“Look up, DeeDee,” he whispered in my ear, and I could feel the scrape of his stubble on my cheek. “The sky is amazing tonight.”

I did, and it was. The stars seemed to dance, there were so many of them, turning the black of the sky to a deep blue. I felt like if my dad let me go, I would fall upward into them, weightless.

“You cold?” he whispered. “Wanna go back inside?”

I shook my head.

“When did you get so big?” he asked. “But you’re still my baby as long as I can hold you.”

I gazed heavenward. The moon was bright too. Almost full. It turned the vapor of my breath silver. I shivered.

He kissed me on the cheek. “Happy birthday, baby doll.” He took me back inside and put me in my bed and stroked my face until I fell asleep again.

For the next year, almost every night, we watched his shows together. Horror hosts showing terrible movies and doing goofy skits. We watched even on his bad days—the days when, like Mom, he couldn’t get out of bed. He didn’t seem to have as many as Mom, but he had his too.

Mom got worse. To my seven-year-old self, it didn’t seem like they were fighting an unusual amount. But then again, I had no point of comparison. By my eighth birthday, he had left. He never told us why. I guess he was doing worse than I thought.

I wish I could have hated him. It would hurt to cling to that, like gripping a thorny branch. But it’d be something more solid than what I had—the memory of love.

And because I won the genetic mental-health lottery, I had plenty of bad days too. Like the ones Mom and Dad had. For years and years.

I almost didn’t make it.

But instead of not surviving, I got on some medication that made me feel right, and then I started making a dumb show on TV Six with my best friend, and that was something I could hold on to.

???

I go around to the back door and open it quietly because I saw Candy Tucker’s Dodge Challenger parked in our gravel driveway, which means my mom must be doing a reading. The smoky spice of incense hitting my nose confirms this. I set down the tub by the door and pad through our kitchen, the sink filled with unwashed dishes and mounds of unopened mail on the table.

“DeeDee?” my mom calls from the living room. “You don’t need to tiptoe, we’re all done in here.”

“I got a new man,” Candy calls out in her bourbon-sanded alto. “Needed your mama to tell me if he was worthless like the last one. And the one before him. And the one before him.”

I enter our candlelit living room. Shadows dance on the knickknacks, paintings, photos, and thrift/antique store arcana that cover nearly every horizontal and vertical surface. “And?”

“Looks gooooood!” Candy says with a salacious grin. Behind her my mom makes a pained “mmmmmmm” expression and flashes me the “so-so” sign. Candy gives a long, hacking, wet cough.

“He’s a lucky guy,” I say.

“Tell that to my last three husbands,” Candy says, rising from the small table where my mom does her tarot readings. “I been meaning to catch your show, honey, but it seems like I’m never home when it’s on.”