When We Were Animals(65)

It would be different now, I thought. His colleagues, they would not know what to say to me now that I had grown into a young woman. People fear those curious interstitial creatures who are neither children nor adults.

So I did not go inside. Instead I sat on the low curb, feeling the coldness of concrete, and watched my father work. I felt alien in that place, watching as the sun went down and the workers began looking at me as they came out of the offices and climbed into their cars. I could smell the oily exhaust of their engines coming alive. I could hear the lonely sound of tires poppling against the surface of the parking lot.

Finally my father came out and saw me. He asked me what I was doing there, and I told him I was waiting for him. He asked how long I had been there, and I told him an hour. He asked what I had been doing—just sitting and watching? Sitting and watching, I replied.

“Sometimes, Daughter,” he said, “you are unfathomable.”

I liked it when he called me Daughter, and he put his arm over my shoulder, and we walked together toward his car, and for a sliver of a moment I remembered what it was like before things went bad, and I wondered if it would ever be like that again.

*



That was the same time that Blackhat Roy Ruggle began parking in front of our house. He had a car now, an old Camaro, once red but now a faded, patchy orange, and it was sitting silent near the woods across the street when I was going to bed that night. I stopped cold when I saw it from my bedroom. I could see the silhouette of Roy’s head, backlit by the street lamps, through the rear window. Cigarette smoke rose from the driver’s window, and as I watched, his arm reached out and flicked ashes onto the tarmac.

This was the first time. There were others. I meant to confront him, to march out to his car and tell him he did not scare me—but whenever I approached, the Camaro growled to life and sped away.

Sometimes in the morning I found a collection of cigarette butts on the street or a smashed soda cup, the plastic straw twisted into anxious knots. Sometimes I could hear the distinctive sound of his engine pass by without stopping, a high-pitched rumble while approaching and a lower-pitched one departing. I knew this was called the Doppler effect, and in my imagination, I pictured explaining the phenomenon to him, sitting in the passenger seat of the Camaro, maybe drawing a diagram in ballpoint pen on the back of a paper fast-food bag, and him—the all-at-once light in his eyes as he understood—smiling. Sometimes I turned off the light in my bedroom and watched him through a slit in the curtains. He could not have seen me, but he seemed to be looking right at me.

There was nothing I could tell from his dark form.

Maybe he was angry and plotting revenge over something I had done.

Maybe he was sad, like the rest of us.

*



My father wondered where I was going those afternoons and evenings. He did not ask about it directly. It was not his way. Instead he said things like, “Boy, you’ve been keeping late hours,” or “Do you think you’ll be home for dinner?”

The house was quieter in those days. We were too aware of each other—like two guarded animals circling each other on a solitary hill. We had sniffed out all the shifts that had occurred in both our lives, and we were keen to them. It wasn’t anger or discomfort or fear—just a heightened sensitivity to certain silent currents that seemed to ebb and flow through the house.

We didn’t avoid each other. In fact, more frequently than I had in the past, I did my homework downstairs, spread out on the floor, while my father read the newspaper and drank Earl Grey tea. But I was distracted. I couldn’t help but be watchful, listening for the fluttering sound of the newspaper pages turning, the sound of his teacup clattering against the saucer as he lifted it and set it down, the sound of his hand running across the scruffy line of his chin while he read.

Sometimes I would listen at the door to his office when he went in there to talk to Margot Simons on the telephone. I couldn’t hear particular words, but I didn’t need them—I was listening for cadences, certain lilts and tones that might speak to who he really was when I wasn’t around to discomfit him.

*



There’s something else I remember—from a long time before that. When I close my eyes, I can see it still.

My father, he looks the same as ever in my mind, no variations. That magisterial jawline, that long face, those rough hands.

In my memory, he sits on the edge of the couch, and I am caught between his knees. I have a splinter in my finger, and he has fetched the tweezers from the medicine cabinet. He has a monocular magnifying glass wedged magically in his eye—I don’t know how he does it. I can’t get it to stay in my eye when I try. He switches back and forth between two instruments: the tweezers and the blade of his pocketknife.

I writhe in panic, but his knees tighten around me. They hold my little body still. I am pressed between the muscly levers of his legs, and I am safe.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t hurt at all. You won’t feel a thing. I promise.”

He pinches my finger tight.

“Ow,” I say.

“Oh, come on,” he says. “That doesn’t hurt.”

He tells me it doesn’t hurt, and I believe him, and so it doesn’t hurt. He instructs my body on what to feel. And I am relieved, because I relish instruction. How does one know what to make of the world if one is not told?