When we started making progress, my father suggested I invite some friends over to show off our work. I decided against this because it seemed a strange thing to do, but a few of my parents’ friends visited and offered compliments. Each day my father and I inched our ladders and buckets farther around our house. Inside, my mother dusted and rearranged with the windows open. She would poke her head out and ask where my father put their wedding album or where I kept my old scout uniform. She packed these things to store in my grandmother’s garage while my father and I sanded small sections of our house, working until it grew too dark to see.
My grandmother’s house was close to the beach and had two bedrooms. She slept in hers, my parents took the guest room, and I spent nights on the tweed couch that itched my skin. Soon I started sleeping in the van. I snuck out after everyone retired for the night and shambled inside with the sunrise, well before my father started frying eggs for breakfast. Ever since we’d started sleeping there, my parents fought more. My mother didn’t like for my grandmother to hear them, so they yelled behind the guest room door and ignored each other at dinner, passing helpings without allowing their eyes to meet.
On the night that everything happened, my father stepped out of his room wearing the black sweat suit my grandmother had given him for Christmas, which made her smile. It was the first time I’d seen him since the morning; he’d worked on the house without me that afternoon. I’d come home, ready to paint, but he’d left a note telling me to take the day off because I’d been doing such a fine job. That evening, he didn’t say anything to me or my grandmother but excused himself to go outside. The smell of sweet cigar smoke crawled under the door. A few minutes later my mother stepped into the hallway and stood still, as if she were lost and confused about where to go. Then she moped into the den and lay on the couch, resting her head in my grandmother’s lap. Seeing her like that saddened me. We watched the late newscast, but in the middle of it she raised herself from the couch and clicked it off. “I would like to hear happy stories sometimes,” she said and walked down the hall. “I would like to hear that things are improving.”
That night I decided against pulling out the bed but just stretched out on the van’s couch and thought about my mother. I fell asleep still in my clothes, trying to remember a positive news story and could only think of Joseph Henson’s, one she did not know.
I AWOKE SHORTLY AFTER HE CRANKED THE ENGINE. Outside the night was a dark, dark blue and I lay as still as I could, wondering what I should do, where he was going. The van was cruising slowly and my father turned off the radio. In the driver’s seat he mouthed something, and though I couldn’t decipher his words I thought he was making a list. And just as I resigned myself to staying hidden and waiting to see what would happen, the van stopped and his eyes fixed me in the rearview mirror. They narrowed in a way that made me cold. He glared at me, but I turned to the window and realized we were parked near our house. We stayed quiet. He was quiet, I think, because he felt trapped and didn’t know how to proceed, and I was quiet because I could think of nothing to say.
“I was asleep,” I said.
He continued staring at me in an awful way, as if I’d accused him of having an affair, which was something that had crossed my mind. His eyes held me for several long seconds before he said, “Get out of the van.” All I could think was that we were going to paint. My father eased the door closed behind me, to the point where it rested on its casing and the interior light dimmed. We crept to our porch. Clouds covered the small moon and no porch lamps burned on Whistler Road. We moved in darkness, me behind my father. When I asked again what we were doing, he raised his hand for me to hush, so I did. I fell in behind him and in front of me he became invisible.
Inside, we turned on no lights. My father hustled around the house picking up things and replacing them, as if he’d lost something. The air reeked of turpentine. He whispered that we wouldn’t stay long and vanished into his bedroom. Because I could think of nothing else, I went into my room and looked it over without the lights. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but I still couldn’t see clearly and stretched my arms out to keep from bumping into things. The squeaks of drawers opening and closing sounded behind me, and soon my father entered with a satchel over his shoulder. He handed it to me and my arm jerked with its weight, then he said to wait outside.
“Wait for what?”
“For me,” he said, ferreting through the cupboards.
“I feel like we’re robbing ourselves.” I laughed a little and expected him to smile. But he only repeated for me to go outside. And though I never actually thought we were stealing what we already owned, I realized that whatever we were doing was something other fathers and sons did not do.
Sitting on our porch, I felt vulnerable, yet standing up made my hands seem heavy and awkward. Painting equipment lay around the foundation of our house, strewn in a way that my father had chided me for in the past. Even in the moonlight I could see paint drying in the bristles of brushes, and cans left open since that afternoon, two of them fallen over and bleeding onto the leaves of my mother’s flower bed. I peeked inside to find my father, and when I didn’t see him, I moved to clean up the mess. But before I took two steps I stopped, and inched back to our porch, where I glimpsed him inside. He patted his pockets, and the tip of his cigar glowed like lava. Everything fell silent. I turned away and he came outside and locked the door behind him. We drove away without turning on our lights.
MY GRANDMOTHER ANSWERED THE PHONE AND screamed, screamed in a way you do not want to hear anyone close to you scream. We sped to our house still wearing pajamas. My grandmother sobbed and I kept asking what had happened, but my parents never answered. The sun was just starting to climb through the morning clouds, but enough light filtered down to see the house was a complete loss. The fire was out, but its wet-tar odor lingered; flames smell different than smoke. My mother collapsed into my grandmother’s arms, the way I pictured our second story collapsing onto our first. Obie dawdled around, adjusting his glasses and trying to comfort everyone by squeezing their shoulders. Everything was black and saturated and reeking of sulfur. I feared causing more damage, cringing every time a piece of wood or glass cracked beneath my feet. I tiptoed to where my room had been and tried to identify things. Water seeped into my shoes and soaked my socks. I remembered that pioneers had burned old barns to save the nails and I wondered what anyone could salvage from our house. The firemen talked and gestured to my father, circling our foundation. I heard two-by-fours snap beneath their feet, and they kicked pieces of our walls and rummaged through ashes of the attic. One of them asked my father if he had any enemies and he answered that he had no more than any man. Then they spoke of turpentine and electrical shorts.
My mother sifted through the remains of her garden. Charred paint cans cluttered the small space where she used to plant her bulbs. She stood and placed her palms on my cheeks and looked into my eyes as though she wanted to apologize for all of this. Her hands bruised my face with soot, and I felt myself start crying. She pulled me to her and over her shoulder I noticed the small plastic fence around her garden. Much of it had melted into nothing, but a few of the stakes had survived the blaze. They remained blackened and gnarled, bowed in on themselves, pointing at each other like fists.
FIRE INVESTIGATORS AND INSURANCE ADJUSTERS ruled that faulty wiring had caused the blaze. When my father relayed this news, it was the first time in two days that we’d heard his voice. My parents didn’t speak much during this time—to each other or to me. And, like them, I held my tongue.
We stayed at my grandmother’s. One night my mother stalked into the living room as I was trying to fall asleep. She smelled of salt water and cigarette smoke, a combination of scents that still conjures her image. She wore a dress I didn’t recognize, but this might have been because very little light shafted through the blinds. I thought again that she was leaving, and it surprised me when she sat down in my grandmother’s chair.
“I went for a walk on the beach,” she said, as if answering a question.
I adjusted my pillow, doubled it over so I could see her better.
She exhaled. The sound made me expect a ribbon of blue smoke to stream from her mouth, but it didn’t. “My father was a fisherman. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“A shrimper,” she said. “His boat was named The Reina.”
I remembered the man and that his skin felt like an old football. I looked hard at my mother then, at her skin, and for the first time realized that she had once been beautiful.
“He told us stories.” She pulled at the hem of her skirt, and then placed her hands in her lap, where they reminded me of baby birds. “I think I’m a poor mother because I can’t remember any stories for you.”
This, to me, was not why she felt like a poor mother, though I didn’t say that.
“But I thought of something tonight. Something he used to say, and I want to tell it to you now.”
I said okay, but a moment passed before she spoke.
“The ocean has no memory.”
And although she stayed in the room with me, this was the last thing my mother said that night. Something outside, maybe a raft of clouds floating across the moon, eclipsed what light slanted inside, and the room fell to blackness. My father rolled over in the next room. When my mother stood, I thought she would go to him or maybe leave through the front door, but she took off her shoes, one then the other, and lowered herself onto the couch beside me. She wiggled into the blanket and became still. I draped my arm over her and her back relaxed into my chest. She seemed to fall asleep, but her body remained tense; under my arm, it felt like one strained muscle. Soon, though, the muscle released and she slipped into quiet, reluctant whimpers, then finally she began to really cry. I doubted her thoughts were far from mine.
WE MOVED INTO OUR NEW HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE of summer. A claims adjuster called daily and visited almost as often. Now I think his frequent visits meant that our family was under some suspicion, but at the time I only knew that my father preferred to talk to him alone and eventually the man ruled the reason the fire had spread so quickly was because of the turpentine and scattered painting supplies. Accelerants, he called them. Furniture came slowly, due to a delay with the insurance, so we slept in sleeping bags and ate on the floor like campers. The house was smaller than our other one, yet it seemed bigger, emptier, and though my father had installed a window air conditioner, the cloistering heat was stifling. The end of summer approached, and we probably looked like any other family getting used to their new house, except ours smelled like someone else’s home. One night when we returned from buying groceries, my father’s key broke off in the lock.
The last check cleared by the end of August, and we finished arranging the house before I returned to school. My mother started lifting alloy hinges and antique light-switch casings to replace the cheap ones in the house, and my father stained cabinets on weekends. The house evolved into something resembling our old one, if only in stolen fixtures and the smell of varnish. And also like before, my father refused to let me help with the renovations. We started eating homemade dinners, then retiring to the den and watching cable. On weekends we slept late, and during the week we moved through the house with a forced familiarity. With every new pillow or set of curtains, we grew more comfortable. A few times, Obie visited, and my parents started laughing again.
The night before school started my father drove me to the bay. He told my mother we were meeting Obie, and whether or not this was supposed to have been true, we never did. We went to the private piers in Corpus where doctors and lawyers docked their sailboats. Security lights illuminated the area and a guard paced in front of the yachts. Gulls squawked above us, though they only became visible when they swooped into the light; they looked like silver fish swimming through black water. We walked to the end of a pier and leaned against the guardrail, where my father opened his pocketknife and began shaving his fingernails. He cut toward his body, a way he’d cautioned me against, and let the edges of his nails spiral into the ocean. The waves walloped against the pylons, their foam like a lazy, iridescent serpent caught in low tide. My hands stayed in my pockets. “Where’s Obie?”
“I guess he got tied up.” My father looked into the sky.
The security light caught the blade of his knife, and I watched him slice into his thumbnail.
“He thinks someone from the base torched our house, Obie does. I wonder, Toby, what you think.”
I shrugged and leaned over the guardrail, trying to watch one of my father’s nails fall to the water. I thought of the story Obie had told me about the rattler and how the men who worked under my father resented him. Of course I didn’t say any of that, though I don’t think it would’ve angered my father.
“Obie’s a good man,” he said, and I looked at his face. My father bestowed this honor on very few, and I immediately admired anyone who received it. “He’s smart.”
“Sometimes I think Obie lies.”
“He does. You’re right.” His voice was low; he was focusing on his hands.
“I try not to lie.” I paused, waiting for him to commend me, but he didn’t. “I don’t think you lie.”
“I have lied. But I would never lie to you. Or to your mother.”
“I’ve lied—”
“You can ask me anything in the world and I’ll tell you the truth as I know it.” My father continued to stare at his fingers, so I looked as well, finding his blade taking dead skin with the nail. I thought hard for something to ask him, something to test his claim, but found nothing. He continued, “Sometimes there’s a difference between telling the truth and telling everything.”
My father looked at me then, harshly, and I remembered painting two and sometimes three coats over stubborn sections of our home. I also remembered his note saying I’d done a good job, but that he hadn’t allowed me to work at the new house. I considered asking him about it, or if he’d really paid all our bills that night at the kitchen table. But I said, “You can ask me anything too.”
He brushed the tips of his fingers against his palm, and from his knotted brow, I supposed he was trying to find something to ask me.
“I don’t need to,” he said, clipping his knife closed. “I know I can trust you. You’re my son and we’re in this together.” He placed his hand on my shoulder and squeezed chills into my neck. His touch seemed to say that soon no secrets would wedge their way between us. We stood there for a few minutes, on the verge of truth and change, two liars staring down the darkness.
WE NEVER AGAIN SPOKE OF THE FIRE, DESPITE WHAT I hoped. Especially in the days after the night on the pier, the topic seemed to exist just beneath all our words, our movements, so that soon it would burst through the thin barrier between us. But it didn’t. The days became weeks, and though I felt my father was only waiting for the right time to explain things to me, the chance of that happening was as slim then as it was a month later, when he died.
He was reshingling the roof. As the doctor explained it to my mother and me, sitting in a cramped room with only a sofa, an end table, and a small brass crucifix, his heart exploded. I knew he was dead, but I thought an exploding heart sounded nice, as if it were my father’s kindness that had killed him. My mother sat beside the doctor, her hands covering her eyes. A priest knocked on the door, then entered. The room seemed very crowded. We listened as he said we could find comfort in my father’s quick, painless passage to the eternal. But almost before he finished his sentence, my mother wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, “I find no fucking comfort in my husband’s death.”
After my father’s funeral, I hated going home. The house felt too spacious, and its emptiness constricted me. My mother took an extended leave from work to stay in her bedroom all day and sleep on the couch at night. I tore the posters off my walls and pushed my bed to the middle of my room. Even then I saw the pathetic nature of our attempts at recovery.
One night I came home later than usual and found her asleep at the kitchen table. Her nightgown had fallen open and I could see the bottom of her neck where my father’s wedding ring dangled from that thin gold chain. I couldn’t help staring any more than I could move to wake her. I watched her chest fall and rise, and I flinched when the phone rang. My mother came briefly to life and answered, spoke for a few minutes, then handed me the receiver without a word. In my grandmother’s voice I could hear the cancer that would kill her in less than a year.
When I returned to school, people touched me. Hands fluttered to my shoulders and arms pulled me toward bodies I didn’t remember knowing. Teachers, students, janitors, almost everyone missed my father and apologized about his death. I thanked them and rushed to class before I started crying.
In the middle of a lunch period, as I dropped the food I hadn’t eaten into the trash, a heavy hand pressed itself into the small of my back and a voice said, “I’m really sorry about your dad.” When I turned, Olaf Hollins was nodding sympathetically.
“What?”
“Your father.” He glanced over each of his shoulders. “I’m really sorry he passed away. I sold him some paint when I worked at McCoy’s.”
Just then, maybe because he seemed like the boy my father might’ve been, I punched Olaf Hollins in the throat. He gasped and his eyes widened like a shot deer’s as he tumbled into the stack of trays, knocking them down and filling the cafeteria with the loud, sharp sound of trouble. He held his neck as if he were strangling himself and scuttled backward across the floor, like a crab, small and awkward and afraid. Everyone glared at me. Someone went for the principal, and as I waited for him I envisioned my fate: His office would feel cold and clean. He would look at my record and act kindly because of my grades and extenuating circumstances, and I would sit quietly when he said, “This is a tough time.” I would not answer when he questioned my relationship with Olaf. Did I know him outside of school? Had there been static between us before? Was there anything he should know? Only when he asked how I felt would I say, “Fine.”
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