A trooper came and led me to his car. I answered all his questions, but I don’t think my answers were much use: It was just the three of us so far; the others weren’t there yet; we hadn’t been drinking because there wasn’t anything to drink; we were waiting. Abel was sitting in the cab smoking—just Marlboros. I was sitting on the tailgate, staring at the river. I don’t know what was going on with Esther.
“There are two kinds of people,” said the trooper, “The ones who run toward the accident and the ones who run away.” I think he was trying to console me or help me not feel guilty.
Then he said it was time to get me home. The clock on the dashboard of the cruiser said it was 10:37.
The headlights of the trooper’s car carved little cones of visibility in the night. It was a very dark world. The river beside the road was blacker than the riverbanks. The trees were darker than the sky. The stars were little and far away. I watched them, and I watched the reflectors on the mile markers. The stars and the reflectors seemed pretty pathetic in the middle of all that night.
We were going to be at my turnoff soon. I didn’t say anything. If I stayed quiet, the trooper might just keep driving on and on, up the valley, past the subdivisions and the old ranches.
It was a silly idea. Troopers know where the roads are. I had told him my name and address during the questioning. He knew where to turn away from the blacktop and which dirt road led to my house. I wish we lived deeper up the canyon, but we’re not that far from the main road. It is just too little time to get my shit together. The road curves around the old pasture fence. There is our barn where nothing lives anymore. The house huddles in the dark, smaller than the barn and almost as empty.
Thin grey light escapes the windows of the kitchen and bathroom. I know the trooper is going to that door, the back door, in the middle of the scabbed-on addition to the main house. The real front door faces the creek because the house turns its back on the road. Nothing good ever comes from that direction. That’s what the house seems to believe.
The trooper left the engine running while he went to the door. I don’t know if they aren’t allowed to turn off the engine or if he just wanted me to feel warm and safe. Or maybe he did it so I couldn’t hear what he and my dad were saying on the back porch.
I couldn’t pay attention anyway. It took everything just to keep my eyes open. I didn’t want them shut. My imagination kicks in when I close my eyes.
Next thing I knew, the trooper was opening the door so I could get out and go home.
“Take care of yourself,” he said.
“OK.”
. . .
My dad waits on the porch until I climb the steps. It’s late for him to be up, and I can tell he hasn’t been to bed. He’s still in his tin pants and boots. His sleeves are pushed up, and the front of his shirt is wet. He’s holding the toilet plunger. It’s easy enough to see what he had been doing before the trooper knocked. I open the door. Dad follows me in, shuts the door behind him, and turns off the porch light.
I could hear the trooper’s car wheels on the gravel road. We always know when someone is coming or going to our place because you can hear the crunch of gravel. I like that sound.
When the sound of the trooper’s car fades, I can hear the sound of the creek. It used to be a comfort, that sound, because that was what my world sounded like. It isn’t a comfort anymore. I can hear my dad breathing. It is so quiet. But quiet doesn’t last for long.
. . .
Dad didn’t spend a lot of time making his point: “What the hell were you thinking? You weren’t thinking. Just out cattin’ around. You’re useless as tits on a tomcat. What’s the difference between you and her?”
What’s the difference? Why am I not a dead girl? I don’t for a minute know. I look at my dad. He can’t let himself be sad. He can’t let himself be frightened. But I’ve forced this moment. The fear jumps out of his eyes and into me like a hot spark.
“You could’a been the dead one.”
That’s when he hits me with the plunger, because I could have been the dead one. He hits me because it is easier to be angry than to be afraid. I could have been the dead one, but I’m not.
. . .
The coffee machine turns itself on, so the pot will be full of fresh, hot coffee when my dad comes down to leave for work. I kind of want to go hide in my room. I could pretend to be asleep. I don’t go. Hiding isn’t going to help. I’m ashamed of myself, and I can’t hide from that.
It isn’t like my dad is going to clobber me again. That’s over. He isn’t a violent man. If he wanted to kill me, he could have pulled the 30-06 off the rack and done it. If he wanted to cause me serious pain, he could have pushed me against the woodstove and left me with a burn to think about. He was just angry, and he had been trying to clear the toilet. He’d had enough crap to deal with, seriously. And then I show up in a cop car way after I should have been home.
He said I was as useless as “tits on a tomcat.” I’ve heard him say that about a lot of mismanufactured, overpriced junk. He heard it plenty himself when he was growing up. It’s almost like a family heirloom. I’ve said it myself. It was the first time he ever said it about me.
I would have rather been hit a few more times with the plunger.
. . .
The coffee was brewed at 5:30. Dad comes in the kitchen to get ready for work. It’s way before light on Saturday morning, but Dad works whenever he gets the chance. He’s lucky right now. Some guy’s brother ripped off three fingers in a cable winch. So Dad has work—at least until some guy’s brother is well enough to work hurt or the weather sours or the gyppo crew loses the equipment to the bank. Today there is work to be had, so he glops a couple of sandwiches together out of leftover stew and bread, pours the coffee in his thermos, and says, “You stay home today. I called your mom at work. She knows what happened. She told them you won’t be making your shifts this weekend.”
As soon as he’s gone, I’m going to go outside and chop some wood. Fresh air and exercise. I need it. It’s getting hard to keep my eyes open—and falling asleep at this point is a really bad idea.
. . .
Mom gets home from work a couple hours after Dad leaves.
I’m lying on the floor in the kitchen. I chopped wood until I lost control of the ax. Instead of biting into the chunk of dead tree, it bounced off and hit me flatside in the kneecap. For a minute, I didn’t think of anything except how much it hurt. Then I realized it was time to stop.Since then I’ve been curled up under the kitchen table. Waiting like a dog for my mom to come home.
I hear her tires on the gravel. I hear her steps on the porch. I hear the door open. I hear her changing her shoes—she is careful to keep the doughy white rubber clogs she wears at work clean and sanitary. She is going to feed the chickens now, just like she does every morning.
I follow her out and watch while she doles out kitchen scraps from an old metal pie pan. Stale bread, the ends of carrots, and soft spots cut out of potatoes—she drops the garbage out like treasures, and that is the way the chickens accept it.
Chickens don’t always cluck, you know. When they are happy, they sort of hum—they chirp—they purr. The chickens are all around my mother waiting for her to make them happy. They are singing to her in their chicken way.
When I step closer, I can see my mom’s back tighten up. She doesn’t look at me. She watches the chickens.
I watch them too. I see how feathers ruffle in the wind. I see how Old Mean Gertie limps along without the ends of her toes. The chickens are very observant. Every scrap that drops is pecked up fast.
Mom says, “They were thinking of giving you a CNA shift at Cozy Pines. It wouldn’t have been official, because you are underage and not certified, but we could have made it look like it was more hours in the kitchen. I could have taught you the ropes. We could have worked the same shift. . . .”
My mom flips the pie plate and slings the last of the garbage out. The sudden movement flusters the
chickens– they scatter and stop singing.
“That isn’t going to happen now,” said my mom, “You missed the chance.”
The wind shifts direction. It slaps me straight in the eyes. It smells like it might snow.
I missed the chance. If I had come right home last night, I could have started working night shifts with my mother at Cozy Pines. I could have just caught the bus from there in the morning, I guess, and everything else about school would have just stayed the same—except I don’t know when I would have done my homework. Could I do calculus between emptying bedpans and tucking in sheets?
And maybe Esther would still be alive.
Because changing one thing, changes everything.
The chickens are getting calmer and are sideling closer to the scraps again. They have forgiven my mom for moving fast, but she hasn’t forgiven me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was undependable when she needed me to be dependable. I was sitting on a tailgate waiting to get drunk when I should have been ready to step into doughy white clogs and take up a bigger share of the load.
She still isn’t looking at me.
But I’m looking at her. I can see the scar by the corner of her eye. She got it when she was learning to walk. She fell against a sharp corner on a coffee table. She made sure there were no sharp corners when I was little. When I was little, she used to call that scar her eye makeup. She used to say that when I was little. When I was little and she was happy.
“Get the eggs,” Mom says, and she heads for the house.
. . .
There are seven eggs this morning. Most are already cold, but one is still warm from being inside the chicken-machine that turns carrot ends and earwigs into perfect shells and gobs of yellow yolk.
Eggs are beautiful. Their shape is ideal. The story about eggs is about how fragile they are, but they aren’t, not always. It depends on how the pressure is applied. If you fling an egg out into the world like you’re in the outfield and it’s the ball, sometimes it bounces when it hits the ground. I have seen eggs bounce. Of course, I’ve seen eggs splatter too. That happens a lot more often.
Whenever they talk about the arrow of time, they use the example of an egg. “You can’t unscramble an egg. Time flows in only one direction.”
On a good day, I would try to understand the beauty of eggs and the puzzle of time. But it is not a good day.
My brain is itching.
. . .
I need to go to school. I cook eggs. I eat the eggs. I get dressed. I walk to the bus stop.
The moon is full, and it’s still up. It’s a nickel in the western sky, round and shiny and not worth much. The snow catches the moonlight and tosses it around until the world is three colors: black, shadow, and snow light.
Trudge, trudge, trudge. Just keep walking down the wheel ruts between the snow. It isn’t far to the bus stop.
What is this? It looks like a little felt slipper. It is. It is a little felt slipper. It is Asta’s slipper. How could she have lost her slipper? Where is she? Her foot will be cold without her slipper.
I want to call her, but I know she can’t answer. She forgot how to answer. How can she be lost here in the snow? Tracks, there must be tracks. There are always tracks in the snow.
. . .
The moon is really there, but it isn’t full, and there is no snow. And there will be no slipper, because there is no Asta.
Asta is gone.
I know how to fight dreams, but I’m not sure I’m winning. This time I woke up before The Bony Guy broke my heart. He didn’t get to hold out his web of bony fingers and show me that he had Asta’s other slipper. He didn’t make me scream in my sleep and wake up crying.
I’m awake, and I am not crying. I’m going to call it a win.
I thought maybe Dad and Little Harold would be around today. It’s Sunday—even gyppos don’t work on Sunday. They would have been a welcome distraction, even though Dad still isn’t speaking to me directly, and I try to keep my distance from Little Harold when I’m bug-ass nuts. I mean, he’s not even nine yet. He’s entitled to some protection.
Maybe that’s what Dad was thinking when he loaded the little guy into the truck this morning and left. Whatever the plan, I wasn’t in on it.
. . .
They went to get a load of firewood, mostly. The back of the truck is pretty near full, but when Little Harold climbs down out of the truck, Dad reaches across the seat and hands him a bread sack. Dad points at me, on the porch, and Little Harold runs over holding the bundle out in front of him.
“Dad says we can have the liver right now. You’ll cook it.”
I take the plastic sack out of his hands. It’s heavy. The wet contents slip around inside. Dad took a deer while he was out.
Back at the truck, Dad unties the blue tarp covering the load. There, on top, is one of Bambi’s stupid brothers. We always call them Bambi’s stupid brothers. It’s a classic.
I stand by the sink and pull the liver out of the sack and rinse it off a little and drop it in a bowl of salt water to soak. There is a heart in the bag too. I take it out, hold it in my hand, rinse it off.
It doesn’t look anything like what I saw on the highway. I stare at it: real heart. I shut my eyes: heart I imagined I saw. Not the same. This is real. The one I see with my eyes shut is not. It never was.
It never was.
I build up the fire in the cookstove and put the frying pan on to heat and chop up onions. I slice the liver into bits. It is perfect and healthy, no flukes, no sign of hunger or disease. If he hadn’t made one tiny little error of trust today, Bambi’s stupid brother would have probably lived through the winter. I drag the slices of meat through a pan full of flour and salt and pepper and drop them into the hot grease. Cook them quick and keep them tender. I brown the onions in the leftover fat and flour. Then I dish up a bowl for Little Harold and slide the rest onto a plate for my dad.
Let that be a lesson to you, Bambi’s stupid brother. All it takes is one tiny miscalculation of trust.
. . .
I’m not better, but I am good enough to make it through the day. I have enough to keep me very busy. Too busy to sleep. Too busy to dream. I’d like to think I’m going to be too busy to see what isn’t there, but I know better than that.
If you stay awake too long, you go crazy, they say. I say, what difference would it make? How much crazier can I get? I’ll scrub the floors and the grout around the toilet and the oven to stay awake. Oven cleaner is better than smelling salts, you old-timey fainting ladies. Get with the program. Wake up and smell the methylene chloride.
So why not sleep and escape this crap? Good question. Sleep should be good, like being numb or being drunk, but it’s not.
. . .
The problem with sleep is dreams.
I’m not the first person to say that. It gets said a lot, because it is true.
Most dreams are bad. This is a scientific fact. It isn’t just me. I’m not special. Everybody’s dreams suck. Some suck really hard.
I know way too much about dreams. I am an expert both in theory and practice.
The worst kind of dream is when you are just trying to shut your eyes and it’s like a slide show. Eyes open: the real world. Eyes shut: you see what you don’t want to see. The detail is amazing, but you can’t look around and you can’t look away. You shut your eyes, and there it is. It’s like there is a camera that shows you the same bloody broken mess over and over again, frame by frame.
I’m standing at the kitchen table folding clothes. I know that. I can reach out and touch the wool socks. But what I know and what I see—not quite the same thing.
Eyes open: a little striped shirt in the laundry basket. Eyes closed: a lump of muscle that looks like a broken heart. Nothing new or weird about that. Been here. Seen that. The important thing to remember is that this is normal—for crazy people.
I even know its name: intrusive imagery. Esther’s bloody heart isn’t now, nor has it ever been, in th
e laundry basket. It’s just a glitch in my brain. My programming is missing a breakpoint, and I’m stuck in an infinite loop. It’s a processing problem, a stray spark lost in the dirty Jell-O inside my head.
. . .
There is nothing special about me. PTSD is common. They used to call it shell shock a hundred years ago almost. It happens to lots of people—guys who come back from the war, rape victims, little kids who lived through hurricanes—they all have to deal. If they can deal—otherwise, they lose it and end up like that crazy gray-haired Vietnam vet who lived in a culvert until he froze to death. Thinking about the images they see, the nightmares they have, it makes me feel like a coward.
I just need to focus on what is real—laundry to fold— and I need to remember those words intrusive imagery.
I may also need to be very aware of my breathing.
It’s not a Zen thing. I have to breathe very carefully because intrusive imagery is only one of the sneaky traps I need to avoid. Memories can also hide in the smell of spilled diesel or hospital disinfectant. There is a proper name for that too. It’s olfactory trigger: a smell that sets off a memory in your brain. Most people like them, I guess. Christmas tree needles or jasmine tea—somewhere people are probably seeking out those smells just so they can feel a wonderful memory light up in their imagination like twinkly lights. Me, not so much. I know that one unconscious breath can let a smell in and zap-zap-zap my brain will start sparking like a fork in a microwave.
Once that happens, I can blast my nose with garlic or Mountain Breeze air freshener or poisonous oven cleaner until tears run out of my eyes and I get a headache. It won’t help. It takes more than another stink to fix that short circuit and avoid remembering.
And there is one other trap: dreams, plain-old-vanilla, recurrent-nightmare dreams. Living through everything once was bad, but not bad enough apparently, because it keeps happening again and again. My brain needs to understand what happened, so it gives itself another opportunity.
“Here,” says my brain, “Let’s just change this one thing. Changing one thing changes everything. You know that. Maybe if you have to ride to school in an ambulance. . . . Maybe if your little sister and your little brother are the same person. . . . Maybe if I make death into a recurrent character—call him The Bony Guy. See isn’t that better now that you can see him? Just fiddle with the focus and make the picture sharper, sharp, sharp, sharper. Now he has a face—well, sort of a face. . . . Don’t you feel better?”
The Freak Observer Page 2