Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  She jogged to the boulevard, where she bought carpet-cleaning foam. That afternoon she hovered over the froth on the stained carpet, scrubbing on her hands and knees, while other deliveries came and went. There was someone supposedly from the phone company, someone from the cable company, and then a knock at the door turned out to be a woman with a basket of muffins.

  Lydia wiped the foam off on her jeans and shook the woman’s hand, then she accepted the basket, afraid to speak. The woman said that she and her husband had seen her move in, and they were tired of living in a place where no one knew their neighbors. “You seem like a nice young girl, and we just thought . . .” Apparently, they were from somewhere in Ohio where people weren’t like this. Lydia felt extremely hungover. The woman ranted on about her job and her family, and Lydia wondered if she’d ever go away. When the phone rang, the woman responded as if it were a timer going off on her speech; Lydia moved past the dissolving clouds of carpet foam to find the phone, newly installed in the kitchen. Cautiously she picked it up and said hello.

  “This is a problem, Lydia.”

  “Jonah, God. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a week.”

  “You can’t have so many people over there. One or two is fine, but a party is unacceptable. I heard it looks like a refugee camp over there. I trusted you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry—and I just kicked everybody out—”

  “I’m going to come over there tonight—about eight o’clock. I want to talk about this situation.”

  “Okay. Eight o’clock is good. I’ll make dinner.”

  Lydia spent the rest of the afternoon preparing. Chloe came through in a pinch, bringing a portable CD player and some Miles Davis—which she claimed was perfect for “older dudes.” The carpet was stained and smelled heavily of chemicals, but the rest of the house was clean. Lydia wore a short summer dress, and Chloe braided her hair in the cramped bathroom.

  “You look so major,” said Chloe. “He’s going to die for you.”

  “I love you so much, sweetie. If it wasn’t for you, I swear to God, I’d be hanging from a meat hook right now.”

  By eight o’clock she had dimmed the lights, moved the table to the center of the front room and covered it with cathedral candles. With Chloe’s credit card, she had bought five bottles of an Australian red wine that a man had recommended at Whole Foods, despite chuckling at her fake ID; and she was trying to cook sea bass, checking it obsessively and poking it to smithereens with a chopstick.

  When Jonah arrived at half past eight, he didn’t say a word. He sat quietly in the chair, moving so calmly that he hardly ruffled the candle flames. He waited while Lydia rambled about how she had “tragically fucked up the fish,” how she was disgusted with herself that she hadn’t been able to follow a simple recipe. Basically, she had gone wrong with the parchment paper, setting it on fire, and next she’d tried to cook the damned thing without it, until it had started to fall apart. She followed the instructions, and as far as she was concerned, Julia Child was a bitch.

  Jonah made some quiet comment about red wine and fish, then he hardly moved; his expression was so blank that he seemed to be meditating with his eyes open.

  Lydia sat down across from him, making the presentation of fish scraps and asparagus and bread and wine, despite the scorched bits of basil and the fuming smell. When she saw Jonah’s posture in the chair, she finally stopped ranting.

  He said, “I’m disappointed.”

  Lydia did everything she could to keep composed, but Jonah’s composure had amplified her emotions, and she felt her mouth quivering and her throat constrict. With her eyes just beginning to water, she said, “I’m sorry, Jonah. I fucked up—but I cleaned the carpet all day, and I kicked everybody out, and I swear to God there’s never going to be anybody in here again. They’re not my friends, not most of them—they’re all leeches, Jonah. They smell blood.”

  Out of his pocket, Jonah removed a small rectangular box, wrapped with a gold ribbon. It looked to Lydia like it might hold a bracelet, and she stared at it for a long time without moving.

  “Open it,” he said. “And don’t overreact.”

  “Jonah, I don’t understand.”

  “Open it.”

  She untied the ribbon, pulled back the lid, and leapt off her chair. She was so horrified that she gave a sudden yelp as if she’d been slapped, and then she lingered by the doorway to the kitchen, heart rioting and hands shaking.

  In the box, nestled on a thin film of cotton, there lay a severed human finger. It was pale and bloodless now, something long dead that a cat would drag to a doormat.

  “Lydia, look at my face,” he said. “Look at me.”

  On his face was the most incongruous expression—he seemed sympathetic. Fatherly. She was cringing, but he tilted his head and spoke gently: “Lydia, I live an ugly life. There is no glamour in it. No celebration. I want you to understand this. Sit down.”

  “Oh God, Jonah—that is the nastiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Lydia. Listen. Where I live—there aren’t good and bad people. They don’t exist. There’s money and lives, and they’re weighed against each other every day. If somebody wants to take a risk, they do it, and they know they’re doing it. I’m not a petty street kid, Lydia. I don’t run around in the dark selling dime bags, never thinking three hours into the future. I’m a businessman. And the people I work for aren’t irrational. They aren’t even bad people. They’ve all just entered into a pact. You come into this with everything you own, including your life; and if you don’t play by the rules, then you don’t live very long. My life is not some kind of rebellion. I’m not your father, Lydia—I’m not some stubborn wild man rejecting society. I live in an orderly universe, more than any business out there. If someone breaks the rules in a corporation, they get fired. Someone breaks the rules in this organization, Lydia, they get killed—and everyone knows that.”

  “Whose finger is that?”

  He closed the lid, handed her the box, smiling for the first time. “It’s yours now.”

  Staying alone that night, Lydia told no one. At first, she tried to plan her escape from the house. But past 2 A.M. on a sleepless night, she began a delirious apology for Jonah, thinking of his face, thinking of the unanticipated affection in his tone. He seemed to believe that he was helping her, that he was showing her something genuine from his own life. Yes, Lydia had known about the violence and brutality just beneath the surface, and it was hypocritical for her to reject him once she had finally seen it clearly. Little by little she revised her thinking, and she began to view the gift as a show of honesty and respect: He had wanted to spare her from the mistakes she was making; he had shown her the seriousness; he had given her the first real glimpse of what he endured in his life. She was beginning to know Jonah, that there was something vulnerable and caring underneath the ugliness of his profession, and so she hugged her pillow and hurt for him, cringing that he was forced to endure such brutality in his life.

  Around four o’clock, she went to look at the finger again. She had tried to respond as she believed Jonah wanted, but it still seemed like more than someone else’s bad decision. She told herself it was just a thing, a lost memento. There was a crescent of dirt under the nail, hair at the joint, grease in the knuckle. But she couldn’t help seeing the details as part of its own history, imagining that it had belonged to a mechanic or a gardener, that he was somewhere out there tonight and could still feel it. She wondered how many things a person needed to lose—fingers, teeth, memories, or plans—before they weren’t themselves any longer.

  Over the months that followed, Lydia and Jonah began a pattern in which she would stay several nights a week at his house. Before each visit, there was always a great buildup on the phone, and each short stay would end in her returning to the cottage, both of them agreeing to spend time apart. They would discuss their common need for space, over the phone, until once again the calls would become heavy with longing and
intimacy. To live with Jonah this way was to experience constant fleeing and returning, abandonment and reunion. Every aspect of their relationship followed this ebb and flow, intense weekends followed by excruciating, uncertain weeks alone. They didn’t fight, but Jonah could become suddenly untouchable, so cold that nothing she did could convince or arouse him. He would rise in the dark and look for his ringing cell phone in his pants, refusing to answer questions. She could think of nothing she had done or said to anger him: It was as if he no longer noticed her presence. He would leave her in his plush bed, not even responding to her good-byes, as they trailed him out of the room: “Good-bye, sweetie. Good-bye, darling. Good-bye, motherfucker.” But, as furious as this silent treatment made her, she was becoming progressively more anxious away from Jonah, as if he were the only antidote to the tension he created.

  Over the worsening months, she found comfort only in Jonah’s crew around the house. She developed a new routine: Whenever Jonah left at night, she would find his bodyguards and party, watch TV, or play pool. Maybe because there was no real way they could make a pass at her without inspiring the boss’s wrath, she found herself in a sisterly relationship—with Iván, especially. Many of the jokes did go on too long. He tickled her sometimes; he and Tito once made a big show of trying to get under her robe; they stole her purse and hid it somewhere in the house; they beat her up with couch pillows, too hard to be funny anymore—but, for the most part, they seemed to like her in a childlike way.

  Tito complained that she was turning into a speed freak, going through all of their drugs like an anteater, but never giving them any game. For a while, snorting a line or smoking ice in a glass pipe, she felt more in control of herself, confident and sexy and quick-witted. Jonah’s mood swings didn’t matter. The mountains of new complications were revised quickly into opportunities; the more difficult her relationship, the more she would be rewarded in the end with something wise and true.

  But after only a few weeks of accelerating meth use, her reaction to the drugs began to change. The pleasant rush shrank in duration, and finally vanished altogether, leaving in its place an intense nitpicking quality, as if the world still could be perfect were it not for some nagging problem: the itch on her neck, her ill-fitting pants, or Tito’s boring story. With more speed, this could become a mystical and insatiable curiosity, a senseless urge to see the inner workings of things, which led her to take apart radios and alarm clocks, to search through drawers on an endless treasure hunt, all the while forgetting what she was looking for. It was as if some analytical quality had gone haywire, and she needed to take apart everything to see its tangled insides. She felt that there was a problem that could be solved easily, so long as she could understand some secret behind the façade; and she would wander Jonah’s empty bedroom in a stupor, plumbing through cabinets and closets, fancying herself an archaeologist, delirious with heatstroke, piecing together a forgotten history.

  One night, she completely unpacked the drawers in Jonah’s bathroom. She found date books and pictures. Jonah had been with another woman recently. She couldn’t tell how recently because he always kept his hair at the same length and never changed his style. He and the woman stood together in a dark kitchen, unsmiling, their eyes scorched red by the flash. He had matchbooks from fancy restaurants, many from a place in Rosarito Beach. In his medicine cabinet there was Xanax, Valium, Vicodin and Halcion. Beneath the drawer with extra razors, she found more pictures, water-stained, all of which seemed to be very old from the coloring and texture. The posing couple must have been Jonah’s parents. They stood on a glowing, overexposed beach, his father, a white man, cooked pink, with a balding head and a grudging smile; his mother, a trim Latina, hunching over and crossing her arms, as if she stood in a draft that her husband couldn’t feel.

  Just then, she turned and saw Jonah standing in the room. She jumped, put her hand on her heart, and tried to explain herself. He was explosively angry and she didn’t recognize him. He picked her up from beneath her arms and threw her into the shower. He grabbed her around the cheeks and mouth, squeezing, and he whispered through his teeth, “These fucking drugs you’re doing here, Lydia—you root around like some kind of tweaker and you’re going to fuck up every little thing I do.”

  She nodded and swallowed.

  She had no idea how to respond except to apologize again, but, as if she had neglected to say a magic word, he turned on the shower and drenched her with freezing water. She rose up violently, swinging at him and grazing his head. Jonah struck her in the shoulder, a fierce jab that deadened her arm. She sat with her eyes closed, letting the water pour over her hair and robe, and when he shut it off, he seemed even angrier. “Get the fuck up! Get out of there and dry off before I break your fucking jaw.”

  She stepped out and dropped the robe and stood naked and shivering, and when he threw the towel at her, there was so much hatred in his face that she started to cry. He hissed at her, “Don’t cry. I mean it. You fucked up, not me. You got no right to go digging around for shit on me. I’m not going to stand here and watch this performance.”

  She took deep breaths and calmed herself, sheathing the towel around her. He was a tiny little man with clenched fists, and she saw in the mirror that she was slouching with the wincing posture she’d once had as the tallest schoolgirl in a class picture. He was tensed and ready to strike her down. He said, “Go to bed. Now.”

  She lay there crying with anger and heartache, until he climbed into bed beside her and began to kiss her forcefully. She was so sickened at first that she swung at him with her fist and said, “No, get off me, you fucking psycho.”

  But he continued, petting around her hair, kissing her ears and pulling open her robe, and within moments the two were crying together, and he was whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lydia.”

  Lydia said, “Why did you do that, Jonah? God, why?” as he hovered over her body, and kissed down her stomach, and whispered something against her skin.

  “I love you,” he said. “But it doesn’t make it any better.”

  “No, Jonah,” she said, with a querulous voice. “Just tell me what’s wrong. Tell me the truth.”

  That night Lydia never closed her eyes. Later, she wandered the house in the dark. She walked through the kitchen, the empty game room, and finally found Iván sitting awake on the patio. She perched down onto the bench beside him and shared his cigarette. She looked at the tattoos ranging up his neck and scalp, and asked, “What do your boys think of you being up here all the time?”

  “It’s business,” he said. “I make money, they make money.” He put his fingers together, like the tips of two guns touching. He sat still for a while, morose, and finally said, “Lydia. You got to get out of this, baby. You got to just go.”

  She took a drag and said, “So you heard the fight. You don’t see us together like we usually are. There’s something else there, there’s something about him that’s just—he’s been seriously screwed with in his life. We got problems, but—”

  “Fuck that Oprah bullshit,” said Iván. “You think you going to turn that motherfucker around? That dude is crazy, Lydia. Crazier than you and I and Tito and all us put together. I think you want to get beat up.”

  “Jesus, Iván, try to exaggerate a little more.”

  “I ain’t even exaggerating.”

  She took a deep breath, dragged on his cigarette, and handed it back to him. “I’m listening to you. But part of me just—”

  “Don’t give me that part-of-you bullshit. Part of you wants this, part of you wants that. All of you is fucked in the head.” He dragged on his cigarette with a last flare and flicked it off into the pool. “Go back to that crack house,” he said. “Get your ugly-ass clothes and all your other broken shit. And go back to that fat bitch with the freckles.” He made a pistol with his hands, fired it at the city, and, from his fingertips, blew away a wisp of imaginary smoke. “Otherwise, you want to die. And I ain’t going to waste my time feeling sorry f
or you.”

  Iván was right. But while Lydia packed up her things at the cottage over the next two days, she felt too depressed to stop the swelling tide of kids that began filling up the rooms again, arriving each night with boom boxes and glass pipes, bongs and skateboards. With all of the housewarming gifts packed into boxes, her sleeping bag rolled tight, she became swept up in the momentum of an impromptu “going-away” party, smoking ice in the bathroom and drinking peppermint schnapps. “Merry fucking Christmas!” She wandered amid the crowded rooms in a wife-beater T and low-riding jeans, clutching the bottle and waving her skinny arms. She was louder than usual, her eyes black with speed; and around midnight, she smashed the bottle onto the driveway and told the lingering crowd that she was sick of this outhouse. She was laughing and showing her teeth, and as she staggered back through the packed living room, Chloe found her and tried to hold her in place. Chloe told her that she was frightened: She had never seen Lydia so high, and there was a volatile undertone brewing at the party.

  Lydia pulled away from Chloe and said, “Go save some, like, starving Bolivian kid, okay—’cause I don’t fucking care anymore.”

  Raising her arms, pants sagging, Lydia pushed beyond her friend and watched as all the girls she’d known, from back among those privileged neighborhoods, left the party one by one, abandoning it to the louder and more aggressive young men who’d been arriving all evening like moths to a stadium light. Lydia hardly knew anyone in the house now, but she made out with a stranger by the bathroom, and smoked more speed outside beneath the avocado trees. When she began talking to the kid about her “homicidal boyfriend,” he slipped away, vanishing into the crowds. She was tingling in her fingertips, she was breathing in short gasps, her heart was beating so fast that her ribs hurt.