by Peter Wright
“Perhaps,” my father says. “Life offers no guarantees, does it?”
“Unfortunately.”
We pause as Chestnut lifts his leg. Walking an old dog, especially one fond of sniffing and marking, requires patience. “His way of being social,” my father once said, explaining a dog’s sense of smell, its ability to reach into the past. Each sniff and dribble a memory rejoined, a delve into a relation beyond the shackles of linear time.
Our house in sight, and our pace slows as Chestnut runs his nose along the base of our neighbor’s light post. Slater on his porch, a whining drill in hand. I give the leash a tug. I indulge the dog, yes, but I want nothing to do with Slater tonight. His peevish observations, his proudly displayed flag of white and red. His new gaze, the look I receive from men and boys, a stare with a hitch and unwelcome heat.
My father pauses. “Hello!”
Slater pulls up his goggles, his shirt white with chalky dust. The drill winds down. “What?”
“Hello,” my father repeats. “Beautiful night.”
Slater glances up. “Hmmm.”
My father steps forward. “Your bit.” His tone hesitant, apologetic. Let’s add Mendel to that list of unappreciated scientists, and allow me to use his once-scorned theories to propose that I am both my father and mother’s child. Imagine my feelings about Slater as alleles on a Punnett square—my mother’s open disdain, my father’s willingness to believe the best in others—and me a mix of the two, my distance kept but my judgment, for the moment, reserved. “Don’t know if you’ve got the right bit for that,” my father says.
Slater wipes dust from his chest. At his feet, a gold-plated mailbox. The sun through the trees casts a glint on the box’s lid. Slater embossed in the metal. I follow my father up the walk.
“I’ve got a special bit for mortar.”
Slater calls to me: “Don’t let the dog go on my flowerbeds.” A pause. “Please.”
Chestnut’s nose in the daylilies, only a few blooms this year. I tug the leash. My father turns. “Will you fetch my toolbox? The one with the red lid?”
Inside the foyer, I unhook Chestnut’s harness. My mother on the couch with a book. The dog ambles to the kitchen and laps his water bowl. My mother lowers her book to her lap. “Where’s your father?”
“Talking to Mr. Personality.” I go to the basement and retrieve the toolbox. The concrete floor scuffed, my roller-blade circlings. Upstairs, I join my mother by the living room window. Skater’s red and white flag lifts on the wind, masking then revealing my father, Slater, and the golden mailbox.
“What’re they doing?” my mother asks.
“Slater’s putting up a mailbox. Only he’s doing it wrong.” I shift the toolbox to my other hand. “Dad’s going to help.”
My mother sighs. “Even kind men can be trying.”
“Think he’s too nice?”
“No.”
“Too trusting?”
She lets go of the pulled-aside curtain. “I guess there are worse things.”
I leave my sandals in the foyer. The grass cool under my bare feet, and the toolbox bumps against my thigh. My father and Slater fall silent as I approach.
“Thanks, sweetheart.” My father balances the toolbox on the porch railing. His fingers scour its depths, and the clatter of metal accentuates the stillness. The breeze brings the scent of just-cut grass, and the flag brushes my father’s face. When I reach to pull it away, my hand collides with Slater’s. He grips the flag’s corner, the material held back, and we consider each other. My father urges me to humanize those I dislike, to consider the history beneath a prickly surface, and I should be able to use my gift of vision to see Slater in a kinder light. A childless man who, on my spyings over his backyard fence, I’ve caught kissing his dog. A man who’s filled his empty spaces with uniforms and flags and shiny mailboxes. I should be able to do this, but for the moment, I’m distinctly my mother’s daughter, and in my gut, a churning mistrust for this grown-up bullyboy.
My father hands Slater a drill bit. “This should work.” He secures the box’s latch.
“I’ll return it when I’m done.”
“No rush.” We descended the porch steps. “Hope it helps.”
When we reach the sidewalk, I lean close and whisper. “Mom says you’re too kind.”
He laughs. “There are worse things.”
“She said that too.”
We climb our front stoop. Chestnut on his hind legs, his snout and perked ears blurred by the screen. Welcoming barks for the creatures of his pack.
I toss Chestnut’s ball, a game of backyard fetch. Another evening’s red fade, colors out of a child’s crayon box. The science of refraction and reflection balanced by the Internet’s folklore. The red the blood of millions, a river of ghosts haunting the cusp of dark and light. Last summer, I sat with my father on the open second floor, the taste of ice cream, the roof beams and sky above. He raised his hand and pointed out the constellations, and in me now, a softening, an appreciation for man’s penchant to craft narratives to explain the unexplainable.
I was inside earlier, but I can’t take any more of the TV and its reports of sit-ins and general strikes. The protests peaceful at first but in this past week, a change. The police in riot gear and the spread of martial law. Molotov cocktails. Protestors shot and trampled. Running battles in the streets of Milan and Rio. The right’s warnings that The Movement’s been hijacked by Communists. Two of the Movement’s leaders pulled from their houses and murdered, the victims either patriots or thugs, depending on the narrative one believes. The unrest also close to home, and I’ve seen the online videos of the protests outside the capital’s assembly chambers, the smashed windows, the cars set ablaze. The governor’s declared a curfew, and as the stars came out last night, Fran and I hurried home from practice. Last week my father staked a placard in our lawn, The Movement’s slogan—NEVER AGAIN, the sign gone by the second day, and I’m unsure who to blame—Slater, who, since the Shut-In ended, has blared patriotic music on his patio as he smokes his evening cigar—or my mother, who now watches the nightly news in silence, her hand often covering her mouth.
I toss Chestnut’s ball, and he half-runs, half-walks through the grass. August, a month of Sundays, lazy afternoons and sleep-in mornings. Chestnut returns, tail wagging, and drops the ball near my feet. My father’s garden, groomed and tended, flanks the lawn and its flagstone path. The rabbits kept away by the clatter of aluminum pie tins hung on stakes, the soft breeze colored with thoughtless notes and silver glimmers. Higher up, arranged on crates and end tables rescued from flea markets, the more exotic strains in pots painted by my mother and me.
I pick up the ball. Its skin gnarled and bitten. I throw it again, but Chestnut abandons his chase near the garden’s brick border. He buries his nose deep in the grass, and as I near, I spot the mound of black feathers. I pick up Chestnut, the bird at my feet. The dog twists, looking down, drawn by instincts. “Dad?” I call. “Dad!”
The bird’s beak points skyward, its wing crooked, a pose that reminds me of a broken and forgotten toy. This is the second bird we’ve found in our yard. More in town, reports up and down the coast, some struck in midflight, gravity-driven plummets that have caused accidents and broken windows. The government sources unable—or unwilling—to identify a cause.
My father steps on the porch. “Kay?”
I walk away, trying to calm Chestnut. “Another bird.”
He goes inside and returns with gloves and a plastic freezer bag. He kneels, a gentle handling, the gardener’s pose I’ve seen him in a hundred times. He seals the bird in the bag, a specimen destined to join the others in his campus lab’s freezer. I set Chestnut down and he follows my father inside. I walk the flagstone path. Sirens wail in the distance. A spider web breaks against my arm, a dewy whisper. At the yard’s rear, I flex my legs, leap, and latch onto the oak’s lowest limb.
I swing up my legs. The earth’s sure touch gone, and the bark rubs roug
h against my thighs. I pull myself up and set upon the familiar path of footing and grip. I climbed the oak the day I first walked across this empty lot. I climbed it last Christmas Eve with my older cousin Mark, a race to the top and me the winner. I climbed it dozens of times in between. The tree has grown with me, and here, in the shaded labyrinth beneath the leaves, I know the tree better than I do from my bedroom window view. Twigs bristle as I work around the trunk, and I’m surrounded by shadows and red-hued slivers. Above, the flutter of a robin’s brood, a nest tucked in the thinnest branches.
Higher, and I come to the climb’s first challenging step. A balanced moment, a pose that stretches every centimeter from my body. Bark scrapes against my fingers. I push aside a branch and peer over Slater’s high fence. The grill he rarely uses, the patio stones he soaks with herbicide, a yard as empty as it is neat. Slater sits with his feet up on a lounge chair as his stereo plays songs that sound like country hymns, God and nation and the might of a patriotic heart. He wears a white T-shirt and his blue work pants, dark socks, one with a hole for his big toe. He reaches down and pulls his panting pug onto his lap. Slater coos baby talk, his T-shirt wet with the pug’s drool.
I twist around the trunk. A new perch brings the sag of weaker limbs. The mother robin protests, and I go no further. Another view here, the house across the alley with a sticker-bush hedge. The strange woman who lives alone. Her front porch dark on Halloween, no visiting cars for Thanksgiving or Christmas. The woman drags a trashcan to the alley. On her way back, she picks up a soccer ball and tosses it over the hedge. The neighborhood kids weave their stories. The money she’s buried in her yard. An ex-con who poisoned her husband. A witch.
Our screen door shuts. Chestnut scoots through the grass. My father close behind, a pot and trowel in hand, and around him, a frame of branches and leaves. “Kayla?”
The distance between us, this perspective of dreams, and I try to see him as others might. His plants. His campus speeches. His dream of brotherhood and the stone’s-throw reality of fences and hedges and locked doors. He calls me again, and the worry in his voice lures me down. Chestnut waits in the shade, front paws scraping the trunk. The return journey with its own challenges.
My father scoops up the dog. I sit on the lowest branch, my feet hanging at the level of her father’s shoulders. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Sometimes I think about all those people, you know? The ones who died. But then I can’t because it’s too much. And then I feel selfish and small because I can’t.”
“We can’t help but be numbed by something so horrible. Either that or it drives us mad.”
I lower myself and drop to the ground. “But that doesn’t feel right.” I brush off my shirt. “I feel like I owe them more than numb or mad.”
My father sets Chestnut down. The dog sniffs my feet. “So do I. At the very least.”
A count of three, and Fran and I jump into the pool’s deep end. The first leap’s chill long gone, and as we sink, my hair rises in the diving well’s deep blue. We near the bottom, and our lips move with silent confessions, bubbles that carry the names of the boys we’d like to kiss. Todd for Fran. Billy for me. We surface, laughing and gasping, a reunion with voices and splashes and the lifeguard’s whistle. We cling to the side, and I’m content just to be, my body tired, an hour of swimming following an afternoon practice, the scene today normal like the normal I once knew. The diving board twangs. A boy pumps a plastic tube, a watery arc that glistens in the sun. Yet throughout the afternoon, we hear sirens. Rumors overheard at the snack stand, the mobs and fires in the capital, the governor’s call up of the National Guard.
The pool crowded today, an afternoon hotter than most and everyone trying to squeeze in a last bit of summer. I adjust my shoulder strap. I missed the pool’s delayed opening, my old bathing suit obscene, the tight elastic and pinched flesh. I’m wearing my mother’s bikini, my first, and I’m self-conscious—my breasts, of which Fran says she is now officially jealous; the muscled shoulders that could pass for a boy’s. We have to leave, and Fran proposes a final race to shallow end. She gets a head start, but I catch her as the pool’s bottom angles up to us. The water chops, my windmilling stroke. We cross into the shallows, and I’m breathing, my face turned, when I collide with a body in my path. I stand and rub my eyes. Before me, a silhouette in the chlorine-stung haze, an older boy. “Sorry,” I say, the word barely out of my mouth before he touches my bare skin beneath the surface. When I try to pull back, he grabs my wrist and forces my hand against his suit’s bulge. I twist away and swim, kicking hard. Fran’s waiting at the ladder by the time I reach the edge.
We gather our towels and bags. I shiver in the warmth, unable to speak, knowing if I tell Fran there will be a scene, a fight or a call to the police, but all I want to do is go. I walk ahead, wet footprints on the concrete for Fran to follow. The pool set to close within the hour, and on the water, the evening sheen. I wrap my towel around my neck and clench a corner between my teeth. In the pool’s glistening middle, the boy who touched me. A shadow’s wave before he submerges, and I curse myself for my indecision and late-surfacing rage.
We pass the snack stand. Soft pretzels in the toaster oven. Yellow jackets circle the trashcan. Outside the pool’s gate, the high school boys kick up the volleyball court’s sand. With the pool out of sight, I breathe easier. I grip Fran’s arm, her Todd on the far court, my shirtless Billy on the near. The ball bounces beyond the sand and when it rolls to us, I kick it back. The boy’s deep voices carry in the humid air. My mother’s car curbside, and Fran and I tease each other as we climb in. Swooning pantomimes and dreamy whispers. Kisses blown from pursed lips. All of it real, yet also an act, my thoughts lost in the feel of the boy’s grip, the touch of his swimsuit.
“I’m guessing you had a good time,” my mother says. I turn from the front seat, another kissy face, and Fran snorts. An arched eyebrow or curled tongue are the only weapons we need to make the other crumble. In history last fall, we entertained ourselves by tallying our teacher’s coffee slurps, and on the sunny morning he doubled his record, we choked on swallowed laughter. Our teacher heightened the absurdity with his demands to know what was so gosh darn funny as he continued to swig from his Number 1 Dad mug. My answers barely a sputter. Fran’s mouth clamped with both hands, her eyes tearing and bright. Being ordered to the principal—a first for us both—a salvation. In the hallway we collapsed against the lockers and slid to the floor, my chest a riot of spams and gasps, control beyond me. The coil wrapped my lungs, then dizziness, and for a moment, the day’s colors faded to ash. Fran guided my head between my raised knees and patted my back. “Don’t die on me, sister.”
My mother exits the pool lot, a final view of the sandy court. The ball high in the air. “Billy Stafford,” Fran says.
“Todd Abbot,” I say. I turn and smile. “Mrs. Fran Abbot.”
On the ride through town, we speak in haughty tones about the charity functions and black-tie galas awaiting the future Mrs. Stafford and Mrs. Abbot. Our mansions’ square footage, our cabanas and guesthouses. The names of our polo ponies and perfect, perfect children.
The car slows. My mother reaches out, her hand on my arm. There’s a fire engine, its red lights flashing, yet its firemen sit on the rear bumper. The mob surges forward, choking the street and overflowing onto the sidewalks and lawns. The fire engine and its crew as still as boulders in the flow. Drums—two, three, more—and my pulse lifts with the scruffy beat. Men in hardhats sprint up the sidewalk. One with a sledgehammer, another with a wrench as long as his forearm, their expressions a loveless mix of yearning and ecstasy. Smoke drifts through our opened windows. “What’s going on?” Fran asks.
“Stay in the car.” My mother’s words sharp. A motor’s whir, and the windows seal. I turn back. Fran’s eyes jittery, a hand on her chest. The grill of the pickup behind us fills the rear window. Smoke dulls the sunlight, a low veil over the street’s chaos. “A fire,” I say, a drea
mer’s observation, sluggish and obvious.
Fran shakes her head. “Then why are the firemen just standing around?”
My mother anchors her palm on the horn, a single, bleating note. “Damn it, damn it,” she repeats, hushed then louder. Her rage escalates, and the truck behind us joins in, its horn deafening. All of it a nightmare, but none of its images are as upsetting as the sinew straining in my mother’s neck. “Move, damn it!”
A fireman rises from the engine’s bumper. He wears boots and suspendered pants, but his hands are empty and his head bare. My mother lowers her window. The smoke pushes in, pungent, a stench beyond wood. The drums louder, faster. My mother’s hand on the horn until the fireman reaches her door. Tears on her cheeks yet she speaks clearly and forcefully. “If you’re not going to do anything, at least get us through!” She shuts the window before he can answer and stares straight ahead, her knuckles white upon the wheel.
Fran’s voice from the backseat: “I’m scared.”
The fireman waves to his crewmates. They fan out before us, a phalanx of linked elbows as they wade into the crowd. The mob inches aside. My mother lifts her foot from the brake and we roll forward. The firemen close to our bumper. My mother’s jaw quivers, and I fear a step too hard or a confusion of pedals. Awareness finds me, and with it, a murderous fear—not for our safety but for the current that has swallowed us. Faces just outside our windows, some looking in. Boys barely older than me. A girl with a red bandanna around her neck. The haze thickens.
Fran’s words undercut by the drums: “They have guns.” I see them too—a shotgun, pistols and rifles. Others with bats. A little boy, his hair and swimsuit still wet, with stones in each hand. The crowd pushes closer, and when our car reaches the engine’s front, the remaining firemen join their brothers. Some in the crowd shove back. Taunts, shouts. A stone bounces off our roof, and the three of us cower.