“Daddy,” Trixie asked, as she was elbow-deep in the sink washing dishes, “what were you like as a kid?” Her father did not glance up from the kitchen table he was wiping with a sponge. “Nothing like you are,” he said. “Thank God.”
Trixie knew her father didn't like to talk about growing up in Alaska, but she was starting to think that she needed to hear about it. She had been under the impression that her dad was of the typical suburban genus and species: the kind of guy who mowed his lawn every Saturday and read the sports section before the others, the type of father who was gentle enough to hold a monarch butterfly between his cupped palms so that Trixie could count the black spots on its wings. But that easygoing man would never have been capable of punching Jason repeatedly, even as Jason was bleeding and begging him to stop. That man had never been so consumed by fury that it twisted his features, made him unfamiliar.
Trixie decided the answer must be in the part of her father's life that he never wanted to share. Maybe Daniel Stone had been a whole different person, one who vanished just as Trixie arrived. She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Why am I so different from you?”
“It was a compliment. I was a pain in the ass at your age.”
“How?” Trixie asked.
She could see him weighing his words for an example he was willing to offer out loud. “Well, for one thing, I ran away a lot.”
Trixie had run away once, when she was little. She'd walked around the block twice and finally settled in the cool blue shadow beneath a hedgerow in her own backyard. Her father found her there less than an hour later. She expected him to get angry, but instead, he'd crawled underneath the bushes and sat beside her. He plucked a dozen of the red berries he was always telling her never to
eat and mashed them in the palm of his hand. Then he'd painted a rose on her cheek and let her draw stripes across his own. He'd stayed there with her until the sun started to go down and then told her if she was still planning on running away, she might want to get a move on - even though they both knew that by that point, Trixie wasn't going anywhere.
“When I was twelve,” her father said, “I stole a boat and decided to head down to Quinhagak. There aren't any roads leading to the tundra . . . you come and go by plane or boat. It was October, getting really cold, the end of fishing season. The boat motor quit working, and I started drifting into the Bering Sea. I had no food, only a few matches, and a little bit of gas . . . when all of a sudden I saw land. It was Nunivak Island, and if I missed it, the next stop was Russia.”
Trixie raised a brow. “You are totally making this up.”
“Swear to God. I paddled like crazy. And just when I realized I had a shot at reaching shore, I saw the breakers. If I made it to the island, the boat was going to get smashed. I duct-taped the gas tank to myself, so that when the boat busted up, I'd float.” This sounded like some extravagant survival flashback Trixie's father would write for one of his comic book characters - she'd read
dozens. All this time, she had assumed they were the products of his imagination. After all, those daring deeds hardly matched the father she'd grown up with. But what if he was the superhero?
What if the world her father created daily - full of unbelievable feats and derring-do and harsh survival - wasn't something he'd dreamed up but someplace he'd actually lived?
She tried to imagine her father bobbing in the world's roughest, coldest sea, struggling to make it to shore. She tried to picture that boy and then imagine him fully grown, a few nights ago, pummeling Jason. “What happened?” Trixie asked.
“A Fish and Game guy who was taking one last look for the year spotted the fire I made after I washed up on the island and rescued me,” her father said. 'I ran away one or two times each year after
that, but I never managed to get very far. It's like a black hole: People who go to the Alaskan bush disappear from the face of the earth.'
“Why did you want to leave so badly?”
Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”
“Then you weren't really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”
Her father, though, had stopped listening. He reached over to turn off the water in the sink and grasped her elbows, turning the insides of her arms up to the light.
She'd forgotten about the Band-Aids, which had peeled off in the soapy water. She'd forgotten to not hike up her sleeves. In addition to the gash at her wrist, which had webbed itself with healing skin, her father could see the new cuts she'd made in the shower, the ones that climbed her forearm like a ladder.
“Baby,” her father whispered, “what did you do?” Trixie's cheeks burned. The only person who knew about her cutting was Janice the rape counselor, who'd been ordered out of the house by Trixie's father a week ago. Trixie had been grateful for that one small cosmic favor: With Janice out of the picture, her secret could stay one. “It's not what you think. I wasn't trying to kill myself again. It just... it's just...” She glanced down at the floor. “It's how I run away.” When she finally gathered the courage to look up again, the expression on her father's face nearly broke her. The monster she'd seen in the parking lot the other night was gone, replaced by the parent she'd trusted her whole life. Ashamed, she tried to pull away from his hold, but he wouldn't let her. He waited until she tired herself out with her thrashing, the way he used to when she was a toddler. Then he wrapped his arms so tight around Trixie she could barely breathe. That was all it took: She began to cry like she had that morning in the shower, when she had heard about Jason.
“I'm sorry,” Trixie sobbed into her father's shirt. “I'm really sorry.”
They stood together in the kitchen for what felt like hours, with soap bubbles rising around them and dishes as white as bones drying on the wire rack. It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us just did a better job of hiding it than others.
Trixie imagined her father jumping into water so cold it stole his breath. She pictured him watching his boat break to pieces around him. She bet that if he'd been asked - even when he was sitting on that island, soaking wet and freezing - he'd tell you he would have done it all over again.
Maybe she was more like her father than he thought.
