“Callie. She wanted to make sure we were having lots of monkey sex.”
I’ll tell Tommy the details eventually, but I don’t need to tell him right now. I’m good at this kind of compartmentalization. It’s a skill you learn early on if you want to have a life. I’ve gone from looking at the body of a raped and mutilated twelve-year-old girl to kissing my daughter on the cheek an hour later.
He grins. “I think we’re safe on that account, but let’s make extra sure.”
“I wish we didn’t have to leave tomorrow,” I murmur, as I clamber atop him.
“Why don’t we stay a little longer, then?”
“I’m the co-maid of honor at Callie’s wedding. She’d kill you and then me if I missed it.”
“That’s true.”
I bend at the waist and breathe into his ear. “Now shut up and do that thing I like so much.”
And he does, and the sun keeps rising and the ocean beats against the sand, and I cherish the minutiae of every moment. But even as we roam against each other, I know this peace is fleeting. We don’t belong here, in this place of too much light. I see other children in my mind, waiting for my return.
Tommy kisses me and I cry out, and the island says good-bye.
CHAPTER TWO
1974
“I’m going to be life.”
The man said these words to the Boy. The Boy took the timbre of his tone and got himself ready.
“Yes, Father.”
“You’ll be you, and I’ll be life.”
“I understand.”
It was a role play.
His father held out a hand, palm up. It was a big hand. It was a hard hand too. The Boy knew that from experience. It had fallen against him many times.
“Give me a dollar.”
His father regarded him and the Boy regarded his father, waiting for whatever was to come. It was the head of a brute, the Boy thought, not unlovingly. A head and face to match the hands, skull rough-cut from a block of concrete or a hunk of slag metal. His eyes were ice blue and ice cold, and they were the eyes of a philosopher and a murderer together.
The Boy was growing the same eyes, with his father as their gardener.
“I don’t have a dollar.”
“Well, now,” his father said. He looked down at the tabletop, tapped a single thick finger on it, as though lost in thought. “Well, now. I’ll ask you one more time.” He returned his gaze to his son’s face. “Give me a dollar.” He held out his hand again, closing and opening it in a gesture of wanting and demand.
“I already told you, I don’t have a dollar. Asking me twice isn’t going to make it so.”
He was rewarded with a glint of approval. What he’d just done was dangerous, but it was also brave. Brave was good.
“I told you I was going to be life,” his father intoned, in a low, patient voice. “When life asks you for a dollar, you either provide it or life punishes you ’til you do.”
The table was small and his father’s arms were long. The hand came down against the left side of his face, thunderous. He saw blackness almost immediately. He woke up on his stomach, chair overturned, his palms against the floor where he’d caught himself. His ears were ringing, and he could taste his own blood in his mouth. Numb buzzing filled his head.
“Get up, Son.”
His head swam. He fought to find the words. “Yes, Father.”
He was grateful.
The Boy was only ten, but he’d already observed some of the workings of the world, and he had a pretty good idea that his father was onto something. Life was going to go on, with you or without you. Probably without if you were weak. His father wanted him to be strong. What other kind of love could a father show a son?
He struggled to his feet. He swayed briefly but caught himself. Weakness was the cardinal sin, cowardice the second.
“Never just take it, boy,” his father said. “Always fight back. If you’re going to lose a fight, then make them pay for every punch they throw.”
“Yes, sir,” he agreed. He brought his fists up, marveling at how small they were compared to the massive ones his father had now raised and clenched.
“Life wants a dollar, boy,” his father said.
The Boy didn’t land a single blow, but he kept his mouth shut as his father beat him into unconsciousness, and he didn’t cry.
The Boy came to in his own bed, shivering and hurting. He wanted to moan, but he bit it back. His father was sitting on the edge of the bed next to him, a hulk in the dark, silvered by the moon bleeding through the curtains.
“I’m being life, and life wants a dollar, Son. I’m going to ask for a dollar every week until you give me one. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he said through cracked lips, making sure his voice was strong and clear.
His father gazed out the window, watching the moon as though the two of them had something to commiserate on. Maybe they did. “Do you know what joy is, Son?”
“No, sir.”
“Joy is anything that comes after survival.”
The Boy filed that away, in the deep-down place where he held the great truths, and then he waited, because his father wasn’t done. He could tell.
“We only have one purpose in this life, Son, and that’s to draw our next breath. Everything else is just a dressed-up lie. You need food, you need shelter, you need a place to sleep and a hole to shit in.” The big man turned on the bed to look at him directly.
The Boy had never really been afraid of his father. In all the lessons in all the times, through the brutal and the painful, he’d never doubted that the man who’d given him life would preserve it. Until now. Now was different, and he held his breath and his tongue and he waited, watched by two eyes that were lit up like dying stars.
“Why’d I pick a dollar? Because money is at the base of it all. Life wants a dollar, Son, it wants it each and every day, from now ’til you go under the ground. If you can’t pay, you can’t eat. If you can’t eat, you can’t live. There’s nothing else to it. You follow me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not sure you do, boy, but we’ll find out. This is a test. I’ll give you some tries, but eventually, if you don’t come up with that dollar, I’m going to have to put you down and start over.”
His father turned away after a stretched minute and resumed his communion with the moon.
“There isn’t any God, boy. There’s no such thing as the soul. There’s just blood and flesh and bone. You weren’t put here by a higher power. You were put here because I stuck something in your mother and the meat of you grew into something else. That meat needs to be fed, and you need dollars to do that, and that’s the sum of all we are and ever will be.”
The big man stood up and left without a further word. The boy lay back on his bed and watched the moon and thought about what had been said to him. He didn’t question the lessons, and he didn’t resent the pain. That ship had sailed, then sunk, long, long ago. There was a time he remembered being angry and sad, but it seemed more like a dream than a memory now. His father’s fists had hammered that weakness from him, like a hammer smoothing the dimples from a sheet of metal. His father was his God, and his God was teaching him to survive.
He needed a dollar. If he didn’t come up with it, he’d die. That was all that mattered, so he put his mind to it.
