“No,” I said quietly. I couldn’t stop shaking.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” I whispered.
He dug his fingers into my shoulder blades until I winced before freeing me from his grip. He nodded once, fell back into his chair, and passed out.
Now I know, I thought as I crept upstairs, retreating into the sanctuary of my bedroom. It stung, but it was better to admit it to myself now. Now I know I can never talk to him about anything.
16.
Things went back to normal on Monday, or as normal as things could be. Dad and I didn’t speak of what had happened that night, or what he’d said to me in a drunken stupor. I’d spent the rest of the weekend in my room, listening to music, smoking up the rest of my weed and even watching a few bad shows with Mom while she chain-smoked and ate peanut butter ice cream out of a tub and lied to me about all of the jobs she’d been applying to.
It was like it had never happened at all. All part of some big, bad trip down the rabbit hole.
I’d had weird dreams that weekend too, vivid and strange. It could have been the after-effects of the acid. But the dreams were tinged with anxiety. I knew partly why I’d been waking up in cold sweats from so many murky nightmares, and why the dreams grew worse as the weekend came to an end, but I tried not to think about it.
Part of me was still sure I had dreamed it.
Mom made me toast and coffee Monday morning and sat with me at the table while I ate, still shaken from the last night’s sleep.
“You know, I’m thinking, if no one in this town will hire me, I might as well do what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ll finally write that book, you know the one, right Jack?” She tapped the ashes of her cigarette right on the table. “Of course you do, I’ve been telling you about it since you were four years old and could barely understand me. You know you learned to read so early on, you were always such a bright little guy, full of ideas. Well I think it’s genetic, Jack, and I’ve got ideas of my own. I’ve got a lot of stories to tell, stories your father hasn’t even heard, stories that’ll have the big shots in New York banging down my door for a finished manuscript…”
She sipped her morning screwdriver and spoke mostly to herself, bouncing around ideas in her head that seemed to fluctuate without rhyme or reason. I nodded passively, my leg jiggling under the table, half-anticipating a text or a call as an excuse to get away from her.
I biked to school by myself, not bothering to ask Max or Toby to join me or give me a ride. I needed to feel the quiet around me. I sat outside under the shade of an oak tree in the courtyard before the morning bell, watching kids laugh and talk and smoke. It all seemed so exhausting, all of the energy that went into every conversation, every turn of the head, every gesture and expression.
My mind wandered back to Dad.
His own dad, my Grandpa Jack, was a Gulf War vet who flew an F-14 Tomcat during Desert Storm, spraying the caked earth with missiles. Shrapnel was still lodged in the crevice of his elbow, right up until he died. As a kid, I’d sit on his back porch on hot summer nights, Grandpa Jack telling me stories about Vietnam and World War II by the light of the fireflies. I cupped the little bugs in my hand and pretended to listen, holding them gently in the cocoon of my palms. They felt so safe there, the way their tiny legs tickled my skin as I silently told them I loved them.
I knew Dad would never understand something like that. He liked to trap them in mason jars for hours. They would suffocate in their glass prison as their mini-engines leaked their chemical lifeblood until they shriveled and died. I’d cry and Dad would always tell me to stop being a pussy about some goddamned bugs in a cup.
That summer I turned eight, I played outside, scraping my knees and collecting insect specimens for study. After dinner, when everyone was settling down for the night, I’d go out and lay in the grass, watching the stars. Back then they seemed to burn so big and bright in the black sky.
I like to tell myself I went out there almost every night because it soothed me, because outside the air was clean and free of cigarette smoke and the stars intoxicated my budding imagination. I’d pretend those memories were clean and pure, just a little boy’s fascination with the galaxy outside his warm California home, while inside Daddy smoked his pipe and watched the evening news and Mama knit by the fireside.
I used to lay out there in the cool lawn, letting the universe roll over me and swallow me whole, pretending that I didn’t hear the television blaring and the sound of my daddy’s garbled words underneath like static, the sharp pops of aluminum cans opening and the clanking of bottles in the fridge. The expanse of sky would drown out my mother’s screaming, her lungs scratched raw from ash and tar, our TV turned up so loud the whole house shivered. Things being broken over and over again.
One evening I just up and ran away. It was around the time Dad lost his job, the big one at the company two hours north of town. That one that
