“I thought he was just trying to scare me, but I ran down the back stairs as fast as I could, just to be sure. It seemed to take forever to get outside, but I wasn’t allowed to use the front stairs, so I had to go around.” Father’s mother had inherited a million dollars in the Depression. The first thing she did was build a huge house on ten acres of beachfront property on Puget Sound. Girl had counted seventeen rooms the last time she was there, if she included the maid’s quarters in the basement. Girl always loved the spiral staircase at the front of the house, but kids had to use the “children’s stairs” closer to the kitchen, even the grandkids like Girl. Grandma was inflexible in her rules and had a way of reprimanding children without raising her voice that was scarier than if she had yelled. It was like she had no warmth inside her at all.
Girl was chewing on her hair as her father talked. She knew she should stop that, but it was a nervous habit. She mindlessly twisted a lock of hair between her fingers, then absentmindedly rubbed it across her lips. Next thing Girl knew she was sucking on it and chewing it. Girl wiped the broken hairs off her tongue and rubbed them on her jeans.
“I got outside and there was Pooh, lying on his side. Dad shot him through the heart. Dad looked at me and didn’t say anything. He just went back in the house. I was hugging my dog and crying and he just walked away. He killed my best friend. I took a shovel and dug a hole. I took off my pajama top and wrapped him up in it as best I could. Tears were streaming down my face. It took a long time to fill that hole back up, and all I could think about was revenge.”
Girl was chewing her hair again, her body tense. This anxious oral fixation would morph into smoking in a few years. Girl wished she didn’t have to wear a seatbelt. There was something about being alone with her father that made her want to be able to escape quickly, but he always made her buckle up in the car. Father had taken Girl and Brother to Washington, DC, to lobby for seatbelt laws the year before, and he’d pull over and stop the car if he saw that Girl was unbuckled. She looked at the car door and unlocked it. She didn’t know why, but being alone with Father scared her, even in a moving vehicle.
“After I buried him I went to my room and went through my closet and found some old clothes.” Father went on. “I sewed them together like a scarecrow. I even sewed a head from my winter hat. I went outside and got straw and grass and leaves and stuffed it, so it was a life-sized doll of me. Do you remember that big window in Grandma Mary’s bedroom?” Girl nodded, even though she didn’t. Girl knew that Grandma’s room was on the second floor, and the house was on a slope, high up from Puget Sound. She imagined that her grandmother could see the ocean over the top of the pine trees. Kids weren’t allowed in there, so Girl had only peeped in once or twice from the hall.
“Well, every morning as soon as my dad woke up, he’d open the curtains and watch the sunrise over the water. So I crawled on the roof and dangled the scarecrow down so it looked like I had hung myself.”
“Wow,” Girl said. She wasn’t sure how to respond. She wasn’t even sure how a kid could get on the roof.
“I did it over and over, every morning. Got him every time.”
Girl closed her eyes and laid her head back on the tweedy brown headrest. Her windbreaker was zipped up, and she buried her hands in her pockets, tunneling into herself for comfort. Grandma Mary’s house didn’t look like much from the front. It was white, with a dark red door. It didn’t look big at all, because it was built into a hill. The back of the house, which faced the ocean, was four stories tall, so the basement was really at ground level. There were four separate doors to the outside, besides the attached garage. The main door and the private entrance to Grandpa Doctor’s medical clinic both faced the driveway. Girl’s grandfather had died before she was born, but his office was kept like a dusty shrine filled with ghosts. Girl wouldn’t have been surprised if she heard lingering screams of forgotten patients. No one was allowed in there, but Girl didn’t want to go in anyway. She ran by the door as fast as she could, even though she was twelve and old enough not to believe in ghosts. With her eyes closed now, Girl could picture dark gray specters in a foreboding swirl around the ceiling of the exam room as Grandpa Doctor loaded the pistol he brought home from the war. She pictured her father running out the front door, the tall trees softly releasing leftover drizzle in the way trees around Seattle always seemed to start their day. But that wasn’t right. The front door faced the driveway. If Grandpa Doctor was going to shoot a dog, he wouldn’t do it out front where anyone could see.
The dog would have been in the backyard. If someone walked out the workshop door at ground level, below the kitchen balcony and dumbwaiter, there was a huge lawn leading
