Animal

he met Alice’s mother, by the way. Alice’s mother brought in a Mexican friend of hers who worked in the kitchen. The friend had a growth she needed removed from her neck. They had to work quickly and the surgery cost in the tens of thousands. She was an illegal immigrant. I remember my father coming home that night. I was eight years old. He came through the garage and I clapped for him and over a dinner of pizzaiola he told us about how two unfortunate women came in, two cooks in a kitchen, and one of them had a growth and they saved her in the nick of time and he made the bill disappear. And the other one was so grateful, she cried and cried and said, Bless you! They were each other’s only friends in the world, my father said. Or America, in any case. My father is such a good man, I thought.

Gosia never told me anything bad about my father. Nor did she really say good things about my mother. And she rarely said anything about herself. I don’t think anybody could have done a finer job than she did, given the circumstances. I was ten years old and she was an Austrian pessimist, childless by design. She had lovers in stone cities and her husband—my uncle—was inconsequential. She tried to lead by example. But she also left me alone with what to make of my life. She held me when I screamed, but she didn’t tell me how to feel. So that a callus could form over my past. It took meeting Alice to understand the precise ways in which I’d been affected. How the night of the killings informed all that I did with men and all that I didn’t do with women. My mother couldn’t keep my father. Can you imagine that that had once been an actual thought in my head?

Look at your daughter.

There was a long period after they died when I could call them up; I could feel like they were holding me in bed. I was able to do this most easily with sleeping pills. When I went to the drugstore with Gosia, she would let me select some off the rack, valerian and passionflower. Vials with beautiful moonlight blooms. Like a scientist, I would make little concoctions out of them, mixing three or more tinctures in one. I used them at night, but sometimes I would drink them very early in the morning to go back to sleep. When I was fifteen and still waking up screaming in the night, Gosia gave me Ambien.

The Ambien helped, but then the early evenings became worse. You would think the middle of the night would always be the worst, the witching hours, the hours I’d found them dead, but strangely these became the most peaceful hours for me. In any case, the better the sleep, the worse the morning. If I slept soundly, in the morning came the job of reminding myself: Your parents are dead. Here is how they died. You are all alone.

—She’s very sick, they kept saying. As though I had the flu. I didn’t feel sick. I felt light. I was hemorrhaging. They ran bags of blood into the room.

Don’t ask men how their day was. If they are tired and look unhappy, say, Oh, too bad, at the very most.

I WILL HAVE THESE FEW minutes with you, they said to me, before they have to take me into the white room.

Look at your daughter.

The past was everything to me. For that reason, though not that one alone, I don’t want you to have one. Just these words, a small guide. Here is what will happen. I will watch you play soccer on an emerald field at a boarding school that is more splendid than the one where Big Sky will send his children. You will be running down that field and everyone—other parents, younger siblings, the opposing team’s coach—will be transfixed by you, by your long tan legs, by the winner’s gleam in your eye, by your speed and hair and clavicle. You will be faster than the rest. Having come from nowhere, you will be more surely heading somewhere. You will always sleep on freshly laundered beds. You will eat wedges of lemon cake on English country estates and drink iced tea with woolly leaves of mint. You will vacation in the best places, not just the good names but places even the very wealthy barely know about. You will have enough money for most of your lifetime. You won’t outrun it, as I did.

My mother left me all her jewelry. She left it for me in her boxes of hair color, which she hid all over the house. Clairol and Wella and some old stained boxes of Féria from Harmon Cosmetics. There were thick gold chains with crucifixes and emerald rings, ruby and platinum bracelets, and the famous thirty-two-diamond ring, which we used to count together, all the diamonds. Later I learned they were just chips. And not very clear. There were also, I remembered, the little rosebud earrings that Alice had, too. I think that was the part that made me feel for my mother the most. That my father bought her and his mistress the same little rosebud earrings. Perhaps they had been on sale. Two for the price of one.

The whole bounty wasn’t worth too much, but she used to tell me that she’d come back from the grave and bite my feet if I sold it. I didn’t sell it. You may, if you wish. I don’t care if you keep it or not, if you wear it around or never do.

My mother was too much for me and she didn’t even live past my tenth year. I couldn’t stop thinking about all of her things. All the books she read at the town pool, wimpled from the wetness of my dripping hands when I went to