Then I look down and see the correlation between the pain and the scalpel jutting from my arm.
Holding his face with one hand, the Swiss staggers toward me as though his soles were dipped in molasses.
“I will cut you.” His voice is thickened by broken lips. “And I will show you.”
A switch flips inside my brain. I will never let that happen. He’s killed Lisa and that’s as much as he will ever take from me. He’s got it all wrong. If he kills me, I’m taking him, too. I dredge up as much spit as I can and launch it at his face.
I imagine my father’s look of disapproval, but he’s dead. I can hear my mother’s lecture about things ladies should never do. But she’s dead, too. It’s just me and him, and I figure my folks would be okay under the circumstances.
“I am going to cut you.” His voice crackles like wrapping paper.
I run.
“Come with me,” Jenny says one Thursday afternoon when we meet on the library steps. She’s in her red coat, a camel scarf wound around her neck. My outfit is similar, but black.
“To see my therapist, I mean.”
I look at her like she’s lost her mind, which makes it a very lucky thing that she’s in therapy. When I tell her that, she laughs.
“You’d like her. Lena is fantastic.”
My shoulders slump slightly. Somewhere at the back of my mind the possibility lurked that Nick was her therapist.
“I don’t think so.”
“It would help me.”
“How?”
“Lena says I have unresolved issues about abandonment that stem from childhood. She feels that meeting you will paint a better picture. So?”
“No. When were you abandoned, anyway?”
She’s huffy when we go inside, her shoulders tense, her chin high. She doesn’t look at me save for the occasional glare delivered sideways.
We follow the drill. Inch our way forward. Try to steel ourselves when we hear the inevitable anguished bursting of battered hearts.
Our turn arrives too soon and not soon enough. I see it before Jenny. Mark’s name leaps off the page. My arm goes around her, I try to steer her out of there before she sees.
“Jenny, let’s go.”
But it’s too late, she’s seen his name. Mark D. Nugent. There’s no way for her to unsee. She’ll lie in bed, close her eyes, and that string of letters will come at her out of the darkness. Tonight. Tomorrow. All the days after. The pain strikes me, too —less of course, but there’s no time for me to feel it; I need to get Jenny out of here.
She sags against me, moans.
I walk her to her car, drive her to the only place I know to go: home. When I pull into our parents’ driveway, the pitted lawn and the ragged garden that our parents normally keep so beautifully don’t register. Times are anomalous, so unusual things no longer surprise me as they once did. Our mother is slow to come to the door.
We are portraits of the same woman: grief, determination, and, thirty years later, surprise.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, but the answer comes to her as quickly as the question forms. She presses a hand to her chest. “It’s Mark, isn’t it? Oh my.” She’s in her nightie, the latest in a long line of floor-length garments designed to
“Mom, is everything okay?”
“Fine, fine,” she says, and I know that means it’s not. She takes over, doing the things a mom always does. She steers Jenny to the cabbage rose sofa, sits her down like she’s a small child again, and pulls my sister into her arms and rocks her.
Jenny needs her mother now. No, Jenny needs Mark, but he can’t be here. He won’t be here ever again. We’re all just meat puppets with an invisible hand inside us, making us dance and live. When that hand slips off the glove, we collapse and that is the end of everything.
I go into the kitchen, fill the electric kettle, then go in search of Dad. From room to room I wander. I check the garage. It’s the same as it always is. There’s a table set up in the center with a half-finished project taking shape. The pile of wood pieces look like they’ll grow up to be a clock.
Then I make for the basement. You won’t find it behind a door in the hall. There’s no rickety staircase descending into darkness, with a bare swinging bulb to light the way. The way to this basement is through a cupboard in the bathroom. It’s a trapdoor in the floor with a ladder attached. Usually it’s open unless company comes over. No one likes to imagine a head popping up through that hole while they’re flipping through the magazine rack beside the toilet.
Today it’s closed. But that’s not what worries me. What makes my heart thump so hard my mother’s cooing in the other room dims to a whisper is the brass bolt locking the wood flap to the floor. There are new hinges, too. They’re the same shiny metal as the bolt. That shouldn’t worry me, either, except the trapdoor used to lie flush with the floor all the way around, and now the hinges jut at perfect right angles. Outside.
“Hiya, Pumpernickel.”
I slip right out of my body, crash into the ceiling, then glide right back in, sliding on a spiritual banana peel. My father is here, not down in the basement locked in like—
—a prisoner. And he looks great. His eyes sparkle with suppressed punch lines.
“You scared the crap out of me, Dad.”
“Then you’re in the right room, aren’t you?”
We hug.
“What’s wrong with your sister?” he says into my hair.
My eyes are rapid-filling cisterns.
“Mark,” he says in a voice too jovial for this conversation.
He marches into the living room, pulling me in his wake even though I don’t want to hear what comes next, because I know something isn’t right; Dad doesn’t look great, he looks
“Jenny, my girl,” he says. “Let’s celebrate. He was never any good for you anyway. So he’s dead, so what? Now you can find another one. One with a real job. A man’s job. Not that sissy sit-behind-a-computer shit he liked so much.” On and on he rambles while Jenny stares at him in horror. I’m wearing the same expression. But Mom isn’t.
Her gaze meets mine, weary with resignation. She knows this isn’t right, that something’s seriously wrong with Dad, and yet she doesn’t intervene.
“Turn up the heat, would you?” Dad thunders, and she scurries to accommodate him.
The air thickens. The heat isn’t flowing just from the vents but also from him. There’s a fire raging inside his body. I can almost see the steam rising from his pores. The air around him shimmers. He’s a sidewalk in summer.
“Dad,” I say. “That’s not—”
“Zoe,” Mom says.
“Why’s the basement locked?” I ask her.
Dad doesn’t stop the flow.
“He was worthless. I never wanted you to marry him, if you remember. ‘Jenny,’ I said—remember this?—‘are you sure you want to do this?’ You were so young, only twenty-two, a baby. You should have lived your life first,
