The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

  His observations and carefully detailed description of the world were making her antsy. Making her wring her hands and suddenly suck in her breath as if for the longest time she’d not been breathing.

  I’d find her looking out the windows or craning her neck off the edge of the porch, longing to see beyond the limited landscape her stuck life afforded her.

  At the very best, she’d linger on the edge of the porch, reaching her hand out and testing for rain before snapping it back to her chest, swearing she’d felt a sprinkle, when in reality, it was the slight falling from her own eyes.

  Melancholy is the woman with ribs like nails and lies like hammers. My mother’s lie was that our house could be enough. That its countries could keep her from feeling like she was missing out. What a housebound woman fears is not the knife in the kitchen drawer. It is the outside being better.

  “Stella, please come outside,” Sal begged.

  “It looks to pour any minute.” She folded her arms and rubbed her hands up and down her mole-speckled shoulders as she paced in front of the sunny windows.

  “You’ll never get her outside.” Dad was passing by and had overheard us on his way to his study. In his hand was a new box of pushpins. The bulletin board had gotten crowded with more papers, more pins, more lines zigzagging this way and that. The progressing investigation meant more stacks of interviews with the families of the missing black boys, of eyewitness statements, of theories and speculation. Stacks and stacks of paper that were taller than Sal, but never him.

  The phone number for the hospital was still in his study because Dovey was still there. She’d been kept on suicide watch ever since losing the baby. She was also having a psychological evaluation after she took a black marker and drew a staircase on the wall of her hospital room. She had numbered the steps but didn’t get to her goal of seven million before Otis and the nurses stopped her.

  Otis stayed with her, dividing his time between Columbus and Breathed. Even Elohim was taking the long drive to go see her. His visits were said to be doing a world of good. Of course, that would be thought. It’s easy to be the boulder rolling through what is left of the dandelion field when everyone has their backs turned and are looking at the already flattened ground.

  “You’ll never get her outside,” Dad said again before closing the door of his study.

  Mom frowned, angry that he’d given up on her and her fear so easily. Not like in the beginning, when he tried so desperately to get her out. Why didn’t he try anymore? she wondered. Doesn’t he still love me? Her anger shifted to nervousness, which put her face in a slope to the right that played favorably with the cluster of dark moles on that cheek side.

  “Stella, you know it’s not going to rain today.” Sal held the curtains back even more, pointing out to the brown ground. “We are in a drought.”

  She winced as if she was full of shards as she lay back onto the wall, closing her eyes. “What if I do go outside, and it suddenly and unexpectedly starts to rain?”

  “Why are you so afraid of the rain, Stella?”

  “Oh, you don’t wanna hear that.” She burst away from the wall, patting her cowlick and licking her hand to do the same to mine.

  “No, Mom, stop.” I swatted her hand like it was an incoming wasp. “I said stop it already.”

  “Fine. Hey, I know, let’s watch a movie.” She skipped, feigning cheer over to the cabinet full of our VHS collection. “What movie you boys wanna watch? Hmm? Something Wicked This Way Comes? How ’bout Mr. Mom? I just love that one. Oh, here’s Psycho.”

  “Yuck, Mom.” Grand leaned in the doorway, along with his friend Yellch. “Anthony Perkins is in Psycho.”

  “So?” Mom shrugged and we shrugged with her.

  “I hear he’s a fag.”

  Mom pulled Psycho out of its cover sleeve as she said, “I don’t want you readin’ tabloid trash, Grand. And what’d your father say ’bout usin’ that word?”

  “I love that movie,” Yellch added his two cents before taking a bite of the peach in his hand, the juices slipping down his lanky wrist and dropping to the rug.

  “Really?” Grand turned to Yellch. “You don’t mind Perkins? That he’s a—”

  “Nah.” Yellch dragged his gapped teeth through the peach’s yellowed flesh.

  Yellch was seventeen, soon to be eighteen like Grand. Both of them soon to be seniors in the coming year at Breathed High. While Grand was pitcher on the baseball team, gangly Yellch was first baseman. He was someone I always thought had the profile of Lake Superior looking out to the northeast. He wore these gold-rimmed eyeglasses that were round and old-fashioned, contrasting his dark, curly mullet.

  His real name was Thatch. The reason for the change to Yellch was because of one day in 1975, when he was eight and Grand was nine. Yellch and his Jewish family had just arrived in Breathed. When they came, it was thought they would live Jewish lives. Maybe they’d want to build a synagogue, invite rabbis, constantly smell of matzo ball soup. These were the fears of a town that wasn’t comfortable with the Jewish identity.

  One day a group backed Yellch into an alley and threw stones at him. Grand happened to be walking by. He ran to stand in front of Yellch, shielding him from the stones. Not only that. Grand picked up the stones and threw them back.

  “What should I do?” Yellch cowered behind this nine-year-old god who stood fighting for him.

  “Yell.” Grand did so himself. “Just yell, as loud as you can. Throw stones at them from your throat.”

  Yellch yelled so loud, Grand had to look back just to see if it was still a boy behind him or something bigger. Those throwing the stones ran away. From that day on, everyone called Thatch Yellch.

  Grand and Yellch became best pals after that, and as Mom slipped Psycho into the VCR, they went upstairs, most likely to play Space Invaders on Grand’s Atari.

  We weren’t even past the FBI warning of the movie before Sal started to beg Mom to tell him why she was afraid of the rain. She ignored his pleas and tried to concentrate on the big knife, the shower curtain, and Janet Leigh’s screams. Finally she could stand Sal’s pleas no more and muted the movie.

  For a moment afterward, she rubbed her neck as if she were loosening some long-held muscle. Then she cupped her cheeks as she slowly told about the night her parents were getting ready for a party.

  “My father was in a tuxedo. My mother was in tulle. She spun ’round for me like a ballerina, I told her with giggles. I was thirteen. I remember it was rainin’. Pourin’, really.

  “My mother went out the door, under an umbrella. My father after her. I called ’im back. I said, ‘Daddy, don’t you go out in that rain.’ He made fish lips. ‘I’m a fish,’ he said. ‘Your Momma too. We’ll just swim right through.’

  “That whole night I dreamed ’em doin’ just that. Swimmin’ through the rain, Father in his black tie and Mother with tulle fins.

  “When I woke, I did so to Grandfather tellin’ me there’d been a terrible accident. My parent’s car, well…” She turned her head, unable to finish the sentence.

  “I thought maybe they’d bury ’em in the tuxedo and gown. I thought my parents would like to be buried in things like that. I don’t know what they were buried in, actually. The coffins had to be closed. So I don’t … I don’t know. That’s a terrible thing for a daughter not to know.”

  She cleared her throat and stood, suddenly desiring to straighten the afghan on the back of the chair.

  “For a long time, I hated ’em for leavin’ that night. Then I realized it wasn’t their fault. It was the rain’s. The rain was what killed ’em. Not the car. Not the turn in the road. But the rain.”

  She couldn’t get the afghan as straight as she wanted it to be, so she yanked it up and bunched it into a ball that she sat down with in the chair. She hugged it into her stomach as she said with a slight chuckle or something like it, “I don’t know how to swim. My parents, the fish…”

  Her words got lost for a moment as her eyes m
erged into a darkness that cast her face in shadow.

  “They never taught me, and I know the rain is just waitin’ on me. Waitin’ to get me like it got them. So I stay out of it. How can it ever get me if I’m never in it?”

  “I could teach you how to swim.” Sal stood before her. “I can’t say you’ll never drown in the rain, but at least it will never be because you don’t know how to swim.”

  She stared at him until his fish lips made her laugh. He grabbed the afghan from her and tossed it to the sofa.

  “Oh, you silly, silly boy.”

  He gently pulled her hand until she was up on her feet. She tightened her apron strings and giggled like a shy little girl as he swam around the room, performing the breaststroke.

  He directed her arms to do the same until she started doing it on her own, swimming around the room after him, soon kicking her heels off so she could swim faster. Her skirt billowed out behind her, the apron strings bouncing as she swam lap after lap, exhaling loudly through her mouth like a swimmer counting off her breaths.

  “You too, Fielding.” Sal bumped into me as he passed.

  I did the doggy paddle when they did, the backstroke, the butterfly, the deep dive, and the surface breach. We swam laughing all through the house like this, one country to another, until Yellch came quick and stomping down the stairs from Grand’s room, yelling for Grand to just stay away from him.

  Grand followed so closely on Yellch’s heels they almost tumbled down the stairs together.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Honest, Yellch.”

  Yellch wiped his lips hard with his sleeve. “What’s the matter with you, man?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought—” Grand’s voice shook, and for the first time in my life I was embarrassed by him. By that fear I’d never heard in him before. That clinging to Yellch like, well, I didn’t know.

  “You’re fucked up.” Yellch said it so steady, so grounded in tone that it seemed such a sobering truth.

  He was fast out the door, his mullet bouncing in that near run. Grand also wiped his lips as he watched Yellch leave.

  “Shit,” he muttered to himself. When he turned to see us all watching, our arms raised midswim, he asked us what the fuck we were all looking at before picking up a vase. He wound up like on the mound and pitched it into the wall.

  While Mom was yelling at him for doing such a thing, I couldn’t help but be in awe at how perfect a pitch it was.

  15

  Here in the dark so many precious things

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:611

  SOMETIMES I THINK I see your shoulder. Then I realize it’s just a jar of honey. I scream out your name and am certain I see your mole, but it’s only the last grape on the vine. I grab hold of your neck, but it’s no more than a piece of rope. I reach toward your rib, but it’s simply a grain of rice. I hold your hand, sorrowed to find it is my own.

  Who you are, I cannot say for certain. Who you are, Grand, I can never find my way to. You are always just something else. No matter how hard I look for you, I cannot find you.

  I try. In the dark, I do try because I was once told you can imagine anything in the dark. So I sit here at night in my trailer with all the lights out, with all the sheets drawn on the windows. I sit here trying to find you and I sit here imagining I do until the light comes back on and I realize you’re just something else.

  A light coming on and beaming through the thin sheet on the window by the door. I get up from the lawn chair, on the way knocking into and rolling an empty bottle across the carpet. I remind myself to make a stop at the liquor store. Not the one by the pawnshop. He never has forgiven me for breaking that bottle against the wall.

  I open the door to the neighbor boy and his light in my eyes.

  “What are you doin’ in the dark?” He lowers the light to my side. “What are you holdin’, Mr. Bliss?”

  I turn my hand over, the light shining on the white leather and red stitching.

  “It’s just a baseball.” I drop it. He keeps the light on the ball as it rolls across the floor. Once the ball stops, he shines the light in my face again. I squint past it to his eyes on me, quick from thought to smile.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you, Mr. Bliss. It’s just that your trailer was so dark. Not one light. I thought maybe somethin’ happened. That maybe you fell.”

  I look at his young face and wince. “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Damn it.”

  “What’d you say, Mr. Bliss?”

  “I said leave me alone. Wait…”

  “Are you okay, Mr. Bliss?”

  I hold my head and try to remember. “Have you seen Sal?”

  “Who, Mr. Bliss?”

  “The boy.” I shake my hands at him. How can he not know who I’m talking about? “Have you seen the boy? We must get him … we must get him away.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Bliss?”

  “Oh, stupid man.” I slap my head. “Stupid, stupid man. No, no, I’m fine.”

  “Who’s Sal?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I know where he is. You go home. I’ll be okay.”

  “All right, Mr. Bliss. Hey, I’m sorry about breakin’ your—”

  I slam the door before he gets to the time machine part. I shuffle back toward the lawn chair. On the way, I scoot my feet over the carpet until I feel the smooth side of glass with my bare toes. I pick up the bottle and tilt it all the way. Not even a damn drop left.

  I carry it over to the lawn chair and sit down. Don’t turn so much as a lamp on. I’m okay without electricity. During that summer, we often had none for extended periods of time due to them blackouts rolling across Breathed. By the end of July, they became a daily occurrence. The electric company issued warnings for us to do our part in conserving energy, such as keeping unnecessary appliances unplugged.

  In an effort to keep cool, Dad ate heat on everything. He made chili and soup, using hot peppers from the garden as spoons. When I asked him why, he said because ingesting heat cools the body from the inside out.

  I wasn’t convinced as I watched him drip over bowls of soup, unintentionally slurping up his sweat. A few days after eating nothing but heat, he threw his hands up in the air and said, “Fuck it.”

  Needless to say, he went back to sucking on ice cubes.

  Interrupting the heat were the phone calls. Always anonymous, but always voices we knew and who called us nigger-lovers, devil-worshippers. Sometimes both at once. These calls sent Dad to the drawer to pull out the newspaper with his invitation in it.

  “What’s wrong, Autopsy?” Sal watched Dad silently read the invitation.

  “If I knew there was going to be this much trouble, I would never have done it.” He laid the paper back down into the drawer.

  There was a fan on top of the table, and he stood there in front of it, holding his arms out and twisting his body, allowing the air flow to oscillate as best it could through his vest and button-up shirt. As he did this, he spoke over the fan’s whir to tell me and Sal about one of his early cases.

  “It was when I first started. It was a case involving a fifteen-year-old girl who had accused her father of rape on four different occasions. The father denied the allegations, but there was evidence of trauma to the girl’s, well—” He cleared his throat, that too coming just as loud as his voice over the fan’s drone.

  “Neighbors came forward, said the girl often went around the house in very little clothing. Furthermore, that her father never seemed to mind this near nudity of his own daughter. They said they might remember instances where his hand landed a little too low on her back for their liking. Perhaps a kiss or a hug between father and daughter lingered just a little too long.

  “One of the girl’s friends, a young boy, gave testimony that he had on more than one occasion walked in on the father naked and sleeping in the daughter’s bed. The father was known to drink too much and had in the past been charged with rape. The woman who
accused him was an ex-girlfriend who later dropped the charges and said she filed only because she was mad at him. Still, I was certain of his guilt in regards to his daughter’s rape.

  “I looked at his narrow eyes and said to myself, those are the eyes of a devil. I looked at his hands, his rough hands with their filthy nails, and said those are the hands of a monster. Ignoring they were merely the hands of someone who works construction.

  “He sat still through the whole trial, never once batting an eye when his daughter on the witness stand described the gruesome details of being violated by him. Yes, I said, he is no father. He is the devil.

  “Everyone cheered when he was convicted on all four counts of rape. Hell, I cheered. I had put the devil through the filter and the world was cleaner for it.”

  Dad stepped over to the window, where he laid his sweating forehead against the glass.

  “Just this last January, the girl—now thirty-three—came forward. Said she falsely accused her father for the same reason the ex-girlfriend had. All that man seemed guilty of was making the women in his life angry.

  “The daughter said before she knew it, the case just got out of hand and she was too frightened to say it wasn’t true after all. But ever since getting off the heroin and becoming a born-again Christian, she felt it was her duty to set things right.

  “As for the boy who testified, he happened to be the one who had caused the trauma that led to the police believing she’d been raped. Apparently, the two liked things a little rough. And the neighbors who said they saw the father with low hands, lingering kisses and hugs, were actually mad at him for a fence he was putting in, which they said was too far over on their property line.”

  Dad pulled his head back from the window, leaving a smear on the glass from his sweat.

  “I wanted to apologize to the man, but that damn daughter, she had come forward too late. Prison can be a tough place for a man accused of raping his own. Three years into his sentence, a sentence that up to that point had been filled with numerous trips to the prison’s infirmary, the man had been fatally attacked in the laundry room.”

  Dad rubbed the scar on his forehead as he mumbled something to himself before squinting to the bright light outside.