Dad left on another hunting trip. Instead of a rabbit, pheasant, or deer, he brought back lilies for Mom, the color of her tattoo. Last time, a slinky nightie. For us, licorice whips today. The time before, a bag of Swedish Fish.
“I’m sorry.” He smoothed the errant hair behind Mom’s ears, then kissed the top of her head. He said it again, falling to his knees and blubbering. “Remember when I took you to prom? You wore your hair like this. Remember our first Christmas? I gave you that V-neck.” Remember this, remember that? He was always asking her to remember.
We wanted to forget how Mom rubbed against him so hard the whole room crackled with static.
We wanted to know if he ate what he shot, right there in the woods, sharing the meal with our dog, which was why he never brought it back. “Did he?” we asked Rex, his head on one lap, his legs on the other, as we swung on the bench swing in the backyard, gazing up at the stars.
Dogs never lie. If they’re scared, they shake. If they’re happy, they wag and lick. If they’re sad, they whine. We opened Rex’s mouth, searching for feathers or fur. But all we could see were black gums. If we were dogs ourselves, we could have pressed our noses to his tongue and smelled all the secret dark places he and Dad had been.
8
If we were dogs we could have run away,” one of us said. The words, interrupting the movie in our heads, sounded like hail pinging off our boots.
“Isn’t that what we did?”
“He treated Rex better than he treated us.”
“He didn’t teach him how to spell.”
“Like that makes up for everything?”
“He gave us our first shot at celebrity.”
“And our first . . .”
“What?”
But we knew. This back and forth. This yes and no. This you and me.
Our first glance at separation.
We had almost let it happen in the spelling bee. It was starting to happen now, our words knifing the air between us, even as we edged our bodies closer together for warmth.
We had made it stop before.
If we could just remind ourselves how.
9
Ms. Rosen, our fourth-grade teacher, flitted by our desks, her breath in our hair. “Make a list. What are your parents good at? What could they share? I want them to join our classroom family.” The last word, from her honey mouth, spellbound us. Could we have two families, one at home and one at school? One to run away to when the other became too much?
She swished her hair behind her shoulders, jingling her charm bracelet, fluttering the butterfly tattoo on her arm. Her skirt swirled against bare light brown legs. All our other teachers covered themselves.
We sisters made a single list, one girl writing what the other had whispered in her ear: Mom could do mom things. She could take care of us. So could every mom of every kid in our class. She had a beauty mark in the shape of a perfectly round jewel. But that wasn’t a skill. We wanted our list to stand out, so Ms. Rosen would pluck it from the pile and smile at us and read it in front of the class.
We wrote:
Our dad’s handwriting is so beautiful it should be in a handwriting museum.
He’s so strong he can carry both of us at the same time.
He carries a map in his brain of the whole wide world.
He can spell every word in the dictionary.
We didn’t tell her the other Dad stuff. The bad stuff he only did to us. No way we would tell. She had never read a list like that to the whole class.
“Pass your papers up,” Ms. Rosen said, and we did.
We thought Ms. Rosen had never even read our pages. But later that year she asked Dad to help our class train for the school spelling bee. He was working the afternoon shift, so he could spare an hour after lunch.
The day he first visited our class, we were doodling in our notebooks—hearts and flowers and butterfly tattoos—while our teacher tried to explain the features of each Great Lake that made it great. Most kids peered at the beckoning world outside the window, the smell of dogwood wafting in. Some boys stared at their fancy yellow soccer socks. Some girls twisted or sucked or braided their hair. As soon as Dad entered the room, though, all eyes were trained on him at the front of the room.
He didn’t look like any of the teachers, not just because he wore his factory clothes to school: blue jeans, tan boots, canvas button-up with the company logo sewn on. At home we got used to his bulging arms and towering shoulders. Here, he seemed to shake the industrial tile floors and the bumpy concrete walls with every step. When he talked, his voice drummed its own beat. “See?” we said to Ms. Rosen with only our eyes. “We told you he was special.”
“You know what you win?” Dad asked the class. “Free plane ride, free food. Prize money. Forget the lottery, these odds are better. And you get to be on TV.”
Now we all stretched our necks to hear. No one we knew had ever traveled on a plane. Most had never left Michigan.
Ms. Rosen held still in the chair behind her desk. Even her charms hung silent.
“You can’t win by memorizing words,” Dad said. “Not big, anyway. You have to learn patterns and rules. A little Greek and Latin. French and German.”
Did anybody else’s dad know foreign languages? He was smarter, even, than our teacher. He stored hundreds of years of knowledge in his head. Thousands. He knew about what had happened before the dinosaurs, even before Earth was formed in the solar system. And not because he had read so many books. Because he had been there.
No one would have believed us, so we didn’t tell them. They might have taken us away, put us in a home where nothing ever happened. Where every weekend was as boring as a school assembly on bullying.
He taught us prefixes and suffixes. Rules and jingles. “I before E except after C.” He taught us exceptions. “Every rule has an outlaw.”
The outlaw words he set to hip-hop beats. He let us stomp our feet. He taught us how to close our eyes and wait for the words to arrive behind our lids.
On the day of the bee, Mom let us drink coffee for the first time, in a United Auto Workers mug. “Helps concentration,” she said. Dad woke up early to see us compete. He made us eat toast sloppy with butter, even though our stomachs churned.
Mom stayed home. She could have asked Ya-Ya to watch the daycare babies while she was gone. That’s what she did when she was sick. Instead, she said, “If I came, it would be bad for your nerves.” Or hers.
We shuffled into the gym, in dresses that tied in the back, our feet pinched in polished patent leather. The spellers sat on the stage, the audience in folding metal chairs under basketball nets. At nine o’clock, Ms. Rosen started with the easy fourth-grade words Dad had drilled into us.
Then came the fifth-grade words and a tsunami of mistakes. First bough. Exorcise. Crypt. Finally, only we two stood. We could tell from Dad’s wide eyes in the front row that he was already cashing our prize money check, eating our free food, flying on our free plane, watching us on TV, in his head.
“Despicable,” Ms. Rosen said. We both spelled it wrong. Each time one of us failed, the other had to spell the same word right to win.
Words formed behind our eyes. “Imagine what winning looks like,” Dad had told the class. We didn’t like what we saw.
“Ten more minutes,” Ms. Rosen said. “If no one wins after the buzzer rings, no one can continue to the next level.”
“Weird” was the next word. An exception to the “I before E” rule. Dad had drilled that word into us so many times, not just at school but at home, we were full of its holes.
The rest of our class squirmed in their seats, their squeaks telling us anyone could spell that word. We closed our eyes and could see ourselves flying on the plane to the regionals. Smiling for the TV cameras. Dad hugging us the way Mom hugged the daycare babies.
We opened our eyes and saw his mouth gaping, ready to accept all the prizes the world was about to offer us. We smelled success on his breath, all the way from hi
s first-row seat to the place where we stood on stage. It smelled like chocolate cake with whipped cream. But then we looked at each other and bit our lower lips in sync. We couldn’t win. Only one of us could. We closed our eyes again and saw that plane, that stage, with only one of us there. We were so cold then, we had to grab each other’s hands.
We wanted to win so bad, to make Dad proud. We wanted to earn the title Moose Jr. Finally.
We reached for it. We could taste the letters. The ones we wanted most. M-O-O-S-E-J-R. Cookie dough ice cream/candy kisses/guacamole and chips/extra cheese pizza, all rolled into one, the taste of winning. We closed our mouths and swallowed. We shut our eyes and imagined what we would see out the window of the plane, on our way, as winners, to New York City. The minutes stretched on almost as far as the miles separating us here from there.
We closed our eyes again. But now we looked harder. Only one of us, in this daydream, was allowed on the plane. The other stayed on the ground. And both of us were gasping for breath, about to pass out, the air so thin, our blood and guts and pee and sweat leaking out the part of us that was ripped. Broken in half.
“W-I-E-R-D,” one of us said.
Wrong.
Now only one of us was left. One correct word and she was the winner. “W-E-E-R-D.”
Air filled our lungs again. The pee ran down our legs only in our heads.
Dad shot up. “Give them another chance. They know that fucking word.”
“Language, sir,” the principal said.
“They. Know. That. Word.” Rain pelted the windows, begging to be heard. “They know that word like they know their own names.”
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” The vice principal, bigger and badder than his boss, strode up to the front row.
“The clock is running,” Ms. Rosen said.
The VP grabbed Dad’s arm and tried to move him to the aisle, but Dad snapped free. Teachers corralled their charges, and parents scattered. The shouting and fleeing camouflaged the sound of the buzzer.
We squeezed hands. Maybe we had spelled the words wrong because of our shared DNA. Maybe we couldn’t help but make the same mistakes. That’s the story we told over dinner.
Mom made our favorite meal: roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and boats and boats of gravy. Her face had softened since the morning, perhaps from relief that the suspense was over. Maybe in sympathy that now we were like her. Unexceptional.
Dad grabbed two drumsticks from the chicken platter and banged them on his plate. “In boxing, they call it throwing a fight. It’s against the rules.”
We linked pinkies under the table. Blood pulsed through our hands, and we clenched our shoulders, turning our bodies to boards, waiting for the sound of his belt sliding out of his pants. Whenever we prepared, it didn’t come.
Before we could lift a fork, Dad plowed through the food on his plate and ours. We shot a look at Mom, a plea for help, but she sidled closer to Dad. We could almost see the heat from his fingers, fueled by all the calories. He locked us in our room, through dinner, through breakfast and lunch the next day. Long enough to make us “remember this hunger.”
For years he reminded us how smart we would have looked on TV. How tasty the buffet might have been. How good it would have felt to fly.
10
Maybe he was finally flying now. Up in the clouds, if we believed what Mom had said at the funeral, that he was the one making it snow. Maybe he had finally gotten what he wanted. Maybe, we said (more with breathy frost than words), we were off the hook.
Yes. Or no. Our bodies spoke for themselves. A nod so deep it was almost a bow brought blood rushing back to cheeks. A head shake—so wide it looked like a dog drying off from a bath—made earflaps slap against one of our chins.
Maybe we couldn’t decide till we let ourselves grow up a little more.
11
The day we turned double digits, Mom finally gave in and let us stack our twin beds. We promised to take turns sleeping on the top bunk, which was of course the best.
Then Dad packed us in the Bull to drive to our present. He promised this would be the most kick-ass birthday ever.
This year we would get a pet. Rex didn’t count. He wasn’t ours. Everyone knew he was Dad’s.
We wanted a hamster or a gerbil or a mouse or a hedgehog or a cat. Anything Dad couldn’t take on a hunting trip. We knew the time was now. Not just because we had begged and begged. We had snooped.
Dad had been away on one of his many hunting trips. We found a bag, stuffed in the back of the master bedroom. No animal hid there. A living thing would suffocate in plastic, but we saw the animal’s house. Too fancy to call a cage, it was more like a pet hotel or an amusement park, with bright yellow and red plastic tubes and a wheel with balls and bells. We wished we were small enough to live in it ourselves. We spent the rest of that weekend up in the pear tree considering names. Hairy the Hamster? Rapunzel the Rat?
On that drive, though, we couldn’t tell Mom or Dad we knew what our present would be. We shouldn’t have rifled through their closet, they would say. Privacy was one of Dad’s favorite words.
So instead, we pinched each other’s cheeks, opened our eyes wide, and asked, only with our faces, “Do we look surprised enough?”
Mom was nuzzled in next to Dad, shotgun. We sat in lawn chairs in the covered truck bed, holding each other upright as each curve in the road tried to dump us. The frayed plastic strips on the seats scratched the undersides of our thighs, below the short shorts Dad hated to see us wear. Mildew and motor oil smells mixed with Fuzzy Slippers, the baby-blue perfume Ya-Ya had given us as an early present.
We exited the highway, leaving behind the smokestacks and orange chemical burn from the few auto factories still standing. Asphalt turned to dirt. Rocky paths led to off-road riding. Dad loved to prove how much he needed his 4 × 4, even though he lived and worked in the city.
We stopped at what seemed like a random spot. No gate, no sign, no entrance to anything. We had never heard of state parks. Hiking? We just walked in the woods. Maps and marked paths were for sissies.
Dad blazed his own trail, and we followed single file, landing in the underbrush he had tamped down with tan leather work boots. We trampled ragweed, Queen Anne’s lace. Ferns, pokeweed, and trees of heaven. Chipmunks skittered, pinky-size lizards scattered at the crunch of our sneakers, centipedes rolled into balls to play dead. Our noses tingled with pine and fresh sap.
It didn’t matter that we couldn’t see the way. Dad could, in his mind’s eye. As we had told Ms. Rosen, our fourth-grade teacher, he had a map of the whole wide world in his head.
The June sky shone so clear and blue, we glimpsed the leftover full moon from the night before. We had no doubt Dad could navigate the heavens, too.
A shot dispersed a flock of geese we hadn’t seen. Dad stopped, and we dominoed into his shoulder blades. “It’s not hunting season,” he said. “Some asshole must’ve gone and shot a squirrel.” Dad pulled four flimsy orange vests from his pack and passed them down. “Not that you look nothing like critters,” he said, “but any jackass fool enough to eat a furry rat might not be looking all too close.” We slipped the vests over our heads and pretended they were bulletproof.
We knew enough not to ask “Are we there yet?” or “Where is that present you promised?” By the time Dad halted at a hollow log and patted the spots where we would sit, we were almost too tired to remember why we had come. The terrain splayed flat, Midwestern-style, wiping us out not with climbing but monotony.
He pulled a rifle from its case. We were used to that. But then he held it up to us and said, “I hope you like your present.”
Mom kneaded her earlobes and jiggled her toes. She fingered her famous beauty mark, which was less than useless. Did she ever have any idea?
We wanted to chase a chipmunk and keep it in our pockets. We wanted to climb a tree and never come down. We wanted to be able to do real magic, so we could make Dad get us what we wanted, fo
r once.
“But . . .” We couldn’t admit we had seen the Hamster Hotel. Maybe he would give it to us at home? One thing for sure: we had no trouble looking surprised.
“I was ten when I got my first gun,” Dad said. “Time you learned to use one.”
We ferreted our fingers deep in the pockets of our cutoffs.
“Take it. You think it’s going to bite?”
Dad might. He tossed the rifle our way, but instead of catching it, we ducked out of its range.
“What am I raising, pussies? It’s not like it’s loaded,” he said.
We stood, keeping each other upright, as we had in the truck bed, this time not with our hands but our gaze. “We don’t believe in guns,” we said.
He elbowed Mom, and she offered a dutiful closed-mouth smile. “Guns aren’t like God, for Chrissake. You don’t have a choice to believe in them or not.”
“What they mean,” Mom stammered, but she didn’t know, any more than Dad did.
“Guns kill people,” we said.
“You don’t think there was killing before?”
“It wasn’t as easy.”
“You know how simple it is to off someone with your bare hands? First thing I learned in the army. If I put my thumb right here . . .” He demonstrated on Mom’s throat.
“Don’t!” We wanted to knock him over; we wanted to cover our eyes. In the end, we did nothing.
He dropped his hands. Mom slumped down on soft moss and started counting under her breath.
He had almost killed Mom with his bare hands. We knew he could kill. And would again.
“You are way too easy to scare,” he said. “Can’t have that, once you’re old enough to wield a weapon.”
“We’re . . .” What was the word? It started with a P. Something like pacifier.
“You’re sorry?” Dad chuckled.
“We’re pacifists.”
“Ms. Rosen taught you that word?”
We looked down at our scabbed knees. Our teacher’s name fell out of his mouth like a toad.
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