Talk

by Rachel Zachary

  ***

  After a week had passed we went back home, we only took the back roads and the side streets and slept in the alleyways overnight. We woke up one morning to find the car surrounded by people shouting and screaming and banging on the windows hard enough that I thought they might break the glass and yanking on the door handles.

  Mom shouted at the crowd, “There are children in here.”

  Dad peeled out of there and I asked Mom what they wanted but Mom told me to be quiet. I held on tight to Mary and hid under the blanket.

  Everything felt different when we got back, the trees, the grass, even the air. It felt dark. Even Mary was quiet as we pulled into the driveway.

  “We’re home,” Mom said.

  Dad crumpled up his empty beer can with one hand, his face was red from the wind and from drinking, his hair was a wild mess of curls poking out from under the baseball cap he had snagged from a clothesline which had a big bird on it. He kept throwing his arm over my shoulder and saying we’re back and you couldn’t get rid of us over and over again, and he wouldn’t stop hugging me. As if he hadn’t been angry and irritable all week. He was so close I could feel the heat from his body and see the bottoms(or was it top) of his teeth whenever he opened his mouth. My skin felt itchy whenever I looked at Dad.

  It was cold in the house, the windows had been smashed out with rocks and the air smelled like urine and cigarettes and cats. The wet laundry we had left in the washing machine was covered with mold.

  “It looks like we were robbed.” I said.

  “We were.” Dad said.

  Everything in the house looked pulled apart, flipped over rummaged through or broken. The floorboards had been broken downstairs and the money jar under the floor in the living room that was FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY had been taken. The I could see clear through the holes in the floorboards upstairs to the ceiling in my bedroom and Mom’s. Dad took a drink and said that Mary and I would be sleeping down in the basement with Mom and he would sleep outside in the car just to be certain that the robbers wouldn’t come back until he couldn’t start working on the floorboards.

  After a quick dinner of canned pea soup that was more paste than soup. Nobody ever went down into the basement. It was as big as the first floor but it was cold and dark. There was one bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling, the floor. There was an old sofa bed down there where we would sleep and old linoleum to cover up the cracked cement floor. It was miserable but for the time being it was still our home.

  ***

  By winter we had moved out of the basement and were all living on the first floor together, one night I was sitting next to Dad on the sofa in the living room listening to a football game on the radio (the robbers had taken our TV) and waiting for Mom to be finished taking a bath so I could use the bathroom. Dad had already told me to go outside twice now, but I told him I could hold it and jogged my leg up and down beside him. Dad had spent most of his day at the Prairie Rider, where he had been spending most of his time. Mary was laying down on a bundle of blankets and old clothes in a little nest on the floor.

  I jumped when I felt Dad’s hand brush up against my thigh. I looked up at him but he was hunched over glaring at the radio shouting and cheering, so I wasn’t sure if I had moved against him or if it had been an accident. But then he did it again, and the third time when his hand pushed down on my thigh, I knocked his hand away. Dad said that I needed to stop moving so much because I would wake Mary. But I couldn’t stop moving because I had to use the bathroom and he knew that, so when his hand found its way back onto my thigh I got up and went outside to pee. When I came back I rubbed some lotion on my itchy skin and went downstairs to the basement and crawled into bed to sleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  One night during that summer, when I was reading Anne of Green Gables on the sofa bed downstairs in the basement, I heard the floorboards creak above me and the sound of something large falling and hitting the floor and then someone cursing. Dad I thought and went upstairs. He was sitting in the kitchen at the table. I turned the light on and ignored his hollering, his face was puffy and his mustache and beard were covered with blood.

  “What happened to you?” I asked him.

  “Picked a fight.” Dad groaned. “Your old man won though.”

  Mary was still asleep in her nest on the floor and Mom was sleeping on the sofa surrounded by blankets. Mom had always been a heavy sleeper and hadn’t moved once since Dad had come in or when he dropped what looked like a large empty whiskey bottle that miraculously hadn’t broken. I padded over to the table.

  Dad was holding one of the kitchen knives in his hand and had a large cut in his left arm all the way up to his elbow so deep that I could see his muscles moving and there was so much blood it covered his arm, his chest and his legs.

  I cursed and asked him why the hell he would do something as stupid as that and pressed one of the towels we used to wash dishes against his arm before rushing and getting a needle and thread. Dad didn’t move, he didn’t even flinch when I started threading it through his skin pushing it and tugging it and wincing for him when it caught or it looked like it really hurt or when I was done and I poured some alcohol on the stitched up wound. There was a line of neat stitches running up his arm as I mopped the blood up off of him.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” I whispered.

  “I don’t feel anything.” Dad said quietly running his fingers up and down the bumpy thread.

  “Dad you need to go to the hospital.” I said. And I didn’t mean the regular one.

  Dad looked down at his arm.

  “Why’d you do it Dad?”

  “Sometimes I just look at you girls and I….I just hate myself.” he says.

  I tried to reassure him. to get him to go at least get his arm checked out in case he had an infection but he refused saying that I had done better than any doctor would and he just needed to sleep for a while.

  “Don’t wake your sister,” he said, holding my hand in a tight grip.

  He had been sleeping when I left him a glass of orange juice (It was the powdered kind, I mixed it together with the kool-aid and water) and was still asleep when I checked in with him throughout the day. If Mom knew what had happened she didn’t say anything or seem to care. When I came out of the bathroom after giving Mary a quick bath Dad was gone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the one year anniversary of Mom and Dad moving in to our apartment Mom, who had gotten a job as a assistant librarian at the New York Public Library wanted to celebrate by going on vacation. She said that it would make up for all of the times we had never been able to go or could never go when Mary and I were growing up. Despite how often we moved Dad hated going on vacation, because he thought it was a waste of everyone’s time, you only went to one place and did a few things that you could do at home and it cost a lot of money.

  Mom didn’t care. So I used up two of my sick days and started packing some warm clothes, Mary had two weeks off from school for winter break. We took off around four in the morning so that we could avoid traffic and drove down to Virginia, stopping to spend the night in a motel just off the highway. Mom had always had a soft spot for the blue ridge mountains, she used to tell us how her parents had taken her hiking and on camping trips every year and on her birthday.

  Mary and I had never been, a mountain was a mountain, it stuck out like a sore thumb there were plenty of trees and the same animals that we had seen in Dogtooth but we played along for Mom’s sake. She had been helpful around the house and was paying for everything except for the gas so we were able to enjoy ourselves a little.

  Mom was happier than I had seen her in years. She kept the windows rolled down the whole time. She held her hand out of the window, she blew bubbles, she refused to let anyone pick the leaves out our her hair. She took about a million pictures of the forests, the hills, a small group of deer that crossed the road. I had to admit that it was beautiful and I was hacing a good time.

  D
ad was sitting in the backseat behind Mom with his foot on the cooler drinking cola’s that he had spiked with beer. He had been ‘sober’ for a few weeks now and had managed to even get a job working as a bartender. Dad had been awfully quiet. Halfway through we stopped to hike a little, and when we got back to the car Dad was sitting in the driver’s seat. I didn’t want to fight with him. I could tell that Mom didn’t either, she climbed into the passenger seat quietly but we were back on the highway racing along in a matter of seconds.

  Mary was holding onto Mom’s head rest, and Mom was yelling her head off at Dad for him to slow down so we could stop at the waterfall her Mom had taken her to when she was a kid but Dad sped right past it. He was laughing and singing along to a country song on the radio ignoring Mom’s pleas. I thumped Dad on the shoulder twice and yelled at him to stop. Mom was crying in the front seat.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen Mom cry.

  I couldn’t remember ever seeing her cry. It made me furious but there was nothing I could do but sit in the car and wait until we had made it back to the motel or we ran out of gas. We were out of the mountains in under an hour. Mom was openly sobbing, Mary and I were trying to ignore everything.

  We were doing ninety miles an hour when the sign said fifty miles only. We weaved in an out of the traffic in our lane. Swerving to and fro in between the cars which honked at us.

  Mary and I were both begging Dad to slow down or to pull over at this point, but he ignored us and stuck his head out the window like a dog yelling and laughing and shouting about how we were all going to heaven. The wind was blowing so hard that he had to keep his eyes closed and we swerved directly into oncoming traffic.

  I didn’t even have time to scream everything happened so fast, Dad pulling his head back in, Mom yanking on the steering wheel, and a small light green sedan slammed into the side of the car. Mary screamed as she was thrown into my lap, her head cracked against the window, there was glass everywhere and I tasted blood in my mouth. I could barely hear anything over the ringing in my ears.

  I held Mary close, she was okay except for a small cut on the top of her head, and some glass. Mom was asking us if we were okay. Only Mary’s door and the trunk had been crushed in. Mom was calling Dad, but Dad was outside walking around the car cursing about the insurance even though It was my car and I paid the insurance.He hadn’t even asked if Mom was okay, or even bothered to check to see if Mary and I were hurt.

  He looked happy I thought dumbly, he looked so damn happy. Was he trying to kill us? None of us could be sure, Mom didn’t want to hear any of us talking that way but I shared my suspicions with Mary and she agreed. Dad had disappeared by the time the police had arrived to get our statements, I traded insurance cards with the other driver an older woman who surprisingly didn’t have any injuries other than a cut on the bridge of her nose and some smaller ones where the broken glass from her windshield had cut her.

  Dad showed up at the motel the next morning and said we were going back to Manhattan.

  I told Dad that we were going to have to wait for the insurance to pay to send out a rental car they had a branch in the state and that a taxi all the way back to Manhattan was too expensive to pay for. Dad said we would take the car back up. For the first time in my life I saw Mom put her foot down and told Dad no, that if he wanted to drive back he could by himself and we were going to stay here and wait for the insurance company to come out. Dad had thrown things and raged, he had screamed and thrown a tantrum but Mom didn’t care. Dad left. A few days later we got back to Manhattan and I had a higher premium.

  ***

  It had been a month since the vacation and things around the apartment had been tense.

  Dad had crossed a line and everyone was angry at him. Mary and I were mad that he had been so careless that he had almost killed us. Mom was mad for a completely different reason. She had stuck with Dad for years, for better or for worse in Dogtooth, on the streets and now in our apartment. She hadn't asked for anything but this one vacation and Dad had found a way to ruin it just like he ruined everything else.

  Mom had had enough.

  Enough of Dad. Enough the way she had been living. She decided to go back to school, she had always been jealous of me the first time I had gone to school and the second time (I had gotten a new job at Wells Fargo and they offered me a tuition reimbursement for school and I was getting student aid for my room and my books but because I already had a apartment I used most of the money to pay off the bills). But the most shocking thing was that Mom had decided to divorce Dad.

  Mom had always wanted to go to school, but she told me that she had to work and now at forty seven years old she was going to do it. Dad was furious when he found out that Mom was going to be going to school with me. He was already mad that I was going to school because I had refused to let him help me pay for it in any way. Dad was just too unreliable, I didn’t want to have to depend on him for money more than the little he was bringing in to help pay the bills or pick up some groceries. He had disappeared for three days and when he came home he was drunk and angry.

  I could hear them arguing all night, Dad promised her that she would just end up quitting like she always did and that he wasn’t going to be paying for it and that she was going to stay here. With him. With us. Mom was serene. She told him that she was getting help with student aid and that she had a job, that she was going to sit in on some classes and that she was going to scrimp and pinch and that she was going to walk across that stage. That she didn’t need his money and that she was going. And there was nothing he could do to stop her. I had 911 on speed dial just in case they started fighting and it got physical. Mary was sitting on the sofa with an old pocket knife she had bought from a army surplus store. Nothing had been thrown yet but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  Mom walked out into the living room practically glowing, “I’ve spent years doing what you wanted to do. I’ve spent my whole life, the entirety of our marriage on the run. I missed my own Dad’s funeral because of you. I’ve put my dreams on hold long enough. I’m going to do what I want to now and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  The table lamp flew past Mom’s head and smashed against the wall, I dialed 911 as Dad kicked at my bedroom door splintering the wood. Mary was yelling at him to get out and I was yelling the address of our apartment to the police, Mom walked right out the door front door. Mary and I took cover in her room barricading the door while we listened to Dad trashing and breaking everything in the apartment until I told Dad that the police were coming and for him to leave.

  “You goddamn bastard,” He yelled pounding on the door. “You traitor! You sold out your old man!” Dad left before the police showed up, even though I was afraid to Mary gave them a statement and said she wanted him arrested. The policeman told us to look into getting a restraining order. While we cleaned up I knew that nothing was going to be the same.

  My hands were shaking so bad I could barely feel when I cut myself on a piece of broken glass.

  ***

  To my surprise Mom didn’t apply to NYU but to Niagara University, four hundred miles away from us. She would be a college freshman working toward a business and accounting degree, Mom had kept the books for her Dad who was a bartender and ran a little gambling racket on the side, and she had helped Dad when he let her. Mom had spent the whole night crying before she left, I was going to driver her up to Albany and then she was going to take the train the rest of the way there. She had thrown up twice and had almost passed out. She didn’t want Dad to be right, she didn’t want to be wrong either. I told Mom that if we were able to leave then she would be too.

  Mary ignored both of us in the back seat, I promised her whatever she wanted to eat for lunch if she just came to be supportive.

  Mom stayed on the train all the way to the university. She went to her first class and then her second, and when she came home I ordered in a pizza from her favorite restaurant to celebrate. Mom was staying i
n a hotel room up in Niagara Falls five days out of the week, and when she came home we would all do our homework in the living room together or at the diner, sometimes we would make the drive up to see her but usually it was just me. Mom was happier than I had seen her in years. She let her hair grow out and never wore it up in a ponytail, she dyed it blonde and started wearing jeans and t-shirts and a few colorful windbreakers instead of her old loose skirts and shapeless dresses. She was happy.

  Dad stayed away for eight weeks. He had been staying in a shelter were he had been forced into sobriety, the shelter had a no drugs and no alcohol tolerance policy. They even used breathalyzers to make sure that people adhered to the rules. This was the longest time he had been sober. He had been in a work program, though he had turned down the opportunity to get his G.E.D. He had gotten a job working as a custodian in a apartment complex in the Bronx and then as the buildings maintenance man after the old one retired.

  Dad called me from time to time.

  Mary wanted nothing to do with him and he never asked to talk to Mom or asked after her. He had a decent sized room off of the lobby and a good living wage, he told me how much he enjoyed working there. He didn’t have to talk to many of his tenants. He got to work on the wiring and on the upkeep, he worked on the boiler and told me he was starting a new project repairing a couple walls. He had started jogging and was on the patch. It really looked like Dad was starting to pull his life together.

  I kept Mary informed though she asked me not to.