The Way I Die

by Derek Haas

  “Peyton,” I say curtly.

  She touches my arm, “You’re going to tell me about you and I’m going to tell you about me and there’s nothing to argue about because that’s what we’re doing.”

  I glare and so she continues before I can interrupt, “Or . . . or you don’t have to talk about you, fine, whatever, but you’re going to listen to my story.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “I’m not gonna stop you from talking.”

  “That’s right. You’re not. You’re not gonna stop me. Because I actually care about keeping this family safe, and since it’s your job, too, I care about you. So listen to my story and maybe that will give you a reason to care about me.”

  I know that no matter what she says, she’s not gonna get the response she craves, but it’s not worth arguing anymore. If she wants to spill her guts and eat into our waiting time, I won’t stand in her way. I’m a sucker for a good story, you know that well if you’ve followed me this far, so maybe I’ll get lucky and Peyton will tell a corker. If not, maybe time won’t be the only thing I have to kill.

  “Okay, let’s hear it. For the love of God, anything to get you to stop talking about your feelings.”

  We continue our loop around the house.

  Smoke puffs black from the chimney, so we know Boone and the kids are up and he’s made a fire. I look over at Peyton to see if she’s reacting to what I said or the way I said it, but no, she’s deciding where to start.

  My father was a drunk, but a happy drunk. A kind of jolly, fat Santa Claus who made every room happier when he was in it, even if his cheeks were a little red or his words a little slurry. He came from Kerry, Ireland. His dad was a soldier and expected my dad to follow in his footsteps, but my dad’s footsteps crossed the Atlantic and then the United States all the way to Los Angeles and never took him back. He settled in Los Feliz and opened a candy store making buttermints or what we called soft candy, which is a lot like salt water taffy. I don’t know, they’re hard to describe.

  I’ve never found any other sweets that tasted like my dad’s and believe me, I’ve looked everywhere. So, he starts this candy store and for a while, it goes well. He meets my mom at a dance bar in Maravilla, and she’s still got her figure at this point, the way she tells it, and he’s in love with her before the jukebox switches from A-8 to B-9. She liked his mustache, and the sweet smell that seemed to come out of his pores, and the way he’d always have a light sprinkling of sugar on his cheeks. She had no money, and he was doing all right, and he was her ticket out of a too-crowded house. That old tune that’s been played a thousand times.

  Were they in love? My father was. That I know. But he also loved his liquor, and if he had to choose one over the other, I can’t say I know which way that vote would go.

  Did she love him? She told me she did. At least for a time. It’s all mixed up with what happened later.

  That’s called foreshadowing, Mr. Copeland. You’ll have to wait for it because I don’t give it up all at once. Do I have you? I do. I can see it. I’ll give it to you nice and slow so you’re wanting more. Ha, I’m just messing with you. Don’t give me that look. Fine, back to the sad tale of Mr. and Mrs. Paddy Martin. That’s my last name by the way, Martin. Peyton Martin.

  Four months after their wedding night, they had me, which tells you everything you need to know about that, and four years later, they had my little brother Bartley. Bart. I call him Bartley but he wants to go by Bart. Fine. Whatever. His name, his call, but he’ll always be Bartley to me.

  My dad wanted a big family, but Bartley must’ve wrecked things coming out of the womb because mom couldn’t get pregnant after him. At least that’s what she told him, but I have a distinct memory of getting in her purse once and finding this clamshell compact and surprise, surprise, there’s candy inside and my mom catches me and swats the clamshell violently out of my hand and across the room and tells me she’ll wear out my behind if I ever get in her purse again, so yeah. My dad wanted a big family and my mom had other ideas, so she was on the pill and telling him her doctor said she couldn’t make any more babies. This crushed my old man but I was too little to understand it at the time.

  He stopped hiding his drinking, brought bottles home after work, and drained them in front of the TV, watching soccer on Eurovision until he passed out. My mom is still young at this point. She’s got two kids under ten and a husband who stops giving her whatever she thought she was promised when they said “I do.” Mom starts staying out late, meals stop getting made, first dinners, then breakfast.

  Dad’s response is to stop drinking. I don’t know if it was the wake-up call he needed, but he snapped out of it like the lights had come on in a dark theater. I didn’t know it at the time, but he went to meetings, he went to church, he committed to it, all twelve steps, all of that. The way he tells it, mom gave him the ultimatum he needed. The only problem was this didn’t play out the way my mom wanted.

  She had just begun to see a life for herself that didn’t involve a husband, much less kids who were growing like weeds, and she had the perfect excuse to escape as the heroine of her life story . . . a drunk husband who couldn’t satisfy her.

  For a month, things settled to normal. Still, she found excuses to go out to dinner, to drink with her girlfriends, to take weekend trips out of town. At eight years old, I only vaguely knew what was going on, and to be honest, I was just glad to have my dad back, smelling like candy instead of the bottle, his big mustache tickling the side of my neck when he hugged me.

  He took over all the house duties, got us fed, got our teeth brushed, got us tucked in, told us bedtime stories, and then went down the hall to an empty bed.

  You think you know where this story is going, but you don’t. You want to know why I became a cop? You’re about to find out. Bet you didn’t see that one coming. I see that hint of a smile, Mr. Copeland. Okay, fine.

  My mom didn’t come home for a full week, and my dad snapped. He didn’t go back to drinking, he didn’t pick up a gun or anything, but he snapped, like the buttons holding his feelings together just popped all at once. He told me to watch my brother, he had to go out for a bit, he had to set something right, and I remember crying and telling him not to leave because I had a feeling something was going to go very wrong, but he was in a fog, and he just brushed away my arms like a cow’s tail twitching at mosquitoes. When he closed the door behind him, I wailed, my brother wailed, we both wailed enough to wake the neighbors, but this was a building where no one stuck their necks out for anyone else.

  After a while, my tears were all gone and Bartley was sleeping and I made myself a bowl of cereal and waited for the door to open again. I remember looking at that door, willing it to open and for my father to walk through with a couple of buttermints for Bartley and me, smiling, and smelling sweet.

  The next one through the door, though, was an LAPD officer, a good-looking Hispanic man with shiny teeth and a dimple in his chin. He told me to gather up a night bag for my brother and me, his name was Miguel, he was a friend of my mother’s, and he’d be helping us. He had a friendly smile and gentle eyes and it seemed inevitable that this was going to happen, that a policeman was going to enter our lives.

  I asked what happened and he said our mother would explain to us but to please hurry. I remember the ride in the back of the police car, the twenty minutes that seemed to last forever, the mesh net built into the glass divider, the door handles that didn’t work from inside. All the time, I looked at the back of this big, strong man’s head, neck, and shoulders as he drove and he cracked jokes and asked us questions about ourselves and tried to make this horrible situation just a little less horrible.

  We arrived at the police station and they shepherded us into a room down a hall that looked like someone’s office but there wasn’t anyone inside. A sergeant came by and gave us some sandwiches and sweatshirts to cover our pajamas and left. Miguel came too and made us feel better with a smile, but th
e whole time I was thinking that this was the end. I wasn’t going to see my mom or dad again. I wondered how it worked. Would I go to an orphanage? Would Bartley and I get split up? I just didn’t know how any of that worked, so I was terrified.

  I asked Miguel what was happening and I think he was about to answer when my mother walked in with a huge bandage on her head and her blouse soaked with blood and she hugged Bartley and me fiercely and said everything was going to be okay and I remember crying and saying, “Where’s Dad, where’s Dad, where’s Dad?” but she rocked me and said “Shhh, shhh, it’s gonna be okay,” and I could smell the blood on her blouse as she hugged me to her chest.

  The trial was short.

  My dad had attacked my mom with a knife from the candy shop, cut her deep in the head. Miguel, the police officer, had been nearby and heard her scream and pulled my dad off my mom before he could hack her again.

  My dad did not take the stand. Miguel and my mother testified against him and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Miguel and my mother, the hero cop and the damsel in distress, fell in love, and as soon as the divorce was finalized, got married.

  He treated Bartley and me as if we were his own children, and mom settled down again, happy for the first time in years.

  My brother and I were raised under Miguel’s roof and everything stabilized.

  “So you were wrong,” I say.

  “How so?”

  “You said I wasn’t going to see where this story was going, but you telegraphed it a mile away. Your surrogate father cop raised you and you followed him into the police force when you came of age.”

  Peyton stops and frowns. “Did you hear me say, ‘The End’?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Did you hear me say they lived happily ever after?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of storyteller would I be if this were it?”

  “Not a very good one.”

  “Then will you shut up and give me some credit?”

  I grin and raise my eyebrows. “My mistake. Continue, please.”

  “Are you going to interrupt me again?”

  I assure her I’m not, so she continues.

  Okay, so you thought I was gonna say we lived happily ever after, but I’ve found that doesn’t happen in life. Life lulls you into thinking everything’s gonna work out and when your defenses are down, when you’re at your most vulnerable, that’s when life hauls off and knocks you on your ass.

  I had a hard time lining up the man who viciously attacked my mother with the man I remembered getting himself sober, cleaning up after us, changing Bartley’s diapers, turning his life around. The man I knew who literally smelled like sugar day in and day out and had never lifted a hand to anyone just couldn’t have done the things they said he did in the trial. Now I know that people get drunk and do stupid things, but I also learned about passing the smell test. Have you heard that one? It means if you think something smells funny, trust your nose.

  I asked to visit my dad in prison a few times in the early years, but mom refused to take us to Corcoran, so I stopped asking. He sent me mail during that time, but my mom burned the letters. I didn’t find that out until much later.

  So I went on living and pretended to my mom and Miguel that I stopped thinking about my dad.

  But I never stopped.

  Every time I ate dessert, every time I smelled something sweet, I would feel his mustache tickling my neck.

  Like life, I wanted to lull my mom into security, into a fog, let her think that I wasn’t thinking about him, that I’d forgotten him, that I loved my new existence as she did and had no need to complicate it. I got my driver’s license at seventeen and saw on the Internet it was 337 miles to Corcoran. I also discovered I had to be eighteen to see my father without a chaperone, so I had a year to plan how to make it happen.

  I befriended a girl, Donna, who lived on the other side of town, a good girl who got straight As, the kind of girl your parents encourage you to befriend. I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t go to sporting events, I didn’t date boys, I kept my grades up, I didn’t do anything to get in trouble or betray Miguel and mom’s trust. For all they knew, I was a model daughter.

  About halfway through the school year, I started spending the night at Donna’s house and I made sure to leave my phone on in case they were checking GPS to see if I was where I said I was. I know they looked at my texts too, so I kept everything clean and even dropped in a little disinformation—my mom is so kind, Miguel is a great dad, that kind of thing. And the lulling worked. Bartley was the troublemaker. Bartley was the teenager who got in fights. Bartley was the one who rebelled against his cop stepfather.

  Looking back, that’s the one thing I regret. I could’ve tried to influence him. He would’ve done anything for me, but the truth is I needed him to draw their attention. I needed him to be the black sheep. That just made my wool whiter.

  And it worked. I had put on the perfect costume. They believed me to be the golden child. They let me stay at Donna’s house a full weekend, and over the summer, I went on a trip with her family to San Diego and the zoo and SeaWorld. Miguel and my mom never checked on me once. Donna’s dad was a firefighter, and though cops and firefighters have notorious disdain for one another, they also share a first-responder respect, and so if I were with the Molinas, then it meant I was safe and secure.

  I turned eighteen the summer before my senior year and told my parents I was spending the night at Donna’s and maybe I’d just stay the whole weekend because her dad talked about taking us to Joshua Tree. I got a “Sounds good” and “Have a good time,” but that was it. My brother stood in the doorway of my room while I put a bag together.

  “What’re you up to?” he asked.

  I played innocent. “What?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, princess do-no-wrong. I know when something’s up . . . and something’s up.”

  I passed him on the way out. “You’re paranoid, baby brother,” was all I could give him. I felt terrible about that, but it was too dangerous to tell him anything, not this far into my plan, not when I’d waited this long. I was too close to the end and if my brother’s trust was a casualty of my scheme, so be it.

  I drove up the 5 from L.A. to Corcoran. It took about three hours before I started to freak, like an actor getting stage fright right as the lights come up on the first performance. I had looked up visiting policies, and if I made a request between the hours of two and four on Friday, then I could see him if he agreed to see me too. Now, so close to showtime, I didn’t know if he would. He’d never written to me, I looked more and more like my mother, maybe he would deny the visit.

  Finally, I arrived at the jail, and if you’ve ever been to a state prison, you know how terrifying the experience is. Prisons are designed to terrify you. Every bit of the process is intimidating. They don’t need to have good customer service. What do they care if you come back or not?

  But I went through everything, the ID, the fingerprinting, the metal detectors, the bag search, the mouth search, everything. They didn’t strip me, but there was one guard who had a look in his eye that he might want to give it a try. I put on my scalded puppy dog look and they waved me into a room with what looks like a bunch of picnic tables, every piece of furniture screwed into the floor. I waited there with a bunch of wives and mothers and fidgety children for a good thirty minutes. I’m sure I was the only person between the ages of ten and fifty alone in that room.

  After a half hour, a buzzer sounded and convicts entered and took a look around as though they were swimming up from underwater, and then my dad walked into the area. He looked beaten down, broken, like an old toy some kid had thrown in the closet and forgotten. He had gotten fatter, his cheeks were more like a basset hound’s jowls, but when his eyes found mine, it was like someone had thrown him a life preserver. He lit up, crossed the room to me, and only at the last second caught himself before he scooped me up, something completely forbidden that would
’ve cut off our visit right then.

  We sat at our picnic table and he kept mumbling about how beautiful I was and asked me a million questions but wouldn’t give me time to answer. I asked how come he didn’t write to Bartley and me, and he looked at me like I’d knocked the air out of him. “I’ve been writing to you since the day they locked me up. Every week.”

  I wasn’t surprised. The same suspicions that got me here held true for the lack of contact. I just didn’t believe my mom when she insinuated our dad had sworn us off. He, however, was shocked. Shocked so much that I think whatever reluctance to tell me what he wished to tell me melted away. He didn’t plan to spring it on me when this was the first time he’d seen me in ten years, but now, now all bets were off.

  “Your mother and the cop set me up.”

  I must’ve sat there for a minute with a dull ache ringing in my ears, because the next thing I heard was the guard saying “Time’s up.”

  My dad looked at me with alarm, stood, and before he walked back toward the guards, said, “I didn’t knife your mother. They planned the whole thing. You have to believe me.”

  And I did.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” I say.

  Peyton swells and actually blushes. “Told you.”

  “You did. You did tell me.”

  She looks back at the house through the trees. The smoke has been going for a while now and Boone and the kids must be toasty. The sun breaks through the clouds and the combination of feeling the rays, seeing the smoke caterpillar out of the chimney, and Peyton’s story warms me.

  “Think we should head inside and check on things? Maybe finish this later?” she asks, smiling.

  “Don’t even think about it. Not when I’m just starting to like you.”

  “Oh, so that’s how it is. Okay. Well, good to know the way to your heart is a good story.”

  “Always has been.”