9

 

 

 

 

9

 

 

I don’t know anything about my real dad, but if you can make a woman a father I think maybe Auntie Clem was this for me. She was my mother-father, which still makes me lucky, because not all kids get to have a father, male or female. Not even for a while. Sometimes having one wouldn’t be so good for them anyway. I can say this from being in other kid’s houses. Going through their drawers and cupboards. Sleeping in their beds.

A unicorn diary with a lock that popped right open. I didn’t even have to search for the key. Those pages full of looping, curling handwriting, hearts hovering above all the ‘i’s’, spelling out sad words.

A plastic Tupperware stashed under a bed, filled with moldy cupcakes and half-opened chocolate slabs, all the edges nibbled at like a night squirrel with clever hands. The word PIGLET taped to the lid, scrawled out in big block letters. Not my box and not my name, but even I felt a little insulted.

Once, when staying the night in a boy’s room, I peeled back a Carmen Electra poster and the words SHIT and FUCK screamed out at me from that hidden square of wall. Written over and over with different types of pens, the lettering both small and big, scratched and scrawled with such heat I was scared to touch anything, to feel how deep the words had been scored. Scared I might catch whatever was burning there.

Maybe I was lucky, having Auntie Clem instead of a dad.

“Little girl,” she called me, roughing a heavy hand through my hair. “Angel kid.”

Auntie Clem was a big woman with powerful shoulders and a wide chest shaped like an oak barrel—the way the bones curved out under layers of tough muscle, her breasts sliding around on the surface in two flat pouches of unanchored flesh. Her small, puffy hands were always dry and cracked. She bit her nails and the skin around them, turning her fingertips into rough, ragged things that scratched when she tickled me. Auntie Clem laughed like a man and talked like a man. She hugged me hard and kissed me harder, picking me up and throwing me over her shoulder so I squealed laughter, the blood thickening in my face like strawberry syrup. I was always kind of scared of her, as much as I loved being around her. Her big, fish-lipped smile. Her laugh like exploding granite. Those hands that held too hard and left bruises, even though they only touched me in love.

Is this what having a father is like? A good one, I mean?

The house the three of us lived in belonged to her—much of the surrounding property, too. It had been left to her by a brother or a dead husband, I don’t know for sure, I never got this straight and I can’t ask about it now. Auntie Clem might have been my mother’s cousin, or maybe she was just an old friend, though sometimes when they were drinking wine and holding hands across the kitchen table, crying, they said they were sisters.

I can’t ask about this now, either.

While I don’t remember the time before Carris myself, I picked up a few clues along the way. Things my mom and Auntie Clem said to each other in low voices, guarding how sad and secret the facts were. Like saying it louder would give it teeth and claws and let it loose to hurt us. I heard the things they said when they thought I wasn’t listening, and the things they said when they knew I was.

Sitting at the scarred kitchen table in low light, late at night, Momma and Auntie Clem talked a lot about ‘growing up too fast’ and ‘staying sane’. They talked about the past tearing up the backs of their legs like rabid poodles—scary, noisy little things that can only do you damage if you turn to face their fangs. But when they said these things they were talking about themselves, each other, and not about me.

“Children deserve a shot at staying innocent,” I remember Auntie Clem saying to my momma.

“It doesn’t last so long, anyway,” my momma said.

“Don’t we know it.”

And when they said these things, sometimes it was me they were talking about, but really they were still talking about themselves.

Auntie Clem worked for a trucking company. Not driving the trucks but doing something else with them that called her away for weeks at a time. Momma and me kept the house going while she was gone. We kept it clean and we fixed what got broken and we spent hours at the kitchen table with paper and colored pencils and alphabet books and picture books and puzzles and wooden blocks and tiny plastic farm animals I got to move around. The way I learned to count and multiply, the way I learned to read and write, I never understood it was anything else than just a game we were playing. A game my momma had invented, for her and me alone.

I’m told I’m lucky because I got to learn without knowing I was learning. No noisy classrooms, no boys pulling my hair, no screaming teachers or playground traumas. No friends, no class parties, no paper airplanes or passed notes or sleepover invites, either. I don’t know if school really is like any of this. I only know about these things the way movies and TV shows tell them.

The house on the property was old and big and a little too close to rundown. I see that now, looking back, remembering the damp stains spreading down the faded wallpapered walls, the way the kitchen taps shook and sometimes spat rust when we opened them. The weak spots on the hardwood floors we knew not to step on. I slept in what Auntie Clem called ‘the back bedroom’, the one furthest from hers and my mother’s. It had a small desk, a bookshelf, a prince bed pushed up against the single large sash window. No curtains. At night I’d lie and stare up at the sky through the glass; the thick, black web of tree branches veined over the stars. That natural kind of darkness. The sun would wake me up in the early hours, white-bright the way it is when it’s still flush against the horizon, warming my sheets until I started to sweat under there. And so when I got up, I slid out from under damp, stuffy covers and stepped into cool, night-touched air.

Even now, if I have a choice, I prefer to sleep without covering the windows.

The property was one of a widely-spaced handful, all joined by a single dirt road. A school bus went by that way, and sometimes it passed me as I was standing near the gate, kicking stones over or looking for frogs or whatever. The bus wasn’t a bus like you see in movies. It was more of a van, a twelve-seater or something. And it was white, with CARRIS PUBLIC SERVICES stenciled on the side in black. Carris was so small it didn’t need its own dedicated school bus. The van had a lot of different jobs. It shuttled the folks at the old age home in and out of town to do their weekly shopping; transported new convicts to the nearest max-security prison a few hours away; it was a makeshift ambulance for the local doctor’s rooms, and there must’ve been a dozen more uses for it. It went to a lot of different places. It carried a lot of different types of people. But when it was a school bus, there were children inside of it. Neon pink and bright yellow backpacks. Rows of small, pony-tailed heads. Braces and buzz-cuts and too-loud voices whipping through the open windows as the van bumped by, its wheels churning up dense billows of fine red dust.

Once or twice a kid would see me, and wave as they passed. A small hand pressed to a grease-smeared pane, a salute across the wind, there and gone. I remember jumping up and down once, grinning, waving back. But the van went by and the brake lights didn’t flare red and a few moments later it had vanished over the hill, ready to turn onto the tar road that wove toward the high street and behind, to the school.

School.

“I’m home-schooling you,” Mom told me. “You don’t need to go to a school with other kids, with strangers all around you.”

Children deserve a shot at staying innocent.

I wanted a bright pink backpack. I wanted to tie my hair up in a ponytail with a puffy, polka-dot hairband like one I’d once seen. I wanted to sit in the van and press my hand to the window, waving at any other little kids we passed. Little kids who stood staring, envious of kids like me who got to stay home instead.

It doesn’t last so long, anyway.

“I want you to stay away from the road,” my mother said. “It’s not safe for you.”

Don’t we know it.

You might think she meant it wasn’t safe for me to be in the road, even though it was a quiet one and not many vehicles went by. All the same. The way she said the words ‘not safe’ gave me visions of a roaring monster with flashing eyes and silver-grill teeth that would catch me up and throw me into the gravel by the roadside. Crack my skull, smash my legs, shatter my ribs. Kill me. I thought that was what she meant by ‘not safe’. I thought that for the longest time. But that wasn’t what she was worried about. Why would it be, when there was so much more to lose?