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This piece compiled from chapters written to be part of a novel. PART ONE Childhood. I am nine when I figure out that people can’t be trusted. It’s snowing outside. The piano in our living room sits cold keyed and waiting for me to finish my half-hour practice. The music book is orange and yellow. A bright treble clef on the jacket. My nine year old face is pressed against the glass pane that looks out into the walkway. My breath, ripe with bananas, comes back at me leaving a steamy cloud of boredom on the window. My pants are denim and my hands are cold. A young woman turns up the path. She has a funny way of walking. Her stomach proceeds before her feet do. She looks like she has a tummy ache the way she’s holding herself. She sees me sitting in the window and half stops. She hesitates there between the frozen stalks that, in the summer, make a lush aisle in my mother’s English garden. My mother is a very committed gardener. She creates yearly palettes and splashes of colour with small brown seeds the way some women knit baby slippers. She makes this garden every spring for the benefit of someone but I’m not sure who. The seeds come in small packages sent airmail from her family in Liecester. The packages have long Latin names on the front over pictures of glorious flowers. I am perennially disappointed by the smallness of things with such big names. The woman with the bloated belly continues up the walk and the doorbell rings. I get down from the back of the green couch to answer it. “Can I speak with your mother please?” the bent backward woman asks me. “She’s not home right now.” I say. My lips are still chalky with banana. “Then your father.” I leave her standing in the cold, her breath blooming around her dark head, and go downstairs to the basement to get him. I come back up the stairs behind him and the woman is crying. I think with alarm that her tears will freeze on her lips and her mouth will be forever shut. Never cry in winter or your face will freeze shut. My mother told me that. My father holds the door for her and tells me to go up to my room. I pretend to, but sit on the third stair from the top where my feet will just be hidden. I can’t hear everything she says but I what I do hear holds meaningful weight. “Where are they?” I hear my father say. And “… gone. Taken everything.” Then there are hoarse whispers, giving way to more intense words that I don’t completely understand. I think I am being accused of being a homewrecker. The woman cries loudly and I can hear my father’s soft tones. They are probably sitting on the couch, my fingerprints in steam still lingering behind them. There is a break in the sobbing where the woman says loudly “I could kill her. Fucking bitch. How could they do this now?” My blood pales and I am certain that I am about to receive punishment for a sin of some magnitude I can’t begin to comprehend. Has the woman been sent from Saint Mary’s? I can’t think of anything I’ve done recently at school that would call for killings but it’s possible that I’ve committed some atrocity without remembering. I have a history of “acting out”. I go up to my room and shut the door as softly as I can, not wanting to incur more trouble for eavesdropping on my sentence before it is handed down. But there is nothing but silence. Hours of silence. When the sky begins to darken, hunger gets the better of my good judgement and I decide to go down into the kitchen to see if dinner has been started. My father makes dinner at six o’clock sharp. My insides are growling. Gnawed with fear. At the bottom of the tan carpeted stairs I stop. In the darkening living room, I can see my father sitting in a wing back chair. Green to match the couch. Green to match my mother. “Daddy?” I say quietly, not wanting to call attention to myself but sensing something desperate in the air. He doesn’t reply. He just sits with his chin down. On his lap, there is a framed photograph. “What are we having for dinner?” I ask, trying to waken him with the routine he honours every day. The moment that follows is unlike any other. More frightening and calm than anything outside it. The picture frame whirls toward the wall behind my head and the glass in it splinters around me like a halo. “Selfish. Just like her,” he says finally. I realize with relief that it’s my mother, not me, who deserves a killing.
PART TWO My mother never came back. What bothers me most is that she was gone before I knew she was gone. That she was gone even the last time I’d seen her. When I went to look a few days later, there was no trace of her in their closets. She must have packed everything and left. It made me angry that I'd been practicing the piano for her when she was already gone. The house was quiet in her absence. I went to school and my father went to work just as we did before she left. Routines established were upheld. Nothing was missing except her body and its clothing. In those first few weeks, our house was tomb silent. The air choked still with the pain of fresh wounds. Neither of us moved too much for fear of breaking the scabs. We crossed paths sluggishly, barely recognizing each other, barely speaking. He never looked at me. He never spoke. Unless I forced it from him. Looking back on those early days, I think they were the most respectful of our days together. And still, somehow, the most frightening. Because in the stillness, storms of fury were brewing. You could almost smell what was coming though you couldn’t tell from what direction. I felt angry with him for letting her escape us. I hated his quiet moping and preferred the few petty moments of outrage he displayed when something particularly got to him. His passive nature is what sent her packing. At least, aggressive, he was a man. He stood for something. I started to poke at him in the place I knew brought the aggression out. Demands, expectations, needs… those were easy ways to get to him. The man hated to be needed. The idea of being left holding the kid was a condemnation. But the best way I found to invoke his fury was to focus on her. To idolize and immortalize her. He hated that. Her. My father bought me an automatic camera, small and brown, for Christmas that year. The tag said “Merry Christmas, Dad”. Not Mum and Dad the way it always said before. I used his gift as a weapon against him. I never took one picture of him with it. Instead, I took pictures of her dead garden, the snow heaping above the fragile stalks. I took pictures of her bed and of her chair at the kitchen table. Late memorabilia.
PART THREE My first shelter was defined by the air between my father’s hard hand and my small body. Because he loved me. Because he wanted to save me from the selfishness in my blood. He let it flow like currents around me. I wasn’t a victim of my shelter. I chose it. I moved into it with enthusiasm just like I’ve moved into new shelters since. Defined by different elements; the emotional water of love, the protection of solid earth or the physical lick of fire. I moved impulsively, happily, undisturbed when I would return one day to the next to find the lock of lost shelters rusted over with salt. But that hectic movement, spinning from one emotional home to another, is in the years to come. My first shelter was here, in my father. These are the surroundings that birthed my need for definition through other people. I think he held back at first. Only brief flashes of electric violence passed between us after my mother disappeared. He was trying to act appropriately and always stopped short of what probably rung in his head as “too far”. But I pushed and pushed against that barrier. Craving his attention, his hate, his affection. If our relationship eventually spiraled tight into “abusive” it was me who stirred it in that direction. Me who fanned the breeze into a whirling tornado. Me who found the door to this new home, opened it and dared him, “Huff and puff and blow our house down.”
PART FOUR My plate was still full. Peas, small and muted green. Two baked meat pies, dull sheen of grease where I had broken them open, the steam long since evaporated. I did not want to eat. My first rebellion against him was to shun the fruit of his routine. He told me I’d sit there until I ate; so I sat. The stove clock ticked off the minutes. Then the hours. I watched the evening sky turn to night wind circling through the tree in the window behind my mother’s empty chair. I sat. I must have fallen asleep there because I was surprised when his fury flew toward me in the dark kitchen. “You don’t want to eat it? You don’t want it? Then maybe you want this instead.” And his big hands tore through the air toward my head. He held me down against the table, undid my pants and took the rage of two months out on me. Selfish. Little. Bastard. That I was.
PART FIVE When two human beings are forced to share the same space in isolation, they must learn a common language or become mute. Until my mother left, my father and I had an established means of communicating. My mother had been the lexicon by which we exchanged familial vows. Now that she was gone, we had to redefine and put new words to what little was left. After two months of silence between us, I was grateful for the language that filled the air around his hands. He was speaking to me finally. Through rage, yes, but it was rage I could understand. It was rage that I must have felt as well. I could sympathize. His anger that ravaged my body and took me by surprise every time was at least an expression. A validation. It said “I love you enough to make you better.” You only hurt the ones you love, they say. He must have loved me fiercely. As with any new language, one becomes more fluent with practical use. My father and I skirted our new dictionary carefully at first. He spoke in tongues, wild unbidden gibberish, then dazed silence. Small embarrassments. He would fly at me and I would take his rage, then we’d be left bewildered and anguished. At first, he would apologize for losing his temper and I would be embarrassed for both of us. Later, when we became accustomed to the easy exchange of hate and fear, the apologies ceased and I was only embarrassed for myself. I wanted his attention in any form. Attention that he once gave my mother, though it took on a different form in her absence. When his sharp palm whistled against my red skin, I felt her presence again. In my mind, she waded out of the lukewarm sea she’d gone to and took my place under his fury. I let her inside my body to take the killing I knew was rightfully hers to bear. I felt closer to her by the time he was through, as though I had her hair clasped in my hands and my face buried in her dress. I was ashamed to be so proud.
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