Читать книгу Man Alive - Thomas Page McBee - Страница 14

6

Pittsburgh

1990 ♦ 10 years old

“Crocodile tears,” Mom said the day after Dad apologized. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me picture him slithering toward me, so I shut my eyes.

“I could just cut his brakes,” she said, nodding toward his sedan in the airless garage. We were in the van beside it, underneath a swinging light cord. I stared at his car like it might rear up to defend itself.

Here’s a story I don’t remember: in the bathroom, I told my red hairbrush about Dad. Had I wanted someone to hear? Sometimes we are mysteries, even to ourselves. My live-in babysitter walked by, pressed her ear to the door. She’d held me like a big, gangly baby and asked careful questions in her honey voice.

“Try to forgive him,” she’d said on the last day I ever saw her, holding my hand and fingering the cross around her neck.

“She must have felt guilty,” Mom sighed when Susan left in the middle of the night, speeding off in her sporty Mazda. A loneliness settled in my chest. I was an astronaut, floating farther and farther away.

The truth was, I kind of wanted Mom to kill him. I watched her in the half-light, knowing she wouldn’t. I thought that no one could really ever forgive anyone, and I looked at her face: unfamiliar, trembling, clenched. I worried the hole in the knee of my jeans. What would a normal kid say?

“Maybe you’d get in trouble?” I offered. She looked at me, her face crumpling.

“Hey,” she said, pulling my hand away from the fraying fabric. “You’re safe now.” We were quiet for a minute, but I thought about the scramble of words: how if you repeat something enough times, the meaning disappears.

Safe, I thought. Safesafesafesafesafesafesafesafesafesafe.