Читать книгу Man Alive - Thomas Page McBee - Страница 16

8

Pittsburgh

1990 ♦ 10 years old

“The police chief’s here to talk to you,” Mom said. I was alone in my room, still trying to build the model engine Dad bought me, but it was way harder without his help. For a brief moment I imagined she’d actually killed him while I slept, but I could hear the distant sound of the riding mower and smell the cut grass through my window.

The police chief reeked of Old Spice, Dad’s aftershave, and I disliked him immediately. Anyone could be a molester, I knew: Mom had grown increasingly suspicious of friends’ fathers, even relatives.

Every man could turn, like sour milk.

I was obedient, keeping track of who to tell what, how to behave. But I hadn’t been briefed on a police chief, on what sort of truth he might require. I looked at Mom, but she just gave me the same sad expression he did.

He sat at our dining room table, sleeves rolled up, a half-smile under his mustache. A recorder sat like an insect between us on the table in front of me. I didn’t like the way his hair crowned his head, didn’t like his straight teeth or his scruff.

“Your mom wanted you to tell us what happened—” he seemed unsure of how to go on, and I didn’t like that, either. The worst thing in the world was a nervous adult.

“That’s right,” Mom said, providing no further clues. I kept my eyes down as he launched into questions, my cheeks reddening with each one. I knew the recorder trapped me in this stupid story, this truth.

How often, he asked. What would Dad say about telling Mom? Where were Ellie and Scott? Where did he touch you?

Then it was finally done, the words stamped on tape, no time to sculpt something less bleak. The house was full of ghosts. But wait.

“I need to ask you one more thing: something very important,” he paused, and my stomach dropped in excitement, anxiety. No one asked me important anything. “And think about it carefully, because it’s a big decision.”

Mom looked at him expectantly. I flexed my bicep, felt the muscle under the cotton of my shirt.

“You can say whatever you want, no one will be mad, okay?” He leaned toward me, the smell of him a five-alarm mix of sweat and cologne. I moved back, nauseous. Maybe that’s the reflex that spun the story in another direction: fear as propellant, the foreign smell of a man’s hot breath on my face.

“Do you want your dad to go to prison?”

Everything froze.

♦

A diorama: our babysitter, somewhere far from us in her convertible Mazda Miata, her auburn hair extended in all directions; Dad still outside in his heavy work gloves, his heart thundering at the sight of the cruiser; Mom’s eyes on mine, the story she’d told me about why he still lived with us: bankruptcy, property taxes, a fruitless job hunt, something something something.

I knew, better than I knew myself, what my family needed me to do.

“No,” I said.

I watched another part of me fly away.

He gave me a look, an adult expression that Mom called “tired.”

“Are you sure?”

A story in motion stays in motion. I nodded, and he waited for me to say more, but my silence was my language, my silence eclipsed truth until it became it.