Part 15 (1/2)

The first time he let me shoot a real gun, I was maybe five years old. It was a sunny afternoon, and the warm brown whiskey smell on his breath was light. His mood was good. He watched me taking careful aim with my pellet pistol, and he said, ”Rosie-Red, I believe you're ready to try something a touch mightier.”

He loaded a .22 for me and talked me through the kickback. He tucked in spongy orange earplugs for me, and I sighted on the Pepsi bottle. I squeezed steady, pressuring the trigger toward me until the gun bucked in my hands like a live thing. The shots rang louder when I could feel them. The .22 seemed powerful and sleek, yet it did what my hands said. I could feel the reverb of it in my whole body, and I squeezed again and again and again. I felt bullets moving out from the pit of me, down my arms, and then out the barrel. I held steady and shot till the gun was empty.

Daddy wove his way over to the Pepsi bottle and held it up. We watched water streaming out of several holes.

”s.h.i.+t, baby. I think you nailed it. Three, maybe four times,” he said, admiring. ”If you wan't so pretty, I'd say it was a shame you wan't born a boy.”

”Who would wanna be a boy,” I said, and spit.

Daddy laughed and said, ”Dead-Eye d.i.c.kless.”

I laughed, too, though I didn't get the joke. I only got that this was a good, good day. My mother was at home, making us lasagna, and my daddy was pleased with me.

Here at the dead end of Pine Abbey, my red brick cube of an ex-house sat on the right, the last in the row. The house across the street was its mirror image, except the trim was cream instead of brown and they had an old VW Beetle rusting away in the carport.

The carport of my old house was empty. Maybe he'd wised up and left the haunted place where his two-person family had abandoned him one by one. Or maybe he really was dead.

Now that I was here, it seemed ridiculous to think that my actual father was sitting inside on the sofa. It was like expecting the copy of Waters.h.i.+p Down Waters.h.i.+p Down I'd set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn't imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or between cars. I'd set on my bedside table a decade ago to still be there, facedown and splayed open to the chapter where the rabbits first meet Woundwart. But at the same time, I couldn't imagine him making a checklist and packing boxes and renting a U-Haul. If he was alive, this was the only place I could imagine him existing. The empty carport might only mean he was off working or between cars.

I wondered if he would recognize me, and I felt my ab muscles go tight on the strength of memory and instinct, as if prepping for his welcome-home blow. A blast of hot red temper came steaming up my throat from my belly. If he was here, he f.u.c.king owed me.

”Sit tight,” I told Gretel. I turned off the car and rolled up all the windows to half-mast to keep her in but leave a cross-breeze going.

I got out of the car and marched across the patchy lawn, chin up, shoulders set. My eyes burned, full of sleep-sand and dry from staying open way too long. Even so, I walked tough, like a kid going to touch the front door of the neighborhood's spooky house on a dare. I jumped up onto the concrete slab that served as a porch, out of breath from just this short burst of angry movement. I had to breathe in short pants to keep from activating the dry cough that was waiting in the bottom of my lungs. I bypa.s.sed the door, going instead to kneel by the living room's open window. I put my face against the screen and cupped my hand around my eyes to block the sunlight, so I could see into the living room.

A little girl, maybe eight or nine, sat on the floor with her dark hair hanging in strings around her face. She felt my gaze and looked up, staring back at me with her big, glossy eyes. She didn't seem surprised to see me, or particularly scared. She put a finger up to her lips and said, ”Shhh. Daddy's sleeping.”

For one crazy second, I thought I must be looking back into the past, seeing my young self, warning grown-up me away. I knew from science-fiction movies that if I touched her, we'd both melt or burn up or explode the world.

I blinked hard, twice, and put one hand up to my aching forehead. Looking around, I realized that the room was a right-now place, not something from my past. There was nothing in it that I recognized. A long, puffy green sofa sat against the wrong wall of the den. Ours had been brown with dark gold flowers, and it had been against the front wall, between the window I was looking through and an identical one farther down the porch. The coffee table was different, too, flanked by a vinyl wingback chair and a stack of cardboard moving boxes. There was a big TV in a hutch, showing a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the sound off. We'd had a smaller TV on a sanded plank table.

The little girl had a slew of Barbie outfits scattered across the floor. She was working a naked Barbie's long legs into a spangled tube dress.

”h.e.l.lo,” I said, quiet through the screen.

The girl's hands were still working to clothe her doll, but the dress stuck at Barbie's flared hips. She said, ”I'm not s'posed to talk to people I don't know.”

”I'm not a stranger,” I said. ”I used to live here when I was your age. This is the house where I grew up.”

She got curious then, tilting her head sideways. She set Barbie down topless and stood up and came over to peer at me through the screen. ”Then what's your name?”

”Rose,” I said. ”Rose Mae.”

She nodded like I'd pa.s.sed some test and said, ”You made the marks.”

”Marks?” I repeated.

”On the wall,” she said. ”Daddy's mad about it. I know you made them because it says your name.”

”You have marks on your wall that say my name?” I asked, and when she nodded I said, ”Can I see them?”

She tilted her head the other way, considering. ”You'd have to come in.”

”Yes,” I said. ”Can I come in and see them?”

After a thinking pause, she shrugged and said, ”I don't mind it. It's got your name, anyways.”

I stood up and met her at the front door. She swung it open for me, and there was a squeak of hinges at the end that was so familiar, it made my teeth ache.

I stepped inside. The carpet had been changed. When I was growing up, it was a dark gold, so thin in places that I could see the woven plastic matting glued to the floor. Now they had a mottled khaki Berber. The little girl pointed at the front wall, where our sofa once sat. A crudely wrought chest stacked with three more moving boxes filled the s.p.a.ce.

”Daddy painted when we first moved in, but they're all floating back up through,” she said, pointing at two words and a host of dark marks on the wall. ”Like ghosts, Daddy said.”

The writing was all contained in an invisible square, exactly under the place where my mother's big framed print of s.h.i.+ps in a harbor had once hung. The lines were thick, drawn on with a laundry marker. If the print had still been hanging, all the writing would have been hidden perfectly behind it.

At the top, someone had written my name, ”ROSE MAE,” in all caps. Underneath my name were long horizontal lines that ran from one edge of where the frame had been to the other. The higher horizontals were covered end to end in tick marks, thousands of them, all made of four vertical lines close together, then a diagonal slash drawn through to make five-packs.

Some were deep black, and some I could see only faintly as they worked their way up through the paint.

I said to the little girl, ”This was done with a Sharpie, and that stuff will come up through paint every time. I've seen it come through wallpaper, even. Your daddy needs to prime the wall with this stuff you can get at Home Depot. It's called Killz.”

”Killz,” the little girl repeated. ”I'll tell him.”

I reached out one hand and set it flat on the cool wall, cautious, as if the marks had been scorched on and were still smoking. They were as mysterious and unreadable as flattened Braille. I slid my hand down, counting horizontal lines.

There were nineteen. The top line was about one-third covered in tick marks. I started counting across by fives, moving my hand over them.

The kid said, ”It's a hundred and thirty-eight on that row. I counted before.”

I kept going. She was right: 138. There were even more ticks on the lines under. They filled every line, until they stopped midway through the eighth line. The last ten lines had no ticks at all.

”I think my mother made these,” I said.

The little girl said, ”Mine works in a doctor's office,” as if we were trading facts about mothers. ”And she's in school to be a nurse.”

”That's a neat job,” I said absently.

My mother had kept my name and a strange count not five feet away from where my father's recliner once sat, angled toward the TV. The air was thickening around me, and it was harder and harder to breathe.

”I'm not going to be a nurse,” the little girl said, confident. ”I'm going into s.p.a.ce.”

”That's a neat job, too,” I managed to say.

The little girl said, ”My Skipper doll has on a nurse outfit. Want to see?”

”Sure,” I said, but the pit of my stomach had gone sour. My eyes burned, and the vision in the corner of my eyes had grayed out farther. I was peering at the marks now through a tunnel of fog. The lines on the wall seemed to flicker, as if the lamp was putting out candlelight.

The girl trotted over and held up Skipper-as-nurse, too flat-chested to fill up Barbie's uniform.

”That's awesome,” I said, already up and moving. ”I have to go.” It was true. I couldn't breathe the air inside this place for one more second.