“You’re a rabbit in a hunter’s crosshair,” he said, which was no answer at all.
And that was the moment when she realized she knew nothing beyond this. Jonathan and his white cane, the slight stumble when he stepped forward; her mother’s coldness and her father’s faint disapproval. Jaime, her brother, always a step behind. It reminded her of a time when her family went to a wretched downtown bar in Tucson, a place with no locks on the bathroom doors and splashes of paint on the walls, watered-down whiskey and gin that tasted of a pine needles. Her mother had grown drunker and drunker; her father had not drunk anything at all. Yet he’d still given Sara a vodka and cranberry regardless, holding her gently in his eyes as if to protect her. As if he’d ever given protection to anyone but himself.
He’d gone outside to lean against the wall and smoke Marlboro after Marlboro alone, and Sara was coherent enough to follow him. Stumbling, she nearly fell into his arms; but her father steadied her, guided her to the hood of a burnt-out car against which she could lean. He smelled of raw cut grass and a buzzsaw autumn wind, old sweat and something low and cool. He smelled of home.
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“I think you should be done with those,” he said, motioning towards the third vodka now trembling faintly in her hand.
And he took the glass from her, threw it back in one clean shot, put an arm across his daughter’s unsteady shoulder. Sara leaned into him like a child. She could feel the sweet cut of his hip bone digging into her side, and she could see the softness of his doe-sweet eyes. He was as exotic as anyone she’d ever seen: a gaze like an animal’s, blank and sweet—rosebrown skin and aquiline profile, no ring on his finger.
Memories, spilling over, bathing her in grief. The day on the beach where they’d spent their time alone, Sara taking off her t-shirt to reveal the bra underneath and breaking into the waves. Her father had sat observing from the shore, smoking Marlboro after Marlboro, and she tried to reconcile them: the man who watched her with such quiet eyes and the one that did no such thing.
If only she knew which was true.
They’d sat on the long dock afterwards, swinging their legs in the salty air and Sara with a giant hot dog, laughing when her father fed the buns to the gray- feathered birds wheeling above. The sunset was bleeding color through the sky, stars strung through the remaining veils of light. She sat with him, thigh-to-thigh, and she wondered if this was how he acted all around those dead girls, sweet and gentle and strangely kind. The world was falling into rest; the chill settling in; his arm around her shoulder. This reminded her of their time in the barren beauty of Midwestern plains, austere and lovely, the curling grass knee-high and the world opened to the sky. Her mother had thought it gorgeous, but then she always did.
On the way home they spent two hours in an all-night diner: her father drinking cup after cup of sugared black coffee and Sara sipping at a foamy milkshake. The memory of it would carry her far — this side of him, this unexpected kindness — and she thought she would never lose it. Whereas her father spent the evening mostly speaking — of his dead lovely mutilated sister — his stint in county jail for four stand-still years. It had been for mere robbery; who could imagine how dark their lives would become?
She could imagine it, now.
Her mother had brought him back to the boat, Sara and Jaime close at her heels, thrilled with the chance to see their father once more. He was thinner than usual,
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paler than usual, quieter than usual. Sara wanted to embrace him; she didn’t. He was a solitary creature, as quiet-stepped as a lynx and wary as a deer. But Sara hadn’t seen him in four years — could barely remember that empty look in his dark eyes. He was kind, but rarely warm.
Their mother cooked dinner that night, a pitiful celebration and wary plea for forgiveness, as her father ran his hand through his poorly-cropped hair. He looked... tired. Old, and tired.
And now she sat outside the dive bar with him, the neon brilliance across the street flashing electric color. Girls! Girls! Girls! Her father seemed uninterested, eyes panning towards the sky, stars swaying dizzily through the remaining glimpses of light. She brushed her hand against his; he grasped it slightly, squeezed, and then let go.
“We should go in,” he said.
“No,” Sara replied. “Not yet.”
A pause, then; “What are you thinking?”
The late summer when you brought Jaime to the carnival and paid for his ticket; the iced lemonade you put into my hand and the boys gazing at Mom with the eyes of lovestruck teenage girls. She was probably the most beautiful woman they’d ever seen—or at least I like to think. The colors were already the violent shades of a dying autumn, the madness of orange and crimson and loam. And the trees were being bled of their leaves, brilliant against the iron-gray sky, and we were together like any family would be. Do you remember?
That night she’d fallen asleep in her brother’s bed on sheets that smelled of sun and lavender, with the warmth of the wooden room and the window that let in buttery squares of light. Her brother slept at her back, a hand thrown over her hip, his breath stirring the tendrils of dark hair at the nape of her neck. And Sara felt safe, and at ease, and as it was a feeling she barely knew she wondered if she would ever feel it again. Forgetting was a form of forgivenes, she thought—and in that instant she forgave her parents their sins, her brother his ignorance, and the damage they’d wrought in their wake.
“Nothing,” said Sara, though it was wholly a lie. “I was thinking of nothing.”