Dreams in the Key of Blue (26 page)

Harper told me that I could feel Jim’s label, but only while he gripped the bottle. He said nice things to me—what a good girl I was, how smart I was—while he rubbed my shoulders and moved me around on his lap. He said he wanted to be comfortable.

He flattered me, told me that I was a big girl and would have to sit just right. He slipped his rough hand beneath my shirt and rubbed my back. If we got along, he said, Mom wouldn’t have to go back to the hospital.

I didn’t want my mother to be sick, but I didn’t want to sit on his lap, either. Harper’s movements were jerky. His face sweated. His eyes closed. He held me with a firm grip, and I felt pressure against my leg.

Each time he let me go, I found red marks on my arms and shoulders, the imprints of his hands and fingers. I rubbed my arms to make the marks go away.

Harper took his black-handled knife from his pocket. The blade appeared with a loud click, as if from nowhere. He cut into an orange and slowly peeled it, leaving a pile of rind on the table. I thought I would choke on the tart scent of oranges. Harper stuck the blade into each piece of orange, bit it from the end of the knife, slowly chewed, and stared at me every second.

One night, Harper came home after eight o’clock, his Jim nearly empty. He wanted to know what was for supper. Mom told him that I’d made ravioli, and he asked if it was from a can.

My mother wrinkled her forehead and tugged at her hair. Canned ravioli was the only kind she knew, what we always ate. Chef Somebody in the pretty can.

Harper said he hated it. He walked to the stove, glared into the saucepan, and complained that the ravioli was cold and stuck together.

Mom reminded him how late it was.

Harper lunged at her. He caught her by the shirt, spun her around and punched her. She slammed against the sink and the wall before she crashed in a heap on the floor.

I scrambled under the table where I sat with my arms over my head, my head tucked down. I heard my father’s footsteps, saw his legs as he staggered past me, heard the click when he switched on the TV, and the smash when he fell across the coffee table and cracked his head on the sofa’s arm.

I crept from my hiding place and crawled to my mother. Her eyes were open. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, and my stomach threatened to empty. I smelled the blood, heard it slide across my mother’s skin.

I went to the sink, moistened a dishcloth, then crouched beside my mother. As I wiped away the blood, I swallowed to keep down my stomach.

“I want a different father,” I told my mother.

She nodded and closed her eyes.

When I heard Harper snoring, I walked into the living room and stared at him. He looked peaceful, indifferent. His black-handled knife lay nestled in the carpet. I picked up the knife and carried it outside to the stoop. I tried to re-create the snapping noise, to make the blade magically appear like I saw him do. I twisted it, pulled at it, pushed the silver buttons on its side. The blade shot out, sliced my right palm, and sent a stream of blood coursing through the spaces between my fingers.

I sent a different stream, a torrent of partially digested ravioli, spewing onto the steps.

My mother heard me and dragged herself from the kitchen floor. She saw the cut, wrapped it with a
piece of torn bedsheet, and said that we were going to out-patient. I didn’t want to go. I don’t like the smells, or the nurses’ swishing sounds when they walk, or muffled voices, or hallways where some noises echo and others do not.

She wiped the knife clean, placed it by Harper’s side, then got our coats. We walked through the damp, cold night to the bus stop and waited.

Then Mom told me that Harper wasn’t my real father.

My real father was Lucas Frank.

He was a doctor. I imagined him as a nice man, gentle, one who loved children. Mom told me that he loved me, but he was too busy to be any one person’s father.

I wanted to see his picture. Mom had one photograph, she said, her voice soft in the darkness. She promised to show it to me the next day. I sensed that my mother was smiling.

“Why doesn’t he visit me?” I asked.

“He doesn’t have time, Lily.”

“Maybe someday?”

My mother agreed. Someday.

The next morning, before she showed me the photo, she swore me to secrecy. Harper must never know that he was not my father.

My mother opened her special wood-and-leather box that she kept hidden in the closet. A tiny pillow of pine needles made the box smell like the evergreens across the road from the trailer park. She studied the photograph and gently touched it before she handed it to me.

I stared at the picture. My mother, much younger in the photo, stood on a beach beside a tall, slender man. Both grinned at the camera.

They were in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, and met in a restaurant where my father was a cook and Mom a waitress.

He had a mustache, and I wondered if it tickled when he kissed her.

My mother’s eyes glistened, and she smiled and told me about a special coffee cup she bought him. He loved coffee, but when he drank it, his mustache got soaked. The cup was made with an extra piece across the top so that wouldn’t happen.

I liked him.

I couldn’t wait for someday.

In the summer when I was nine, while I waited for someday, I discovered the swamp behind the trailer park. At first I was afraid to walk on the dike, so I sat in my favorite dry spot, listened to the breeze creep through the bayberry bushes, and wondered why my father—a doctor, after all—did not arrive, fix my mother, and send Harper away.

I couldn’t ask my mother. Questions like that might upset her, and I would never do that. If she got too upset, she might have to go away. Then what would happen to me?

In July, when the high water receded from the marsh, I walked onto the dike and discovered new friends, the snakes that lived in the bog.

I went to the school library and read articles about snakes and their habits. I studied the varieties that like to live in saltwater bogs and marshlands.

One day in August, I sat on the dike and called to Billy Brown-spot, Suzi Stripe, and Lenny Lemon-color. I advised them about their health, about shedding their skins, about the cold weather to come. I picked up Suzi Stripe. The small snake slithered and squirmed from my hand, but I always had my other hand ready to catch her so that she did not fall.

Then I heard Harper slam his pickup door and yell, “Where’s the fucking dog?”

It was early. What was he doing home? What did he want with the dog? He always stayed away from Spike.

I ran across the dike and up the path. When I got to the courtyard, the truck was there, but Harper had disappeared. I ran into the trailer.

My mother lay in a familiar heap on the kitchen floor. Before I could say anything to her, I heard a loud crack, then Harper’s voice: “Fucking piece-of-shit dog.”

There was a second loud noise.

Mom did not move. She didn’t seem to know that I was there.

Harper crashed through the door, his shoulders hunched forward, elbows jutted out, and feet wide apart. His hands and gun glistened red, coated with gore. He told me to take off my pants and get my ass on the sofa.

I slipped out of my jeans as I hobbled to the living room.

Harper told Mom to get off the floor and go to Ellie’s.

I heard her moan and cry softly. I peeked over the back of the sofa as she stumbled down the front steps.

Harper slammed the door behind her, blood flying like spittle from his left hand, the gun gripped in his right. I lay unmoving on the couch, my fists pressed to my mouth, my bare legs cold, my eyes shut tight.

When Harper stepped around the sofa into the living room, he held something in his left hand and stared at whatever it was. He placed the gun and the other object on the coffee table, then wiped his hands in broad red strokes across the trailer’s walls.

He stared at his work, then slowly turned and pointed at the bloody mess on the table.

“Fucking dog’s heart,” he said.