August and Then Some (5 page)

We were standing at the counter in the stationery store when my sister hauled off and punched my dad in the balls. Dad pulled a twenty out of his wallet to pay for his lottery ticket and outta nowhere … fist to the crotch. Dad folded over and held himself. Dani ran outside and the bell on the door clanged behind her. I thought,
Holy fuck, did she just do what it looked like she fuckin did?

The dazed guy behind the counter goes, “Umm … Excuse me sir … I'm sorry, but … you have anything smaller?”

Dad said, “Keep the friggin change,” and busted out of the store.

The guy held the twenty out to me and he said, “Tell your dad it's on me. I hope it's a winner.”

I pocketed the bill and left.

Dani was standing next to the car. Just waiting. Not for our dad to yell at her or hit her back, just waiting calmly to be let inside. Dad unlocked the back door, she opened it and climbed in. I got in the front. Dad slid in the driver's seat, put his seat belt on, and turned the ignition. He sat with his hands on the wheel for a second, staring straight ahead. All three of us in silence.
In the back seat Dani folded her arms over her chest with an attitude like
don't even think about burning my ass on this one
. Dad tilted his head up to see her in the rearview, but she didn't look back. Then he looked at the dashboard and nodded. A nod that seemed to say he knew he had that punch coming and wasn't going to do anything about it. Nope. Not a damn thing. Not gonna retaliate, not gonna ask for an apology. Not even mention it. Just gonna put the car in reverse, pull out of the parking lot and drive home, twenty dollars in the hole.

 

A week after the lottery ticket incident—or the crotch-punching incident, or the twenty-dollar embezzlement incident, whichever way we're gonna look at it—I woke up to my mom yelling, “Go in the bathroom, wash your hands and face and brush your teeth!” Every school morning with the accuracy of an alarm clock my mother hurled these words from behind her bedroom door into our ears. You'd think after a few years she would have cut out the “Go in the bathroom” part. Like if she didn't specify, we would have climbed up to the attic to look for running water.

Mom's about five-one on a confident day, but has a set of pipes that can fill the house. She carries what little extra weight she's got below the waist like a slender bowling pin. She looks like someone who spends a few days a week in a gym, but she's never stepped foot in one. Her shape comes less from exercise than it does from anxiety and dread burning the extra calories. Her nervous energy keeps her hands constantly occupied, always moving things that don't need moving. In between bites of dinner she'll slide the salt shaker two inches to the left, then right, then back again like she's playing one-woman chess. When she's cooking she flutters around the kitchen from chair to stove to sink, a bird hopping from branch to branch, the whole time
her head twitching in all directions like something's going to sneak up on her. She's so busy looking over her shoulder that a Chinese alphabet of burns scores her wrists from pulling pans out of the oven without pot holders.

Mom says my grandma Terri passed down recycling instincts. Terri taught her to clothes-pin used zip-lock bags to the kitchen faucet to dry out. I wonder if Terri's foot used to tap against the floor under the table during dinner like my mom's, like sending out Morse code. When her foot starts going up and down, my sister and I look at each other and smile because we know what's next. Our dad will hear it too and when he's had just about enough, he taps his heel really loud, and Mom jumps in embarrassment realizing what she's been doing. Then she says, “Sorry …” and me and Dani mouth the rest of the sentence with her: “…it just happens without me.”

So that morning after washing and brushing, I came out of the bathroom and saw Dani's bed empty and unmade. Dad had gone to one of his construction sites at seven-thirty and Mom was getting cereal bowls out of the cabinet when I made it down to the kitchen.

1230 WFAS (Westchester's Talk Radio and Soft Favorites) played on the AM dial from Mom's old-time wooden kitchen radio—which was also a spice rack. The DJ came through the airwaves with a sing-songy voice so jolly and optimistic he sounded like he was trying to convince listeners—regardless of how much death and inflation he had to report—everything was so friggin dandy that no one in Westchester County ever really took a crap.

That morning it played to my mom twitching around the kitchen as she put cereal and bowls on the empty table.

“Mom, where's Danielle?”

She sighed then yelled to the ceiling, “Danielle, hurry up with your teeth, we have to leave in fifteen minutes.”

“She's not upstairs.”

“What do you mean?” She went to the refrigerator for milk.

“Remember how you told me everyone is always somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“Well Dani's somewhere isn't the bathroom.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it's not.”

She sighed, put the milk on the table, left the kitchen, and climbed the stairs. I followed her upstairs into the empty bathroom, then into Dani's room. She stopped when she saw her bed was empty. To me she mouthed the words,
is she hiding?
and I shrugged my shoulders. “Danielle, come on,” she said, “we have to go.” Then she stayed still listening for rustling sounds. None. “Was she in your room?”

“No.” We checked my room anyway. Mom called out, “Danielle?” Nothing. This was getting weird. Dani was quiet, but a disappearing act was never in her repertoire. We went into my mom's room. “Danielle, come on, it's getting late.” No Dani there either. In the bathroom Mom pulled back the shower curtain. Bathtub was dry. And just as Mom turned away from it she snapped into nurse mode. STAT. Fast as TV jumps to commercials I saw what she was like at work, calling out BP numbers, scrambling for sutures, wiping sweat off brows, keeping cool during life and death.

She went back into each room and opened the closets saying, “OK, game's over.”

“You haven't seen her since you woke up?”

“Not uh. Maybe she's in the car.”

Mom looked at me like I knew something she didn't. “Why would she be in the car?”

“Because everyone has to be somewhere. Right?” She had no time for her own piece of completely useless wisdom right then. She ran downstairs and into the kitchen, picked up the
phone, started to dial, then hung it up, and thought for a second. “The car?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

She swiped her car keys out of her pocketbook, and we hauled out the side door, down the stairs to the curb, where her car was parked and empty. She jangled her keys against her leg and her head twitched from left to right looking down the street. Neighbors were driving their kids to school and themselves to work. City commuters walked past our house to the train station while my mother stood on the sidewalk in her pleasant pastel nurse's uniform, took a big breath, and said, “I can't believe I can't find my daughter.” She ran her hands through her hair and scratched her scalp with her mellow-long fingernails, her hands shaking. She wasn't the cool ER nurse anymore. Her panic made her too young for that. Thirty-five years peeled off her, and the stories she'd told me about her childhood showed in her eyes. She was nine, wearing her Sunday dress and wool coat in Rockefeller Center, separated from my grandma Terri, lost for hours in the huge crowd of people that came to look at the Christmas tree, shivering next to a cop when they found her. She was hiding in her closet, crying because her hand-me-down clothes were too big and made her look fat. She was seven, in the supermarket breaking a glass jar of artichoke hearts, then taking a slap in the mouth from Terri that made her lip bleed. She was thirteen, months after Terri died, coming home late from school in a panic that she wouldn't have dinner ready for my grandfather, then him being late. She was the interrupted kid, the misplaced care-taker of too many things. And then—because keeping it cool, keeping her feelings underneath where she thought they belonged was what she was best at—she somehow jolted out of it with a new plan: “Let's check the back. Jake, you go around the house that way and I'll go this way and we'll meet at the back door.” We split up. Mom
started off in a fast walk that turned into a run. That's when my head got loud with all the scary stuff that could have happened: stolen, kidnapped, beaten, killed, cut up for someone's pleasure. I guess it's a sign of the times when an eleven-year-old thinks these are actual possibilities. Any of those images alone were terrifying enough, but coupled with the idea that I might have to live in the house without her was a scenario beyond torture. The dinner table without her. The walls with no one knocking on them. I could predict the loneliness but I couldn't measure it. In that moment I remembered who I felt most connected to in the house. And it wasn't the people paying the bills.

Then I thought,
Idiot, you didn't check the porch yet,
and I made a deal with God.
God, if I get to the porch before Mom does, Dani will be standing there with her hands and face washed and her teeth brushed, in one piece ready to go to school
. I hoofed ass up the slope of the driveway and around the side of the house, racing my mom for my sister's life. “Be there,” I kept saying. “Be there, be there.” I did get to the porch before my mother did, but Dani wasn't standing there. She wasn't washed or brushed or ready for anything. She was lying on the wicker couch. Asleep. No blanket, no pillow. Just pajamas, socks and a red hooded sweatshirt pulled over her head. It's so like God to change the outcome of your prayers just enough so you can't quite tell if He personally handled your request.

Her sleeping hands had searched for heat and made their way to her mouth. Somehow she looked more vulnerable on the vinyl cushions of our ancient couch with its chipped white paint than she did in the images I'd conjured a few seconds before.

Mom came running up the porch steps. I turned to her and put my finger to my lips so she wouldn't wake her. I was proud to have been the one to find her. And for a second Mom listened to me; then she kneeled down to her and shook her a little. “Danielle.” Dani's eyes snapped open and she let out
a little scream. That made my mother scream. “What are you doing out here?” Mom asked.

“I was sleeping.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to.”

My mom looked back at me for a second, probably trying to see if I'd come up with my own answer. “Well I guess that's OK. But are you cold?”

“A little.”

Mom grabbed her fingers and rubbed them fast between hers. Granted, the porch was on the side of our house surrounded by hedges and up enough of a slope that it couldn't be seen from the street, but that didn't seem reason enough for Mom to think Dani couldn't get swiped by some black-market psycho during the night. Maybe it was just me, but I expected a different reaction than:
Here, let me warm your fingers little girl and you'll be juuuust fine.

“Go inside and get warm, Danielle.”

“OK.”

Dani stood up and walked through the side door. “And brush your teeth,” Mom yelled. “We have to go to school now.”

 

All that September, if Danielle wasn't in her bed in the morning, my mother would sigh and say to me, “Would you please go on the porch and wake your sister up.” Seems a first-grade girl sleeping outside by herself regularly should have sent up a few more flags than it did. Dani started taking covers and pillows out with her, and that was enough because September was still bringing the kind of overnight weather a blanket could protect you from.

The night she came into my room, I mostly still feel like shit
about. She tried to take the blanket off my bed and I think I said something like,
get your own and quit waking me up
or something stupid like that and yanked it out of her hands. But the thing was, it wasn't so much that she wanted my blanket as she wanted me to know she was out there. It sucks when it takes you a year to catch on to something any schmuck with a quarter of a brain could probably figure out in a half hour.

She stopped coming to me after that. So I started setting my alarm clock for 2 a.m. and kept it under my pillow so I could check on her and not wake up the rest of the house. Some nights she'd be asleep in her room, some nights she'd be outside and sometimes I'd take an extra blanket down to her. Other nights I'd say, fuck it, I'm not checking on her anymore. She's fine. And even if she's not, my parents will take care of it. Fuckin joke that was.

Then October came.

It was almost 2 a.m. by my clock. I knocked the one
Come-in
knock and got no response. I went into her bedroom and she was gone. I got a pair of gloves from my closet and went down after her.

She had the hood of her red sweatshirt pulled over her head, the string cinched up so tight it covered her nose, mouth, eyebrows; all you could see were eyes peeking out of the little hole like a pair of brown dice. She had two blankets: the one against her was fuzzy and plaid and the other was rust colored, so heavy and wooly you'd think it was issued by the Army. Somehow she got both the blankets around her body tight as plastic wrap, like she put them flat on the floor, laid down on one side and rolled herself up like a burrito. She looked up at me through her hood and I said, “Dani, it's freezing. You sure you wanna stay out here?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. How someone could be so soft spoken and so stubborn at the same time blows minds.
“OK, I got you these anyway.” I laid the gloves on top of her and stood there for a second wondering what was going on in this kid's head. That's when she wiggled one arm out of the cocoon of blankets and knocked once on the wall behind her.

I said, “What?”