The Impossible Knife of Memory (16 page)

I was first in line when the bus pulled in. Took the seat on the left, two rows from the back. Stared at the zombies on the sidewalk dramatically reciting their lines, stalking to the edges of their stages, playing at life.

Looking out the window, I wondered how many of those kids had parents who were losing it, or parents who
L A UR I E H A L S E A N D E RS O N

were gone, taken off without a forwarding address, or parents who had buried themselves alive, who could argue and chop wood and make asses of themselves without being fully conscious. How many of them believed what they were saying when they blathered on about what college they’d go to and what they’d major in and how much they’d earn and what car they’d buy? They repeated that stuff over and over like an incantation that, if pronounced exactly right, would open the door to the life of their dreams. If they looked at their parents, at their crankiness and their therapy and their prescriptions and their ragged collections of kids, step-kids, half-kids, quarter-kids, and the habits that had started in secret but now owned them, body and soul, then they might curse that spell.

And then what?
Despite my best intentions, I was beginning to understand how my dad saw the world. The shadows haunting every living thing. The secrets inside the lies wrapped in bullshit. Even Gracie’s box of mints was beginning to make sense.
“Excuse me?” a voice said. “Can I sit here?”
I turned to say no, but he was already sitting down.
Finnegan Trouble Ramos.
I opened my mouth, but he put his finger on my lips.
“Shh,” he said. “Please. Let me say this before I chicken out again, okay? First, I’m sorry I didn’t call or text you or show up this morning.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple dropping down and bouncing up like a basketball.
“I really like you, Hayley Kincain. I want to be with you as much as I can. I get that it’s weird at your house, scary maybe, and your dad can be a jerk. You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to, but it kills me because you are so beautiful and smart and awesome and I don’t want anything to be scary for you, I just want—”
He paused for a breath.
I reached out and put my hand at the back of his neck; I pulled myself close to him and I kissed him until everything that hurt inside me melted into a pool of black water so deep I couldn’t touch the bottom. As long as I was touching him, I wouldn’t drown.

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49
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So.
That
.
Right?
That feeling in your stomach when you hear him whistling off-key, down the hall. That way your heart trips and then hammers against your ribs when he sees you and he grins like a little kid at the top of a steep, shiny-hot slide. Call it hormones, an early-stage bacterial zombie infection, or a very pleasant dream I was experiencing; I didn’t care.

I liked That.

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50
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Two days later, I came home to find that the hood of Dad’s pickup was warm and ticking, like he’d just pulled in the driveway. I opened the door to check the odometer. Twenty-three miles had been put on since I left for school.

“Hop in!” Dad called from the garage.
His cheery tone of voice made me suspicious. “Why?” He stood up, holding a hand pump and a basketball. He

bounced the ball once and grinned. “Got a surprise for you.”

I hesitated. Since Sunday, he’d been quiet, but not sober. “Are you okay to drive?”
He laughed. “I’m running on coffee and sweat today, nothing else.” He bounce-passed the ball to me. “It’ll just take a couple minutes. Get in.”
I didn’t notice the paint until we were on the road: two shades of yellow and a dark blue dotting his forearms and knuckles. He had paint on his shirt and jeans, too. He sang off-key with the radio, his breath smelling of mint gum, his hands steady on the wheel and gearshift. I was beginning to see a pattern. After the bonfire argument, he’d made nice and taken me to the cemetery. After his ax-murderer bit in the garage and the fight we had about it, here he was acting happy again. Well, happy-ish.
My phone buzzed. It was probably Finn, but I didn’t take it out of my pocket. I didn’t want to trigger Angry Dad again.
The song ended and an obnoxious commercial for a used-car dealer came on. Dad turned the radio off.
“I ran into Tom Russell in the grocery store.” He took a deep breath. “He was buying carrots.”
I had no idea where this was going. “Were they on sale?”
He turned left and stopped along the curb in front of a small park I’d never seen before. The swing set was empty. A couple of old people sat on a bench watching dogs chase tennis balls that they tossed onto an empty basketball court.
“Didn’t notice,” Dad said. “The point is that Tom’s a contractor. Small jobs mainly: roof repair, gutters, painting, that kind of thing. Anyway, he was buying carrots, like I said, and he recognized me from high school. We got to talking and one thing led to another, and it turned out he’d had a guy not show up for work today.” He pointed to a small house with green shutters across the street from the park.
“
Voilà
.”
“
Voilà
?”
“I painted the kitchen and the laundry room in there. Only took five hours. Tom paid me cash, everything under the table. Not too shabby, huh?”
His face lit up with real excitement, not the kind that comes in a bottle or a bong. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him like this. “That’s fantastic, Dad.” “I thought you’d like hearing that.”
“Tell me more,” I said. “Is this going to be a part-time thing? Full-time? Did you know any of the other guys?”
“I worked alone,” he said. “Had tunes playing and the windows open. It was a good day, princess.”
“What time does he want you tomorrow?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Your buddy there. The guy who hired you.”
“Tom?” He turned the key enough to glance at the time, then took the keys out. “Said he’d call if something else came up.” He picked up the ball and opened the door. “We haven’t shot hoops in forever. C’mon.”

It took him a long time to find his rhythm. I fetched the balls that clanged off the rim and bounced off the backboard. For about ten minutes, he made one shot for every five he took.

“Painting took more out of my arms than I thought,” he said.
“It’s been a while,” I said.
I ran through topics in my head, trying to find something to talk about that wouldn’t lead to trouble. I couldn’t bring up Finn, for obvious reasons. He didn’t want to talk about work. I didn’t want to talk about school. Politics was completely out of the question. Spock had started to gnaw on a hot spot on his hind leg, but to talk about that we’d have to talk about a trip to the vet and that would lead to talking about money and how we didn’t have any because of everything else we couldn’t talk about.
By the time he’d started to sweat, his bad leg was dragging a bit, but his hands were remembering what to do. He dribbled, one, two, three, leaned a bit on the good leg, pulled in his shooting elbow and launched the ball in a beautiful arc that fell,
swish
, through the basket.
“Nice!”
He grinned and made three more shots in a row. “What time is it?” he asked as I grabbed the rebound.
I passed him the ball and checked my phone. (Finn had texted five times.) “Quarter after. Why?”
“Just curious.” He dribbled with his left hand. “Finally got ahold of your guidance counselor today.”
“Ms. Benedetti? Don’t listen to her. She lies about everything.”
“Don’t worry. She likes you.”
“What did she want?” I asked carefully.
He bounced the ball between his legs and passed it to me. “Still struggling in math, huh?”
I put the ball on my hip. “I have a tutor.”
He wiped his face on his shirt. “Sounds like you’re spending a lot of time in detention.”
I dribbled the ball. “Cruel and unusual punishment, remember?”
“Maybe you should work on your diplomacy a little bit.”
I shot and missed. “They’re all lunatics.”
“Teaching kids like you?” He chuckled, grabbed the rebound, spun around me, and made a layup. “Can you blame them?”
I caught the ball and dribbled it behind my back. “What else?”
“Nothing else.”
I passed him the ball and watched him make a couple layups. Maybe Benedetti hadn’t talked to him about Trish or she had and he didn’t want to discuss it with me. A loud motorcycle headed toward the park. A couple of guys had arrived and were shooting at the other basket. Dad watched them for a minute, dribbled to the foul line, sank a free throw, and raised a triumphant fist.
“Not bad for an old guy, huh?”
Asking about Trish would spoil everything. It wasn’t worth it.
“Watch this,” Dad said.
He dribbled, cutting left, then right, like he was faking out an invisible opponent. He spotted up and tried to jump, but stumbled, landing hard and wincing. The ball sailed over the backboard.
“Oh, God, I said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” He limped a few steps. “Just need to walk it off. Get the ball, will you?”
I found the ball under an SUV across the street as the engine of the motorcycle revved loudly then cut out. I stood, then ducked back down, trying to keep out of Dad’s sight. He looked around once, then hurried over to where Michael sat straddled on his Harley. The exchange— something in Dad’s hand, something in Michael’s— happened so fast nobody else would have noticed it.
My phone buzzed and I took it out of my pocket.
Sup?
Finn wrote.
have you been kidnapped by aliens? are they torturing you?
helicopter is gassed up and ready I can rescue you
I wrote back:
i wish

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51
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As we were walking to gym the next day, Finn asked me to go to see a school with him.
“We’re already in school, dummy,” I said.
“No, goof.” He gently hip-checked me. “College. My mom set up an interview for me, tomorrow. I don’t really want to go, but if you come with me, we can make it into a road trip. An epic road trip.”
“
Epic
is a stupid word,” I said. “Ninth graders call the cafeteria nachos ‘epic.’ That actress, what’s-her-name, the stoned one, she says her dog is ‘epic.’ And her lipstick.”
“It’ll get us out of here for a day,” he said. “And my mom will pay for the gas.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded.
I kissed him. “That’s potentially epic, I’ll grant you that much.”

Forging my father’s signature on the excused absence card was cake, and it felt good, in a bizarre way, to watch Ms. Benedetti’s face light up as she officially approved the absence. I wrote a note on my hand to bring her back a souvenir.

He picked me up at the corner the next morning. I thought he’d be buzzing on energy drinks and the epic-ness of the adventure, but he hardly said a word. Barely looked at me. When we got to the Thruway, he took a hard right into the commuter parking lot instead of driving through the tollbooth.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Did the oil light just come on? Is the engine overheating?”
He shook his head, but I craned my head for a look at the dashboard, just in case. The indicator lights showed no impending disasters. Finn sighed heavily, but still didn’t say a word.
“Want me to drive?” I asked.
“You said you didn’t have your license yet.”
“Not technically.”
He didn’t even smile at that.
“It’s not the car, is it?” I asked.
He sighed again, watching the line of cars rolling through the tollbooth. “I had a fight with my mom this morning,” he said. “Before she even had her coffee.”
“Why?”
“She was telling me a bunch of stupid, ass-kissing things to say in this interview and then she got on me again for quitting the team. Next thing you know, she was bitching about the rent going up again and what a rotten son I am. For the first time ever, I yelled back.” He pounded the steering wheel gently with his fist. “I made her cry. Didn’t think that would happen.”
“Call and apologize,” I suggested. “Text her, at least.”
“I already did. That’s not the point.” He leaned forward and wiped the condensation off the windshield with his sleeve. “This interview is a waste of time. I don’t want to go to Oneonta.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Told you the other night. Swevenbury.”
“What’s so great about it?”
“Swevenbury College, home of The Wanderers? Voted Strangest Small College the last three years in a row? You get to design your own major; there are, like, only two required courses and everybody has to study overseas for a year. Swevenbury is what all other colleges want to be when they grow up. They say the grounds are seriously hallowed. Step foot on the campus and it changes you forever. It’s. . . .”
He paused like he was searching for the right word, something I’d never seen him do before.
“It’s Nerdvana!” he finally declared.
I nodded. “How far away?”
“One hundred eighty-three miles, north by northeast.” I shrugged. “Let’s go.”
“So I can be tortured by the magnitude of its awesomeness? No, thanks. I’d need a winning lottery ticket to go there.”
“That’s not why we’re going, numbnuts,” I said. “Road trips can make things look different. Trust me.”
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You have nothing to lose,” I said. “The look on your face when you said Swerva-whatever—”
“Swevenbury,” he corrected.
“See? Just saying it makes you smile.” I said “You promised me ‘epic,’ Finn-head. Point this car to Nerdvana and floor it. Or at least try to make the speed limit.”
I tried to goad him with stories of my years stalking ivory poachers in Southern Cameroons and the time that the Dalai Lama and I got snowed in on a mountaintop and played checkers until dawn, but Finn wasn’t interested in talking. He drove hunched over the steering wheel, his face stuck between a frown and pout (a prown? a fout?). I finally gave up and crawled into a book. Three and a half hours and one thick novel about dragons later, we drove under a massive stone arch with the words swevenbury college carved into it. A few minutes later, the forest opened up and the main campus came into view: old stone buildings, impossibly green lawns, and expensively dressed students. It looked like a supersized, Americanized version of Hogwarts, without the robes.
We parked and got out of the car.
“That grass looks like it’s been combed,” I said.
“Whatever,” Finn grumbled. “This way.”
The admission office was in a red stone castle, complete with turret and winding staircase. The receptionist there explained that we’d missed the first tour group, but we could join the next group after lunch.
Finn grunted.
She handed us a stack of glossy brochures and badges that had guest printed on them in red block letters.
“You’ll need these get into the library and student center,” she said. “Those coupons are good for five dollars off your meal.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Finn handed back his badge and the coupons. “We don’t have time.” He walked out of the office without another word.
“Sorry.” I took back the badge and coupons. “He needs some chocolate milk. We’ll be back for the tour, thanks.”
She winked. “Good luck.”
I caught up with Finn at the top of the front steps of the building. “What’s your problem?”
“You want a tour? I’ll give you a tour.” He pointed behind me. “Over there is the School of Teaching Rich Kids How to Become Richer. Behind that—”
“Get over yourself.” I followed him down the stairs. “This place is amazing. Look at how that stone is worn down in the middle.” I pointed to the marble steps. “Worn down by people carrying books! How cool is that?”
“I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this. Did you see the cars in the student lot?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I was looking at the castles.”
“Give me the name of one college you’ve visited that didn’t have a castle on it. We should leave.”
“No!” I said. “I’ve never visited a college before, asshole, and I want to see it. Stop whining. You’re smarter than most people on the planet, you have nice teeth, and your parents can afford your glasses. Your life does not suck that bad.” I started down the steps. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot at three.”
“Wait.” He stepped in front of me. “Can we back up? You’ve never visited a college before?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Not even when you were in middle school, like on the way to a band competition or something?” Finn tilted his head to the side a little, like he was confused, like he couldn’t imagine a life that didn’t include college visits on the way to band competitions.
I’d given him bits and pieces of my peculiar life, but colored softer and funnier than they had been. I’d painted my dad as Don Quixote in a semi, on a quest for philosophical truths and the best cup of coffee in the nation. I’d explained Dad’s craziness with the ax as a rare night of too much drinking and avoided the subject ever since.
He raked his fingers through his hair. “Your dad never took you?”
I wasn’t going to ruin the day by discussing my dad’s parenting style.
“Go to the library,” I said. “Absorb the dork energy. I’ll find you when I’m done walking around.”
He bit the inside of his cheek. “Am I really being an asshole?”
“Yes.”
He stared at the students walking up and down the steps for a moment, absently nodding his head like he was having a conversation with himself. Finally, he took a deep breath and exhaled hard.
“Please forgive me, Mistress of the Blue.” He rolled his right hand in front of his belt buckle, then swept a low bow in front of me. “This day shall henceforth be dedicated to your education of all things related to, but not exclusively concerning, this institution of post-secondary, ivy-choked, divine education.”
“Rise, knave,” I said regally. “Rise and let the merriment begin.”