Everybody’s standing in the yard waiting for dad. I’m the oldest, so I hold Megan, the baby, in my arms. Mom is in the car already, looking exhausted. I have the feeling like I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be, like I’m about to be caught. My legs get all tensed up, ready to run, and my breathing gets shallow. I wonder if that’s what’s happening to dad right now, if that’s why he’s locked himself in the downstairs bathroom and refuses to come out.
We’re supposed to be at grandma’s for our cousin’s birthday party, but we’re almost an hour late now. I look to mom to see if there’s any indication when we can just give up and go back inside. When we can stop standing in the yard like a pack of wolves – all eight of us kids, plus the baby. There’s a slamming, and for a moment I think dad has finally vacated the bathroom, but then mom walks up beside me. She says, “He’s overwhelmed with work,” and takes the baby from me. I wonder why we don’t just go to grandma’s without him, but the way mom’s shoulders droop as she carries the baby and tucks Jen, the five year old, under her armpit, I can feel the reason why without entirely knowing it. The rest of us follow suit: Reinard, the ten year old, two year youngers than me; Laurence, nine; Bennett, seven; Maxwell, five – Jen’s twin; Leigh, four; and Peyton, two and a half. She lets us eat cereal for dinner. It takes two boxes of Frosted Flakes, and by the time I pour my own, the milk is down to its final drops and I use water to fill the bowl. Mom nurses the baby, digging entire handfuls of cereal out of the box and eating it, not noticing the tiny white and beige crumbs landing on the baby’s head.
Tonight we came home to this scene: The front door, ajar. Our things – clothing, books, dishes (broken), and those tiny milk glass figurines I’d been collecting since I was in high school – strewn about. I leaned against the door frame, staring, thinking about all of the words I would use to describe this: Agape, ajar, strewn, shattered, nausea. Dennis whispered commands at me: Get back! Call the police! Get your cell phone! Don’t touch anything! The more he hissed, the heavier I became, pushing against that door frame like a life support. In the end, it was he who rummaged through my purse to find my cell phone. He had to hang up twice and redial because he was fidgeting and shaking so much he couldn’t dial 9-1-1.
By the time the police arrived, Dennis had dragged me into the yard, standing close to the truck so we could make a quick getaway in case the “people who did this” decided to exit through the front door and chase us. We stood in silence as the sirens and the lights singled us out to the neighborhood. Heads poked out of houses, blinds slid open, and cars driving by slowed. And all I could think – as the officers walked through the house and Dennis, taking inventory, barked the things we were missing at them – was about that weekend I went camping with my dad when I was 12. We had just pulled up to the campsite, the sun had set and he was in a bad mood because traffic had delayed us. He hated pitching a tent in the dark, but still, he whistled while he did it. Perhaps it was his whistling that roused the buck nearby, who came charging out of the woods at such a speed I couldn’t help but stand and stare at it, wondering at the way I couldn’t make out its hooves. The only thing I’ve ever seen that has matched the speed of that deer was my father, who picked me up and threw me in the truck so fast that my shoulder popped out of its socket. The buck head butted the driver’s side door, making a dent that looked like a sculpture. My father drove up about a half mile from the campsite where he put my shoulder back in place and let me drink some of his soda with whiskey in it. When we went back to the camp site a few minutes later, my tears dried and sticky on my face, the tent was in shreds and our cooler of food was on its side, sandwiches and ice cream bars mushed into an unrecognizable pile. I sat quietly, thinking about cleaning up all that mess, when my dad put the truck back into drive and pulled away. “It’s just stuff,” he said when I sniffled.
Shawn can fall asleep anywhere. He can fall asleep on the school bus to and from school even when all the other kids are screaming and giggling about nothing in particular. He can fall asleep on the train ride to and from his grandma’s house in Braintree, where she bakes him cookies and smokes her cigarettes outside even though the entire house smells like an ashtray and the walls are an unintended yellow. He can fall asleep with his dress shoes on, still wearing his Sunday suit that’s gotten too small for him too fast and makes his mother wince whenever she tugs the jacket onto him. He can’t fall asleep in his own bed though, with his mother right down the hall so that when he shrieks and pretends it was a bad dream which is impossible because he hasn’t fallen asleep in that bed in the months since his father stopped coming home, she can be next to him, kneeling as in prayer, repeating, I’m here. I’m here.
Sometimes it takes her eight seconds, sometimes ten. Tonight it has taken her eleven seconds, which still did not give her time to put her left house shoe on, the toe of the right one toe sticking into his carpet like a tree stump or one of those cars being swallowed up by the desert.