Eileen

WEDNESDAY

The house was locked. I could see my father asleep in his chair in the kitchen through the windows, the refrigerator door wide open. He sometimes left it that way when the heat from the stove and the oven made him sweat. And on my father’s feet, shoes. With the exception of Sundays, when he was closely chaperoned by his sister to church and back, if my father had shoes on, it meant there would be trouble. He wasn’t a violent threat, but when he got out he did things the warden would have called morally offensive — falling asleep on somebody’s front lawn, folding up postcards at the drugstore, knocking over a gum-ball machine. His more aggressive indiscretions included pissing in the sandbox at the children’s playground, yelling at cars on Main Street, throwing rocks at dogs. Each time he got out, the police would find him, pick him up and bring him home. How I cringed at the sound of that doorbell when an X-ville cop stood outside on the front porch with my father, drunk and tugging at his chin, eyes crossed. The officer would take his cap off when I answered the door, speak in hushed tones while my father busted into the house in search of booze. And if he chose instead to stay and take part in the conversation, there were handshakes and pats on the shoulder, the respectful pretense of love and loyalty. “Routine check, sir,” the cop would say. If a cop tried to express even the slightest concern, my father would take the guy aside and launch into a rant about the hoodlums, the mob, the strange noises in the house. He’d complain of ill health, heart trouble, back pain, and how I, his daughter, was neglectful, how I was abusing him, how I was after all his money. “Will somebody please tell her to give me back my shoes? She has no right!” And as soon as he turned to me, hands trembling and creeping up toward my neck, the cop would nod, turn and close the door and leave. None of them had the guts not to play into his delusions — ghouls and gangsters, ghosts and the mob. They would have let him get away with murder, I imagined. “America’s finest,” the prison guards of the civilized world, those police. I will tell you frankly that to this day there is nothing I dread more than a cop knocking at my door.

That morning I rang and rang the doorbell, but my father wouldn’t budge. I figured the keys were in the pocket of his robe or, worse, around his neck, wearing them the way I used to, a noose at the ready if I’d ever thought of it. I could have tried to walk to work that day, stick my thumb out, that’s true. Nobody would have looked twice at my outfit at the office. Nobody cared.

I went around the back of the house and tried to open the cellar door. Bending over and tugging at it had me burping up and gagging. It was not a pleasant morning. Nothing is more disturbing than waking up to the taste of vomit. With bare hands I cracked through the glazed layer of ice over the high snow and filled my mouth with it. It hurt my head. Maybe that was when the previous night came back to me: Rebecca, Sandy, leaving the bar and going back in. I recall sitting down in a booth, the sparks of matches, wobbling over manly fists with my Salems, the itchy wool of my dress or a man’s rough sweater rubbing against my neck, then falling down and laughing. “Rebecca,” someone had said, and I responded, “Yes, doll.” I’d been Rebecca for a night. I’d been someone else completely.

A night of heavy drinking would kill me now. I don’t know how I managed it back then, though I’m sure my shame and embarrassment were far worse than the hangover. I shook off my fractured recollections and tried to gain access to the house. The cellar door was locked, of course. I considered busting through a back window with the heel of my boot, but I didn’t think I could reach up high enough to get my arm through and undo the lock on the inside of the back door. I pictured severing my arm on the broken glass, blood spewing across the snow. Surely my father wouldn’t stay mad at me if I was bleeding to death in the backyard. The image of blood-stained snow turned my stomach and I bent down to retch but all that came up was yellow bile. My head throbbed remembering the frozen pile of vomit waiting for me in the car. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my dress.

When I went back around the front of the house and rang the bell again, I saw that my father was missing from the chair. He was hiding from me. “Dad?” I called out. “Dad!” I couldn’t raise my voice too high or the neighbors would hear. And given that the day was starting, mothers sending their kids off to school, men leaving in their cars for work, they would soon see the old Dodge smushed into the bank of snow. The car was fine, but clearly the person who’d parked it was out of her mind.

Already we, the Dunlops, were regarded as something of a case in the neighborhood. Even my father’s reputation as a cop — an upstanding citizen, a man of service to his country — couldn’t make up for the fact that in recent years our lawn was never mowed, our hedges never trimmed. A neighbor would do that once or twice a summer, to keep up appearances, I’m sure, but it was passed off as a gesture of appreciation for the old man’s good work and sympathy for me, the skinny girl with no mother and little hope for a husband. We were the only house on the block without Christmas lights strung in our bushes, no fancy tree twinkling through the living room windows, no wreath on the door. I’d buy treats for Halloween, but no kids ever rang our doorbell. I ended up eating all the candy myself, chewing it up and spitting it all out in the attic. I didn’t like any of our neighbors any more than my father did — not the Lutherans, none of them, no matter their gifts or favors. They were goody-goodies, I thought, and I felt they judged me for being young and sloppy, and for driving a car that filled the whole block with smoke when I started it. But I didn’t want to earn any more of their scorn. I didn’t want to give anyone more fodder for gossip. I had to get the car into the driveway before it aroused suspicion. This was my thinking. And I had to clean the seat full of vomit before my father saw it.

But, of course, he’d seen it already. I suppose he’d been waiting up for me the night before and came out and yanked the keys out of the ignition after I’d passed out. It occurred to me all at once: He kept me from carbon monoxide poisoning that night. He may have saved my life. Who knows whether the engine had been running when he came out and yanked out the keys. It’s possible. The windows were up when I came to. Perhaps he simply wanted his shoes from the trunk, and that’s why he took the keys. Still, I like to think that somehow his instincts as a father — his desire to protect me, to keep me alive — kicked in that night, overrode his madness, his selfishness. I prefer to tell myself that story than to believe in luck or coincidences. That line of magical thinking always leads to too fine an edge. In any case, I was grateful to be alive, which was nice. At first I was all the more frightened at what my father would have to say, what he might want in return for saving my life. But then I thought of Rebecca. With her around, I didn’t need to beg for my father’s mercy. He could yell and cry, but he couldn’t hurt me. I was loved after all, I thought.

Again I tried to knock on the front door, but my father still ignored me. I climbed over the wrought-iron handrail that went up the brick steps and jumped down behind the front bushes and looked through the living room windows. They hadn’t been washed in years. I rubbed a spot through the frost, but there was still a thick layer of dust on the inside. I could barely see in. I caught then a weird vision of my father — pale, naked from the waist up, thin and frail but full of tension, jolting slowly past the living room windows with a bottle in his hand. He seemed to have grown small breasts. And when he turned, I thought I saw long purple bruises up and down his back. How he stayed alive for as long as he did is sheer proof of his stubbornness. I pounded my fist on the thick glass, but he just waved his hand and kept on walking. I ended up sneaking in through a dirty living room window. It was, strangely, unlocked.

I was an adult, I knew that. I had no curfew. There were no official house rules. There were only my father’s arbitrary rages, and once he was in one he would only relax if I agreed to whatever odd, humiliating punishment he came up with. He’d bar me from the kitchen, order me to walk to Lardner’s and back in the rain. The worst crime I could commit in his eyes was to do anything for my own pleasure, anything outside of my daughterly duties. Evidence of a will of my own was seen as the ultimate betrayal. I was his nurse, his aide, his concierge. All he really required, however, was gin. The house was rarely dry — as I’ve said, I was a good girl — but somehow everything I did, my very existence, rubbed him the wrong way. Even my National Geographic magazines gave him cause to bewail my unruliness. “Communist,” he’d call me, flicking at the pages. I knew he was furious that morning. But I wasn’t scared. I stood on the carpet in the foyer, snow sliding off my boots. “Hey,” I called out to him. “Have you seen the keys?”

He emerged from the closet with a golf club, thudded up the steps, and sat on the upstairs landing. When he was truly enraged, he got quiet — the calm before the storm. I knew he would never try to kill me. He wasn’t really capable of that. But he seemed sober that morning, and when he was sober, he was especially mean. I don’t recall exactly what we said to each other while he sat up there, tapping the golf club along the rungs of the banister, but I remember I held my hands over my face, in case he threw the golf club down.

“Dad,” I asked again, “can I have the keys?”

He picked up a book from where they were piled along the hallway walls and threw it down at me. Then he went into my mother’s bedroom and took a pillow off the bed and threw that down, too.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, setting himself on the top step again. He rapped the golf club against the rungs of the banister like a prison guard with a baton against iron bars. “You’re not going anywhere till you read that book. From cover to cover,” he said. “I want to hear every word.” It was a copy of Oliver Twist. I picked it up, turned to the opening page, cleared my throat, but stopped there. A week earlier I would have acquiesced and read a few pages until he got thirsty. That day, though, I just put the book down. I recall looking up at him, still shielding my face with my hands. Through my fingers, to my regret, I caught sight of his gray scrotum peeking out one side of his billowy, yellowed shorts.

“You see the car keys?” I asked. “I’ll be late to work.”

His whole body seemed to blush with rage. The shoes he had on were his worn black oxfords.

“Out all night, nearly crashed the car, sleeping in your own sick, and now you’re worried about getting to work on time.” His voice was eerily measured, grave. “I can hardly look at you, I’m so ashamed. Oliver Twist would be grateful for this home, this nice house. But you, Eileen, you seem to think you can just come and go as you please.” His voice cracked.

“I went out with a girl from work,” I told him. It was a mistake to disclose this, but I suppose I was proud and wanted to rub it in his face.

“A girl from work? Do you think I was born yesterday?”

I refused to defend myself. In the past I’d have begged his forgiveness, done anything to appease him. “I’m sorry!” I would have cried, falling to my knees. I’d gotten good at being dramatic; he was only ever satisfied by complete self-abasement. That morning, however, I wasn’t going to stoop to his level.

“Well,” he said, “who is he? I at least want to meet the boy before you get knocked up and sell your soul to Satan.”

“Please, can I have the keys? I’ll be late.”

“You aren’t going anywhere dressed like that. Now really, Eileen. How dare you? That’s the dress your mother wore to my father’s funeral. You have no respect,” he said, “for me, for your mother, for anyone, and least of all for yourself.” He let go of the golf club, startling himself with the racket it made as it tumbled down the stairs. Then he started shaking. He sat on his hands, bowed his head. “Trash, Eileen, just trash,” he whined. I thought he might start to cry.

“I’ll go get you a bottle,” I said.

“What’s his name, Eileen? Give me the boy’s name.”

“Lee,” I answered, almost without thinking.

“Lee? Just Lee?” He winced, wiggled his head back and forth mocking me.

“Leonard.”

He ground his teeth, jaw pulsing, and rubbed his palms together.

“Now you know,” I said, dropping my hands from my face as though my lie itself could shield me from my father’s wrath. “Keys?”

“Keys are in my robe,” he said. “Come back quick and change. I don’t want anyone to see you in that getup. They’ll think I’m dead.”

I found my father’s robe thrown in the empty fireplace. I got the keys, unearthed my purse from a pile of junk by the front door, put on a coat, and went back out to the car. The vomit was already melting, the edge of the puddle coinciding with the strap of the seat belt. It was awful. The smell transferred to everything I wore and lingered on my coat long after I’d abandoned the Dodge and disappeared a few days later. I had no intention of going to the liquor store, which would have been closed anyway at that early hour. But I had to extricate the front of the car from the snowbank. That took some effort. My father may have saved my life that night, but he clearly didn’t care much for my well-being. He wasn’t capable of much, I knew that. The one time I’d dared to ask him not to pick on me, he burst out laughing, then feigned a heart attack the next morning. When the ambulance arrived, he was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette. He said he felt fine. “She’s on the rag or something,” he told the paramedics. They all shook hands.

Once I got the car out of the snowbank, I drove back to O’Hara’s. If I’d had my wits, I could have taken off then and there. I could have just sped off into the morning, a free woman. Who could stop me? But I couldn’t leave yet. I couldn’t leave Rebecca. I parked in front of the bar and went inside.

It was dark as ever in there, just thin daggers of light needling through the chipping black paint on the window over the door. The smell of stale beer made my stomach churn. Sandy stood behind the bar drinking a glass of water.

“Can I borrow a bottle of gin?” I asked him.

“You’re back,” he said. His smile perturbed me. He looked like a man who’d fondle children. He was a real creep.

“My dad needs a drink,” I said.

“You girls drank all the gin I got last night,” Sandy chuckled. “Would your dad believe that, huh?”

“You have anything else I can borrow?”

“I’ve got gin, dear,” he said, fatherly. He walked behind the bar, ducked and disappeared for a moment, came back up with a bottle of Gordon’s. “And consider it a Christmas gift. To your dad, not you. You deserve much better,” he said. “Have a drink with me first, though,” he said, plunking down two shot glasses, breaking open the bottle with a violent twist, a crack like bones breaking as he twisted the cap. “One drink with me and the rest is yours.” He nudged the glass toward me. I swallowed it quickly. The soapy, burning taste at least seemed to cut through the taste of bile in my mouth. “Good girl,” Sandy called me. When he handed me the bottle, he lifted his other hand to caress my face. I jerked myself away.

“Tell your dad this is from me, OK?”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “Thanks.”

That was the last time I saw him. In the years since, I’ve wondered what memories of Sandy I may have buried from that previous night, perhaps of his thick, beer stained hands grappling me, maybe his mouth on me somewhere, a sour tongue probing my throat, disgusting. Who knows? Sandy, wherever you are buried, I hope you’ve stayed out of trouble. But if you haven’t, I’m sure you paid for it somehow. Everyone does, eventually.

• • •

Back home, my father appeared to be sleeping when I set the bottle down on the kitchen table, but before I could leave he bolted up out of his recliner. His hand darted out and gripped my wrist.

“Leonard, you said? Leonard what?” he asked.

“Polk,” I answered, stupidly.

“Polk,” he repeated. I could see his rusty gears turning. He shook his head. “Do I know him?”

“I doubt it,” I answered, wresting free of his weak grasp and flitting up the stairs. I was relieved to hear him crack open the gin. My guess is he washed away any memory of this exchange immediately. He never mentioned the Polk name again, though my hope is that it vexed him as a clue he’d failed to follow when I disappeared. “I should have known she was in trouble,” I’ve imagined him saying.

From under the bathroom sink I grabbed a bunch of rags and went back out to the car and slid the vomit off the passenger seat and into the snow. It was remarkable how easy it was to remove the frozen puddle in one piece, but it left a stain. I sprinkled dishwashing powder on it and covered it with a towel. I’m sure I was gagging and retching the whole time, though what I really remember is rushing up into the shower afterward. I scrubbed myself vigorously down there again — a mess had been brewing all night — and washed the vomit I found dried in my hair. My hands were swollen and tight as I fumbled with the towel, still damp from the night before. Those navy stockings were by then tattered, looked like ghosts where they lay dashed out across the bathroom tile. I dressed quickly, combed my wet hair, grabbed my coat and purse and ran back down to the car.

I suppose the details of my behavior that morning are unnecessary, but I like to remember myself in action. I’m old now. I don’t move vigorously or frenetically anymore. Now I’m graceful. I move with measured and elegant precision, but I am slow. I’m like a beautiful tortoise. I don’t waste my energy. Life is precious to me now. In any case, when I went back out to the car, there was a police cruiser blocking the driveway. I was aghast. The cop’s name was Buck Brown. I remember him because we’d gone to grade school together. He was big and dopey and talked with a lisp, eyes still full of sleep, white spittle at the corners of his mouth, the kind of man to act dumber than he is, to deceive you into lowering your expectations. I really dislike men who do that. He corrected his cap and stuck his hands in his pockets.

“Miss,” he began, lisping. “May I have a word?” The police were always very formal. After how many years of knowing me, they never called me by my name. Never trust anyone who holds so strictly to decorum. “It’s about your father,” Buck began. Of course it was.

“I’m listening, Buck,” I said impatiently. I tried to smile, but I was too tired. And there seemed to be no point in trying to appease him. Before Rebecca, I’d always been too ashamed and nervous to ever act as cranky as I felt. “What do you want?”

“It’s about the gun,” was his answer.

For a moment I imagined my father inside, perhaps down in the basement, bleeding from a bullet wound he’d inflicted when I didn’t return fast enough with his gin. Maybe he’d left the phone off the hook in the kitchen, line open to the police station, “I’m ending it!” his last words. But of course I’d just seen him alive and well enough to torment me a moment before.

“What about the gun?” I asked.

“We came by last night but you were out,” he said, looking at me accusingly. I really despised him, everyone. After a pause, he explained. “Yesterday afternoon we received several calls from neighbors, and from the school principal, that Father Dunlop,” he halted, “that Mister Dunlop was sitting at that window,” he gestured toward the living room window, “pointing his gun out at children walking home from school.”

“He’s inside,” I said. “Go talk to him yourself.” Or maybe I wasn’t quite so forceful. Maybe I said, “Oh dear,” or “Dear Lord,” or “I’m sorry.” It’s hard to imagine that this girl, so false, so irritable, so used, was me. This was Eileen.

“Ma’am,” he said. I could have spat in his face for calling me that. “I’ve talked with your father,” he said, “and he’s agreed to relinquish his property to your care, as long as you promise not to use it on him. His words.”

I really didn’t understand the fuss. I didn’t think he kept the gun loaded. He was too afraid to, I assumed. He still cleaned it regularly, that I knew.

“Ma’am,” he said, and pointed at the house. “I must put it on your person.”

“What does that mean?”

“Orders are to give the gun to you immediately. Children will be walking to school any minute.” I’d never wanted to go to the prison so badly. “It won’t take a moment,” Buck said, and walked with me along the front walk and up the steps.

Inside, I called out to my father. “Dad, there’s someone here to see you.”

“I know what this is about,” he said, tottering out from the kitchen in his robe now streaked with soot stains from the fireplace. He was smiling that drunken grin I’d come to recognize as an expression of compliance — mouth pulled flat, eyes nearly closed, just squinty enough to make him look the slightest bit delighted. He opened the front hall closet, shuffled around and pulled out the gun. “Here,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Buck. The ceremony of all this was both comical and maddening. “I trust Miss Dunlop will take excellent care of the weapon.”

“As she does with all things, as you can see,” said my father, motioning with the gun in a circle around the dilapidated house. Buck took a step back in alarm. I pictured one of those icicles hanging above him cracking off at that moment and diving straight into his skull. My father handed the gun to Buck, who placed it gently into my flat open palms.

I’d never handled my father’s gun before, or any gun for that matter. It was a heavy thing, far heavier than I’d expected, and ice-cold. Holding it frightened me at first. I couldn’t have told you at the time what kind of a gun it was, but I remember the look of it clearly. “Dunlop” was etched into the wooden handle. I’ve since looked in books about guns and have identified it as a Smith & Wesson Model 10. It had a four-inch barrel and weighed nearly two pounds. I kept it for a few weeks once I ran away, then I threw it off the Brooklyn Bridge.

“That should do it,” Buck said. He waddled back down to his cop car.

My father shuffled away, mumbling to himself, then said clearly, “Your lucky day, Eileen.” He was right. I put the gun in my purse. I didn’t know what else to do. I expected my father to put up a fight to get it back, but all I heard was a glass clink in the kitchen, then the recliner squelch under his weight. It’s not quite right to say that this ordeal with the gun disturbed me since I’d been numbed down for years by its presence in the house. Still, it was odd to hold it now. I locked the front door gently, mindful of the icicles, and left. In all his dysfunction, my father, while I’d been scrubbing the vomit in my car, I suppose, had left his shoes for me out on the porch. Perhaps it was to remind me that I had a job to do, that I was, above all, his caretaker, his minder, his prison guard.

As I drove to work, I considered what advantages that gun might afford me. It was the gun my father had carried around all his years on the police force. While I was growing up it even seemed to have its own place at the dinner table — Dad at the head, Mom across from him, Joanie and I on one side, the gun on the other. Then, in the years since his retirement, he concealed it in his holster against his bare abdomen while he clunked around the house. At a red light, I carefully removed the gun from my purse, thinking I would shove it into my glove compartment. But when I saw that frozen mouse in there, I decided against it. That little critter stayed in there to the bitter end. It doesn’t signify much of anything, but I do remember its little face — long snout, mouth agape, tiny teeth, soft white ears. That was probably the last time I saw it. I kept the gun on my lap as I drove. It did something to me, as I expect it would do to anyone: It calmed me down. It soothed me. Perhaps it was just my hangover which made me lackadaisical, but when I pulled into the Moorehead parking lot that morning, instead of locking my purse in the trunk with the gun inside it, I carried it with me into the prison and let it sit out in the open on my desk. The ugly brown leather stirred my heart with fear and excitement every time I reached out to touch it.

• • •

I suppose it was a typical morning at Moorehead, but every footstep I heard, and every time the door opened to let in a blast of wind, I would first cringe — the headache of my hangover like a blow to the brain — then look up, devil-eyed and excited to see Rebecca walk in, but she didn’t appear. I was eager to be with her again, to reaffirm what I had felt the previous evening. I could smell my excitement leaping up from my body like the pungent shock of burning sulfur when a match is struck. How could I leave X-ville now that Rebecca was in it with me? Maybe she would come with me when I disappeared, I wondered. She’d said she couldn’t spend too long in one place, didn’t she? We would have fun together. I fantasized how I’d change my appearance once I got to New York, the clothes I’d wear, how I’d cut my hair, color it if need be, or wear a long wig, a false pair of glasses. I could change my name if I wanted, I thought. “Rebecca” was as good a name as any. There was time, I told myself, to sort out the future. The future could wait, I thought. At some point that morning I went to the ladies room to apply my lipstick. That’s when Rebecca squealed the door open and shimmied up beside me, aligning her face with mine in the mirror.

“Well hello, old gal,” she said to my reflection. She was playful. She was funny.

“Good morning,” I said. I made my mind up on the spot to sound confident, good-humored, like I was just fine and dandy.

“Aren’t I cute in my holiday colors?” she asked, twirling. She wore a red wool skirt suit and a green scarf around her neck. “Dizzy,” she said, holding her head melodramatically.

“Adorable,” I said and nodded.

“I’m afraid I don’t give a damn about Christ,” she said, or something crass like that. “Kids like Christmas though, I think.” She strutted into the bathroom stall and continued to talk while she urinated. I listened and watched my face turn red in the mirror. I wiped my lipstick off. That new shade wasn’t any good on me — far too bright. My father had been right about it. It made me look like a child playing around with her mother’s makeup. “I was wondering what you’re up to Christmas Eve,” Rebecca went on, “seeing as we have time off.” She flushed the toilet and came out, slip exposed, hiking up her stockings. Her thighs were as thin as a twelve-year-old’s, and just as taut. “Would you be up for a drink tomorrow at my place? I think it’d be nice. That is, unless you have plans.”

“I don’t have plans,” I told her. I hadn’t celebrated Christmas in years.

Rebecca pulled up her sleeve and took a pen from her breast pocket. “We’ll do it like this. Write down your phone number. This way I won’t lose it, unless I take a shower, which I won’t,” she said. “Barring a visit to the doctor, or from a gentleman caller,” she laughed, “I barely shower. It’s too cold up here anyway. Don’t tell.” She lifted her arms and comically craned her neck back and forth between her armpits, then held a finger to her lips as though to hush me.

“Me too,” I said. “I like to stew in my own filth sometimes. Like a little secret under my clothes.” We were the same, she and I, I thought. Rebecca understood that. There was no reason to hide anything from her. She accepted me — liked me, even — just as I was. She handed me the pen and stuck her arm out for me to write on. I gripped the pale, narrow wrist and wrote my digits up her forearm on skin so clean and soft and firm I felt I was defiling something as pristine as a newborn baby. My own hands under the fluorescent lights were red and burnt from the cold and rough and swollen. I tucked them into the cuffs of my sweater.

“I’m leaving early today,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll have fun.”

I pictured a lavish table spread with gourmet dishes, a tuxedoed butler pouring wine into crystal goblets. That was my fantasy.

By noon I was grateful to have to drive out to the nearest grocery store to buy my lunch. It meant I could hold the gun again, let the Dodge coast, feel the wind in my hair. My hunger that day was like no hunger I’d ever felt. I purchased a carton of milk and a box of cheese crackers. I ate them voraciously sitting in my car in the Moorehead parking lot — stink of vomit still strong — then gulped the milk like a football player. Nothing had ever tasted so delicious. The gun, a hard weight in my lap, seemed to have something to do with my appetite. At any moment I could have pointed it at someone and demanded his wallet, his coat, that he do something to please me, sing a song or dance or tell me I was beautiful and perfect. I could have made Randy kiss my feet. The Beach Boys came on the radio. I didn’t understand rock ’n’ roll back then — most rock songs made me want to slit my wrists, made me feel there was a wonderful party happening somewhere, and I was missing it — but I may have jiggled a little in my seat that day. I felt happy. I hardly felt like myself.

Out in the parking lot, I ground my heels into the rocky salt, took in the view of the whole of the children’s prison. It was an old, gray stone building which, from afar, reminded me of a rich person’s summer home. The carved stone details, the rolling sand dunes beyond the fenced gravel, might have looked beautiful under different circumstances. The place felt like it was meant to be restful, peaceful, to inspire contemplation, something like that. As I understood from the odd display case of historical drawings, maps and photographs in the front corridor, the place had been built more than a hundred years earlier, first as a temperance boardinghouse for seamen. Then it was expanded and converted to a military hospital. The sea breeze was refreshing, after all, good for the nerves. At some point it was used as a boarding school, I think, when that part of the state was prosperous, full of smart, wealthy people who preferred quiet lives outside the big city. Once there was a monument to Emerson out front, a circular drive, a fountain with an English garden, as I recall. Later the place turned into an orphanage, then a rehabilitation hospital for ailing veterans, then a school for boys, and finally, twenty-something years before I got there, it became the boys’ prison. If I’d been born a boy, I probably would have ended up there.

Leaning out the open window of my car, ears bright red from the cold, I powdered my nose in the side-view mirror and watched a corrections officer escort a young man out of the back of his cruiser and into the prison. I was especially excited when a new inmate arrived, which was only about once a week. There would be paperwork for me to process. There would be fingerprinting. There would be photographs to take.

The office ladies gave me the stink eye when I walked in late from lunch that day. My mood and health feeling much improved, I whirled my coat off onto my chair, used my teeth to pull off my useless gloves, fingered the sleep out of the corners of my eyes and rubbed my hands together. Mrs. Stephens chatted with the corrections officer while the new boy fidgeted with his handcuffs. He was a pudgy blond teenager with an upturned nose, large, fleshy hands, but small, girllike shoulders. I remember him. He squeezed his eyes shut in an effort not to cry, which touched me. He sat across from me, handcuffed and sedated. I asked his name and wrote it down, took his height, his weight, noted his eye color, checked for facial scars, handed him the starched blue uniform. I felt like a nurse, dry and caring and untortured. I talked to him quietly, took his picture. I remember the look on his face in the viewfinder, the strange passive mix of resignation and rage, the tender sadness. Like when I’d peek at that dead mouse in my glove box, the boy’s picture bolstered me. “Glad I’m not you,” was my sentiment. All the while the corrections officer stood behind the boy with crossed arms, waiting to witness his signature. Two guards milled around in case the boy tried to make a run for it or attack me, though none of them ever did. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen, as I recall. My heart went out to him, I guess, because I was in a good mood and he was rather short and plump for his age, and from his sorrow I gathered that, like me, he was an odd child, deeply pained by the hard world around him, tender, distrustful. When I put his file away in the cabinet I read his charge: infanticide by drowning.

When I was conducting these little intake exams, I felt normal, just a regular person going about her day. I enjoyed having a set of clean instructions, following protocol. It gave me a sense of purpose, an easiness. It was a brief vacation from the loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind. I’m sure people found and still find me odd. I’ve changed considerably over the last fifty years, of course, but I can make some people very uncomfortable. Now it’s for entirely different reasons. These days I’m afraid I am too outspoken, too loving. I’m a sap, too passionate, too effusive, too much. Back then I was just an odd young woman. An awkward youngster. Angst wasn’t quite so mainstream back then. My old deadpan stare would terrify me if I saw it in the mirror today. Looking back I’d say I was barely civilized. There was a reason I worked at the prison, after all. I wasn’t exactly a pleasant person. I thought I would have preferred to be a teller in a bank, but no bank would have taken me. For the best, I suppose. I doubt it would have been long before I stole from the till. Prison was a safe place for me to work.

Visiting hours came and went. It delighted me to see the ugly brown leather purse now hanging by its worn strap from the back of my desk chair. If I or anyone jostled it, the gun inside the purse would clank against the chair’s hollow metal backing. What would Rebecca think, I wondered, if she knew I was thus armed? I had the vague notion that bearing arms was in poor taste. Unless you were terribly wealthy, hunting was for the brutish lower class, uncivilized country folk, primitive types, people who were dumb and callous and ugly. Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed.

For the rest of the day, I did my duties mechanically. I tried to fixate again on Randy, as usual glancing over at him as he sat on his stool, but my fascination fell flat. Like a favorite song you’ve heard so many times it begins to annoy you, or like when you scratch an itch so hard it begins to bleed, Randy’s face now seemed common, his lips childishly plump, almost feminine, his hair silly and pretentious. There was nothing mesmerizing about his crotch, nor did his arms seem at all special — the magic of his muscles had vanished. I even felt a bit sick when I imagined him coming toward me in the dark, his breath smelling of sausage, burnt coffee, cigarettes. The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose. He really was special, though. I wish I’d just told Randy I loved him when I had the chance, before Rebecca came along. He had captivated me. It’s rare to meet someone who can do that to you. Randy, wherever you may be, I saw you, and you were beautiful. I loved you.

• • •

I left Moorehead for the last time that afternoon, though I couldn’t have predicted that. I left my desk a mess. The vermouth and chocolates sat in my locker, a library book in my drawer. I don’t recall my last moments in that prison, and I occasionally wondered what became of my belongings, or what the office ladies had to say about me when I didn’t show up for work after the holidays. Mrs. Stephens was probably put back in charge of visitation, Mrs. Murray intake. I doubt much fuss was made. If Rebecca went back there, maybe she tried to cover for me. “She’s visiting family,” she might have lied. I don’t care. I haven’t lost any sleep thinking about what I left behind at Moorehead.

I was exhausted on the drive home that evening, and already suffering from the powerful wrenching pain that usually accompanied my period on the third day. I was too tired to stop by Lardner’s on my way home that night. If my father needed something, that was his problem. It wouldn’t kill him to drink a glass of milk, spend a single night sober, I thought. Or perhaps it would kill him. Either way, I didn’t care. I suppose it was at that moment, with the weight of the gun in my purse on my lap, turning into the dark and icy driveway between the tall walls of piled up snow, that I thought of trying to put him out of his misery. I could have shot him, but that would have been messy and might get me in trouble. My mother’s pills were a better idea, but there were only a few left in the bottle. She had taken them to alleviate the pain of dying, as the doctor had prescribed. She said, however, that she took them to protect her daughter, poor me, from having to hear her moan and yelp and gripe and complain all day. I took one, too, from time to time as I waited for her to finally “kick the bucket.” This was how I described what had happened when I called Joanie on the phone the morning after she died. I’d spent the night before in the blackness those good pills provided, then woke up to a cold dead body in the bed beside me, my mother’s angry corpse.

The gun was heavy in my purse on my shoulder as I walked up the front steps that night. I let myself in through the front door, careful under the dripping daggers of ice. Even through the dimness, it was apparent that the foyer had been cleared of old newspapers and bottles, even swept. The cool shape of a white circular tablecloth on the kitchen table told me that someone had been cleaning. Perhaps the station had sent over a rookie after word got around that my esteemed father had been living in a pigsty. Or maybe my father had cleaned up on his own — boiled a strong pot of coffee, got industrious, sober for a day. He had undertaken projects to improve the home in the past — building a shelf to organize the basement, insulating the attic — projects he always abandoned as soon as the coffee got cold and he figured he deserved a beer. None of his pledges to get off the bottle lasted more than an afternoon. When I left, there were still bright pink rolls of insulation stuffed in the slanted corners of the attic. I’d stared at them for years every night as I fell asleep.

My father’s coat was hanging on the hook by the front door. When I turned the light on in the kitchen, I found his chair empty. I pulled out two slices of bread from the refrigerator, slathered some mayonnaise on one, slapped the two pieces together, and let each bite melt on my tongue. That was my dinner. It took me years to learn how to feed myself properly, or rather it took years to develop the desire to feed myself properly. Back there in X-ville, I desperately hoped I could avoid ever having to resemble a grown woman. I didn’t see that any good could come of that.

When I went upstairs, I saw there was a light on in my mother’s bedroom, the door closed. Through it I heard the loud, irregular breathing of my sleeping father. My mother’s old pills were in a drawer of the bedside table, but I dared not go in there and risk waking him. A half-empty bottle of gin lay at the top of the stairs. I took it up to the attic with me. The previous summer, my father had fallen down the attic stairs one morning on his way up to wake me, yelling that there were mobsters in the cellar planning to kill us. I was barely awake when I heard him trip and thunder down the steps, splinters cracking like lightning until his body hit the landing with a low thud. I had to get dressed and help him limp to the car. I drove him to the emergency room, where they pumped him full of liquids, measured his liver, and a doctor told me the bad news, which was that if he stopped drinking he might die, and if he continued, it would surely kill him. “It’s quite a quandary,” the doctor told me, looking down at my bruised knees. “Eat a can of spinach, young lady,” he said. I went home. I did the laundry. I took a bath. The house without my father in it felt as though it belonged to strangers. All my belongings were there, but the rooms all felt so empty, unfamiliar. It irked me. Eventually my father was sent home with a cane and a bandage on his ankle, a stitch on his chin. He wore his wound proudly, cleaning it meticulously at first, then excessively, with rubbing alcohol, of which he demanded more and more. I liked the smell of it, too, and when my father wasn’t looking, I took a sip of it and nearly choked.

That night I took the gin and my purse to the attic, changed into pajamas, and slipped the gun under my pillow. Doing that felt like a prayer, or like when my first tooth fell out as a child and I placed it there before I went to sleep. I recall waking up to two shiny nickels under my pillow once. What shocked me was not the transformation from tooth to silver, but the idea that I had slept through the disturbance of my mother or father sneaking in during the night, that I had been unconscious, completely unaware, vulnerable. I remember my question that morning — what else had they done to me in my sleep? I’ve often wondered about everything I may have slept through, what arguments, what secrets. When I think back on my childhood, not much appears but the house itself, the furniture and its arrangements, the change of seasons in the backyard. There are no faces on people, only their shadows slipping out of sight as they leave the room. What I remember most about my mother is the slight weight of her in the bed the morning she died, her cold hands when I held them, perhaps for the first time since I’d been a child, the give of her shoulder when I leaned into it and cried.

I drank for a while that night, remembering. Then I put down the bottle, pulled out my reading materials. I must confess that amidst my stack of National Geographics were hidden several issues of my father’s pornographic magazines. I pulled one of them out and leafed blithely through its pages until I fell asleep.