E
VERYTHING'S SET
Kat and Dad are asleep. My Swiss army knife lies ready on my desk in front of me. The towel, stained a deep burgundy from past sessions, is right beside it. I wait, savoring the moment. Then I slowly pick up the knife, press the tip of it into the soft skin on the underside of my arm and watch for that first bubble of blood. I drag the knife across my skin, watching the red line trail behind it. The knot in my stomach that’s been gradually growing tighter all day begins to loosen already. I watch the blood pool up, not wiping it off until it runs together, forming a stream that threatens to drip onto my desk. Once the bleeding begins to subside, I poke the tip of the knife into a fresh patch of skin and begin again.
I
t’s Saturday morning. I find a note from Dad propped up among the dirty dishes on the kitchen counter.
Gone shopping
, it says in his barely legible scrawl. Dad’s not a man to waste words, so I’m surprised he’s left a note at all. I should feel flattered.
When the fridge and cupboards are practically bare, Dad takes Kat to the grocery store. They don’t need to talk much to shop. He doesn’t like to take me along because a hungry fifteen-year-old boy tends to fill the cart too full. Kat selects food the two of us like to eat. I don’t know what Dad eats because we rarely have meals together, and even on weekends he often goes out with his truck-driver friends. I suspect he lives mainly on fast food, judging by the size he’s become.
I quickly see why they decided to go shopping this morning. There’s only a couple of crusts left in the bread bag, but I pop them in the toaster anyway. Finding no glasses in the cupboard, I look for an almostclean one on the counter. I rinse it out, pour in drink crystals from a can and fill it with water. I have to really scrape the sides of the jar to get enough peanut butter to thinly cover my two lousy pieces of toast.
Dad’s left today’s newspaper on the table. My first impulse is to ignore it, a good strategy for avoiding any more nasty surprises, but curiosity gets the best of me. It’s like driving by roadkill and not wanting to see but having to look anyway.
The front page is typical. The lead story covers the latest scam in municipal politics. Big hairy deal.
I slowly flip through the pages and when I see no mention of Mom, a flicker of hope begins to brighten my mood. Maybe the story of her release is old news already. But then I hit the week-in-review section. Hope springs daily? Yeah right. My heart sinks, totally. They’ve given over the whole section to the community’s response to Mom’s parole. The number of letters to the editor is staggering, and the sentiment is unanimous: Mom should not be set free. Ever. And especially not in this town.
People have written in to say she does not deserve to be forgiven. Some crimes (this being one of them) should never be given early release, or release period, says one law-abiding Hope Springs citizen. There is even the suggestion that the citizens should unite and drive her out. Where, they don’t say. One writer went as far as to suggest that a formal protest be planned for outside the prison, and he invited others to contact him to set it up.
It goes on.
A woman calling herself “A Worried Mother” implies that none of the town’s children will ever be safe again. Another suggests that her release might be a good thing. Then the community will be able to see true justice done—through some kind of vigilante retaliation. That sends a shiver down my spine.
I’m still reading when I hear Dad and Kat bang through the door. Dad’s puffing. He’s got four overflowing bags hanging from each hand. I guess he doesn’t want to make two trips to the car. Kat follows him in with a couple of packages.
His glance takes in what I’m reading and he says, sounding oddly pleased, “It’s causing quite a stir, isn’t it?” He pushes the bags onto the counter, sending the assortment of dirty dishes crashing. Spilt juice and cold coffee stain the papers lying there. I jump up and snatch Kat’s report card out of the pile.
“It’ll blow over.” I try blotting the paper with a dish towel, but it’s pointless. I don’t know why I care. No one but me reads it anyway.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Kat comes over, oblivious to who and what we are talking about, and pulls some clothes out of the bags she’s carrying. I can see that they are not new, probably bought at the second hand store in the same strip mall as the grocery store, but Kat seems pleased with them. She holds a blue sweater up in front of her. Her eyes ask the question, “Well?”
Tucking the report card under my arm, I nod my approval and tell her, with my hands, that the blue matches her eyes. I can see she is pleased. “What else did you get?” I ask.
She pulls an assortment of jeans and shirts from the bags and I have to agree, she did do well. They must have had a new shipment of donations recently.
Dad goes into the living room, flops down on the couch and flicks on the TV. “Darcy,” he calls back to me. “Could you ask your sister to make us some brunch?”
I guess he’s not planning to put the food away, but I should be grateful. At least he brought it in from the car.
I'
M UNPACKING THE
last bag when the phone rings.
“May I speak with Darcy Murphy?” the voice on the other end asks.
Alarm bells go off in my head. I go by Fraser, my dad’s surname. Murphy is my middle name, after my mom. Whoever is calling obviously wants to talk to my mom’s son. I don’t want to talk to anyone who connects me with her. Not knowing what to say, I hang up the phone.
It rings again a moment later. I see Dad glance up from the couch in the living room.
“I’m sorry,” the same voice says when I pick it up again, “somehow we got disconnected.”
“There’s no one here by that name,” I answer.
“How about Katrina Murphy?” he asks.
“Nope. She doesn’t live here either.” I hang the phone up again.
“Who was it?” my dad calls from the living room.
“Wrong number,” I call back to him.
When it rings again I stare at it. I can feel Dad staring at me. It keeps ringing, three, four, five times.
“Pick it up!” Dad orders.
I don’t do anything.
“What are you, daft?” he hollers while heaving himself off the couch. He storms into the kitchen. Before he reaches the phone I pick it up and just as quickly slam it down. He stares down at me incredulously.
I see Kat watching us from the stove, where she has just cracked eggs into a sizzling frying pan.
“It was someone who wanted to talk to Darcy Murphy,” I explain.
“Yeah, so? That’s your name. Why didn’t you talk to them?”
“You know damn well why I didn’t talk to them,” I answer.
“No, I don’t,” he replies. “You have no idea what they wanted.”
“I know it has something to do with Mom, and that is reason enough not to talk to them.”
It’s a standoff. He glares down at me. I stare right back at him. Kat flips the eggs.
The phone rings again. This time my dad snatches it before I even have a chance to move. “Hello?” he says, still staring at me.
I watch his face as he listens. His expression has changed from its bully-the-kid look to an I-like-whatyou’re-saying-and-tell-me-more one.
“Uh-huh,” he says. “Yes, I’m the father.” He glances at me and then returns to the living room with the phone at his ear.
I follow him.
“Of course we can talk to you. Yes, it has been hard, but I’ve done my best. She’s fine. No, there was no permanent damage. A photographer, too? Sure, bring one along.”
I stand in front of him and wave my arms. “No, Dad,” I say. “We’re not talking to anyone!”
He turns his back to me. I move around in front of him again.
“This afternoon would be fine,” he says.
“No, it isn’t,” I say as forcibly as I dare.
“Around three o’clock?” he suggests.
“I won’t be here,” I say to him.
“We’ll see you then,” he tells the speaker and shuts off the phone.
We’re back to our standoff, but this time it’s me doing the glaring. He’s looking slightly amused. I’m just about to say something I would definitely have regretted later, but there is a crash in the kitchen.
“Kat!”
I wheel about and race across the room. In the kitchen I see her leaning over the sink, shaking violently. The frying pan has been knocked off the stove and the eggs have left greasy snail-trails where they’ve slid across the floor.
Being careful not to step on any of them, I gently lift her rigid body and carry her back to the living room, where I lay her on the same couch Dad has just vacated. I cover her with the blanket that we keep there for TV watching. Her eyes are rolled back in her head and she is sweating profusely, yet she’s shivering at the same time.
“Find me a clean dish towel,” I tell my dad. Actually, it’s an order.
He does, and I roll it up and manage to jam it between her clenched teeth to keep her from biting her tongue.
I sit with her, wiping the sweat from her forehead. Dad’s leaning against the doorjamb that leads to the kitchen.
“A perfectly good breakfast ruined,” he says, glancing into the kitchen.
“Why didn’t you remind her to take her pill this morning?” I ask him. We’ve been down this road before.
“How should I know when she takes it?” he answers. “If you’d got your sorry butt out of bed…”
“She’s your daughter!”
“Yeah, well, I won’t have to deal with this much longer.”
I look at him, trying to take his meaning. “You don’t mean…”
“Listen, Darcy. You know I’m not cut out for raising kids. I’ve done the best I can, given the circumstances. You can stay if you want,” he says, grudgingly. “You’re almost grown anyway. But if your mom wants her back,” he gestures at Kat and makes a face, “I’m not going to stand in her way. You know how this kind of stuff grosses me out.”
I stare at him, stunned.
“A girl needs a mother,” he continues, sounding like he’s trying to convince himself as well as me. “She’s going to be going through those difficult years soon, and I don’t know what to do with a teenaged girl.”
“Probably the same as you do with your teenaged boy,” I say. Which is nothing, I think, but don’t dare say aloud.
“I’m sure your mom will be completely reformed,” he says. “Kat will be better off with her.”
“Mom dropped Kat off her balcony, Dad! Doesn’t that tell you anything?”
“Of course it does. I was as shocked as the next person. I was sure she loved you guys…”
“Yet you still want to send us back to her?”
“It’s not like she’d do that again,” he says.
“No, I guess not,” I say, noticing that Kat’s body is relaxing. I pull the towel out of her mouth. “We’re a bit too big now.”
Dad comes into the room and sits across from us, in the armchair. “I know I haven’t been the greatest of parents,” he says, actually sounding contrite.
“No? What makes you say that?”
“Don’t get sarcastic on me now, Darcy.”
“Well we didn’t ask to get born, Dad. But we did. And you’re the only parents we have. So how am I supposed to act when one parent tries to kill my sister and the other doesn’t even want us?”
He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, but he doesn’t say anything.
“I might be able to understand it if you’d just had me,” I say, deciding now is as good as any time to air a few things that have always ticked me off. “Anyone can make a mistake once, but you went on to have a second kid.”
“That was your mother’s doing. She swore to me she wouldn’t get pregnant again.” He sits still, lost in thought for a moment. “You know, things weren’t too bad after she was born,” he continues finally. “We had one of each—a boy and a girl. Life was okay for a while. I even thought we might get married and lead some kind of normal life, whatever that is.”
“So what happened?”
He thinks for another minute before answering. “One day she realizes your sister is deaf. Your mom was always borderline crazy anyway, but that seemed to push her over the edge.” He lowers his voice. “I won’t swear to it, but I think she may have shaken her a little too hard.” He is looking at Kat.
The awful truth dawns on me, slowly. “That’s what caused the epilepsy?”
He just shrugs. “That’s when I got out of there,” he says. “There was no living with her anymore.”
I feel the anger welling up, and suddenly I hate her even more, if that’s possible. Mom was exposed to German measles when she was pregnant. That’s what caused Kat to be born deaf. She couldn’t help that, but if she’s responsible for the epilepsy—maybe she does deserve to be jailed for life. Or longer.
K
AT IS EXHAUSTED
after the seizure, so she goes to bed. I clean the kitchen and put the rest of the food away. Dad’s gone out, probably to get some breakfast. It didn’t occur to him to make his own.
My plan is to be out of here before the newspaper people show up, but I don’t want to wake Kat. Keeping one eye on the clock, I begin to pace the hall outside her room. I’d like to leave while Dad is still out, but I don’t want to leave her here for the big interview. Mind you, without me here, no one will be able to talk to Kat. Dad will look like the fool he is, hardly able to communicate with his own daughter…
I grab my skateboard and head for the door.
I
DON'T RETURN
until I’m sure they’ll be gone, which is after five o’clock. There aren’t any suspicious-looking cars parked in front of our townhouse so I climb the steps tentatively. Dad’s going to be steamed. I remind myself that he’s never been physically abusive, but a little voice in my head keeps telling me that there’s always a first time. I wonder how Kat has fared. I hope she realizes I did this for her own good.
The door bangs open. He’s waiting for me.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demands before I even reach the top step.
“Out.”
“You knew the guys from the paper were coming at three o’clock.”
“And you knew I wasn’t talking to them.” His presence is enormous, it fills the whole doorway, but I slink past him and into the kitchen. I need to find Kat, make sure she’s all right.