As we drove past I pretended not to look. My feet didn’t reach the car’s floor. I bounced my pink bunny slippers and tried to resolve the toilet wiener flasher with the Papadaddy who’d taught me how to paint a birdhouse yellow. My memory tried to keep the poopie finger a poopie finger, but keeping a lie alive in my head was wearing me out. It’s exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth. It didn’t help that this was two in the morning.
That holiday in tedious upstate, everyone kept a secret: I’d killed someone. My papadaddy was a restroom lurker. My nana had cancer the size of a cherry, a lemon, a grapefruit, growing inside her like a garden, but I didn’t know that as yet.
Just in case the police found a witness, I planned not to look like myself for a while. That’s one reason I got truly obese: camouflage. Becoming a fatso turned out to be a very clever disguise.
Otherwise it was only my nana and me and drunk drivers on the late-night highway. She motored past the traffic island without a glance. A cigarette puff later, after a couple hacking coughs, she asked, “How are you liking the book?”
I choked back the memory of a squashed, dead wiener outlined in people blood between two pages. That Beagle book, squirted full of some juice I told myself wasn’t sperm. “It’s fine,” I said. “That book is a literary tour de force.” God only knew what she was rambling on about. I reached to turn on the radio, and my nana slapped my hand away from the knob. Just that tiny smack reminded my stomach of the Darwin tome thwacking that wrinkled menacing… whatever.
Now I’d never know how evolution ends.
The way my nana talked, with her lips clamped onto the brown part of a cigarette, the white paper burning part bobbed in front of her face like a blind man’s cane. Red-tipped, even. She was feeling her way along, asking, “Have you got to where the collie dog helps stick up a bank?”
Of course, she meant that The Call of the Wild book. The saga of some animal implanted with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula. If I’d chosen that Jack London book we’d all still be alive. Even with my eyes shut I’d picked the wrong option. I told her, “Bank robbery?” I said, “I loved that chapter.”
Nana Minnie’s chin tilted up a little, lifting her eyes off the road a smidge. She stared in the rearview mirror, watching the bright toilet crime scene shrinking from a real place, smaller and smaller, until it was just another night star. She said, “How about the part where the dog sees the crazy person murder the old fella in cold blood?” She asked, “Have you got that far?”
Our headlights zoomed ahead, skimming over a stretch of upstate highway, and I watched the steady horizon without giving her any answer. Instead, I imagined peaches, apricots, cherries, tomatoes, beans, even watermelon pickles preserved in clear glass bottles. Sapphire pink and ruby red and emerald green juices. A treasury of food, this bounty steeped in too much sugar or too much salt, to keep bacteria from setting up shop. My Nana Minnie had blanched, boiled, and canned a long future of meals for her and Papadaddy, and now it was only her. The best way to support her would be to help her eat. Maybe between the pair of us we could justify all those years of peeling and coring.
My nana asked, “You know, I always felt sorry for that collie dog.” She said, “If that dog could’ve just told the truth, you know, folks would’ve still loved it.”
Whatever she was talking about, it was no book I’d been reading. Instead of answering her with more lies I sagged my head to one side on a limp neck. My hands snuggled in my chinchilla pockets. My eyes drifted shut and I made a fast snore like I was asleep, only it sounded more like I was just reading the word snore off a thousand cue cards.
Nana Minnie said, “Everybody knew that collie dog was just defending herself,” but then she had to take a break from talking in order to catch up on her coughing. For my part, the car was jam-packed with everything I didn’t want to say. If my nana was going to be hurt, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.
I couldn’t spit out my secret any easier than she could cough up her tumor.
At the hospital she pretended to wake me, and I pretended to be groggy, mostly blinking my eyes and acting out yawns. One unintended outcome was that we’d no doubt have to hold a funeral, and my parents would have to come. They’d have to collect me and take me away with them, and that rescue seemed almost worth killing someone for. We walked, me and my nana holding hands, up a hospital sidewalk and into bright light behind sliding glass doors. The linoleum floor was waxed so shiny it seemed as bright as the fluorescent ceiling, and the waiting room seemed sandwiched between these two forms of light. There, she left me to sit with the magazines, in a hard-plastic chair that would’ve been avocado-chic in Oslo but in upstate read as just plain shabby. Among the magazines were three old issues of Cat Fancy with me cuddling my kitten, Tigerstripe, on the cover. Poor Tigerstripe. Beginning with People, Vogue, and Time, I began to leaf through every copy in search of scenes from my other life. My real life.
Suddenly, I worried my papadaddy might be alive in a bed nearby, tubed to a saggy, hanging-down bag of secondhand blood, laughing and eating Jell-O as he told the nursing staff how his roly-poly, spoiled-rotten grandbaby had tried to hack off his wiener when all he’d been doing was playing her a practical joke. Then I heard a police officer walk past saying the words “hate crime” to a doctor, and I guessed I was in the clear.
Within my earshot the officer said how my grandpa’s wallet, watch, and wedding ring were missing, and I fumed that someone would rob an old man lying dead on a toilet floor. It’s true I’d killed him. That goes without saying. But I was his Baby Bean Sprout. That made it different. From their talk it was clear the police didn’t have anything right. It irked me to let their theories stay so totally wrong, but there was no pressing reason my nana had to be a widow and know she’d outlived a sex pervert.
No one said anything about finding my dropped euros and rubles soaked in blood, or about finding my busted eyeglasses or the dagger of shattered glass from the tea jar. The policeman said, “Insane thrill killer.”
The doctor said, “Ritual mutilation.” Suggesting space aliens, I hoped.
The policeman let slip with, “Satanic cult.”
All along I thought they were bad-mouthing my Papadaddy Ben, but then I realized they meant me. At best they were referring to some crazed, at-large killer, but that was still me, sitting here in my bunny slippers and fur coat. Just by being a dead body with no wallet or blood, his wiener half torn off, that made my grandpa the innocent injured party. It didn’t seem fair. Yes, it hurt to have authority figures call me a “sadistic bastard,” but if I tried to defend myself I’d wind up in the electric chair, and that wasn’t going to improve the situation for my nana. Or help my already unruly, flyaway hair.
DECEMBER 21, 9:29 A.M. CST
A New Book and a New Beau
Gentle Tweeter,
It was at papadaddy’s funeral that I noticed my nana started to cough in a new, more intrusive way. Among infants, one might cry, but another will cough to attract loving attention. Other babies will drink vodka and gobble down illicit drugs. Other babies will date abusive men. Or overeat. Even negative attention beats ending up some Baltic orphan ignored in a crib, warehoused in a forgotten ward filled with castoff urchins. Coughing through Papadaddy Ben’s funeral, coughing and hacking at the graveside, this was my nana’s bid for sympathy. I never dreamed she’d escalate her emotional neediness all the way to cancer.