Careless girl, the nuns said, immature, a dreamer. They told my father they had to smack my hands with a ruler just to wake me up.
I was afraid of the lake, the dark water, the way rocks blurred and wavered, the way they grew long necks and fins and swam below me.
I was afraid of the woods where a hunter had killed his only son. An accident, he said: the boy moved so softly in his deer-colored coat. When the man saw what he’d shot, he propped the gun between his feet and fired once more. He bled and bled. Poured into the dry ground. Unlucky man, he lived to tell.
I was afraid of my father’s body, the way he was both fat and thin at the same time, like the old cows that came down to the water at dusk. Bony haunches, sagging bellies — they were pitiful things. Daddy yelled at them, waving his stick, snapping the air behind their scrawny butts. They looked at him with their terrible cow eyes. Night after night they drank all they wanted, shat where they stood. Night after night the stick became a cane, and my father climbed the path, breathing hard. He’d been a crippled child, a boy with a metal brace whose mother had had to teach him to walk a second time when he was six, a boy whose big sister lived to be ten. She drowned in air, chest paralyzed, no iron lung to save her. I thought it was this nightly failure, the cows’ blank eyes, that made my mother go.
My daddy worked for a man twelve years younger than he was, a doctor with an orchard on the lake. We lived in the caretaker’s cottage, a four-room cabin behind the big house. Lying in my little bed, the one Daddy’d built just for me, I heard leaves fluttering, hundreds of cherry trees; I heard water lapping stones on the shore. Kneeling at my window, I saw the moon’s reflection, a silvery path rippling across the water. I smelled the pine of the boards beneath me, and the pines swaying along the road. Then, that foot-dragging sound in the hall.
I remember the creak of the hinge, my father’s shape and the light behind him as he stood at my door. This was another night, years before the movie, another time my mother lied and was gone. He said, Get dressed, Ada, we have to go. He meant we had to look for her. He meant he couldn’t leave me here alone. I wore my mother’s sweater over my nightgown, the long sleeves rolled up.
This time we drove south, down through the reservation, stopping at every bar. We drove past the Church of the Good Shepherd, which stayed lit all night, past huddled trailers and tarpaper shacks, past the squat house where two dogs stood at the edge of the flat tin roof and howled, past the herd of white plaster deer that seemed to flee toward the woods.
We found my mother just across the border, beyond the reservation, in a town called Paradise, the Little Big Man Bar. Out back, the owner had seven junked cars. He called it his Indian hotel. For a buck, you could spend the night, sleep it off.
My mother was inside that bar, dancing with a dark-skinned man. Pretty Noelle, so pale she seemed to glow. She spun, head thrown back, eyes closed. She was dizzy, I was sure. The man pulled her close, whispered to make her laugh. I swear I heard that sound float, my mother’s laughter weaving through the throb of guitar and drum, whirling around my head like smoke. I swear I felt that man, his hand on my own back, the shape of each finger, the sweat underneath my nightgown, underneath his palm.
Then it was my father’s hand, clamping down.
I am a woman now. I have lovers. I am my mother’s daughter. I dance all night. Strangers with black hair hold me close.
I remember driving home, the three of us squeezed together in the truck. I was the silence between them. I felt my father’s pain in my own body, as if my left leg were withered, my bones old. Maybe I was dreaming. I saw my mother in a yellow dress. She looked very small. A door opened, far away, and she stumbled through it to a field of junked cars.
The windows in the truck were down. I was half in the dream, half out. I couldn’t open my eyes, but I knew where we were by smell and sound: wood fires burning, the barking of those dogs.
I remember my prayers the morning after, boys lighting candles at the altar, my mother’s white gloves.
Green curtain, priest, black box — days later I was afraid of the voice behind the screen, soft at first and then impatient, what the voice seemed to know already, what it urged me to tell. I was afraid of stained glass windows, saints and martyrs, the way sunlight fractured them, the rocks they made me want to throw.
Sometimes my father held me on his lap until I fell asleep. He stroked my hair and whispered, So soft. He touched my scraped shin. What happened, Ada, did you fall down? I nodded and closed my eyes. I thought about the boys, the gully, the things they stole. I learned that the first lie is silence. And I never told.
Then I was a girl, twelve years old, too big for my father’s lap. I dove from the cliffs into the lake. I told myself the shapes waffling near the bottom were only stones.
I played a game in the woods with my friend Jean. We shot each other with sticks and fell down in the snow. We lay side by side, not breathing. My chest felt brittle as glass. If I touched my ribs, I thought I’d splinter in the cold. The first one to move was the guilty father. The first one to speak had to beg forgiveness of the dead son.
I worked for the doctor’s wife now. My mother’s words hissed against those walls. I knew the shame she felt, how she hated that house, seeing it so close, getting down on her knees to wax its floors, how she thought it was wrong for an old man like my father to shovel a young man’s snow.
But Daddy was glad the snow belonged to someone else. That doctor had nothing my father wanted to own. He said, The cherry trees, they break your heart. He meant something always went wrong: thunderstorms in July; cold wind from Canada; drought. I remember hail falling like a rain of stones, ripe fruit torn from trees. I remember brilliant sunlight after the storm, glowing ice and purple cherries splattered on the ground. My father knelt in the orchard, trying to gather the fruit that was still whole.
Then I was sixteen, almost a woman. I went to public school. I knew everything now. I refused to go to mass with my father. I said I believed in Jesus but not in God. I said if the father had seen what he’d done to his child, he would have turned the gun on himself. I thought of the nuns, my small hands, the sting of wood across my palms. I remembered their habits, rustling cloth, those sounds, murmurs above me, that false pity, poor child, how they judged me for what my mother had done.
I knew now why my mother had to go. How she must have despised the clump and drag of my father’s steps in the hall, the weight of him at the table, the slope of his shoulders, the sorrow of his smell too close. He couldn’t dance. Never drank. Old man, she said, and he was. Smoking was his only vice, Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, minus the ones I stole.
He tried not to look at me too hard. I was like her. He saw Noelle when I crossed my legs or lit my cigarette from a flame on the stove.
He gave me what I wanted — the keys to his truck, money for gas and movies, money for mascara, a down vest, a cotton blouse so light it felt like gauze. He thought if I had these things I wouldn’t be tempted to steal. He thought I wouldn’t envy the doctor’s wife for her ruby earrings or her tiny cups rimmed with gold. Still, I took things from her, small things she didn’t need: a letter opener with a silver blade and a handle carved of bone; a silk camisole; oily beads of soap that dissolved in my bathwater and smelled of lilac. I lay in the tub, dizzy with myself. The dangerous knife lay hidden, wrapped in underwear at the bottom of my drawer. Next to my skin, the ivory silk of the camisole was soft and forbidden, everything in me my father couldn’t control.