on privacy. I'd left the door open. I looked up and saw him standing
there, and I knew he was drunk. You could always tell. He looked bad.
Very bad. I wasn't angry. I felt sorry for him. I watched him
looking at me and I didn't yell and for a while I didn't move or say a
word. He'd seen me naked before, but this was ... different. I was
already a woman by then. I knew. I really knew. And I felt bad for
him.
"I got up and wrapped a towel around me and walked past him. He didn't
touch me. He didn't say anything. I went into my bedroom and closed
the door. I remember looking into the mirror for a long, longtime.
"I read for a while until I got sleepy and then I went to bed. I could
hear him rattling a round downstairs in the kitchen. I guess he was
drinking some more. But I couldn't sleep. I'd get close and then I'd
drift back and I'd hear him again.
"How can I say this? I... wanted him to come in. I used to think I'd
willed him there. He was so obviously, so terribly unhappy. And I
I watched the tears come, watched her fight them to submission before
they could take hold of her again.
"... and I loved him. He was my father. He'd never harmed me.
"I heard his footsteps on the stairs and then the door opened and then
he was next to me on the bed, and he was making these sounds and he
smelled of whiskey. The smell was bad and the sounds were bad, like
someone hurt and frightened. His hands felt so much bigger than I
thought they would.
"He stroked my hair and my cheek. He put his hand on my breast. I was
wearing pyjamas. He pulled the bottoms off me. I was sea red, the way
he looked. I asked him to stop. I told him I was sorry, like a little
girl who'd been bad. "I'm sorry," I said, over and over. I was crying
by then. But he kept on touching me. He wasn't hurting me but I was
scared, really scared, and I started yelling for him to
stop and yelling that I'd tell, I'd tell my mother, and over and over
saying I was sorry
"So then Jimmie came into the room. Rubbing his eyes. Adumb little
kid, eight years old, half-asleep, wondering what all the commotion's
about. And there's my father with his pants half-off, and there's his
sister bare-assed in bed with Daddy's hand between her legs, and
there's blood ... all over the sheets, all over my legs. Blood I've
just seen for the first time now.
"He ran out of there so fast it scared me worse than I already was, and
my father, I remember he just groaned like I'd hurt him bad or
something, only it was worse than that, an awful shuddery sound. But
he rolled off me. And I... I went after Jimmie.
"We had a little dog. Just a mutt. He was Jimmie's dog but everybody
loved him. And we had a staircase in the house just like the one in
this one. And the hall was dark. Jimmie ... he didn't see the dog
lying by the stairs. I ran for him but he went down ... and the rest
is all just sounds for me. The dog yelping. My father screaming
behind me. Jimmie falling down the stairs. And then something loud
and wet like if you dropped a ... melon. I guess passed out.
"Jimmie died in a coma. My mother knew everything by then. We got rid
of the dog. You just couldn't have him around anymore. My father was
sober for about a year, all told-"
She leaned back hard against the seat, exhausted.
I watched her awhile, saying nothing, wondering if she was more
comprehensible to me now, wondering if it helped anything.
She was silent for a moment, and then she laughed. In the laugh you
could see how some of the toughness was made.
"Just now my father, who I suppose has had a couple martinis, had the
temerity to put his hands on my shoulders and kiss me on
She looked at me and her eyes held that same indifferent cruelty I'd
seen that day at the beach, looking down at Steven from that rock,
naked and terrible.
"He doesn't touch me. Not ever. I touch him if I feel like it, but
nothing else is acceptable. And every time he forgets that, I make him
pay. Every time."
I knew a girl once who was rumored to have slept with her father. A
local girl. She was a pinched, starved little thing with frightened
eyes who held her books tight to her chest and ran on spindly legs from
class like something vast and evil was always in pursuit. Sitting next
to me now was the opposite of her, tempered maybe in the same waters
but unbroken, raw and splendid with physical health and power. This
one had turned the tables, pursuing the pursuer with a ferocity that
probably would have amazed that other girl, but that she would have
understood thoroughly.
I wondered, though. I'd met the man. To me he was just ashadow.
Insubstantial, insignificant. And I wondered if in that place within
where we're all blind and dumb to ourselves, the cat wasn't chasing its
own flayed and miserable tail.
"Let's drive," she said.
I started the car. Since we'd met, how many times had she said that
now? Let's drive. Let's just drive. It never mattered where. Slice
a fissure of black macadam through time.
Drive me.
Orders from the lost to the superfluous.
And I think I saw, glimpsed where I fit in then. Where Kim and Steve
fit in too.
We were just diversions, really. Bodies of water suitable for a brief
immersion. I diverted her into passion. If we were lucky, orgasm.
Steve and Kim into something that looked like friendship but was
probably more like continuity, habit. Company. There was nothing--not
even herfatherorthe memory of her brother--between Casey and Casey. Not
anymore. She'd expelled everybody else. Maybe it's like that for all
of us. I don't know.
I know we all are lonely. Locked off from one another in some
fundamental secrecy. But some of us declare war and some of us
don't.
This isn't a value judgment upon Casey. I'm sure she had her reasons,
that for her it was the only strategy. I don't think she came to it
out of any elemental cruelty.
But war is still death. Death made unselective and infectious.
Tonight she'd repelled a minor invasion. But it had cost her. A piece
of her father, a piece of me. And something of herself too. She was
dying. She would always be. Casey could survive, but not intact.
There were some rules she couldn't break. And the best of her was as
vulnerable as the worst.
I drove. Silence thick around us. Eyes fixed to the road in the
headlights as though eyes and lights were one and the same.
I knew she did not want sympathy. I knew she'd talked it through and
then had wrested the confidence back from me again and thrust it away
inside her. In the morning there would be broken windows. The only
evidence that it had ever happened.
I drove. Slow through the little towns and back roads and fast -very
fast- over the long rolling hills between. We saw a doe frozen in the
headlights along the side of the road. The clouds had cleared away and
the moon was bright, the sky filled with stars. I felt like I had a