“I’m going to go farther up,” I said.
My father stopped rocking the horse.
“No, sweetie,” he said. “This is it.”
“But there’re more stairs,” I said.
“That’s just a cramped attic space. No people there.”
He stood but still straddled the rocking horse, and I knew he had another secret.
“I’m going up!” I said gleefully, and turned and ran, his glasses still in my hand.
I could hear my father stumbling as I put my hand on the newel post and gained the bottom stair.
“Honey, don’t!” he called out.
At the top of the stairs, there was a closed four-panel door. I put my hand on the cold porcelain knob.
“You won’t like what you find in there.”
“Oh, well,” I said over my shoulder. “Such is life.” It was an expression Mr. Forrest often used when talking to my mother in the living room. She would complain, and he would say, “Such is life,” and steer her back to a discussion of Trollope, whom they read in tandem, or of Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon, a first edition of which Mr. Forrest had given my mother as a gift.
I turned the doorknob and stepped into the room.
It was much smaller than the floor below, and there were windows only at the back, which looked out over the sunken yards of Lambeth. Unlike that of the first and second floor, the view from the third floor still cleared the trees. In the distance I could see the menacing inward curve of the Delaware.
My father stood in the doorway now. He had taken the stairs slowly, giving me time to see what there was to see. His eyes without his glasses looked lost.
“Here,” I said. He fumbled for them and put them on.
“The front is a storage space. You get there by crawling into that small doorway.”
But I was looking at the mattress, covered in blue ticking with balled-up blankets and a pillow, that sat in the middle of the floor. I thought of all the days he spent away from us.
“Sometimes I sleep here,” he said.
I shifted my feet so that all my father would see from where he stood was my back. There were paperbacks on the floor beside the head of the bed. I recognized a photographic history of trains. It had once been on the nightstand in my parents’ bedroom. And a huge anthology of love poems was there too. It had been a gift at Christmas from my father to my mother. And I could see, peeking out beneath a scattering of detective novels, one fleshy thigh of what I knew was a nude photograph of a woman in a magazine. Her skin looked orangey to me.
“I like being able to look out over the yards at night. I feel like I’m hidden away up here in a nest.”
“Did you really go to Ohio that time?” I asked.
“I went to a hospital, Helen.”
I took this in.
“And the business trips?”
The question hung in the air. He walked up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. He leaned over and kissed the top of my head, the way he did with my mother.
“I go on business trips,” he said, “but sometimes, on my way home, I spend a night here.”
I tore myself away from him and turned around. My face felt hot.
“You leave me alone with her,” I said.
“She’s your mother, Helen.”
I stumbled over the edge of the mattress and fell down. He came toward me, but I quickly leaped to my feet and walked to the head of the bed so that we would have the blue ticking and the smelly wad of sheets between us.
“Just for a night or two at a time,” he said.
I kicked the anthology of love poems and the detective novels aside and uncovered the rest of the orangey woman. Her breasts were larger than I’d thought it possible for breasts to be. Even then they struck me as preposterous.
We both stared at her.
“She’s gross, Dad,” I said, forgetting, for the moment, my anger.
“Admittedly,” he said, “she’s a bit top-heavy.”
“She looks like a freak,” I said. Inside my head I heard the word “hospital” over and over again. What did it mean?
“She’s a beautiful woman, Helen,” he said. “Breasts are a natural part of a woman’s body.”
Without thinking about it, I crossed both arms over my chest. “Gross!” I said. “You come here and stare at gross freak women and leave me with Mom.”
“I do,” he said.
What I didn’t ask, because it was never a question in my mind, was Why?
“Can I come here with you?”
“You’re here now, sweet pea.”
“I mean, can I sleep here?”
“You know you can’t. What would we tell your mother?”
“I’ll tell her about this place,” I threatened. “I’ll tell her about the magazines. I’ll tell her about the plywood babies in that little room!”
Each sentence hit nearer the mark. He didn’t actually care much if I told on him about the mattress or the Playboy bunnies or visiting the house. It was the plywood people he cared about.
“I didn’t raise you to be cruel.”
“What hospital?” I asked.
My father looked at me, considering.
“Why don’t we go on our picnic and I’ll tell you about it.”
For the remainder of that afternoon, my father showed me the still-visible parts of the town where he’d grown up. We had a picnic of egg-salad sandwiches with cucumber, and chocolate chip cookies that he’d made himself. There was a thermos of milk for me, and he drank two Coca-Colas end to end and burped as loud as I’d ever heard anyone. He couldn’t get me to stop laughing after that. I laughed so hard I ended up coughing, like a bark, over and over again.
“Why don’t we wait for the darkness here,” he said.
It was a gift, and I did not have the heart to ask again about the hospital. Part of me was happy with the fib. It made him seem normal, even if it was just pretend. Where is your father? In Ohio, visiting friends and family. I decided that day that I would never blame my father for anything-his absence, his weakness, or his lies.
THIRTEEN
Jake and I had been married for little more than a year when I began having nightmares. They involved boxes, the empty gift boxes that occupied space on tables or were circled under the Christmas tree. But these boxes were sodden and the cardboard darkened. What was in these boxes were pieces of my mother.
Jake learned to wake me slowly. He would put his hand on my shoulder as I mumbled words that in the beginning were too garbled for him to figure out. “You’re here with me, Helen, and Emily is safe in her crib. Let’s look at Emily, Helen. You’re here with us.” He had read somewhere that repeating the name of the sleeper helped usher her into the present. He would speak to me like this as he saw me surfacing. My eyes would open but remain unfocused until I heard him saying his name, Emily’s name, mine. My pupils were like camera lenses, adjusting, readjusting, zooming in. “Cut-up dream?” he would ask then. Slowly I rose out of the land where I was the person who had cut my mother up and labeled the boxes. My father was in our house at large in the dream. Whistling.
As the remaining students left and Tanner futilely shouted out a homework assignment to their departing backs, I stepped behind the partition to get dressed.
“We’ll wait for you outside the room,” Detective Broumas said.
I heard them go and the door shut, but I was not dressing. I was sitting on the wooden chair, shivering and holding the hospital gown tighter and tighter against myself. I had finally done it, and now the world would know.
“Helen?”
It was Tanner.
“Are you okay?”
“Come around,” I said.
Tanner came behind the partition and knelt in front of me. We had tried to have sex once but instead ended up getting drunk and depressed about how our lives had turned out. As he knelt before me, I saw that he had begun balding on top.
“You have to get dressed,” he said.
“I know.” I stared down at my knees, which suddenly seemed as marbleized as my mother’s skin. I saw my joints, fat sheared off at a rendering plant. Scarsdale patties made of my thighs and arms and stored in a meat freezer, waiting to be broiled or pan seared.