THE PROOF THAT his stories were true was his madness. He raced through traffic or hit large puddles with such speed that his truck had wings of muddy water and sputtered until its engine dried. Watching TV, he contemplated Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump a motorcycle over buses, or how Houdini had escaped handcuffs, live burial, and torture cells.
Yet many of his exploits involved not escaping torture but subjecting us to it. In the mall, when I was four, he hid, standing with mannequins in a window, arms lifted and motionless, head cocked at an angle as he stared into space. He blended in perfectly, his posture so convincing that my brother and I walked past him repeatedly, crying as we called out his name. Only when a woman stopped to help us did we see the mannequin leave the display and hurry toward us, laughing.
Or once he took my brother and me to an empty store that he intended to rent. Along with running Christmas tree lots each winter, he’d established three seafood shops in the city and wanted to open more. But while my brother and I explored the musty backroom with its peeling linoleum or old cardboard boxes, he locked us in and hid outside. We raced to the storefront window, calling out, and my brother pounded on it until, suddenly, it cracked.
My father loomed in the broken glass. His key ring jangled against the door and he threw it open. He spanked us for acting like babies, but as he struck me, I struggled and shouted, “I wasn’t crying!” Even afterward, following him to the truck, I yelled, “I wasn’t crying!” I stopped only when he turned and glared.
✴
USUALLY WHEN I woke up, my father had already gone to his stores, and he returned after I was in bed. But some mornings before school, if his truck was in the driveway, I stood at the window and searched the misted rows of pines. His figure passed between them, followed by the swift movement of his German shepherds.
The November of my fourth grade, while he worked his tree lots, I worried that the salmon runs would end and checked spawning dates in the books I’d hoarded from the school library. He and I used to fish often, in the streams between the fields or in the reservoir outside the valley, but he had less and less time and often wasn’t even around, so I couldn’t ask. I lay in bed, looking at pictures of fish—the toothy great barracuda or the gaping goosefish with its antennae. Their mystery riveted me, the way they appeared from deep, shadowy water and vanished again.
I woke up later that night with my cheek glued to the page I’d been reading. I carefully peeled it off and sat up. He was shouting somewhere downstairs.
I got out of bed and opened my door. No one was in the kitchen, and I crept downstairs, gently setting my foot on each step so that it wouldn’t creak.
I went to their door and listened. My mother was crying.
“It’s all bullshit,” he said.
“I saw it. It was as real as you standing here. I was lying there dead, and my body rolled over, and half of my face was rotted. It was me from a past life.”
I held the doorframe, my cheek to its cold, painted wood.
“Stop going to those things. What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m not stopping. I want to know who I used to be.”
Her description was like a mystery in a novel. But maybe he was protecting her. That happened in stories too. I’d thought she was angry at him, not the other way around. I was so confused that I stomped back to my room.
The next day he was gone, and she made us sit with her on the living room carpet. She wanted to teach us something special she’d learned. We sat cross-legged and closed our eyes, and she told us to calm our minds until we saw a white light. The white light was our soul. This, she said, was called meditation.
I rolled my eyes in the dark and then opened them. My brother and sister sat, my mother, too, their eyelids settled. The sun descended against the mountains, the fields in shadow. The last flare of daylight dimmed in the dirty glass.
I closed my eyes again, and there it was—a pale thumbprint in the inky substance of my mind.
That night, when she came to say good night, I told her.
“I saw my soul. I saw the white light.”
Tears came into my eyes, not from sadness but the spinal thrill of mystery—all that could be discovered. She knelt by my bed and stroked the hair from my forehead.
“I’m proud of you,” she said. “I want you to keep looking inside yourself and to tell me everything you see.”
✴
MY MOTHER OFTEN talked about purpose.
“You all have one,” she said, driving us home from school, staring off above the glistening, leaf-blown highway as if we’d keep on toward our purpose and never return.
She told us that our gifts helped us to understand our purpose. Since my brother’s and sister’s report cards contained stars that mine lacked, they were clearly gifted in school. In particular, my sister’s gifts were singing and, when necessary, punching boys, and my brother’s were math and behaving. He was also gifted with an obsession for space travel and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and he played so many hours of Tron Deadly Discs on his IntelliVision that his thumbs blistered.
Though I’d tried my hand at creating sculptures from trash and even made dolls with my mother’s old maternity underwear, stuffing them with cotton and twisting them the way clowns did with long balloons, none of this was appreciated. The sculptures returned to the trash, and the dolls, shortly after I gave them to the neighbor’s toddlers, unraveled and were left on the roadside.
As we were nearing home, I asked my mother why I had a purpose.
“So you can do something great for the world,” she said.
“But how can I know?” I practically yelled.
“What?”
“What my purpose is?”
“Just ask inside yourself,” she said. “All the answers you’ll ever need are inside you.”
Along the road, dead autumn grass resembled a dirty shag rug. Ten Speed appeared in the distance and zipped past, turning her head to take us in with her wide eyes. And then the road before us was clear. A few leafless trees leaned this way and that, hunched and bent and reaching, like old people.
“Do you have any invisible friends?” my mother asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are there people you talk to?”
It seemed like a dumb question. I talked to stuffed animals and books, to my pillow and the trees. I walked across the fields talking.
But my brother was eager to explain. “Not real people,” he said.
“Spirit guides,” she interrupted. “Your brother and sister have one. How many do you have?”
Ten Speed had made a U-turn and was trying to catch up to our van, her chin to the handlebars. I watched her, giving my mother’s question some thought.
“Twelve,”
