mother had gone. She knew.
But instead she only recited the imagined life she and my mother had made for their mother after she was gone. The pink hotel from the four or so postcards she sent. Chandeliers and white sand. The smell of salty air and smog and the sound of waves that crashed into their uneasy sleep. I clung to the green of palm fronds and the taste of Italian ice eaten with a flat wooden spoon.
“Boo, where is she? You have to tell me.”
Boo closed her eyes and offered me explanations, a thousand tangled necklaces I tried to separate in my mind. Your daddy. For a long time. She couldn’t breathe. But I already knew why. What I didn’t know was where. But just as I opened my mouth to demand that she tell, Becca opened the door and stood there in a hot-pink dress two sizes too big, waiting for compliments, and I felt sad and sorry that I’d even tried.
Later, after Boo had given us supper, Quinn pulled into the driveway and waited patiently for Becca to pick out the few things she wanted to keep before he took us back home. Sometimes Daddy was there, but that night he didn’t get home until after I’d let myself slip off the edge of the wooden pier into the cold dream water where an undertow threatened and birds screamed.
My body mimics that girl’s now. It has lost its softness, without the necessity of curves. There will be no babies, so there is no need for hips, and I am returning to the body I remember. In this way, nothing can hide underneath the skin’s surface anymore; I have made certain of that. What was buried is now laid bare, each new malignancy revealing itself as soon as it is born. I am prepubescent in this remembered body. And I wonder if this is how he saw me then. As possibility. As before and someday. He would be sad to see me now, though. He would be sad to know that I am dying.
I remember his fingers more than I remember his face. I suppose that’s because touching was always so much more important to me than anything a face could disclose. His fingers had a way of skipping over my skin like stones skipping across the lake. I remember lying facedown on his bed, the pills of a chenille spread beneath me, feeling like water.
The discovery of the first lump was accidental. I wasn’t looking, having given up searching a long time ago. I found it the way you stumble across a dollar bill on the sidewalk. You know you should stop to pick it up, but it also means pausing, breaking your momentum. It was like this the first time.
In my terra-cotta-colored room, I was naked and alone, my hair wet and tangled from a shower. I was swollen, aware of my breasts and hips and the softness of down. Under covers, I pretended exploration, but it was too familiar. All of this. There were no surprises in my body to be found anymore. Nothing startled me the way it used to. But there was comfort in the predictable rhythms of blood and heart and breath. It was like sleepwalking, this touching. Smoothness of skin, interruption of navel, the edge where skin seemed to stop and then start again, warmth and wetness. My seamstress fingers always working, pushing and pulling at the fabric of my body, the needle moving up and down, precise tension and speed. But when I reached for myself, held onto myself, pretending my fingers were not my own, they stumbled. Remarkably, it wasn’t fear the small knot evoked, but relief: My body could still surprise me. There were still secrets to be found. And I let my fingers linger there, the certainty of what it was no different from the certainty of a new gray hair, wiry and strong amid softness. But later, when the inevitable connections between the lump and the meaning of the lump engaged, I knew my mother had been wrong. Some things are best undiscovered.
It is for this reason that I made myself forget about what I’d found. I left it there. I dismissed it. But, like the ignored weeds in my rooftop garden, it grew. It grew and grew, until finally I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Because of my neglect, it made itself prominent. It demanded attention. It became angry.
Now, in this child’s body, nothing can hide anymore. But somehow, this remembered innocence (of bones and blood and breath) makes what is happening seem almost cruel.
Once, as we lay looking at the lake through his bedroom window, he told me that there was nothing more beautiful than dying. That violence and peace are companions, peace always preceding and following violence. I knew he was talking about his wife. About her skin and bones fractured by the windshield and dash. About the way the air was so quiet around them inside the car as she lay dying. About the absolute silence of glass after it’s broken.
Daddy met Roxanne at the lodge in October, and she looked to me like a fallen leaf. Her skin was brown and weathered. She wore leather pants and scratchy sweaters. She hired him to bartend, even though he didn’t know the difference between vermouth and vodka. When he gave up looking for my mother at the side of the road, he looked for her in the shadows, in places she would never have gone. He must have thought she was only hiding. And strangely, looking for my mother, he found work, something none of us expected. But he also found Roxanne. Autumn, and everything was falling.
I knew Roxanne, because her son, Jake, was in my English class. He was a football player. I sat behind him and stared at the bristly hairs of his military cut, the only marker of where his head ended and his neck began. When there were football games after school, Becca insisted that I sit with her on the rickety bleachers instead of going to Boo’s. She promised that football, cold autumn sunshine, and hot chocolate in Styrofoam cups were somehow critical to our survival at Quimby High. But more often than not we wound up sitting with the football players’ mothers, a high-strung and husky-voiced lot who patrolled the bleachers like angry bees. The Quimby girls circled the track on the periphery of the football field, their movements as choreographed as the players. Becca and I had not yet learned this dance, so we sat with the football moms.
Roxanne was the queen bee. Her hair was the swirled colors of vanilla and caramel ice cream, but she smelled like booze and cigarettes. She kept a flask inside her bright blue parka vest, sipping at it seductively between drags. She winked at me once; I never trusted her. Her eyes were set far apart, and her face looked like an old glove. Jake had the same wide-set eyes, giving him the look of an overgrown infant, or an alien. In English class, I studied the back of his neck. Flaky patches of dandruff made snow on his shoulders. He wore sweaters without T-shirts underneath, and their ribbed collars were stretched taut, synthetic fibers threatening to tear or to strangle. I felt sorry for him then. He didn’t know his mother was sleeping with my father.
If autumn here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the autumn when my father met Roxanne: neon red turned upside down inside the green glass of a beer bottle. Sunlight catching dust, making triangles in the air and on the wooden dance floor of the Lodge, where Roxanne got drunk while Daddy poured liquid sunlight into chipped pint glasses. And later, dawn through ruffled curtains hanging over her bed, when he realized he’d forgotten to come home again.
At night, when it was just me and Quinn, we watched TV, eating from cardboard boxes he brought home from the Shop-N-Save’s deli. I can still taste the pasty dough of batter-dipped chicken swimming in bright pink duck sauce. Potato salad with too much mayonnaise. Later, he would disappear into his room and shut the door. I don’t know what he did in there, but he did it in silence. Not even the sound of the radio escaped. He came out to use the bathroom and then to get a snack, rubbing his knuckles gently across the top of my head on his way to the kitchen, where he would pour a glass of milk and take three Fig Newtons from the package on top of the fridge. “Night, Piper,” he’d say, and disappear again.
I could have been alone in the house on the nights when Daddy didn’t come home. But I’d pretend I’d been sent to my room to study, and would stay up staring at my open textbooks until the air turned cold and almost blue, then fall asleep with the light on.
One Friday night in late autumn when the trees were already bare and the windows were covered with frost, Roxanne came home with Daddy. Through my bedroom window I could see the outline of her sharp shoulders and pointed profile. She’d given him
