I concentrated on building a breadstick bridge across my salad bowl and asked, “Why are you telling me this, anyway?”
He reached over the pizza and patted my hand. “Because you have big shoulders. You know what that means?”
I didn’t then, but maybe now I do.
I turn the knob to Dad’s office, putting my weight on it as I push the door open so the warped edge won’t scrape the top of the frame. Usually it’s locked. Lindy and Officer Griffin must’ve opened it; I know there’s a spare key hidden in the decade-old plastic cactus on the kitchen windowsill. Inside it’s dark. The streetlights outside filter through the horizontal blinds, painting pale bars on the carpet. It’s a little creepy. Not that I’m afraid of the dark or anything pathetic, but for some reason when it’s late at night or ungodly early, this house I’ve lived in all my life doesn’t feel . . . quite like mine. Like the hallways are longer, the furniture just to the left of where I remember it, the people in the pictures slightly unfamiliar.
When I breathe deeply, the sweet-spicy clove smell of Djarum Black cigarettes fills the room. Dad’s favorite, a kind of pretentious habit he picked up when he quit his very practical job and sat down to type his first book. To Lindy’s dismay, he inhales them by the carton every few years when he’s truly, especially stressed, and even though he swears he sticks his head out the window to smoke, the smell clings.
I trail my fingers along his desk, cluttered with all the stuff you’d expect. Coffee mugs crammed with pens. Printed pages in a dozen stacks with scribbles that’d be indecipherable to anyone but Dad. His favorite paperweight, which I bought him on a field trip to the New England Aquarium: a plastic mermaid floating in sleek blue glass. His laptop, which Lindy has combed through and Officer Griffin has briefly perused. Neither of them found a document titled “Where I Am by Joshua Scott.” Nor did they find a roadmap marked with a big red X in his desk drawers. I open them anyway to double-check, and find only tins of mints and Dunkin’ Donuts receipts and a Rubik’s Cube, unsolved.
On the bookshelf, I see what I really came in for. I pull out A Time to Chill, the first book in the row of Dad’s novels. On the dedication page, I find the familiar words: “To Sidonie, with all my love.” The rest of Dad’s stuff is dedicated to me or, in books published after Lindy came along, to “my best girls.”
In the very back where the author’s headshot should go, there is instead a picture of my mother holding me in her hospital room at Good Shepherd (which gives the impression that Joshua Scott is either a small woman with a masculine name, or a baby). She’s in an armchair, limp-haired and haggard and blurred with sweat. She cradles pink newborn me in her arms, resting against a still-ballooned stomach under her hospital gown. I think she looks happy. I mean, it’s not the most flattering picture; maybe that’s why she never wanted Dad to take another. There aren’t many pictures of me and my mother. Which seems crazy; you can’t spend five minutes on Facebook without stumbling into two hundred photos of some older cousin’s kid eating Cheerios. Then again, she left when I was two. All my baby pictures fit in a polka-dot child’s album, and my mother must’ve snapped most of them, because she’s not in them. When she does show up in shots, she’s a white pair of hands steadying me as I climb into a laundry basket, or she’s the hem of a skirt, a socked foot, a bent knee, or the nut-brown tips of her dangling hair.
These flashes in the corners of photos are all I have. Aside from the story of her leaving, Dad never talked about my mother. “That’s all in the past,” he said whenever I asked. But we read Faulkner in AP English last fall, and I know Dad has a bunch of him on the shelf between Terence Faherty and Gillian Flynn. So I think he should know better that the past isn’t dead . . . or however that old quote goes.
I shove back Dad’s battered rolling chair from the desk and settle down in the groove that’s almost warm, then start up his laptop. It’s a sleek black machine that I’m not supposed to touch, but have on rare occasions. The password—Faye4321—has always been scribbled on a sticky note under his mouse pad. Not his most cunning maneuver.
The laptop pings to life, too loud in the silent house, the screen unnaturally bright in the dark office. After I punch in the password, his background picture materializes, some old painting of fishermen in a boat.