What a day that must have been. To gain and lose everything in the same, awful moment, your entire life cut into two. Before and after. And your daughter, your sweet little angel, was the knife that sliced your world in half. Whenever I worked up the courage to peek in that room, all I could see was all that I had taken away from him. I was the reason that bed was half empty, and because of that alone, I stayed far away.
Despite all the reasons he had to hate me, my father was a good man. He didn’t know what he was doing, and there were certainly times I hated him because of it, but I’m too old for that silly shit now. None of us know what we’re doing. All I’m left with now is the question. Yes, he was a good man, but if my mom were still around, could he have been a great one?
I’m stalling, and I’m sure you can tell, but this stuff is important. I have to make you understand who I was, who Andy was, who Dad was, because you won’t believe me. You can’t. What happened when I was nine was… impossible. A dream. Something you forget a few minutes after waking up, not because your memory is playing games, but because it was too awful to stick around.
No, if you want to understand the most impossible parts, you have to understand us. Stitched up. Not quite broken, but held together by duct tape. A family adrift at sea. If that… thing… hadn’t come into our lives, we might have just kept on drifting out onto the horizon. But these things happened. I saw the back door slide open, and I saw it slink in, crawling over my bed, touching my face, light as a shadow. For years, I’ve argued, convinced, bargained, and refused to make peace with the thing that invaded our home, with the toys that vanished that long summer of ’91.
The toys.
That’s all they are: worthless things, scraps of cloth and hunks of plastic. They don’t mean anything. They aren’t worth anything. Every shred of meaning and value and substance comes only from what you put into them – the innocence and hope that they absorb like sponges.
Just toys.
I never had much use for them, not the way I grew up, but when I was about seven or so, I found a box marked ‘Jack-Baby.’ It was near the back of the garage, hidden behind old Christmas decorations I’d never seen out, relics as strange as cave drawings. I wondered if my mom had hung them up back before I came along. I sat there trying to picture the house filled with winter decor, maybe with the smell of cookies in the air. I pushed the thought aside and dug into the box, rifling through a few foam blocks and baby rattles before finding a single, green-around-the-edges teddy bear. It didn’t make a lick of sense. The box was too big for just a few toys, and I got the distinct feeling that it had been full at one point. Maybe Andy had scrounged around in there, looking for something to burn.
It didn’t matter. When I looked at that bear for the first time, I didn’t see a toy that meant something, some sort of far-off relic of my early years. Just a bear. Cotton and button eyes, staring straight at me. My hand caught hold of something on the back, and I turned it over to find a little metal clasp. I turned it, winding it up, and a slow, plinking version of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ began to play. It wasn’t familiar, not exactly, but I couldn’t stop staring at it, listening to that song play all the way to the end.
But there was something. A twinge of a feeling. A subtle hint at something bigger. Looking at that bear, listening to that song, I saw that someone at some time had cared enough to buy it for me. Dad still bought me toys, but for as long as I could remember it had been a perfunctory thing, a motion we went through. He’d take me to Walmart on my birthday with fifty bucks in his pocket, and we’d stroll around, doing the math, seeing how far the cash would go. They aren’t bad memories, not really, but that bear spoke of something else. A different life. A life of anticipation and surprise. A life with sleepless Christmas Eves, and birthday presents neatly wrapped.
That bear, in more than one way, was my mother.
I drew it out of that musty box, and I clung to it. It moved into my room permanently, going with me wherever I went, and I slept with an arm slung over it, the smell of dust filling my nostrils every night. That’s how it was.
Until he came.
That summer changed everything, and I’ve never told anyone until now. The girl I was, without question, is gone, but those memories, the weight of what happened, will never leave me until I get it out. I mean to tell it. What I saw. What I did. Every last moment. So buckle up.
Chapter Two
Sallie Renner was a rich girl. Or is a rich girl. Or woman, or whatever. She’s married off now, and the two of us haven’t spoken in probably eight years or so. It’s easy now, so many years out, for me to try to trivialize our friendship, to try to make it less than it really was back then. I mean, she was a wealthy girl from the other side of town, the nice side, you might say. I was the daughter of a single father, a construction worker no less, and the pair of us never really had that much in common. It’s fair to ask, were we ever really friends at all? But no matter how I try, that narrative doesn’t quite hold as much water as I wish it did. It would be easier if it were true. But the reality is, she meant a hell of a lot to me. When I think back on the time we spent together, before the thing with the toys, it burns like a patch of dry brush catching fire in a dark field.
Warm. Inviting. Bright as daylight.
That was Sallie, or at least, that was Sallie and me, together, that little electric connection that certain friends have. There were sharp edges, moments that could bleed from blissful laughter into instant, dark reproach if the unspoken rules weren’t followed, but in those days, there were no rules.
Out of all my handful of friends, she was the only one who ever slept over alone, not like the small gaggle that roosted on birthdays or over the long, endless summers. No, Sallie and I usually slept over at one of our houses at least once a week. Her home was all wide spaces. Huge rooms, a football-field yard, endless walk-in closets, and yet we were never really alone there. Her dad and brother more or less let us be, but her mother – a crane-necked shrew named Ruth – never let us out of her sight. It was me, of course. Even when I was nine, I knew it. Compared to the rest of the PTA inner circle, my father was an unknown variable, something possibly wild, likely dangerous, and most importantly, poor. I never felt poor until I started going over to Sallie’s house, but her mother had a way of letting me know I was.
“These are steaks,” she once said as she stared down the long, straight ruler of her nose. “You’ll need a knife.”
Despite the room, it was stifling over there, and after a handful of times and countless begging, Sallie somehow convinced Ruth to let her spend the night with me. I can still picture her perched on the edge of the porch as we drove away, the three of us piled into the front of my dad’s filthy truck that farted black smoke as we drove away. She was right not to trust us, of course, but one time was all it took. Once Sallie got a taste of freedom at my house, I don’t think we ever spent the night at hers again.