There were stories both ways, and Mom told us that either being true wouldn’t make him alive again, and that—she only said this when she was down—we were maybe better off anyway. We never would have left otherwise.
Now I was going to a school with a higher graduation rate, and there weren’t as many fights.
Also, there weren’t dogs smiling at us around every corner, or faces we knew in cars driving by, or the snow coming off the mountains the same way, but it was supposed to all be worth it in the end.
And, as near as I could tell, there were no beads or feathers or facepaint anywhere in the house. No proof of Dad having walked through. I even checked the vacuum cleaner bag, even though we hardly ever used the vacuum because the smell from the belts always made us have to eat our fish sticks outside.
That didn’t mean I was done looking, though.
If I couldn’t find any trace of him, then maybe I could reconstruct what he’d been doing.
Over and over, and slower and slower, I walked what I’d seen of his path from the kitchen to the utility room. Maybe fourteen feet—a little longer than the tape measure would go. I looked at every chair back and coffee-table edge and wall he could have brushed by, that he could have touched with his fingertips the way I imagine the dead touch solid things: with wonder.
Then I backtracked, figured he must have crossed the living room before crossing the kitchen, right? Which meant he’d walked right behind me when I was standing there asleep, looking out into the driveway—meaning that, maybe, my sleeping self had heard his ghost truck pull up out there. That truck with the thrown rod, the truck he’d killed, that had maybe killed him. I’d heard it and risen to watch him walk up, but, asleep, I’d been too slow. He’d probably been coming through the front door right as I was parting the curtain, and then had been walking behind me when my sleeping eyes were trying to see out into the dark. It was pure luck that I’d sensed motion in my peripheral vision, and that flurry of movement had shaken me awake, pulled my head around to barely catch him slipping out the kitchen.
To the utility room.
Mom caught me in there when she got home from work.
I had her roll of duct tape, was tearing some out, then pressing it to every surface in there, trying to lift something that would prove I’d seen what I’d seen.
“Junior?” she said, standing in the doorway.
I didn’t try to explain. What I asked her instead was were there any secret compartments in here, or any old photo albums, or maybe a box of old leftover clothes, something like that?
She didn’t answer, just watched me some more.
“What have you been reading?” she asked.
Our questions were going right past each other, as usual.
Another effect Dad being back was having was that I was less patient with Mom now. Quicker to dismiss her. I mean, sure, that could be part of being twelve. But I think it was my way of siding with my dad, too.
I don’t claim to be smart or good or right or any of that.
My name’s “Junior,” after all. I’m my father’s son.
When two-thirty rolled around that morning, I was rooted to the exact same spot by the front window. I was even still wearing the exact same underwear. The only difference was that I had my glasses on now. I hoped they wouldn’t mess everything up.
What I’d also done, just on the chance this was key, was deadfoot it into the living room. It was something I’d learned at my new school, listening in: if both your feet fell asleep and you walked around anyway, you could accidentally step into some other world. I figured that’s maybe what had happened to me the night before—my feet had been asleep but I’d walked on them anyway, into some other… not plane, I don’t think, but like a shade over, or deeper, or shallower, where I could see more than I could otherwise.
The difference, it was that I wasn’t asleep. To try to make up for it, I’d snaked one of Dino’s jump ropes—they were supposed to teach him to count, if anything ever would—and pythoned it tight around my thighs until the beds of my toenails had started to darken.
My concern now was that, by being early so as to be sure not to miss anything, I was also insuring that my feet would be awake by 2:49, and I’d be standing in the same waking level or depth I was standing in every other day.
At 2:43, the skin on the outside of each of my feet started to tingle and pinprick. I hotfooted it back and forth without thinking, then just stood there looking down at what was happening. Circulation. It was ruining everything.
I could gamble that it didn’t matter what my blood was doing, and whether that blood was somehow connected to my brain in a way that nudged my vision over just enough, or… I did it, I sat down right there and tied my legs off one more time, tighter than before, and pulled the rope between my teeth instead of knotting it like last time.
This time, it hurt. I think it was because all the blood that had just got to go back where it was supposed to have been, it had only been starting to make the turn, suck back up to my heart, but now I was shutting it off again. It felt like my feet were balloons. When they weren’t supposed to feel like anything.
I pulled tighter, closing my eyes, leaning back to do it, and then jerked forward when our dog Chuckhead brushed my bare back with his mangy, matted coat.
An instant after that, I remembered that Chuckhead hadn’t come with us down here. He was living on the streets now, was trying to put on fat for winter, or else becoming fat for one of the bigger dogs.
Meaning?
I twisted around, letting the jump rope sling past my mouth, the handle taking a chunk of lipmeat with it, but I was alone. It wasn’t the air conditioner or the fan, either. Mom kept the fan in her room mostly, and the air conditioner parasited onto the back window behind the TV was rusted shut.
I stood, forgetting I was supposed to be watching for some wavery version of headlights in front of the house.
Had it been a feather that brushed the skin of my back? The ermine cuff of a fancy moccasin? The lightest brush of a porcupine quill from a bustle?
Had my dad reached down with his fingertips to touch the back of his oldest son, because that was the most he could do?
I reached my hand as far around as I could.
Another thing I’d learned at school, it was “canteen kiss.” It’s when you drink after a girl you like, or she drinks after you.
This was like that, I guess.
If my dad had touched me, then there was some kind of countdown where I could touch where he’d touched, and it would matter.
It was two-fifty. Then it was three. I had school the next morning.
I policed my area, being sure there was no evidence of my nocturnal activities—no explanation would cover me out here, mostly naked with a jump rope and a prayer—and walked the uncreaky parts of the floor back to my room, stopping to check on Dino for good measure.
He was spasming in his bed.
It wasn’t the first time.
Mom swore she’d not had a drop of anything while carrying him, but still, and lately more and worse, he was kind of… It was like there was something in his head not quite making a complete connection. Like the way he wasn’t learning his numbers or his letters when, by the third grade, he definitely should have. The school had him on some special learning plan already, but there was talk of special classes now, and special teachers that talk so soft and nice it’s terrifying, like they’re about to eat you.
At the bus stop, if I didn’t stop it, the other kids would push him back and forth between them like playing pinball. And Dino didn’t mind. He liked being part of the game, I think.
The last month or two, though, he’d started zoning out in the middle of meals, or while watching a game show, or just while standing looking out a window.