Next was the bathroom I didn’t need, at the end of the hall.
On the way there, I stopped to whisper the back door open.
There was no body. No blood.
I swallowed a lump, stepped out to be sure. Then down the three wooden steps, the soles of my feet ready for the splinters I knew I deserved.
Maybe ten feet to my right, one section of the skirt was… it wasn’t flapping shut, exactly. This was slower. This was that piece of corrugated tin or aluminum or whatever being held, and guided back to its careful overlap.
I was breathing too deep now. I missed a step, my foot going through to the coffee can ashtray, the lip of the can scraping the back of my ankle, the sole of my foot whumping into the ash, sighing that smoky smell up into the air all around me.
But I could still see. I had to see.
There were drag marks in the dirt.
Not from just now, but from—I guessed from when I was getting punched into the carpet in the hall. When I was staring into Dino’s room.
Dad.
If a cat and bugs and drinks from Dino could bring him far enough back to drag a full-grown, shot-dead man under the house, then what could a full-grown, shot-dead corpse do for him?
I pulled back inside the house, shut the door, twisted the deadbolt, and hated that I had to call it that in my head.
After the weekend, which mostly involved me standing in Dino’s doorway all night, then falling asleep on the couch to cartoons, we were at the bus stop again. The sixth-graders and even the seventh-graders either gave us room, or they didn’t see what worse they could do to my face that wasn’t already done. Mom said that if the school tried to call Child Services on her, to tell them to call the sheriff’s department, too.
Walking past the neighbor’s chainlink, there’d been no dogs to harass us. And no neighbor to harass us, either.
How long until he was missed? Was he on probation now? Was he going to skip a check-in soon, and then the next check-in as well?
I hadn’t been under the house again.
There had to be a matted nest of hair and grass and saliva pulsating down there, though. Not pushed into the corner anymore but probably dug into the ground, in case I pulled all the skirts off at once, let the light in. I wasn’t sure whether what I was seeing in the secret parts of my head were my dad trying to crawl inside a corpse, wear it like more regalia, or if he was drinking it in somehow. All I did know was that if I uncovered him down there, then there would be a corpse riddled with bullet holes under our house, and that corpse would belong to a neighbor we already had bad history with.
Everything was screwed.
Soon Dad was going to be solid enough, he could just knock on the door. Except he wouldn’t knock, I knew.
I always thought—I think anybody would think this—that when you come back from the dead like he had, that you’re either out to get whoever made you dead, or you’re there because you miss your people, are there to help them somehow.
The way it was turning out, it was that you could maybe come back, be what you’d always meant to be, but to do that, you had to latch on to your people and drink them dry, leave them husks. After that, you could walk off into your new life, your second chance. With no family to hold you back.
It wasn’t fair.
He was going to be out there on the pow-wow circuit, taking every purse, walking out into the campers and lodges and back seats with whatever new girl, and nobody would ever know what he’d had to do to us in order to dance like that. After a few years, he’d probably even stay on one of those other reservations, have two more sons. Ones who weren’t broken. Ones he could teach things to, ones he could tell stories to.
It made me want to throw our tethered football so hard into the ground that the whole pole fell down.
Game over.
School was school, like always.
Teachers reading to us from lesson plans, hands going up, trays of food getting doled out. In the bathroom, with a dollar I’d stolen from my mom’s purse, I bought a tube of cinnamon toothpicks. They were the hot thing at this school—everybody trying to outburn the last batch. I threaded one between my teeth, but the liquid cinnamon the tube was swimming with found the cuts in my lip and gums, and made my eyes water.
“Perfect,” the guy who’d sold me it said, and patted me on the shoulder, left me there by the paper-towel dispenser.
After school, I made Dino watch cop shows with me. Which meant he did what he always did: melted off the couch like I wouldn’t notice, dug his toys out from under the coffee table, and walked and flew and drove them across the carpet between me and the television.
The way I knew Dad could smell him, that he was right under that part of the floor now, it was that the show went all static.
He was up, then. Out of the ground, cracked out of his chrysalis, however it worked. It didn’t even matter anymore. Figuring it all out wouldn’t change how any of it had to go.
What could we do against him?
Nothing.
Even if he wasn’t dead or a ghost, he would still be our dad, wouldn’t he? What could a sixth-grader and a third-grader and a mom do against a dad? When they’re drinking, you can slip away, hide. But the only thing Dad was going to be drunk on, it was us.
Dino, at least.
Was that what I was supposed to do, to save me and Mom? Leave Dino like an offering? Trade him for both of us?
None of the cops on my shows would ever do that. Even for the worst criminal.
Because of justice. Because of what’s right.
Dino flew a superhero action figure up into the air to swoop back down against some convoy of dinosaurs—dinosaurs on the trailers of trucks, all lined up—and I recognized it as the one I’d rescued from under the house. Meaning I’d left it in my pocket, Mom had found it in the laundry, and she’d returned it back to Dino’s room. It’s the natural life cycle of toys. Even ones that had been bitten through, partially digested, then somehow been born again, whole.
The reason I could see that superhero action figure so crisp, it was all the snow behind it on screen.
When it swooped down, though, the cop show cleared up.
Instead of telling Dino to do that again—fat chance—I waited for it to happen on its own.
A T. rex batted the superhero back, and he tumbled up into the crackly white snow background then gathered himself, angled himself down, leading with his left fist, and when he came at that open-mouthed, ready-for-battle heavy metal T. rex, my detective on-screen cuffed another perp. The picture was clear enough I could see the tiny key he was holding between his teeth, that he spit down into the drain in the curb just to show this bad guy how soon he was getting out of these particular handcuffs.
I didn’t care about the show anymore, though.
That night, after Mom had lingered too long in each of our rooms like she wanted to say she was sorry—for what?—and after she’d stopped with the dishes in the kitchen, I crept into Dino’s room with my sloshing tube of toothpicks. What gave them their extra kick, I’d heard, it was a single drop of mace stolen from a mother’s purse.
“Turn your head,” I said down to Dino, and he did it without questioning, in a way that made me hate myself, and the whole world.
The hickey hidden behind his ear, I should have known it for a spigot the moment I saw it. You couldn’t grab any skin there, where it’s pulled so tight to the bone. Where there’s no meat, no muscle.
Was that what made it good for Dad? Was he drawing something from the inside of Dino’s bones? Would Dino’s kneecaps also be raw in the same way? The knobby parts of his wrist?
He wasn’t getting clumsy, though.