out that he had the machinery to be both and he’d made a choice, because he was sixteen, and he was now Linda. One day shortly thereafter, Dan chased us all into the garage. He was wearing his Hawaiian print bikini underwear and was waving around a butcher knife and screamed at us in German. And then he wasn’t our stepfather anymore.
You showed up at our graduations. We saw you in the back. It had been years, but we recognized you. We looked for you afterward, and since we never found you, we began to think that maybe you weren’t really there, were just a mirage, just us wishing you’d reappear.
We remember when there was no one left. We remember when the men stopped coming because Mom had become sick, was told she’d be dead in six months, though of course she never did die. But by then we were gone. We came back as adults to care for her, back to our old bedrooms. We slept on our Star Wars sheets. We listened to The Knack and Gordon Lightfoot and Journey and REO Speedwagon and The Thompson Twins and Shaun Cassidy and Blondie and talked about how much those songs used to mean to us, so much so that when Mom would scream “Down or off !” we’d just turn it up and wait for
the rage, wait for her to walk outside and turn off the power, leaving us in the dark, spinning the records on our old Fisher-Price record players, the music just tinny scratches of sound, a departure from the yelling that rippled down the hallway, that caused Sam and Roxanne, the dogs, to crap themselves right where they stood. We found Bonnie’s Ouija board and tried to contact you there, in case you were dead. We stood Mom up in her shower and bathed her, the water glancing off the tile wall and pooling at our feet, and we imagined you standing there alone, hitting that wall, pounding that wall, sobbing, and we reached out to you in our minds in case you stood there still, haunting the shower, your demons buried in the grout along with bits of skin from your knuckles. We put Mom into her bed, and it seemed so much smaller than we imagined it. Just a bed. Four corners. Sheets. A headboard. We imagined you there beside her. We tried to figure out what drove you there in the first place. How old were you? Thirty-five? Forty? Our age now. We have our own beds. We have our own master bedrooms, and yet we think of you still, standing here, saying good-bye to her in bed, because that’s where it happened. You stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, and you said, “I just can’t do this. How many others, Sally? How many?” And she said a number like five or seven or who fucking cares just get the fuck out you no-job son of a bitch. And you walked down the hallway and poked your head into each of our rooms and you said good-bye and you said sorry and you said you tried for us but that there’s a limit and you’d found yours, and then the stapler hit you in the back and we looked and Mom was throwing things from her bedroom at you. You just kept walking. You even stopped and hugged the dogs. You
put your nose in that space between Sam’s eyes and you held her ears and you whispered something. And you picked up Roxanne, who was a collie, and you hugged her like a child and she licked your face. A bottle of your cologne came sailing down through the air and it cracked on the wall and you didn’t even move. The hallway still smells of you. Mom would have us shampoo the carpet and scrub the wallpaper, but nothing removed the smell. Here we are, decades in the dust, and we find tiny bits of glass still wedged into the wall.
You exist on the Internet. We’ve MapQuested your addresses. One day we will fly to you in Florida and Iowa and Alaska and Washington and we will knock on your door and when you open it we will say, “Do you remember us?” And you will say no and you will say no and you will say no and then maybe you will say yes. Because it will be you and not just a man with your name. You’ll be older, too, because there isn’t a
You showed up at our graduations. We saw you in the back. It had been years, but we recognized you. We looked for you afterward, and since we never found you, we began to think that maybe you weren’t really there, were just a mirage, just us wishing you’d reappear.
We remember when there was no one left. We remember when the men stopped coming because Mom had become sick, was told she’d be dead in six months, though of course she never did die. But by then we were gone. We came back as adults to care for her, back to our old bedrooms. We slept on our Star Wars sheets. We listened to The Knack and Gordon Lightfoot and Journey and REO Speedwagon and The Thompson Twins and Shaun Cassidy and Blondie and talked about how much those songs used to mean to us, so much so that when Mom would scream “Down or off !” we’d just turn it up and wait for
the rage, wait for her to walk outside and turn off the power, leaving us in the dark, spinning the records on our old Fisher-Price record players, the music just tinny scratches of sound, a departure from the yelling that rippled down the hallway, that caused Sam and Roxanne, the dogs, to crap themselves right where they stood. We found Bonnie’s Ouija board and tried to contact you there, in case you were dead. We stood Mom up in her shower and bathed her, the water glancing off the tile wall and pooling at our feet, and we imagined you standing there alone, hitting that wall, pounding that wall, sobbing, and we reached out to you in our minds in case you stood there still, haunting the shower, your demons buried in the grout along with bits of skin from your knuckles. We put Mom into her bed, and it seemed so much smaller than we imagined it. Just a bed. Four corners. Sheets. A headboard. We imagined you there beside her. We tried to figure out what drove you there in the first place. How old were you? Thirty-five? Forty? Our age now. We have our own beds. We have our own master bedrooms, and yet we think of you still, standing here, saying good-bye to her in bed, because that’s where it happened. You stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, and you said, “I just can’t do this. How many others, Sally? How many?” And she said a number like five or seven or who fucking cares just get the fuck out you no-job son of a bitch. And you walked down the hallway and poked your head into each of our rooms and you said good-bye and you said sorry and you said you tried for us but that there’s a limit and you’d found yours, and then the stapler hit you in the back and we looked and Mom was throwing things from her bedroom at you. You just kept walking. You even stopped and hugged the dogs. You
put your nose in that space between Sam’s eyes and you held her ears and you whispered something. And you picked up Roxanne, who was a collie, and you hugged her like a child and she licked your face. A bottle of your cologne came sailing down through the air and it cracked on the wall and you didn’t even move. The hallway still smells of you. Mom would have us shampoo the carpet and scrub the wallpaper, but nothing removed the smell. Here we are, decades in the dust, and we find tiny bits of glass still wedged into the wall.
You exist on the Internet. We’ve MapQuested your addresses. One day we will fly to you in Florida and Iowa and Alaska and Washington and we will knock on your door and when you open it we will say, “Do you remember us?” And you will say no and you will say no and you will say no and then maybe you will say yes. Because it will be you and not just a man with your name. You’ll be older, too, because there isn’t a
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