The Source of All Things by Tracy Ross Page B

ballet. I had to pick a place above my dad’s head, because it made me feel even dizzier to look in his face.
    â€œI know what you’re thinking,” he said after several minutes. “I know what you think that was.”
    I considered asking him how he knew that I was thinking Do fish breathe in the murky water that disappears under the grass ? I was imagining, in some abstract and childish way, how, if I wanted to, I could slip into the water with them, swim toward the current, and let it pull me out of sight. I held my breath and waited formy dad to tell me why I’d felt so scared and dirty the night before, in my pj’s, in the bunk bed of my trailer, in the safety of my own family. But Dad took one last puff of his cigarette, then threw the butt into the creek.
    â€œI mean it, Tracy,” he said. “I was only tucking you in.”

6

Agent of Change
    A s far as I can remember, Mom and Dad never brought up the camper incident again. But on this point my parents’ and my memories diverge. Mom says she went to her priest in Jerome and that he told her we all needed to sit down and talk about what had happened. She brought my dad and me into the living room, circling the wagons. She peered into both of our faces, saying, “Okay, you two. Tell me again about that night in the camper.” When both Dad and I stared down at the carpet, she sat back and breathed a sigh of relief. Just as she’d suspected: even if something sinister had occurred, it wasn’t so important that it needed repeating.
    My dad, however, tells a slightly different story, one in which he and my mom both manipulated my memory: “I made up all kinds of excuses that sounded good to your mom. She went along with them. That’s how we overran that particular situation.”
    Deep down, I knew that my dad had done something bad to me. But if my parents were so sure that I’d been mistaken, I must have made myself believe them. Who was I to question the people who fed, clothed, and protected me from things like Bigfoot and monsters under my bed? If there was a God, to me, they were It. I had no business refuting their version of reality.
    For weeks following our return from Redfish Lake, though, it felt like static electricity radiated through our house. We resumed our schedule of school, Brownies, Boy Scouts, piano lessons, swim team, track, drive-in movies, and Kick the Can. Mom busied herself with her job as the Bickel Elementary lunch-money lady, and Dad lurked around the basement, loading shotgun shells or tying flies, emerging only when Mom needed his help making dinner. At first, I spent more time than usual in my bedroom, playing with my Lite-Brite or writing in a journal that I could lock with a tiny key. But pretty soon I managed to push from my mind the memory—and all physical sensation—of the fingers scraping across my body.
    That was the year Darcie Murray and I ran around the schoolyard screaming the lyrics to “Another One Bites the Dust,” with our IHorses shirts over the tops of our heads. Tornadoes of little-girl energy, we did back-flip knee-drops off the high bar and chased boys into the Love Tunnel to pretend make out. One time, a teacher on recess duty heard us yelling “fuck you!” to no one in particular and sent us to the principal’s office. When Mrs. Anderson asked where we’d learned such vulgar language, I told her I didn’t even know what “fuck you” meant (a lie) but that Chris had taught me to say it (the truth).
    My erratic energy bursts earned me sprained wrists from falls off the monkey bars and the occasional catfight with girls on theplayground, and Dad was always doctoring me up. He burned ticks out of my hair after they’d burrow into me when Jeannie Mitchell and I played house on fresh deer hides while Dad and Gary Mitchell hunted. When I crashed on my bike, Dad used his best tweezers to pick the gravel out of my