“I’m his son,” I said. I was there on my own, without my mother knowing. I’d driven three hours to look him in the eye. Even if I didn’t say anything to him, I wanted to look him in the eye.
The guard tried to look past me. He was big. Six inches taller than I was and about three of me wide. I saw him blink.
“Come back tomorrow, kid,” he said.
* * *
I knew what my father looked like from pictures. I remembered living in the farmhouse, but I didn’t remember living with him. We moved into the woods when I was three, when the farmhouse burned down. When my father, Park Jenkins, set it on fire and tried to kill all three of us, himself included. What I knew was the story my mother had told me, about the falling beams, about the staircase on fire, about crawling out to the front porch, which was crumbling above us as we went. I remembered her story but not the event. I carried the trauma on my body in the form of scars. As if trying to kill me wasn’t enough. I had damage anyone could see, anyone could feel with their hands. A scar on one shoulder that spread over the blade and up onto my clavicle, the skin wrinkled like a wadded-up piece of paper. It was mostly covered in a T-shirt.
I didn’t remember the pain. Or the hospital.
My mother got out with a permanently damaged back. A beam had fallen on her, burned the skin and broken two of her vertebrae. We lived with my grandparents after the fire, when Park was in prison and while my mother got better. And when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to Vermont to live with my uncle Jimmy, we lived there alone.
My mother never stopped taking the pills. Or she would, for a time, and then she’d flip out, sweaty and panicked, and go back on them. She was only twenty when the fire happened. She never worked after that. She’d barely worked before. She’d left high school when she had me. Then we holed up in the woods and she got disability, she got food stamps and public assistance, and she got painkillers. That was our life. Until Birdie was born.
* * *
Park wouldn’t look me in the eye. We sat a couple of feet apart at a table with thick plastic between us. I held the phone to my ear, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. Time was limited. I studied his face, his shoulders, the way he sat, the way his spine curved forward. I kept my eyes on his, waiting to catch them. We didn’t look alike. I looked like my mother. We didn’t seem alike at all, but I felt it, that fear in my gut that I was just fucking like him, which forced me into a situation I didn’t want to be in. The only way out would be death.
“What do you want,” he said.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want anything from you.” Except, I thought, maybe for you not to have tried to kill us. For you to have been around. Maybe not, though. If it hadn’t been the fire, then what?
“Well,” he said. “Good talk.” He was about to hang up the phone. I was alarmed by the hollowness in his face, how old he looked for forty-two. He was missing a bottom tooth. His eyes were deep set and dark green. His hair, buzzed down to a silvery shadow. On his thick forearm, he had a pentagram with a deer’s head that I knew my mother had drawn in high school and that my uncle Jimmy had tattooed on him. They were all cousins.
Park put the phone back to his ear for a moment.
“Tell your mother I know everything,” he said.
“What?” I said, startled at the rasp of his voice again, at his directness.
That’s when he looked me in the eye. “You heard me,” he said. “Tell her I know every goddamn thing she does,” he said, and hung up. When he stood, the guard was right behind him, took him by the elbow, and walked him away from the visitation room.
I hung up my phone without making a sound.
That was two years ago.
* * *
Our town had misfits. There was Junior Savage, who ran the diner. His whole family was from Spring Falls or just north of it. He didn’t quite medically qualify as a midget, but he was only four foot nine. He was missing a finger on his left hand. He let me work at the diner and paid me cash every week so I didn’t have to report it against my mother’s welfare.
There was Sally, the lady who ran the flower shop. She was willowy and about seventy, and her flowers were exquisite and delicate, but she would sometimes leave the counter in the middle of a sale because she heard the baby crying. She’d hold up a knobby finger. “Let me just check on the baby,” she’d say, and then disappear, usually for the rest of the afternoon. There had never been a baby as far as anyone knew, but Sally would appear in the windows of the apartment above the shop, pacing, like she was walking an infant to sleep.
There were the Metzgers. They were trashier than we were. A whole family of boys, a dead mom, a dad who started drinking cheap beer at breakfast. I’d gone to school with two of them. I was often mistaken for the youngest, Kyle. We had a similar slight build, blond hair—two flannel-wearing, cigarette-smoking, truck-driving losers in the same town. Except that Kyle was hopelessly straight and dumb as a box of fucking rocks. My mother bought oxys and benzos from him. Nobody in town knew how they even made it, but I knew for a fact that my mother gave Kyle a hundred a week for pills.
And there was my mother, Pearl Jenkins, who rarely went into town but would drive in to pick up her prescription or to get things from the farmers’ market in the summer. She dressed like a crazy hippie. Most of the time her hair was dirty and she smelled. In the summer, she was always barefoot. People knew her as paranoid and disabled, even though she got around okay. We lived in the woods, surrounded by security cameras. People would say her husband tried to kill her and their son.
* * *
The cairns on the side of the road were what stopped me. They might have been there all along, but the day I noticed them, it was like they’d grown overnight. A balanced pile of rocks that seemed impossible, a bigger stone on top of all the rest, touching at only a narrow point. It was two feet high, visible from my bike as I whizzed past. I skidded to a stop a few yards ahead and backtracked.
There were two. One close to the road, and another, similarly precarious, a few feet in. They marked the edge of a narrow dirt trail that followed a line of pine trees along Mill Road, where I rode my bike every day on the way home from the diner.
I looked off down the path. It led into the woods in such a way that I thought it might cut right through to my house. I’d been biking my way down Mill Road to Hidden Drive all this time, riding for miles around the edge of the woods.
It wasn’t dark yet, so I got off the bike and walked it beside me, following it alongside the trees and then deep into them, the woods cool and completely shaded, heady with pine needles, like the floor was spun with gold. Not far in, a ravine sloped off to the right, and people had dumped tires and old appliances down it. A whole washing machine lay on its side between tree roots and rock.
And behind it all, slid down the dirt, was an old Pontiac, crashed against a tree trunk, like someone had driven it over the lawns and between the trees sixty years ago and left it there, doors flung open, and run.
I stood with my mouth open. “Holy shit,” I muttered.
I had never been back here. I’d covered the trails all around our house, but they’d never connected to anything that led here. I gauged the terrain between where I stood on the narrow path and where the car lay. If I put the bike down, I could probably make it. I glanced at the sky, still light enough, and went for it.