Bloodline Read online

Perhaps the trouble with the essay isn’t the real matter. Ophelia took the advanced English class, the harder one, the one where you read more and have to write essays instead of doing so many work sheets, the one she encouraged you to take if you were even partly serious about doing something great with your life. But the piece she just shared about her mom not writing, it is everything you knew that she fears.

  “I hate war. I hate it,” Ophelia mumbles, tears in her eyes.

  You wish, at that moment, like so many other instances dragged across time, that you could wield that fire, the fire of her fear in your hands, grip it fully and yank it out of her, maybe vanquish it far from her sight, so that it never plagues her again. Perhaps you can. Perhaps you can allow her to pass it onto you, this fear, to permit you to ball it up in your hands and make it so small, so manageable, and take it into yourself, bury it deeply in the rut you already carry in your gut.

  “Do you think . . . ?” you begin and then hold the thought.

  “My family will eat dinner together every night,” Ophelia continues as you sit down on your grandmother’s porch step, the wood cold.

  You nod. You always nod whenever she talks.

  “I like that idea.”

  You smile, because her ideas are so grand sometimes, like hot-air balloons rising vividly and with joy over the horizon. So colorful. Vibrant and courageous against the city land. Showing gravity another way to live.

  But then Ophelia says nothing, her teeth pressed tightly into the plum that her lips form.

  How quickly the conversation has died.

  How quickly the nerves have set fire to themselves.

  On the porch step, you hold her hand again. The wood creaks beneath you. At first, she minds it, shifting her palm away irritably into her other palm, and holds it there motionless.

  “You know, sometimes my aunt just sits at the table on Facebook,” she says. “She won’t say a word to me. She’ll eat a little bit, like pick at her food, but she’ll text and laugh to herself and go through photos. My mother says this is the curse. Having so many devices is bad luck. I hate the sound of a fork hitting somebody’s teeth.”

  “Why does she do that?”

  “It’s not all bad. Technology, I mean,” Ophelia clarifies.

  She grabs at your hand then. Clutches it in her palm like a small animal she’s found in the dirt. The pace of her chest generates its own small heat, a soft mound of the earth starting on its own to move. The little gold cross sitting below her neck glimmers, rising and falling just above her chest. You both sit on your grandmother’s porch, the puddles giving the sky back its light, a siren singing its fire song streets away.

  “I should get back,” Ophelia announces. “It’s Monday . . . my mom might Skype. I need to be there. In case.”

  And you nod, knowing this is one thing the two of you share—missing parents. Ophelia hasn’t told you much about her dad, except that he left with another woman when she was five and that now he has his own family, a new one, with kids and a wife and a house in Dallas. Her mother, an army medic, was sent to Afghanistan last year. Although it isn’t the same—not having one’s parents around—it’s close enough to what you’re familiar with to give you a bond.

  Some nights, when you sit with your thoughts, you imagine Ophelia also sitting in a dark room alone with only a lamp and the computer monitor giving her light. She waits and waits and hopes to see her mother’s face materialize from the other side of the world.

  “I’m sure she’s just busy. Hard to write when you’re saving the world.”

  Ophelia produces a half grin, her teeth pearly and perfectly imperfect. She clutches your hands, both of them. You love this.

  Above you, the wind ruffles the trees, and the pecan runs its long limbs over the roof. Somewhere in the neighborhood the noise of a fire truck and dogs howling occupies the sky. For a second, the weight of the world is as light as a pin. For the rest of time, you will consider Ophelia’s smile and this moment of you holding hands on your grandmother’s porch in November.

  Gradually, the world around you is losing its heat, the sun’s departure forging pink and orange flares on the horizon. The light peeks through the tree branches, filtering the pink and orange rays. You stare at Ophelia’s hair. The color of sunsets and cinnamon. Behind the sharp, dark tips of the trees the sky is emblazoned, and for a few minutes Ophelia sits beside you, your hands woven together, the simplest form of communication. Ophelia kicks a mud chip from her boot, and together you watch it rile up a puddle. The ripples. You listen to her breathe, and when her head falls onto your shoulder like a warm shadow, you understand, then, that you could have lived every day of your life like this.

  While the world is getting colder, you think about asking her if she needs a blanket. Instead, you take off your hoodie and place it on her legs.

  “Here,” you say, covering her skin, “let me walk you home.”

  8

  Fathom.

  It’s one of the nine words the teacher writes on the board for your English class to define. Beside reparation, solace, pungency, idol. The letters pop off the white-board like insect parts, spider legs and thorax fibers, antennae and butterfly bones. When you define these vocabulary words, you’re supposed to write down what the term means in your own words, of course. Then you give an example of the word in a sentence and then a nonexample, or what it does not mean, and finally you draw a picture to show you’ve learned it.

  Fathom. It means to imagine something. That’s how you paraphrase it. Your example sentence: I can’t fathom why my grandma’s girlfriend would help my loser uncle get a job at her factory.

  It’s the truth.

  Becky helped him, and you don’t understand why. But she vouched for your uncle, and he got a job inventorying trucks parts for Tundras, and each evening, while the house you’re in shushes itself to sleep, he carries the lunch your grandmother has prepared for him, he checks to make sure he’s packed his headphones, he steps into the cusp of darkness, down the crooked wooden steps, and starts his car. Like a lion, the engine roars. The house is quiet when he’s gone. You enjoy his absence.

  He’s a man. And you don’t know many men, not men like him, men with consuming appetites and worries and grins that stir discomfort and anger inside you, rude men, men without manners or boundaries, men who carry fistfuls of power and hunger and aggression as if these were suitcases, as if these were hogs taking men to slaughter. But another place in your body is full of him, convinced he belongs, that he has goodness to lay on the table like a feast for a sad boy like you, one with his own worries, his own suitcases, his own hungers for life.

  The truth is you wanted. You wanted life. Wanted him or someone to show you what it all meant, what it could be, what it took.

  Who doesn’t want when he’s seventeen?

  When you’ve looked in the mirror, the face in front of you is the face that hangs in the hall, the photo your grandmother has kept of her two sons, arm in arm, their clothes neat and firm and the soft sun like felt pulled gently over their bodies. In front of your grandfather’s old Chevy, they stood and beamed, and your grandmother has treasured this photograph over all others. It hangs in the hallway, and sometimes, when you walk by it, you turn your face or look down, but other times, other times, you stare full on and study their bodies, their postures, their neat-creased khakis, their undershirts and tattoos. They were men. And you are becoming a man. And each day, your body lugs itself closer to theirs. Your father, your uncle. You are becoming.

  It terrifies you. Some days.

  The prospect of bills and a job and a family to lead—it’s too much to fathom.

  Other days, it exhilarates you, the idea of manhood—independence and strength, money and time—filling you with a sound much like wonder and awe and the beauty of making it, and suffering, too, because that is life—the questions, the questions, the unanswerable quests, those that, still half-formed, swim like gar in the deep, dark sea of your hopes for the next d
ay and the next year and the life you fear you might eventually live.

  Today, you are fixed on the idea of why Becky got him this job and how, when, why your uncle, this man with his slick rubber hands and his hammer tongue, would eventually, in time, with no regard for Becky or your grandmother or you, screw this up.

  Shame pursues you. The steps of this thinking weaken, and you know better than to wish ill on another person. You know better. Your grandmother and Becky didn’t raise you this way. You should only wish him the best.

  But today, you can’t shake it, the question of what he’s done to deserve it.

  Today, you stare in the mirror and inspect your teeth, and you hold an old flat razor to the soft curve of your face. The thin blade shines, lifting up its reflection to the wall and onto the ceiling, and a whole world places its weight just inside your thumb, on the palm, in the lines, like a bulb.

  The water splashes in the basin.

  The razor hovers near the chin.

  The faucet is dull, like a piece of skin rubbed too many times.

  Your feet tighten, the floor emitting its chill through the bones and the tough muscle of your soul.

  So you hold the razor, and your face is not the one you held in the morning, not yours. Dark hairs have begun to jut from above your upper lip and along the full, wide jaw and chin, and your brow has grown heavier.

  Behind you, your uncle’s clothes puddle. Left behind, the worn clothes discarded after a shower, for someone else to pick up. A snakeskin. In the house, near where you stand. A snake has shed its skin. You kick the clothes into the corner and return to your face.

  But someone is banging on the door.

  And you haven’t yet filled your palm with foam.

  But vigorously, your uncle beats his blunt, bald fist on the small wooden door. It is a thin, flimsy door, and he might break it, you think.

  A vigor like a fat cigar burning slowly is filling the house with its smoke.

  “Busy,” you say.

  “Hurry your ass up! I got business!” He bangs again, bangs and bangs his knuckles, his talons ready to maul.

  The door rattles.

  Your toothbrush falls off the counter.

  The water sloshes the basin.

  Your toes contract into the other bones of your feet.

  You drop your towel, but you can’t move.

  “I’m serious, Abramito! Goddamn it!”

  He kicks the door, and he kicks it again, and you think it will all come tumbling down. The wall, the door, the house, your life . . .

  But you don’t move. And you fill your palm with foam. Slow motions. Decidedly and full of reason, you bring the foam to your face. You look in the mirror to be sure what you’re doing is right. To say to yourself, You belong. And your hands go into the water.

  “Fuck it!” he yells then. And he kicks the door two, three more times. The doorframe cracks. You hear it. The fissure clenches, and you step back. Walls shiver. The faucet halts its spillage and drips.

  But you don’t want the wall to come down, and you know it will cost money to fix whatever is broken, so you unlatch the door.

  “I was talking to you,” he huffs, shirtless, his chest puffing, his hair not smooth. “I gotta get ready. I’m going out.”

  You ignore him.

  So he presses his body even closer to you, his full chest at the muddle of your own chest, so close he grazes your chin. On your neck and your mouth, his hot breath lays itself out like a towel. Against the wall, your body is stiff. In your palm, the foam shrivels, and your knees buckle in their distress.

  “Put some fuckin’ clothes on,” he smirks, then pushes your stuff off the counter and peels off his socks.

  9

  “My aunt says men are dogs. Not all,” Ophelia pauses, gulping.

  Her hands straighten a stack of books left on the study table. Looking at you as if to say, Not you. To separate you from the pack. Not to indict you. To pull you apart from the insult she’s flung like a handful of burrs.

  Her eyes blink.

  The library is quiet. Around you, books and more books, a stack of magazines.

  “Some men,” she clarifies. “Not everyone, of course, you know.” Ophelia’s hand crushes a ball of paper; it softly falls to your feet.

  Of course.

  “They mark their territory like dogs. My aunt was saying this. They stray.”

  She squeezes another ball of paper. The library table bends light. Your shoes squeak if you move, and so you sit very still.

  I’ll be different. I am different, you can’t say. Let me show you.

  But the words are just words, and they sit there inside you, building up, gathering weight, strengthening, wanting to taste air and be heard. Waiting for you to believe in them.

  You nod. You nod, and she talks, and isn’t this like most other days with Ophelia?

  “I don’t like my uncle,” you finally say. “He’s an ass,” you add.

  “How?” she asks.

  On a folder she draws a lilac. She twirls the pencil in her hand, her face bones glistening as she listens to your attempt to make reasons. A lilac. You know it because she’s told you before what’s it’s called, this flower, its petal clumps like clusters of sweet sugar, you know it, the lilac, because it’s hers, her flower, the one she draws, the hue she loves, though you’ve never seen one, not in real life.

  I just don’t like him.

  Can’t trust him.

  He can’t control himself.

  And he has a big mouth. A dirty mouth.

  He always ruins shit.

  This will end badly. I know.

  You want to say each of these things, to serve them up on a clay platter for her to dissect with her ideas, the sharpness of her beliefs, the true things she knows about living and how to be good and what not to do, but none of it comes, not when you ask it to, not when you call it. And why is summoning so difficult? Why can’t the words just jet from you, fall out, even, or spew?

  The librarian announces that the library is going to close.

  You glance at your phone. “He just is.”

  10

  Write about something you want. Explain your plan to get this thing you want. Ten minutes.

  The slide on the screen instructs the class to do this.

  In your English class, you spend the first part of the period each day jotting down your thoughts on topics. You sit in a half-dark room, the blinds withholding daylight, and sometimes the topics connect to a story or a poem the class is reading, and the connection is overt, obvious. Other times the tie seems arbitrary, unconnected, a topic randomly selected, even.

  Today, you do not care what it means. You do not wonder about the connection.

  The girl beside you writes furiously, her hands wobbling as they push across the page.

  Jacob stares at you, spins his pencil between his thumb and forefinger and shakes his head.

  The clock on the wall speaks its little language, telling you when to start and when to stop.

  Behind his desk, the teacher sits, sucking coffee through a little straw and reading a book about a father and a son and the end of the world.

  You write: I want to know about my father. My plan to obtain this is to ask. It’s a simple plan. I’m just gonna ask.

  For the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds, you sit there and imagine the ask.

  11

  The next day you sleep until the middle of the afternoon, and you wake up with your heart in your eyes. Terrified, uncertain of the time of day or where you are, if the world around you is the same as you’d left it, you pop out of bed and rub your eyes as if the confusion can be wiped away. Your feet knotted, toes horning their way through sheets. Somehow, your feet lost their blood. Numb and heavy, they sink into the old mattress. Shaken, your belly crouches and splits inside itself, and the emptiness, elusive and forthright, is a hunger.

  In the bed, you think of your question and how your uncle will respond when you pitch it. With y
our hands on your face, you wonder, What will he say? Will it be truthful? Or will he give me a box of lies? Dark fibs and behemoth half-truths? The bed coils squawk, struggling with your weight. Your knees ache, and your toes tingle.

  All the while, the world is going on without you, and the house is as still as a cemetery.

  You stir, and you wish blood back to your toes, and then, at the foot of the bed, you see him. Your father. His sad, lost grin and his hands, plaster-like, full of nothing, hanging beside his thighs. A neat black suit, gray tie over a white shirt that beams crispness, shoes that shine in the dim light that slides through the curtain. But he brings a grimness, too, one of ghosts and caterpillars, hogs from pictures at school about slaughterhouses and mortal wounds and a suffering you will know only in a death that shouldn’t have been.

  At the foot of your bed, the figure smokes a long cigar, thick like a giant man’s finger, its leaf paper brown, elephant skin, moist from his tongue. The saliva links him to the cigar as he takes it from his mouth to speak and places a hand on your sad, bloodless foot.

  The lines in your foot grow hot, and at the foot of your bed, he says: “Do better. Do not end up like me, boy. Don’t be nothing, nothing,” he emphasizes, “like your uncle.”

  Your tongue is a wad of cotton. It’s impossible to force a word out or whisper one or scream or cough out the silence. You gag.

  “Help yourself, Abram.”

  At the foot of your bed, your father leans in, his mouth a poor slit from which spills the admonishment: “Do not trust the devil. Do not. Not even if he dances. Not even if he asks you to dance.”

  You watch the room blacken. The pecan tree scrapes against the wooden house, croaking its concerns, because a man who should have been dead manifests himself, warning you, smoking a long, fat cigar. This isn’t real. Isn’t real. Not real, you try to convince yourself so much that finally you say it out loud. “Not real.”

  To convince you, the weight of him crushes the bottom of the bed. The bed moans. The sludge in your soles quickens, sloughs off, and slowly, gradually, necessarily, you regain your footing. The veins in your feet are lines, crooked and throbbing and green, and suddenly they are able to move. And you say: “Real?”