I planned to ask him about the photograph, but I stop myself before the words come out. To ask will be to force Harris into a vulnerable position. Your wife has a secret.
If he knows she keeps the photo, I can’t imagine he’s happy about it, whether it’s Uncle Chris or an old boyfriend. And if he doesn’t know she keeps it, he’ll hate that he didn’t know. Either way, he’ll lash out.
I press my lips together. “Never mind,” I tell him.
“Drop it!” Harris says to Albert, who has come up the ramp with the tennis ball.
Albert drops it.
“Good dog.” My father snatches the ball and holds it high, waiting for the others to come out of the water and pay attention. “You sure?” he asks me. “？‘The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.’？”
“I think it was the wrong question.”
“Claude Lévi-Strauss,” he adds, explaining the quote. “Anthropologist.”
All four dogs are waiting now. Harris throws the ball and they leap into the water, swimming and panting.
He puts his arm around me. “You did well tonight, with the lemon speech,” he says. “Did me proud.”
24.
THAT NIGHT, I take one of the sleeping pills I stole.
I take it because I am curious.
I take it because if I don’t take anything, I’ll likely get up in the middle of the night sweating, thirsty, and disoriented. That happens a lot. And I like the feeling I get from my painkillers, so I want to save those for when I’m awake.
I take it, too, because the events of tonight have me especially keyed up—my mother’s photograph, seeing Yardley and George, the kisses with Pfeff, the plan for tomorrow, the conversation with my father. Energy buzzes through me, but I am also bone-tired. I want to turn myself off like a light.
I am careful. I do not take the sleeping pill with anything else. I have not had any alcohol.
And it works. I fall into sleep, fast. It is dreamless.
I do not know yet that it will take me some years and two stays in rehabilitation clinics to stop taking pills.
I do not know that this habit will make me drop out of college. Or that even after recovery, I’ll always drink a little more than I should, to fill the gap where once these pills consoled me.
I don’t know yet that I’ll regret drinking so much, and the way that habit has made me a lazy thinker. It clouds my judgment and makes me a more selfish, dimmer version of the person I might have been. I don’t know yet that I will wonder, in my forties, whether my son Johnny is dead partly because I am such a drinker.
I don’t know any of that.
I just sleep.
25.
LET ME TELL you another fairy tale. It is not a famous one. I first read it in our family’s copy of Grimms’。 And I read it to Rosemary again, the summer I am seventeen.
This is my version.
The Stolen Pennies
ONCE UPON A time, a man went to visit a friend. This friend had several children and a wife.
On the day of the guest’s arrival, they all sat down to a meal. As the clock struck noon, the front door of the house opened.
In walked a girl of about ten years old. She wore a white dress and no shoes.
No one in the house paid any mind except the guest. They all just kept eating.
The girl walked silently past the family at the table and into the next room. She did not look around. “Who is that child?” asked the guest.
The family told him they saw no one. They returned to their meal.
After a time, the child walked back out, past the family and through the front door.
“Who is that child?” asked the guest again. “The one with no shoes?”
But again, the family saw no one.
The next day, at precisely noon, everyone was eating together again when the front door opened. The girl walked in. As before, she walked silently past the family and into the next room.
No one else saw her.
This time, the guest followed. Through a crack in the door, he saw the child on her knees, scratching with her fingernails at the floorboards. She became frantic, digging. He feared she would injure her hands.
The guest told his hosts what he was seeing. He described her tangled hair, her round face, the mole on her chin.
Now they revealed what they had hidden from him during this strange, tense visit: one of their children had died four weeks ago, of a sudden illness. She was a ten-year-old girl with tangled hair, a round face, and a mole on her chin.
The parents went into the next room. They wrenched open the floorboards where the ghost child had been digging and found two pennies.