chapter 19
september 25, this year.

The doctor says that my ACL is destroyed. No one is surprised, least of all me. He starts talking about surgery. I stop listening.

My dad and I are a fine pair, leaving the hospital. I use his chair like a walker, limping and pushing and leaning. He sits there, head bowed, like he can’t imagine how we will get through this. Like this knee injury is the final thing, the thing we can’t survive.

He is right.

When we get home, I’ve missed another day of school and there is something wrong with Glob. Something more than what is already wrong with Glob. I push Dad through the front door and Glob is right there in the hall, in the way. She is lying on her side. Her eyes are half open but her breathing is all wrong, hitching and catching and coming out in a rush, like a balloon popped.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Dad says. Like it’s my fault.

“Glob?” I say. “Good girl. Come here.”

She doesn’t move. She can’t move. She’s dying.

Dad leans forward and slides out of his chair and onto the floor until he’s lying on the dog. He doesn’t look at me, he’s muttering, murmuring, gentle in a way that he never was.

“Glob,” he says. “Glob.”

I step over them as carefully as I can, which is hard when you can really only use one knee, although this stiff bandaging helps a lot. I go downstairs.

The basement of our house is full of grow equipment and stinks in spite of the fans that are meant to pump the stink outside where no one can smell it but the corn. I don’t know how we haven’t been caught. We must be draining the grid, all the power this sucks up. But maybe it’s hidden by Our Joe’s own use of power, his bank of greenhouses where he grows corn in the shoulder season. Early and late. He uses hydroponics too.

The plants in this crop look terrible. Gary’s crop. A good crop is full of buds, healthy leaves, green lushness. It makes me think of jungles. I’m always expecting to see insects. This crop looks like skeletons, like what is left after everything rots away.

I know what to do, so I set about doing it. If you overlook what it is, it’s sort of satisfying. For a few minutes, while I hunker down there under all those hot lights, I know what my dad felt like with the tomatoes.

It’s totally different. I know it. But still.

I can hear Glob’s nails scratching the wood floor upstairs. My dad’s quiet voice.

I stay downstairs for a long time, and when I go up, the dog is not dead. Dad is back in his chair. Maybe I imagined the whole thing. Glob wags her tail weakly and drags herself over to her mat in the corner.

“How’s it look?” says Dad, like nothing is different. Like he wasn’t just lying on Glob in the hallway where Glob lay dying.

“Bad,” I say. “But it’s good stuff, it just doesn’t look good. Looks aren’t everything.”

“Huh,” says Dad. “I’d like to take a look.”

“I already did it all,” I tell him. “There’s nothing to see. I gotta take a shower.” I raise my hands and show him the dirt.

“Want to watch tv?” says Dad.

“Nah,” I lie, “I have homework. And we have to eat too. I’ll make something after I shower, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks,” he adds. It’s definitely an afterthought, but I’ll take it.

“Sorry about your knee,” he says. “Hurts?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s okay though.”

“Okay.” He nods. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I say.

And that’s that.

In our old house, the family room was in a big open space, open to the kitchen. Here, everything is a tiny room, separate from everything else. I go into the tiny bathroom and blast the water, which comes out first icy cold and then boiling hot, there’s nothing in between. I settle on cold and try to make the water wipe my brain clean so I don’t have to think about anything at all.

I haven’t done one bit of homework so far this year.

I want to rewind, start over, begin again.

Can you do that?

If I started over, I wonder if Olivia would exist.