TEN

My freshman year I fail algebra and have to attend summer school in the neighboring town of Bristol to make up the class. I pay attention and quickly work my way through the sections of the course that had mystified me throughout the school year. Suddenly, actually doing the formulas instead of writing song lyrics, the math makes sense. On the night before my final exam in summer school, Dad calls down to the basement from the top of the stairs. I’m surprised to hear his voice.

“Want to go see a movie?” he asks.

I look at the clock. It’s after eight. I have to be up for summer school the next day at seven.

“Sure,” I say.

In the car Dad taps the dashboard in tune with the music on the radio. “You’re going to love this movie,” he tells me. “It’s fucking amazing.” In the lobby of the movie theater, the air-conditioning pumping over us. Dad buys two tickets for Pulp Fiction. I’ve never seen anything like it. On the way home we talk about it nonstop. That night in my room I do an impression of Mia Wallace in my mirror and I’m too excited to get to sleep until almost four in the morning. At seven, Dad knocks on my door to wake me up for school. I drag myself out of bed to take the final test. When it’s over, I walk over to Dad’s waiting car. “Did you pass?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I got an A in the class.”

“Good job, kiddo.” He slides on a pair of Oakley wraparound sunglasses and pulls the car out of the high school parking lot. It’s the best grade I’ve gotten on anything all year.

On nights when Ann-Marie has to go out, I take care of Taylor. By now Taylor talks a bit and walks. She moves around in wildly unstable steps, hurling herself forward with the force of her own momentum. She watches The Lion King on repeat and has a VHS collection of songs from Disney cartoons. We sit on the living room carpet and sing along to them together.

I put her in her high chair and make an elaborate process of picking what her dinner will be from the jars of baby food lined up in the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator. What goes better with turkey—mashed peas or mashed green beans? And for dessert—do we want plums or applesauce? Taylor is a happy, giggly baby. She drools constantly, leaving a dark half-moon on the neckline of all her clothes, and loves to poke and kiss Shilo, who lets herself be pinched and slapped by Taylor’s clumsy baby hands. It’s fascinating to see her go from amorphous infant lump to a real person who expresses her desires for things by pushing an oversize cardboard picture book into your lap, or beckoning through the bars of her crib at the pacifiers just out of her reach.

Most often on the nights I watch Taylor, Dad is gone or asleep in his room, unaware of what’s happening in the rest of the house. But some nights, like one intolerably hot August evening, as I put Taylor in the bathtub and try to cool her heat-rash-stricken body with a damp washcloth and she cries and cries, Dad calls from the bedroom.

I look down at Taylor, naked and miserable in her padded chair in the bathtub. I pretend not to have heard him. “Ssssh,” I whisper to Taylor and hand her a pacifier. She throws it over the side of the tub and continues to cry.

“Leah,” calls Dad.

“What?”

“Bring her in here.”

I wrap a thin towel loosely around Taylor and lift her out of the tub, carrying her to her room. We sit in the rocking chair in front of the open window. A box fan whirs loudly by our side.

“Did you hear me?” Dad yells again. “You can bring her in here.”

“She’s better now,” I yell back even though Taylor is still crying.

“Jesus Christ,” says Dad. “What do you think I’m going to do to her?”

I sit silent, not moving from the rocking chair. Eventually Taylor drifts off to sleep and Dad is quiet in his room. I don’t know what he’d do to her, but I do know that she’s the most precious thing to me in the world. And I know Dad has turned some kind of corner.

FOR MY BIRTHDAY that year, Dad takes me to Thayer Street to get my nose pierced. I sat in a dentist’s chair while the piercer lines up his silver needles on a paper napkin. I pick out a small steel hoop decorated with a tiny ball. Dad insists on taking pictures during the whole process and I’m mortified until the piercer, tattoos flexing beneath his white T-shirt, admires Dad’s camera and asks to look at it. I sit, so excited about getting my nose pierced that I can barely breathe, while Dad and the man bond over the superiority of Canon lenses. By the time they’ve begun listing the litany of reasons that Morrissey is a whiny asshole, I think I might cry from anticipation. Dad looks over at me, pulls the camera to his eye, and says, “Well, it’s probably time to put a hole in her face.” He moves around me snapping away as the man slides a needle into my cartilage.

“It was fun, Dad!” I say when it’s all over. I admire my nose ring in the car mirror. “Like it hurt but it was a good kind of hurt, you know?”

“Good Lord,” says Dad. “Just promise me you won’t get any tattoos.” Dad always says that people are surprised he doesn’t smoke or have tattoos. My Aunt Rita explained to me once that growing up, their mom made sure they had the nicest clothes and the shiniest shoes. She taught them how to present themselves to the world. Being a Vietnam vet and a man who hangs out in bars, his intense dislike of tattoos and cigarettes does seem a bit out of character, but if you really know him, if you know the line he walks between who he is and who he wants to be, it makes perfect sense.

“Uh-huh,” I say, watching the way my nose ring looks when I talk, or look slightly to the left. I’m definitely the coolest person in high school, I think.

MY SOPHOMORE YEAR I have a boyfriend. He has a blue Ford hatchback, in which we drive around Barrington looking for stuff to do. It’s not long before I figure out I don’t like Dave very much—not just as a boyfriend, but as a person in general. He steals blank checks from his mother, who is disabled by multiple sclerosis, and shows me how he makes them out to Cash. Of course I don’t object when the stolen money keeps us in cigarettes, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and Bickford’s meals.

It isn’t the theft itself that bothers me. It’s more the methodically shitty way in which he conducts his schemes. He is, I realize, no good, and not in the hippie-burnout way that people assume. Rather, he’s the kind of just-smart-enough criminal who will likely spend a lot of time in prison for petty crimes as an adult.

As much as I’m pretty much continuously disgusted and annoyed by him, we stay together for my entire sophomore year. I like the freedom of his car. He begs to come over late at night after Dad and Ann-Marie have gone to bed, and I acquiesce, apathetically French-kissing him for a few minutes at a time. I wonder if I’ll ever have a boyfriend that I like.

THAT WINTER, AS Belo restructures, my father is laid off. The Journal pays him a generous severance and gives him access to his 401(k), but it’s as if a lifeline has been severed. Before there’d been an excuse to get out of bed, at least for the hours he had to be at work. Now there isn’t. I can’t imagine my dad not working at the Journal. What will he do? When he gets out of bed to take pictures or do whatever it is he does on his own, he puts on his natty suits and shoes and overcoats. Then he comes home and falls heavily into bed, still wearing his expensive clothes as he tosses and turns in front of the muted TV.

One morning he offers to drive Derek and me to school. Once we’re in the car it’s clear something is very wrong. Inside the Mitsubishi it smells like something died. The drive from our house to school is less than three-quarters of a mile but Dad pulls the car over to vomit on the way. Derek opens his rear door and just gets out, heading down the sidewalk to school. I unbuckle my seat belt and tell Dad I’ll walk the rest of the way as well.

“I’m fine,” he wipes his mouth with his hand.

“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re practically there.” Then I slip out of the car before he can say anything else. As I walk around the hood to get to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, I glance down at the puddle of vomit on the ground. It’s pink and foamy, as if he has been throwing up blood.

WEEKS LATER, WHEN I come home from Dave’s house, Ann-Marie is waiting up for me.

“Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she says.

Her contacts are out for the night and she has on her large glasses and white sweatpants. “I’ve decided that you can come and stay with us,” she says. “If you want. It’s your decision.”

When she says “us,” I realize she’s talking about Taylor and Derek. I don’t want to be without my sister.

“Okay,” I say, right away.

I try to summon the appropriate emotion but can’t figure out what it should be. Their divorce seems inevitable. For the last year they’ve barely talked. Dad has cut himself off from all of us and is drunk all the time. When he lost his job we all doubted he’d really try to find a new one. Ann-Marie explains that we’ll move to the apartment building her parents own, the one she lived in when she and Dad first met. They’ll sell our house. Dad will have to find an apartment to live in. When she’s done talking I go to my room and try to cry. I think if I can cry I’ll figure out how I should feel about the whole thing. I think if I cry, it will make me a better daughter for abandoning my dad. But I can’t cry, no matter how much I screw up my face and heave my gut, trying to force out emotion.

That weekend, as I pour myself cereal in the kitchen, Dad comes in. His silver hair is a crazy mess around his head. He leans against the kitchen sink and puts his palms behind him on the counter. “Well kiddo,” he says, “looks like it’s just you and me again.”

My stomach flops. I was sure that he and Ann-Marie had talked about who would go with whom.

“I’m going to live with Ann-Marie.” I avoid eye contact. “She asked me to, so I thought you wanted me to,” I add quickly.

“Oh,” says Dad. He walks from the kitchen to his room, and slams the door shut so hard that all his framed photos on the wall rattle.

For the next few weeks as we pack up our stuff in boxes and stack them along the wall in the kitchen, Dad ignores me. He won’t look at me or speak to me. It’s one thing if he’s sleeping, like he always does, but to actively act as if I’m not there is something I’ve never experienced. I try talking to him about what I’m reading, about what he thinks about a certain band, but my questions are met with a determined silence, as the boxes pile higher and our move date gets closer.

ANN-MARIE STARTS DATING almost as soon as we move out, and I babysit for Taylor more and more. Fifteen, with no job and no money, I take Taylor for long walks in her stroller down to the Barrington River. I remember being little and walking with my grandmother around her little cul-de-sac and how it always made me happy. As spring comes and with it that old creeping anxiety I get with the changes of the seasons, I hope the walks with Taylor might make me feel better. But my stomach still turns nervously as I push her stroller down these new suburban streets and along the murky edge of the river where we collect pebbles and broken bits of clamshell. I’m nervous all the time, it seems, but I’m never sure why.

Our downstairs neighbors in the apartment building are a family of five, three small children, their mother, and their father, Doc. Ann-Marie quickly begins dating Doc’s friend Marco. Marco is young and handsome, with black hair and brown eyes and a thick mustache and beard. He has a small commercial fishing boat, a clam dragger, and he gathers up quahogs from the ocean floor. He brings them home, and we boil the clams in a stockpot with potatoes and Saugys. He’s nice enough, and seems to like Ann-Marie, but it’s clear he has spent his life dragging for shellfish and not necessarily getting an education. Trying to connect with Derek one night he offers to take him out on the boat, promising he’ll be able to make lots of “moneys.”

“Money,” Derek says.

“Yeah,” says Marco, “that’s what I said. Moneys. You can make lots of moneys.”

“You can’t say moneys,” says Derek. “It’s not plural. You make money.”

Marco, perplexed, tries to brush off Derek’s tone. “I’m just saying, if you wanted…”

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Marco’s lack of education isn’t his major flaw. At night sitting on the couch with Ann-Marie while we watch TV, or at the dinner table while we eat oyster stew, he trails off mid-sentence into quiet gibberish. His eyelids droop once, twice, three times until finally his chin comes to rest against his chest and he starts snoring.

“Marco’s on heroin,” I tell Ann-Marie as she shakes him by the shoulder.

“He is not!” she says.

We’re sitting at the dining table. From where I am, I can see out over the backyard—a rectangle of patchy grass set off from the gravel parking lot by a series of railroad ties. Across from me at the table, Marco’s head bobs up and down. Taylor sits happily in her booster seat playing with a pile of oyster crackers. She and Marco are occupying the same mental space, some different place from Ann-Marie and me.

“Then why does he nod out all the time?” I ask.

“He’s tired,” says Ann-Marie. “He fishes all day.”

Marco’s upper body flops face-first onto the table, just missing the bowl of soup. He snores contentedly on the vinyl place mat. I smirk at Ann-Marie. She stands up and strokes his head. He opens his eyes and smiles at her, his head sideways on the table, but doesn’t sit up.

“Well, what the hell do you know about heroin anyway, smart-ass?” asks Ann-Marie.

It’s a good question and one that, wisely, I don’t answer, despite my natural inclination to be the expert of all things. Toward the end of that school year my loser boyfriend has gotten into snorting heroin, because he decides pot makes him paranoid. I drive with him to the Manton Heights Housing Project in Providence where he buys the drugs. Before pulling in, Dave will have me rifle through the pile of cassette tapes on the passenger-side floor.

“Find the Beastie Boys,” he’ll say. “We need them to know we’re cool with them.” Then we pull up to a corner in his hatchback, the rear window all but covered in Grateful Dead stickers, white-boy rap blaring from the crappy speakers in the tape deck.

At first Dave only snorts the heroin instead of shooting it, but he has a friend Lindsay who regularly shoots up. Lindsay is infamous in Barrington. The summer before I started high school, there had been MISSING CHILD posters of her taped to telephone poles and hung in storefronts across town. She’d gone to a Phish show and run off with a group of kids for months. Now back in Barrington, she seems to me the most world-wise teenager I’ve ever met. And she’s an honest-to-goodness heroin addict at seventeen, having already gone unsuccessfully to rehab and to treatment at a methadone clinic.

The three of us go together to buy heroin, which I never do because I’m too scared. Lindsay has a tiny scrappy voice and talks in slang I do my best to imitate. Looking up at Dave beneath a mop of matted hair, she’ll smile sweetly and blink her large dark eyes. “Dave,” she’ll say, “let’s get some diesel. I wanna get high.”

She carries a syringe in her enormous canvas army bag and shoots up in the backseat of Dave’s car. Once when she can’t locate a vein in her arm, she asks if someone will hold her wrist tightly so she can shoot into a vein in her hand. I volunteer right away, squeezing her wrist tightly so that her veins puff up big and blue.

Later Dave tells me that I didn’t have to do that, that Lindsay sometimes makes people uncomfortable, and that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. I don’t explain to him that I’d never do the drug, but that I think being around it is cool and that Lindsay is way more of an authentic junkie than Dave will ever be.

I try to impress Lindsay with stories about my mom that are mostly made up.

“We used to have junkies stay at our house all the time,” I tell her once. “One time one of them ate his own puke on a bet for money to get high.”

Lindsay nods as if this is something she’s witnessed many a time. I try to conjure a narrative of what it had been like being the child of an addict mother, but really I remember mostly brief and benign glimpses of my mom. Her silhouette in the open door, her hanging strips of film from the shower rod, her brushing back my sweaty hair when I must have had a fever. I can’t really see her in any of these memories. There’s just the sense that she’s there.

But for all my efforts, Lindsay seems most impressed by the fact that I don’t do heroin.

“You’re really smart,” she says to me once. “You don’t act like these other dumb Barrington girls. Like, obviously you’re smart because you don’t do dope and stuff. But you are really smart about books and things, too.”

I MISS DAD. When we spend time together it starts out awkward, but then we go to a movie or up to Boston to take pictures, and we have things to talk about. On the hour-long drives back from Boston, Dad tells me about things like this new show he has been watching on Comedy Central called The Daily Show, and how funny it is. In between the times we see each other, in the days before Google, I save up questions about things that are in the news to ask Dad, later.

He explains the centuries-old conflict in Bosnia to me and why hopes for any kind of resolution without understanding the history are pointless and shortsighted. We talk about Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. I’ve recently joined the brand-new gay/straight alliance at my high school. Dad explains that it’s akin to a Jim Crow law, something separate but equal and therefore not really equal at all. “What’s Jim Crow?” I ask, and then recite his answer nearly verbatim to anybody who will listen for the next few months.

On one of our outings I tell Dad how unhappy I am at school and how much I want to transfer. Dad agrees that School One, an alternative school in Providence, seems like a good fit for me and takes me on an appointment to interview with the faculty and take the placement tests. In my interview with Dad and the principal, Dad smiles charmingly at the woman and crosses his heel over his knee, leaning backward to rest his hand on the back of the chair.

“I’ve thought for a long time that Leah and public school are a bad fit,” he tells the principal. “I mean, this is a kid who reads Goethe in her free time.” The closest I’ve come to reading Goethe is when I asked Dad what Faust was and who “Geth” was, while reading Anne Rice, but the principal is so impressed I don’t dare contradict him. She escorts us out, handing over a large manila envelope of financial aid information for Dad to fill out. She beams at me as we walk out onto the sidewalk. “I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better, Leah!” she says. In the car I look into the envelope. There are a bunch of tax forms that Dad, as my legal custodial parent, will have to fill out. “You’ll do it, right?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says. “I think this is really good move for you. You need a place like this, I think.”

Over the next few weeks I abandon any semblance of finishing up my sophomore year with passing grades. I tell everyone that it doesn’t matter because I’m going to School One. But soon the school starts calling, saying they haven’t received Dad’s paperwork. The next time I see him I ask him about it.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I have it. I just haven’t mailed it in.” As the summer comes and goes I realize I’ll be going back to Barrington High School in the fall.

“My dad is so fucked up!” I whine to Dave. We sit on the front porch of my three-family house, smoking cigarettes. “I hate Barrington. He just doesn’t want to fill out tax forms. It’s so unfair.” I flick my cigarette onto the street and light another one. I puff angrily and exhale into the thick summer air, cicadas buzzing loudly all around us. I think about Dad and how it always seems like he drinks more in the summer and becomes more dangerous. I’m furious with him. I turn to Dave. “If something ever happens to me,” I say, “my dad probably did it. I’ve been afraid before that he would murder all of us.” I stare hard at Dave, daring him to doubt the conviction of my statement.

“Yeah,” says Dave. “But I always kind of thought your dad might kill himself. Since you didn’t go and live with him and stuff.”

I reach over and pinch Dave’s arm, twisting his skin between my fingers as hard as I can. “Ow!” he whines. “What are you doing?”

“I fucking hate you,” I say. And I do. I hate his big black cow eyes with their long lashes and his slender nonthreatening limbs and the stupid poetry he writes me, where instead of saying “you” he says “thou” and “thee.” And I hate that this ridiculous person would dare to insinuate that somehow my dad is not strong enough to go on with life. He has never met my dad. He doesn’t know his booming laugh, or how he’d worked his way through the seven-volume Shelby Foote history of the Civil War in a single month of intense concentration, or the way that people cluster around him to hear his stories at the bar, or how people cower if he just looks at them a certain way, with a certain turn of his body, and a certain tilt of his face. He wasn’t there the other Saturday morning in Dunkin’ Donuts, like I was, when a woman held up a long line of people by going back and forth on what choices to include in her dozen donuts until finally, exasperated, my dad called out from the middle of line, “Lady, they’re just fucking donuts,” and the whole store erupted in spontaneous applause.

Fuck this kid, I think, and walk back into the house, locking the door behind me. From the street Dave calls my name and weeps loudly until one of the neighbors sticks his head out of a window and threatens to call the cops.

I’m done with him. Done with his heroin snorting and doing nothing but riding around in his car and listening to terrible live Grateful Dead shows on his tape deck. I’m mortified by the way I’ve taken to wearing hippie clothes and singing along to Phish songs to fit in with him. But no matter how much I try, I can’t be done with the idea he has planted, the idea that my dad might hurt himself, and that if he does, it will be all my fault.

I SULK MY way through my junior year of high school, failing so epically and unequivocally that the assistant principal points out how I easily could channel just some of that negative energy into passing at least one class. I scoff at him.

We’ve always worn off-brand clothes, purchased on layaway, but now with only Ann-Marie’s income, there is no money for anything new; Ann-Marie no longer buys us “school clothes.” So my wardrobe is almost entirely comprised of Salvation Army finds that I alter on the sewing machine Grandma Ann buys for me. During classes I sketch out patterns for skirts and dresses. I spend hours sewing a long dress with bell sleeves that becomes my favorite. I buy six different types of scrap fabric, cut them into large triangles, and sew them into a pair of Salvation Army corduroys—it’s a version of a popular trend in my high school of taking straight-legged pants and turning them into wide-legged ones. I love making my own clothes. My room is scattered with long strips of ragged ribbon I’ve salvaged from a craft store liquidation sale, musty piles of old cardigans and skirts that I buy on blue-tag days at the Salvation Army and think I might repurpose, and, much to Taylor and Ann-Marie’s continued annoyance, straight pins and spools of thread that tangle around our ankles and stab the soles of our feet.

I start to hang out with a group of girls, and the five of us, Reba, Alex, Heather, Sarah, and I, form an unlikely but inseparable alliance. Reba and Heather are clearly headed to the Ivy League, but we still spend our nights and weekends parked at Barrington Beach smoking cigarettes and creating derisive nicknames for all the people in our high school. I laugh harder sitting in Alex’s little black Honda Civic than I ever have before as a teenager.

My friends’ families became a support system for me. Heather’s parents stock their basement fridge with microwave burritos and cans of Dr Pepper for when I come over after school. Reba’s parents encourage my writing and pay me to take photographs for them. Alex drives me everywhere, to and from school, to my part-time job at the supermarket, and to doctor and dentist appointments. The group of us confess everything to each other, conducting mini therapy sessions on the beach late at night while sipping from a bottle of vodka. Alex feels terribly out of place, Reba feels she has too much to live up to, and Heather wonders why old friends are now mean to her. And of course we are all madly, wildly, and unrequitedly in love with boys.

The summer after my junior year, I go to an outdoor music festival with my friend Rick and we meet up with some guys from school. John, who is a grade younger than us, is with them. It’s a beautiful day, hot and sunny, and the concert takes place at a campground. We smoke pot and strip to our underpants and go swimming in the freezing-cold pool at the edge of the tents. Normally, I’m embarrassed by my body. I’m barely an A cup and at five foot five I weigh less than a hundred pounds. I have the long, gangly arms and legs of a praying mantis. But that day, something is different—I feel calm and confident for one of the only times I can remember. Nobody has seen me in just my underwear since I was a child, including my ex-boyfriend. Later, after borrowing a giant T-shirt from one of the guys who is camping out, I see that my camisole top has been neatly laid out to dry.

“Thanks, Rick,” I say to my friend, oddly touched that he has taken the time, when I would have thrown the shirt in a ball on the ground and probably forgotten about it.

“I didn’t do it,” he says. “John did.”

I’m stunned. John is by far the handsomest boy I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s on the soccer team and doesn’t smoke cigarettes and I’m sure he doesn’t really even know who I am.

“Oh,” I say, watching John and a friend kick a Hacky Sack to each other.

As the sun sets, Rick trades some of the quarter pound of pot he has brought with him for a sheet of acid.

“It’s white blotter,” he says. “I don’t even know if it’s real.” We all divvy it up generously, sure it won’t work. An hour later I am—as I keep repeating over and over to Rick and then collapsing into giggles—“tripping face, man.” I find myself in a stand of trees, clutching a warm Miller High Life, engaged in a passionate discussion with John about colors and what they really mean. Later we make our way over to where a reggae band plays. I look up at the crystal-clear night sky and when I look back down, the stars are suddenly all around my body and I can move them around with my hands. I sit down in the middle of all the dancing people and stare up at the moon. A shadow moves slowly across its surface until eventually all I can see is a ring of beautiful white fire at its edges. Then the shadow dissolves.

I turn to John. “Did you just see the lunar eclipse?”

He sits down next to me and shakes his head no. “Are you cold?” he asks. I don’t respond. He unties a button-down shirt from around his waist and I drape it across my shoulders and almost die from swooning so hard.

When it’s time to leave, Rick and I get into his brown two-door car that sits ominously low to the ground. We’re both still incredibly high. I’ve smoked more pot that night than I ever have in my life and I’m not even close to coming down off the LSD, which at some point I decided to take more of. Rick still has some of the acid and a giant bag of pot on him.

“I should carry that stuff for you,” I say. “Male cops can’t search women.” We both agree this a good idea. Driving down the pitch-black roads from Exeter to Barrington feels like being in video game come to life, and I cling to the sides of the passenger seat as we weave our way around curves. At one point, I see a long line of lights in what seems like the middle of the road. Unlike the lunar eclipse, which only I could see, Rick sees the lights and pulls off to the side of the road

“How will we get around it?” he asks.

We stare and stare and finally realize the lights are headlights, and the floating line is an overpass. All we have to do is drive underneath it. We congratulate one another on keeping it together.

I wake the next morning still wearing John’s button-down shirt. I wander into Derek’s room. My body feels slimy from the acid but I can’t stop smiling. I sit down in the big orange chair Derek had found on the sidewalk and lugged up to his room.

“How was the show?” he asks.

“Derek,” I say, “I am totally in love.” I absentmindedly pat the front pocket of my shirt and feel something puffy. I pull out a giant bag of pot and the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes containing a strip of blotter paper. I hold them both in my lap and start laughing.

“Whoa,” says Derek. He’s just waking up and his dark hair, so similar to mine that people often assume we’re biological siblings, sticks out in all directions. I’m glad, like always, to have Derek there. We fight but really he knows me better than anyone else. We’ve lived in the same houses, shared the same bathrooms, and for so long that I never think of him as just a “step” brother.

The girls’ reaction to my newfound love is more high pitched. I showed them John’s shirt and ask their advice on how I should go about returning it. We squeal at the various possibilities and drive past his house several times, once even pulling into the driveway, as I scream at Alex to drive away. I don’t see him for the rest of the summer, but they indulge my rattling on about how perfect and amazing he is. Now when we get one of Alex’s friends from the gas station where she works to go to the liquor store for us, my beer of choice is Miller High Life. The group of us sits on a narrow rocky outcropping of the beach and drink it while I recount my amazing discussion with John about colors. Of course, the girls are the ones I really love, the ones who look out for me, and laugh with me, and see the potential inside me that I don’t.

I DON’T SEE Dad most of that summer, but shortly before school starts again, he calls me. I answer the phone in the kitchen, wrapping the cord around my wrist and looking out the window at the driveway. Doc, the downstairs neighbor, is draped across one of our chaise lounges with his eyes closed. His four-year-old daughter goes up and down Taylor’s plastic play slide next to him.

“I was thinking we could go to DC for a few days,” Dad says over the phone.

“Okay,” I say. The last time we’d seen each other we had discussed the recently opened Holocaust Museum.

“We’ll drive through the night and get there in the morning. It takes about eight hours. Do you want to go?”

“Yeah,” I say, and then catching my monosyllabic responses add, “I want to see the Holocaust Museum.”

“Me too,” says Dad. “I think it’s important that you see the Vietnam Wall, too. I’ll pick you up tomorrow night? Around ten?”

“That sounds good.” As I’m hanging up I hear Dad clear his throat.

“Love you,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, caught off guard. I hang up without saying it back. Should I call him back and tell him I love him too? I unwind the phone cord from my wrist and decide it would be too weird. I walk down the back staircase and out onto the patch of grass behind the house.

“Can I bum a cigarette?” I ask Doc. He opens his eyes and looks at me, his pupils tiny pin pricks. High on heroin, I realize.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says. His voice sounds stuffed up, like he has a cold. He reaches beside him and takes out a cigarette from the beat-up-looking pack of Basics at his side. “Do you need a light?” he asks.

I stand for a moment, cigarette balanced between two fingers. I can still hear the sound of Dad clearing his throat. I feel ashamed.

“Please,” I say.

Doc stands and lights my cigarette. I exhale and lean against the house, conscious of the way I look and hold my cigarette. I can sense that Doc is looking at me, and it makes me embarrassed. I slouch a bit against the wooden shingles. I wish I’d stayed upstairs.

“Nice night, isn’t it?” Doc’s jeans sit low on his narrow hips and I look away quickly from the strip of tanned flesh exposed beneath his T-shirt. Then, suddenly, he’s in front of me, balancing his palms against the side of the house and pinning me between his arms. I try to slip out from beneath him and he grinds his pelvis into mine. “Nice night,” he says again, eyes closed.

I push him away and run up the stairs. When I get to my door I realize I’m still holding the lit cigarette. Disgusted, I throw it into the kitchen sink and run to my room. I sit there in the encroaching darkness, sweating in the stuffy space. I feel like if I try to stand up I won’t be able to.

DAD PICKS ME up the next night around ten. I’d been lying on the yellowing white leather sofa in the living room, wondering if I should have agreed to go at all. It had been a long time since I’d spent more than twenty-four hours with him. What if it didn’t go well and I was trapped on an eight-hour car ride away from home? I heard his car horn outside and gathered my bag of stuff. Ann-Marie’s room was dark. She and Taylor were staying at her new boyfriend’s house.

Dad drives a black five-speed Jetta. After he totaled the Mitsubishi, he’d driven a big Pontiac for a while, but he must have stopped making the payments on it at some point, because a large man had come pounding on the door to our apartment and demanding that Ann-Marie tell him where the car was. After she’d explained to him that they were divorced and she didn’t know, I asked her who he had been.

“The fucking repo man,” she said.

Now, Dad pops the trunk for me and I throw my overnight bag in and get into the passenger seat. Right away I can tell Dad had been drinking. The scent of whiskey and Polo permeates the car.

“Hey kiddo,” he says.

I slump in my seat and make a big show of buckling my seat belt. “How long will it take us to get there?”

“About eight hours,” says Dad. “You can sleep in the back if you want.”

“Can I drive?” I have my license but we only have Ann-Marie’s one car and she doesn’t let me use it, so I never get to drive.

“Why not?” says Dad. “The highway’s easy.” He pulls off onto the side of 95 and we get out of the car and run around the front to switch positions. Cars fly past me in the dark as I jump into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut. Dad talks me through guiding the car into fifth gear and the car rattles along the dirt shoulder, as I rev the engine and grind gears. Once I’m going fast enough Dad looks behind him and yells, “Go!” I don’t even look to my left as I pull onto the highway, heart racing.

“Good job,” he says. “Easy from here on out, just stay in fifth. And I’m not drunk, you know.” I know he is, but I also know he’s not as drunk as he could be, and that means something. I looked straight ahead at the highway in front of me and don’t say anything in response. After hours of driving and another stop on the highway to switch spots, so I can climb into the backseat and sleep for a bit, we get into Washington, DC, a little bit after sunrise.

We pull into the hotel parking lot just outside the city in Northern Virginia. Despite how early it is, it’s already blazing hot. We emerge from the air-conditioned car onto the blistering asphalt of the parking lot. I pull my bag from the trunk and Dad bends over the backseat of the car, rifling through a pile of laundry for a clean shirt.

“Leah,” Dad says, jogging after me. “Jesus Christ, wait up.”

As we check in, the woman behind the counter greets us in a thick Southern accent. I’ve never heard one outside a movie before and when we walk back outside to go to our room, I joke about it with Dad.

“We’re in the South now, baby,” he says.

“We are?” I’ve never thought of Washington, DC, as being “the South.”

“Well, we’re in Virginia,” he says. “You’ll see.”

We throw our stuff in the room and wash our faces and then go to eat breakfast in the hotel lobby. I push my plate down the buffet line and scoop myself a large helping of oatmeal. I join Dad at a table and take a bite of cantaloupe. I hadn’t realized how starving the night of driving has made me. Dad looks at a map he’s picked up at the front desk.

“We could do the Holocaust Museum first,” he says. “And then maybe come back and take a nap. We can go to the Mall tonight. I’d like to get pictures of the Wall at sunset.”

I nod, devouring the food on my plate. I scoop a huge spoonful of oatmeal into my mouth, gag, and look up desperately at Dad. He turns away from the map, sees the look on my face and the mound of food on my plate, and laughs out loud.

“Spit it out, kiddo,” he says, handing me a napkin. “What’s the matter? You never had grits before? I told you we were in the South!”

I do my best to spit the strange rubbery stuff into the napkin, then swallow an entire glass of water trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Dad is still laughing.

“I thought it was oatmeal.” It’s all I can do to keep from wiping my tongue with the napkin.

“People love that shit,” says Dad. “When I got back from Vietnam, they promised to send me to a base near home and I wound up in fucking Alabama. In the middle of fucking July. It was as hot as this at night. And man when they served grits those Southern boys would go wild!”

I push my plate away and smile at Dad. “They’re disgusting,” I say.

“Yes they are, Leah, daughter of mine. Yes they are.”

We leave for the Holocaust Museum after breakfast. By that time, midmorning, the pavement practically sizzles. We wait, the car idling sluggishly at the traffic light, both of us halfheartedly acknowledging the Federal Treasury as we watch for the signal change. It’s so hot that in the barely moving traffic the air-conditioning struggles to work. When we finally get into the cool dark museum, we both breathe an audible sigh of relief. Dad nudges me with his shoulder.

“Seems like there is probably something wrong with being psyched to get into the Holocaust Museum because of the air-conditioning, don’t you think? I mean the ovens and all?” He raises his eyebrows at me. I roll my eyes but I’m trying not to laugh.

We make our way through the winding, stark design of the place. We look at the chart the Nazis used to determine purity: both parents Aryan, blond hair, blue eyes, the most pure; both parents Jewish, dark hair, dark eyes, the least.

“There’s you,” Dad says, pointing at a row near the bottom. “Mother Jewish, dark hair, dark eyes.” I look up at him thinking he might make a joke, but the look on his face is sad and angry. I wondered if he’s thinking about me dying. I wonder if he’s thinking about my mom. Had she lived, I would have been raised an observant Jew. I wonder if Dad feels bad about not having done that.

Outside, we stand on the sidewalk with the Jetta’s doors cracked, waiting for the heat inside to dissipate slightly before we get back in.

“You should see Fiddler on the Roof,” Dad says. It comes out like it’s something he has been thinking about for a long time.

“Okay,” I say. “Is it coming to Providence?”

“If it does,” he says, “you should see it with your aunt and your grandmother. I think they would really like it.” In the car, Dad adjusts the air-conditioning vent, leaning close to it. His face is bright red. I notice how purple and puffy the lines on his nose and cheeks have become. They made his skin look fragile and sore, and I have the sudden urge to ask him if they hurt. “I need a nap,” he says. “That wore me out.”

We go back to the hotel and Dad lies down on the bed near the window. We’re both glistening with sweat just from the walk from the parking lot to our hotel door. “Did you bring a bathing suit?” Dad asks. “There’s a pool.”

I hadn’t brought one.

“Maybe I’ll go in my clothes?” I say to Dad. I think maybe if he wants time to be able to drink, it’s now. I change into a giant tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of army pants I’ve cut into shorts that go to my knees. I cinch them at my waist with a giant safety pin.

“That’s what you’re going to swim in?” asks Dad, when I emerge from the bathroom.

“So what?” I say, instantly defensive.

“No big deal,” he says. “You might as well just wear one of those Victorian things with the striped arms and legs. I mean are you sure you’ve got enough on? I can see your ankles.” Dad has the ability to see exactly what my specific insecurity is and needle me about it. And I have no ability to disguise emotion on my face. I think of the girls at school sunning themselves on Barrington Beach in their bikinis. I look down at my legs. They’re so white they’re practically blue and covered in the dark stubble that develops if I don’t shave them every single morning. Other girls, I’m sure, are born with golden down on their arms and legs that requires little maintenance. Dad sees the look on my face. “Hey,” he says, “I was just joking around with you. You look fine. Don’t forget to grab a towel.”

There’s only one other family inside the gated pool. The young mother and father bob around the shallow end as their daughter swims between them, every limb encased in a blow-up floatie. She looks less like a toddler and more like an inflatable raft. The mom and dad call to her in baby voices and clap their hands. A listless-looking teenage boy sits in the lifeguard chair, looking out at the highway that runs in front of the motel. I lower myself into the deep end and submerge my body, holding on to the bottom hem of my oversize shirt as I drop to the bottom. When I open my eyes underwater I see the blurry outlines of the parents’ legs, jumping up and down. I move my hands around in front of my face in the blue water. I love swimming pools. I wish I had a bathing suit.

Walking back to the hotel room, dripping wet, I squeeze out the T-shirt and ball the heavy canvas fabric of the shorts into my fist, trying to dry out a little before I go back into the room. A few doors down a maid in a blue-and-white uniform knocks on a door and then props it open. Her cart of towels and sheets blocks the doorway. I walk down to her and peek my head into the darkened room.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Excuse me.” She comes to the door and I gesture to my sopping clothes. “Can I have another towel?” I ask. She stares at me. In the silence I can hear myself dripping water onto the pavement. Finally, she shakes her head and hands me a towel. I press it against myself like a squeegee.

I go to our door and knock. I don’t want to surprise Dad in the middle of anything. Maybe he’s drinking, or watching porn on TV, which I’d caught him doing a few times growing up. I blush just at the word porn and try to tell myself I’m being silly. But even with the key card in my soaking pocket, I won’t go into the room until Dad opens the door.

Once he does, I stand in the air-conditioning and shiver as Dad turns on the TV.

“How was it?” he asks.

“It was really nice,” I say. “It’s so hot.”

Dad flips through the channels. “I thought we could get dinner in Georgetown,” he says. “It’s a really cool part of the city, kind of like Thayer Street. I think you’ll like it.”

I nod and sit down at the edge of the bed.

“Maybe you should take a shower and put on new clothes?”

“Oh,” I said dumbly. “Okay.”

I come out of the bathroom, towel around my hair, fully dressed. I feel clean and sleepy. Dad sits at the edge of the bed and counts a large pile of twenty-dollar bills. He has never carried a wallet or money clip and loves to have as much cash on hand as possible. His favorite thing is to pull a fat wad of money from his pocket and wave it in front of Derek and me. He has done it so many times for a laugh that by now it makes me embarrassed just thinking about it. I wonder where he’s getting his money now that he doesn’t have a job. He taps the bills into a neat pile, folds them in half, and puts them into the pocket of the suit pants he has changed into.

“Have you ever seen this show?” he asks, pointing at the TV. I haven’t.

“Oh you’d really like it,” he says. “It’s called Homicide and it takes place in Baltimore and it’s all based on this book about homicide detectives. The book is great. You should read it. Baltimore—it’s like no other city. We should stop there on the way back, do you want to?”

I haven’t been with Dad for this long—almost twenty-four hours straight now—since he and Ann-Marie got divorced. Listening to him talk, telling me what books and movies to see, what he has just read about in a magazine article, is my sole understanding of culture outside Barrington. I want to see Baltimore and I want to read Homicide and I want to eat dinner in Georgetown. And I want to do all those things with Dad. But I start to feel panicky, like the trip will never end. Like I’ll never get back to the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Alex’s car, where we’ll smoke cigarettes and drink enormous coffees, while I talk haughtily about the awesome book I’ve just read about homicide detectives.

It’s as if I want all this to have happened already. I want the memory of it, but the doing it is hard for me. I don’t know how to talk to Dad anymore, whether to try to be his peer or to reach all the way back and try again to be his daughter. Every answer I give feels not good enough. So I err on the side of caution.

“We could go,” I say, trying to sound noncommittal, and see the look of disappointment flash briefly across his face. He’s disappointed in me, I realize. Disappointed that I can’t just let it all go and have fun, after all the time he has spent planning. Next time, I promise myself, I will say the right thing. I will answer the right way.

At dinner in Georgetown we sit at an outdoor table. I feel drab next to Dad in his immaculate button-down shirt, his silver hair brushed away from his face. Even the veins tracking across his face seem distinguished in the late-day light as he squeezes a lime into his glass of club soda. I order an iced tea, unsweetened, and resist the urge to mix in a packet of sugar.

“I’d like to get pictures of the Wall at sunset,” Dad says. Next to our table is his enormous camera bag, his tripod anchored at the bottom of it with Velcro. “We can do some shopping first. On the way back to the car.”

I nod my head enthusiastically. Am I being too enthusiastic?

“I really like it here,” I say. “Georgetown is really cool.”

We walk past boutiques and coffee shops on the way back. Dad looks over his shoulder at me on the narrow sidewalk. “Do you see someplace you want to stop?”

I shrug, trying not to look too eager. “I mean, this place looks cool,” I say. We’re standing outside a high-end head shop and in the window is a display of necklaces made out of sterling silver, semiprecious stones, and what appear to be delicate bones, all strung together. I think they are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Inside, I browse through the small section of CDs, and slowly make my way over to the jewelry. I’m not used to asking for things but the necklaces are so pretty, I know I will think about them nonstop after we leave. I pick up one from the felt display case and hold it up to my neck. The little cylinders of bone hold in place a teardrop-shaped piece of turquoise, all filigreed at the edge in sterling silver. The stone hangs perfectly, right in the hollow of my neck. “These are kind of cool,” I say. “Do you think?”

“Sure,” says Dad. “Why don’t you pick out two?”

I hold my breath and try to suppress a smile, thinking of how cool the necklaces are, and how I’ve gotten them, brand-new, in a fancy shop far away from Rhode Island, and how that will always make them special. As the cashier rings them up, Dad and I look at the display of stickers on the wall behind him. I’m giddy with the rush of the purchase, and laugh aloud at the two with black-and-white images, one of older Elvis, and one of young Elvis beneath which are emblazoned the words: I’M DEAD.

“Should I get fat Elvis or skinny Elvis?” asks Dad.

“Fat Elvis,” I say. “It’s awesome.” The cashier slips it into the paper bag with my necklaces. Driving to the Vietnam Wall, I put on the turquoise necklace and look at my reflection in the passenger-side mirror.

“You really like that, don’t you?” asks Dad.

“I love it,” I say, trying to convey how much I really do.

“You know, Leah,” he says, “if you want something from me, it’s okay to just ask.”

I’m quiet because sometimes that’s true and sometimes it isn’t.

We circle the area around the Wall looking unsuccessfully for a parking spot. Finally, Dad drives away from the crowds and into a more industrial part of the city filled mostly with office buildings emptied for the night. He tells me how DC is really two cities—the part the tourists come to see and the part with one of the highest murder rates in the country.

We park the car in front of a meter and walk toward the Wall, Dad’s camera equipment knocking at his legs, though as usual he doesn’t seem to notice. The sun has set but it isn’t yet dark. Magic hour, Dad calls it. It’s the light in which he wants to photograph the Vietnam Memorial, so we trudge past the Lincoln Memorial.

“Should we climb the stairs?” I ask.

Dad surveys the steps, holding out the front of his damp shirt, his face flushed in the heat. “I think it will be there for a while,” he says.

“It’s so hot,” I say.

“Almost there,” Dad says. “I promise it’s worth it.”

When we get to the Vietnam Memorial and descend the angled walkway running parallel to its marble wall, I understood what he means. As we move down the side of the Wall, a hush falls across the area. I reach out and touch the cool polished stone, then, realizing what I’m doing, I pull my hand away.

“It’s okay,” says Dad. “It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s designed that way.”

All around us are large men, many of them in leather vests, tattoos running down their arms. One man with a long gray ponytail traces a name onto a piece of paper and weeps. A man in a suit stands a bit back from the crowd. He looks as if he has just stopped by the monument on his way home from work. Tears spill down his face from behind his sunglasses.

Dad takes photos of the adjacent monument, a statue of three infantrymen looking into the middle distance. He tells me the story of Maya Lin who won the contest to design the Wall and the ensuing fury. How they’d hired a well-known sculptor to create this other statue because they didn’t know if people would “get” Lin’s vision.

“Plus,” says Dad, “she was an Asian woman. But you can see which monument matters more.” We look toward the marble wall, all the people gathered there.

“Is it an anniversary or something?” I ask.

“Leah,” he says, “I’ve been here maybe a dozen times. And I’ve never not seen a grown man crying his eyes out. Big tough guys. Sobbing. It never stops being real for us. This place. It’s really important.” Dad shows me how the names are arranged in chronological order, and how to find a specific person by looking them up in the large tattered books stationed around the wall.

“People wanted the names in alphabetical order, but Maya Lin pointed out you would wind up with, like, twenty-five Kevin Carrolls all in a line. The whole point was that this was personal. It wasn’t that.” He turns around and points at the statue of the infantrymen. “But in this light. What a gorgeous shot that will be.”

I watch Dad think about his shot, about the way the light will play off the intricately molded faces. It’s sad here, but it’s a kind of soaring sadness, and I don’t mind just standing, taking it all in.

When we leave, it’s dark, and we walk through the deserted city center back to the car. Dad walks briskly in front of me, his tripod slung over his shoulder, navigating the city streets. I almost bump into him when he stops in front of a homeless man who leans against a building, panhandling.

“Anything you got, man,” he says and folds his cardboard sign to hold out his hand. Dad puts his tripod down and digs through his pockets. Usually, they’re full of change, piles of it that he pulls out by the fistful and drops into a large vase at the end of the day. And he always gives change to people asking for it on the street. Sometimes, walking through Providence or Boston, we’ll get stopped two and three times and Dad will plunk a fistful of change into an outstretched palm.

Now, with Dad looking down, the man stares at the side of his face and wrinkles his forehead. “Kevin?”

Dad looks up. The two men look each other in the eye for a long silent beat.

“Hey man,” says Dad, holding out his hand. The homeless man slides his hand against his palm, and they lock fingers for a moment before letting go. Dad peels two twenties from the stack of bills in his pocket.

“Thanks, Kev,” says the man and turns to look at me as if he has just noticed I’m there. Dad has started walking away.

“Who was that?” I ask.

“Some guy I was in Vietnam with,” he says.

“Seriously?” I ask. It seems too staged, too unreal.

Dad opens the trunk and throws in his tripod and camera bag, saying nothing. I get into the passenger seat and Dad starts the car, puts it into first gear. He looks over his shoulder to be sure it’s clear and says, finally, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”

I have nothing to say in response. I’ve forgotten what it can be like to be with Dad for more than just a couple of hours at a time, the way the universe seems to line up for him in a more dramatic way than it does for the rest of us.

We drive home the next day, stopping in Baltimore to see the Edgar Allan Poe house. Driving down the streets lined with row houses is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. In the abusive heat, everyone stands on their porches or out in the street. Someone has pried open a fire hydrant and children jump through the pulsing water. I didn’t realize that even happened outside the movies. This is a larger collection of black people than I have ever seen in my life. I say that to Dad and he laughs.

“Rhode Island, you know,” he starts, and then is quiet for a moment considering what he wants to say. “Some places it’s really easy to be open-minded. It can be really easy to talk about equality when you go to the Stop and Shop, and it’s filled with other white people.”

We’re driving around, trying to find the Poe house, the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning pumping. Dad says, “We’ll just have to ask someone,” and before I protest he rolls down my window and I’m staring up at a tall black woman in a bright-pink tank top.

“Um,” I say.

The woman rolls her eyes and before I can even ask, she says, “Poe house is that way. Down this street, take a right.”

When we get there, we’re surprised to see that the house is in the middle of a residential block, a narrow row house just like the others, except that this one has a sign affixed to the door. It’s closed because of the heat. Unsafe conditions.

“What about all the people who live in the houses around here?” I ask.

Instead we go to Poe’s grave in a tiny church cemetery surrounded on all sides by busy city streets. Cars roll past, the windows down and music pouring from them into the thick air.

“Look,” I say to Dad, showing him the dates on Poe’s grave. “He died on October seventh. My birthday.” I’m sure it means something. Dad smiles at me in a way that’s so rare, I practically glow when it happens. I’m sure he doesn’t realize it looks different, but it does; it’s slower, less self-aware. I never know what I’ve done to deserve it.