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By the time she arrived, I had opened every window in the house, sprayed air freshener, and stuck Dad in the shower. I’d thrown the bong as far into the cornfield as I could and flushed his pills down the toilet. I’d cleaned up the now-solid puke from the carpet, poured baby powder on the mess it left behind and tried to vacuum it all away.

Dad stepped out of the shower and was yelling at me to close the goddamn windows when Trish walked in. I explained what had happened in a few quick sentences while she checked Dad’s pulse. He’d put on a baggy pair of sweatpants and an ancient sweater and looked more like a homeless man than a war hero or my father. She told me to shut the windows while she got him into bed. I finished a heartbeat before a squad car pulled in the driveway, lights flashing, no siren.

“Can they arrest him if they don’t find anything?” I asked.

“Depends,” she said. “Keep your story simple. You woke up, Dad was passed out, and you didn’t know the guys in your living room. You never saw them before.”

“But Michael—”

“No names. They wouldn’t leave. You were scared. Okay?”

A cop knocked at the front door.

“Feel free to cry,” she added.

* * *

Trish took charge, explaining who she was and why she was there, and then taking one of the cops, the skinny one, back to see Dad. The other one was built like a defensive tackle, massive shoulders, neck thicker than his head, and hands the size of baseball mitts. He was on guard, assessing danger with every step like Dad did, but by the time he’d checked out the whole house and sat down with me in the living room, he had relaxed a bit.

I answered his questions. Dad had the flu. I stayed home to take care of him. No, he hadn’t been to a doctor. No, I didn’t know the guys. No, I couldn’t describe them, I was too scared.

He wrote down my answers in a spiral notebook and then he asked me the exact same questions again. I gave the same exact answers. He wrote them down again and then he looked at me and smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. He had brown eyes, light brown like an acorn. He glanced above my head.

“Who punched the wall?” he asked.

“It was like that when we moved in,” I said. “Squatters.”

He did not write that down. “Stay put,” he said.

He walked down the hall, his keys and handcuffs and various chains jingling, sounding absurdly close to what I’d always imagined Santa’s sleigh would sound like. At the end of the hall, he and his buddy held a murmured meeting. The heat had kicked on and the air was beginning to smell like Michael’s satanic cologne. What if this kept happening, what if Dad wasn’t on a roller coaster, what if he was on a spiraling slide, turning down and down into the darkness? What would Michael do the next time?

“Excuse me, sir?” I called. “I took a picture of their license plates. Would that help?”