On Monday morning, when asked about the ketchup stains, Paine told her mother about the weekend she spent with her father, Bran, and her best friend, Callie.
“That prick,” Jessica said. Paine laughed.
“What does he do for money again?” Vick said. Vick didn’t care about Bran. Paine was the product of a single night between Bran and Jessica. It was no thorn in Vick’s side.
They sat around a small table in the kitchen next to a door that opened onto an all-weather room which connected to the garage. There was a living room, a formal dining room, a single bathroom, and three bedrooms, all painted in neutral colors, though Jessica planned to change that. The house, a low brick ranch, was built sixty years ago by a developer looking to capitalize on the sprouting outer-ring suburbs. The street was lined with similar builds, differentiated mainly by shade of brick. After dating for a decade, a decade which saw Paine grow from infancy to adolescence, Vick bought the house for the three of them. Up until that point, seeing each other was limited to weekends. This meant little of Paine in Vick’s life, and even less of Bran. It wasn’t really much of Jessica either, but they were all adjusting.
Paine said Bran took her and Callie to a super-arcade and dropped them at the door with something like eight dollars in quarters. They spent five dollars and some odd change on a basket of french fries. They played one game, twice, on a brand new machine. Two television screens rained down a series of arrows pointing in various directions, but Paine and Callie couldn’t figure out if they should swipe the screen, step on the pads on the ground, or some combination of both. They argued until Callie dared Paine to wipe some snot on one of the screens. Afterwards they watched a group of teenagers play basketball for two straight hours. “There are a lot of numbers in your story,” Vick said.
“He’s a clinical psychologist,” Jessica said. “His specialty was children, but he sticks to tele-health now, online consultations, renewing prescriptions.”
“I imagine those are one-sided conversations,” Vick said.
“He didn’t go in with you?” Jessica said to Paine, who was wincing and turning green. “Did he stay in the car the whole time?”
Paine shrugged.
“They don’t really interrogate the patient at all,” Vick said. “They look at the sheet and say oh yes you’ll be needing this. It’s all about volume. A numbers game.”
“Does your father have a girlfriend?” Jessica said.
Paine shrugged.
“Anyway, you should change your shirt. Vick will walk you today.”
All of this at breakfast, before school, a day of classes Paine would never attend. After cereal and oat milk and orange juice and conversation and turkey patties, before she could make it to her bedroom to change, Paine vomited into the kitchen garbage can.
“So,” Vick said. “Then there’s that.”
“I need to get my things,” Jessica said.
•
The following Monday was Halloween. Vick took Paine and Callie trick-or-treating. There was a chill and some passing drizzle, some of it forming into frozen crystals and staying that way. The darkness came early that day, seemed to come early that year, leaving Halloween feeling like a half-engagement with winter. Paine was no longer green, but whatever colors had lingered all week had not been her own, and her appetite hadn’t returned for anything but sugar. She wanted to be dead, so Vick painted her that way.
“And yesterday?” Vick said. Toddlers in sailor suits, infant gourds, a group of teenage football players and cheerleaders in their real uniforms, a losing record, the uniforms all too clean. They tramped some azaleas.
“We were at Gramm’s,” Paine said. “She made us jelly-filled pancakes with sugar on top. She told us about lunar physics and Apollo 11. She let us on her computer.”
Vick waited for more, but it never came. “What else?” Paine and Callie didn’t respond, instead exchanging looks of inhaled laughter. “Great. Where was Bran?” Vick said. They turned towards the next house. “Your dad…” But Vick’s phrase disappeared over the roof of the bungalow. A wolf, a burn victim. A man stood behind a closed screen door.
Once up the stairs, Paine and Callie stopped and stared. Vick was over their shoulder, behind and down the stairs. The man did not open, instead waiting for the girls to knock and say trick-or-treat. When they didn’t, he opened his screen door, casting them in the light from the house. His long shadow stretched into the yard like pulled taffy.
“What are you supposed to be?”
Callie wore heavy eyeliner, heavy everything, and carried a small attaché case with pyramid-scheme makeup brochures. “I’m my Aunt Lynn.”
Paine swelled and looked down. “I’m dead,” Paine said.
Vick had done green beneath Paine’s eyes and sallowed the rest of her face. The man spent time on her until saying to Vick, “Is she okay?”
He candied them without an answer, and they walked away. Zombies, witches, rabbits, queens, blue-suited superheroes.
“In being death, you hope that you won’t become death. In being a door-to-door makeup salesperson,” Vick said, “the same.”
Someone sneezed.
•
One week after Halloween, the midnight calls to Jessica’s phone began. It was Bran, in the dead of the night, to say to Jessica, in the earliest of hours, that someone was poisoning Paine’s idea of him. Each time she heard his voice she could feel the wild admissions of time. A gruff gravel had emerged in his throat over what had been those eleven years. For Jessica, Bran had only been one night, and what does a single night constitute other than a party? One night between two strangers is nothing except guts and, if you are unlucky, a brand new, other stranger.
If Jessica silenced her phone at night, Bran left voicemails, litanies of questions as to who she thought she was. What did that prick Vick say about him to his own daughter anyway? What had he done to her eyes? After Halloween, Paine looked worse than before, but when Jessica tried to explain the nuances of Vick’s makeup job combined with Paine’s lingering bug, how she wanted to be dead, Bran still went on and on about that fucking prick Vick. Vick slept through every tirade.
It wasn’t long before, with Bran’s consistency and long-windedness, Jessica’s voicemail box grew full, incapable of housing anymore Bran. How she had remained so cordial all of these years, she did not know. Was Paine’s adolescence triggering this? Was a parental relationship, regardless of its framework, such that it fell victim to the increased sentience of its offspring? Or was it simpler than that? Now that Jessica had Vick around full time, there was a great contrast in how she dealt with and felt about Bran. Maybe Bran noticed. There was the inverse as well. Everything that she valued about Vick now seemed small and sheepish and inconsequential when put side-by-side with the oddities and danger of Bran. Vick could hide from Bran. Bran could chase Vick. The two of them could consume each other. Bran in the most visceral sense of the word, Vick, in his existence, such an emotional magnet as to render Bran’s aura empty.
That’s how it was in the middle of Jessica’s brain, in the middle of those November nights. Jessica awake quick and hot, then cold, then hot, disturbed by the most shallow of rings. This was beyond her narcolepsy. Her doctor had given her something new a few months back, convoluted dosages and administrations of Rohypnol meant to push her towards REM, but both she and Vick were scared to death of touching it, so REM eluded Jessica still.
“If administered incorrectly,” the doctor had said, “it could stop your heart.”
“How likely?” they had said.
“Very.”
•
Under the joint decision making of Jessica and Vick, Paine began to come home from school to no one. She would spend two hours each day by herself. This is how she learned to achieve her boredoms, to apply too much makeup, to sip the kitchen sink rum until it made her spin. The arrangement was made with certain caveats, namely that she come home immediately, complete her homework, and stay home until Vick returned from work. Other things were suggested, like light chores. When she received homework, which was not often, she wouldn’t do it. Jessica and Vick’s system of checks and balances, which was supposed to keep Paine honest, was not much of a system at all, consisting of a simple question and an even simpler answer. Yes. Once Paine realized the extent of her mother and Vick’s vigilance, she began to eschew other things, not just the homework. She started with simply dallying on the way home from school. It was only a block to walk. She could see her house and her school in the same glance, so she took her time, zig-zagging the sidewalk, looking towards the fringes of her neighbors’ lawns for bugs or weeds or deep, worked trenches. Soon she made a habit of finding a stick that she could pick up and walk with everyday. She would poke around in the fringes. One day, bored with an anthill she could not stir, she threw the stick into a yard. There was something about depositing the unwanted debris onto someone else’s property that thrilled her. She began to toss rocks into yards, a little further and further each time. This gradually raised her line of vision. She knew that she couldn’t get away with throwing rocks onto porches or through windows, not in the middle of the day, but she did feel just insignificant and isolated enough that she began to stare into the windows, seeing what she could see, which was usually nothing. On a dreary enough day, she might catch a body moving from one window to another, a lamp turning on or off, someone in the thrall of their own chores, but it wasn’t enough. As the days grew shorter, and Paine took more notice of the late darkness of morning and the early darkness of evening, she asked her mother and Vick if she could walk to school in the mornings by herself. She had shown herself to be a responsible and capable walker, so they took no issue. This is how Paine started to get an even better look into windows, through the darkness, into the light of the houses.
•
“I think we should have Bran and Eleanor over for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Is he still calling you at night?” Vick said.
Jessica stood up and, without saying a word, began moving dishes around. She pushed a platter of ham from the center of the table to the far end, closer to the empty seat than anyone else. She took the salad tongs from the salad and placed them directly on the table. When she reached into her water and began to remove the ice, Vick reached out and wrapped his hand around her wrist. She smiled at him like she was up to nothing at all and had run into him on the street at random.
“Gramm and Dad are coming here for Thanksgiving?” Paine said.
“Your mother doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving,” Vick said. “Right, Jessica?”
Jessica sat and smoothed her napkin into her lap a few times. “It’s not that we need to celebrate Thanksgiving, but we eat dinner everyday, and we happen to be off work.”
“He hates me,” Vick said. Paine laughed. “But that’s not the point.” He turned to Paine. “The man, your father, is an animal. He’s hardly fit to see you as often as he does.”
Paine’s laughter turned. She was old enough to know the difference between parenting by the book and whatever it was that her dad was doing, but she did not care.
“He’s not your dad,” Paine said to Vick. “And he’s not yours either. He also isn’t your husband. He’s my dad.”
“Can you put the tongs back in the salad and pass me the bread and butter?” Vick said.
“We’re going to cook a bird,” Jessica said. “We will have them over and we’ll stuff the bird with our bare hands. How’s that sound, Paine?”
“What’s stuff the bird?” Paine said.
“You take bread and vegetables and herbs,” Vick said, “and you shove your hands into the ass of the dead, featherless bird. Then you cook the bird and eat everything, inside and out.”
“I’m going for a walk,” Paine said.
•
It was cold. Paine walked to Callie’s. On the way she looked through windows and saw three families eating dinner and most of the televisions on. She hoped to see much more, though she wasn’t sure what it was that she could see. She knew that there was more to see, more that might make her body feel new ways, as bodies feel so many ways, and she had only discovered a few of them.
Each of the televisions told something different both about the world and about the people watching them. Paine wondered. What did it mean to watch the weather incessantly? What did it mean to watch sports? What did it mean when the news was on? These were all people, that much she knew.
“You can come in,” Callie said. “My dad isn’t here.”
Callie and Paine took a bottle of vodka from a cabinet and went to her garage where they sat in Callie’s dad’s 1986 blue Ford Mustang and sipped the smallest sips.
“Gross.” Paine said. “Is this rubbing alcohol?”
“No,” Callie said. “It’s not.”
Paine asked Callie about her mother. Callie said that she swam into the lake and never came back.
•
The following Saturday, Bran took Paine and Callie to a nearby ski slope. It was small, just a few hills taken in a single view. The snow, fake and fancy, dropped on Friday morning and was all ice after Friday night, teen night. Neither of the girls had ever skied before. Bran pulled into the parking lot and up to the front entrance. He gave them enough money to cover the cost of renting skis or snowboards, whichever they preferred. He took a permanent marker and, pushing up their sleeves, scrawled his phone number, large and barely legible.
“Go ahead,” he said, and they began to go.
“Thanks, dad. Love you,” Paine said, and Bran drove towards the back of the parking lot.
“Let’s switch,” Paine said to Callie. “Today I’ll be Callie and you be Paine.”
In the lobby, they rented snowboards and fell in line with a beginner’s class on their way to the bunny hill. During the lesson, they pretended to be real bunnies, dropping to all fours and showing their front teeth. The rest of the day progressed just fine except for an occasional striking hunger. There was nothing enriching happening at all.
•
While Bran was at the ski slope with the girls, Eleanor sat down in her brown recliner with the worst headache she had ever had. Sunlight streamed through the front window, and the aneurysm ruptured. Her wake took place on Tuesday, the funeral on Wednesday. The following day was Thanksgiving. Bran came alone to Vick and Jessica’s for dinner. No one expected any problems. At both the wake and the funeral, Bran had been curt and formal with everyone, even sweet, Jessica thought, with Vick—so much so that when Jessica delivered the toast, she felt confident ending it as such: “Paine. You have long met us with ideas rather than questions, and we are, all of us, lucky to be your parents.”
After dinner, before pie, Paine asked both Vick and Bran to go on a walk with her. Vick shared his cigarettes with Bran. They both drank at dinner until they were tipsy, and the sidewalk was now too humble for them, the bite of the nicotine adding an extra spin. Paine pointed to each house and explained its habits, its inhabitants, as best she knew them. The street they were on came to a dead end, a field. Paine pointed to the last house on the right.
“The parents in this house never sit down for their meals,” she said. “They move everything from the kitchen to the table, one-by-one, while the kids eat. As soon as they finish they start moving it all back again, and the kids get up and run away.”
“Sounds lovely. Lively.” Vick said. The house was dark now, no one home.
“Looks like they’re someone else’s nightmare tonight,” Bran said.
A bunny hopped through the yard and onto the porch. It stopped in front of the large sheet glass of the storm door. Paine picked up a rock. With a similar bend of the back, Bran also picked up a rock. Vick lit another cigarette with the one he had just finished and blew his smoke towards the moon.