Hide and Seek

For a moment she was very still. My hand found the warm bare flesh of

her shoulder where I'd torn the shirt. Her breathing was calmer and

more even now.

"He hasn't done anything fora longtime now. I'd almost forgiven him.

Both of us."

She paused, thought a moment. Her voice turned colder.

"No, I hadn't. That's a lie."

"Who? Who are we talking about?"

"My father."

She turned her head away from me slightly so that it rested just below

my shoulder and stared out through the windshield. Clouds had parted

for the moon again just moments before and now I saw snail tracks of

tears across her cheeks, bathed in cool white light, dissolving the tan

into something pale and famished-looking.

"He drinks. A lot. You're not supposed to do that when you're

vice-president of a bank. So he drinks at home where there's nobody

there but us to see.

"My mother would go out. Clubs and meetings and all that, the kind of

thing that's expected of a wife in ... her position. Because he

couldn't manage his end of it. Get him around liquor, and he's drunk.

So he stayed in. With us, me and Jimmie, my little brother. Maybe she

just wanted to get away from him. I don't know.

"He's not a bad man. He's not mean. Even when he's drunk, he's not

mean. Just weak, and foolish. She's very smart. Intolerant, and

disappointed, I guess. They should never have married at all. But

where she comes from, you get married. You just do."

She glanced at me once and then looked away, shaking her head.

"I'm not doing so good at this."

"Go on."

"When I was thirteen ... I guess you could say he raped me."

I waited. I could feel something clog my throat. I think I'd half

expected it. I felt the sudden press of the inevitable. Itwasas

though the car sat underneath a bell jar and we were in a perfect

vacuum, with everything extraneous sucked out of it and us except this

one moment in time, this one event.

Figure this if you can: