I have just finished Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief," and now I need to tell a story. My own story. I am putting it here because of one simple truth: the only way I'm ever going to finish it is to tell it directly to you, whoever you are, reading this. There have been a hundred stops and starts in dozens of notebooks and on more than a few hard drives, but somehow I always lose the words. My memory fogs. I lose the proper time line and question my own remembering, getting lost in the numbers. I am desperate to tell this story right, as if not slipping up even one tiny time will ensure that you believe it at the end.
But the older I get, the less and less it matters to me whether or not you believe it. I just need to tell it, to have someone witness it. I can't promise that it will make sense. I can't promise you will like it. I can't promise I won't mess up a year, or a detail, or lose a chunk of time altogether right in the middle of recalling it. That happens sometimes. I'm walking along and suddenly there's a crater bombed into the surface of my brain, and the only way to get to the place where the words start up again is to hold my breath and jump. If you are still listening when I land, I will hand you the next piece of the story. Come with me, if you will. Let me tell you who Tif is.
The train tracks ran a few yards from our trailer. Rocks hit the window sometimes, and the deafening shriek of the train in the middle of the night was enough to unnerve me every time I heard it. I never got used to that train. Every time it thundered by I would match its whistle with the length and breadth of my screaming. I was four years old. I had a puppy, a baby brother, and a best friend named Jimmy who lived next door. My aunt and uncle lived across the road from us in a big green house behind an unpainted fence, and across the road the other way was a weather-beaten old house with "Massey's Old-Fashioned Grocery" painted on a sign above the porch.
I loved Mr. Massey. I remember him as tall and bald, always wearing a black jacket and little spectacles perched on his nose. Once he showed me an old rat trap, lifting a little door to demonstrate how the rat would fall into the water at the bottom of the trap and drown. I have no idea whether or not this was accurate. He could've been joking, or telling me a story just to keep me entertained, but I thought he was a god. I'd have followed him everywhere if he had let me. He did something even better, though, in giving me candy.
I remember his candy counter as being absolutely huge. It seemed to span the entire room from one end to the next. It shone with its own special light from a little girl's version of Heaven. I would press my nose to the glass and stare in at all the colorful candies, and Mr. Massey would open a white sack and reach into the counter to scoop out Sixlets and M&Ms and candy lipsticks, Whoppers and Butterfingers, candy cigarettes, necklaces and bracelets made of candy. I'd eat the candy lipsticks first and then put the pink and yellow tubes over my fingers to make long witch fingernails. I never knew I'd grow up to be a real Witch.I guess some things are in the cards.
Before I left home so many years later, I looked through my mother's photo albums and appropriated for my own uses a handful of photographs from my younger years: a baby picture, infant Tif in a pink dress with a white collar and the soft spot on her head still visible beneath her furring of hair, staring open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the camera; toddler Tif sprawled on a hotel bed during a vacation to Florida, all dimples and brown ringlets and plaster casts. According to my great-grandmother, rest her soul, I told a boy in the elevator to come to my room and play with me, and he did. It may have been the bellhop. That's the impression I got when I heard the story.
The other picture with me in it has my father in it, too. He's sprawled on the front steps of our trailer grinning cheekily at the camera, shirtless, wearing blue jeans. I'm sitting next to him, summer-blonde, my tanned little legs curving oddly, beaming my widest little-Tif smile. Both of us are wearing sunglasses. Mine are much too big, and somehow I've hooked them behind my ears upside-down. I look like a mutant fly. I look innocent and happy, the way a child is supposed to look. I pick up that photograph now and stare in at myself frozen in time, and I wish I could remember that day, crawl back into that picture and assume that sturdy little body and sit next to that man for a few minutes, wearing his sunglasses upside-down and both of us smiling. I miss that man.
My father was in the same category as Mr. Massey back then: he was a god. I was always learning new things to please him: "Look, Daddy, look!" concentrating to pump my willowy little legs in time with the swing, to make him proud of me. He'd say, "Good job, Sissy!" and slap me fives: high five, low five, middle five. He was there when I needed help navigating something, flying me through the air in a glorious swoop before setting me on my feet again with, "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down." And when his weeble did fall down, he taught her to be tough:
"Are you broken?"
"No."
Are you bleedin'?"
"No."
"Are you dead?"
"No."
"Well, get up and walk it off, then." And I would.
Even today I go through this mental inventory when I've crashed to the floor somewhere and feel like crying: "Are you broken? Are you bleeding? Are you dead? Get up and walk it off, then."
When I did happen to be hurt, he always took care of me. If I fell and bloodied my nose, he'd show me how to sit with my head between my knees to keep from swallowing the blood. Once, I lost my balance on the edge of what I can only describe as a small cliff and crashed through the undergrowth rolling over and over and over, until my back connected hard with a tree. I had skinned my arm from the wrist to the shoulder in a painful, bloody mess.He was there the second after I gathered my breath to scream, vaulting over the side of that hill like an Olympian. I didn't even notice the other man with him. I just saw my daddy, coming to save me.
A long time later, grown and in college, I tripped in my living room and fell, cracking my head open on the sharp corner of a table. I curled into the pain and clutched the wound, then pulled my hand away to find blood running down my arm. I almost panicked. Then I remembered my father's calm voice, taking inventory. I sucked in a breath and took my own. What did I need? Help. Stitches. And therefore a phone. I crawled to the phone and hit the emergency number, 444. I calmly explained what had happened: "This is Tiffany in 8014, O'Daniel. I just fell and hit my head. I'm bleeding."
The first security officer to arrive reminded me a lot of my father. Physically, they were nothing alike: my father was tall and slender with dark hair, and this man had gray hair and was built like a linebacker. But their words were the same. I was crying by the time he came in, because blood had pooled in the lenses of my glasses and turned my vision red. He walked to the bathroom and wet me a rag. He handed it to me and sat on my coffee table like an old friend. "It's alright," he said. "You're not dead. You're just scared. You're a tough cookie, you know that?"
Tough cookie. My father used to say that. I quit crying. When the EMT's arrived to strap me onto a backboard and hoist me into the ambulance, I didn't cry. The whole bumpy way to the hospital, even though the wound on my head ground harder against the backboard with every pothole we hit, I didn't cry. When they wheeled me into an empty room and left me there for a good half hour, still strapped with my open wound tight against the backboard, I didn't cry. I gritted my teeth and dug my fingernails into the bed rail. I was a tough cookie, and somehow, even though he wasn't there, I was trying to prove it. I was trying to make him proud.
I almost called him when I got home that night, just to tell him. To hear him say, "Good job, Sissy." But a lot of things had happened between us by then, and yesterday's pain has a way of obstructing today's redemption. I got my stitches, collected my pain medication, and went home. I let the night pass without picking up the phone. I didn't know what to say. I still don't.
Sometimes I imagine a reunion. He'll be standing in the garage in his blue jeans and boots with a handkerchief tied around his forehead and a grease rag poking out of his back pocket. The radio will be playing his favorite CCR song, and I'll come up next to him and we'll sing it together:
"When I was a little bitty baby, my Mama used to rock me in the cradle ..."
There will be no need for explanations. He will know, and I will know, and it will be enough. Only it wouldn't be enough. Not really. Because I don't think I could stop myself from opening my mouth. I don't think I could stop myself from saying, "Why did you let her? Why did you always leave me? How can I ever trust you again?" I don't think I could stop myself from shaking in his presence. From remembering his fist going through my bedroom door. The sound of his belt cracking against the wall. The sound of his voice raised in anger and directed at me. Me. The one who had always thought he walked on water. The one who watched her last hero become someone she didn't know, someone she was afraid of. But mostly, I don't think I could look at him without seeing his back as he walked away, leaving me behind to suffer. And no matter what he said about it, I know I wouldn't trust him. I wouldn't want to and I wouldn't learn to. Some things, once broken, cannot be fixed.
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