Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

are. That’s one thing you’ll never have to go through, no matter what, I promise you on my sacred word of honor.” Ten years old; that’s exactly what I was. “Ten years old, and I love you a great deal—Father,” he wrote in his very own handwriting on the round gold locket he gave me for my tenth birthday. We had never heard about divorce before, except from Grandsarah, who had skipped those details, and we were overwhelmed by pity and love for Father, cut in half when he was a little boy ten years old. Father, what about the promise, I reminded him, trying, in my mind, to shake his arm harder, but I could tell just by the way he was standing, that he already knew.…

“Furthermore,” Mother was saying, “you will see that this won’t really be as painful or make as much difference as it sounds. Although Leland won’t be staying here—he’ll be at a hotel—you will see him just as much as ever, probably more. He’ll come and have dinner with you when he can, just as he does now. You see, one of the biggest problems of his kind of business is that, even more than now, he will find it increasingly necessary to travel, to spend so much time away from home—in New York, for instance—that we will hardly ever be able to see him anyway.”

“But, Mother,” said Bill. Bridget and I looked at him, astonished at the interruption. Father half turned away from the ocean toward us.

“Yes, my darling,” said Mother, kneeling down and kissing the top of his head.

“But we are in California to be with Father,” blurted Bill. “Isn’t that why?”

“Yes, my darling,” said Mother. She paused for a long time, then stood up and looked over at her gold cigarette case on the table. Nobody moved.

“Now it’s silly of me to make this all sound too serious,” she said, changing the matter-of-fact inflection in her voice to one of levity. “You all look stricken and there’s no need to be. Everything will be practically the same, you’ll see.” She smiled at us in a secret way, knowing how to make us giggle. “Only you must treat this just like going to the bathroom; it’s not something you talk to other people about. Even if they’re nosy and ask. All right? This must be just between the five of us. And Emily.”

We were tongue-tied. Father walked over slowly with his eyes down. He didn’t say a word either. Oh, please, I thought with all my strength, the way I did whenever he said he wished he could put me in his pocket and take me with him. He raised his eyes, and in that moment I knew from the look in them why he wasn’t able to say anything at all.

“Don’t worry, darlings.” Mother smiled. “We both love you, each of you, more than you will ever know. Now go on and play with what’s left of this beautiful afternoon.” And she turned toward Father.

“Father.” I said his name involuntarily. He looked at me again, blindly, and that made me want to cry. I forgot what I wanted to ask, there was so much. “Are you going right now?” That was just a fragment of what I wanted to know, but I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes.

“No. Oh, no. Of course not. Would I ever go without hugging you goodbye?”

I put up a hand to shade my eyes so that he wouldn’t see them; I was afraid they reflected his. “A bear hug?”

“Until I squeeze you to death.” The familiar answer made us smile tentatively.

“Are you staying for dinner?” asked Bridget.

“Well, we’ll see.”

“What hotel are you staying at, the Beverly Hills Hotel? Are you going to take all your clothes with you? Now? Do you have to?”

“No, no,” said Father. “I’ll be right here for a little while and I won’t go without telling you.” He looked at us very hard and we looked back for a minute before obediently turning away.

But what, I wondered as we walked in silence across the lawn in the direction of the playhouse, what if Mother’s not right and there is a difference from now on? What if he never comes back again? What if after two or four or six weeks—? But he had promised. And Father never broke a promise. I knew, because he had promised me he would never spank me again, that summer night in St. Malo, and he never did.

After that, nothing ever seemed the same again.

It was as if the first decade of my life had been roped off from the rest of it. I thought of it that way, that first decade of my life, when I thought of it at all, which I tried not to. For one thing, there was no way to approach it without crossing a barrier of pain. Sometimes I blundered across, forgetting. Then all I could do was cross my fingers and pray that next time the pain would be less.

Once I was back inside, I felt crazy and alone, as if I were talking to myself. That was another thing. Bridget and Bill were no help: they claimed they recollected barely anything, less and less as those years receded. Bridget finally swore she could remember nothing that had happened in the first seven years of her life. That was odd, I thought; part of the disparity, because on the other side of the pain was a time when everything was radiant, when every detail had such absolute clarity, every color such vibrance, that it would be impossible ever to forget. Or to duplicate. By comparison, time afterward was fogged over. By comparison, my more recent history had, for me, the remote impact of photographs or postcards shown in the wake of a stunning event witnessed firsthand. Either I couldn’t see as clearly or some quality was missing, gone forever.

eter Fonda:

“I remember