my cheek.
My father had just come in the door, red gouges on the skin around his eyes, the collar of his shirt torn. He picked up the telephone’s black receiver. Blood covered his knuckles.
“He’s knocked out,” he told my mother. “I knocked him out.”
“What happened?”
“She jumped on my back. His girlfriend—she tried to scratch my eyes.”
“She’s out there?”
“I broke her jaw. I didn’t mean to. She jumped on my back.”
My mother just stared.
“I wanted to fight,” I shouted and began to cry.
She hurried to the couch and lay me back against the pillow.
“Go to sleep,” she told me, her voice stern. There was a tension in her that I knew from my father’s rages.
“I didn’t mean to,” he kept saying. He was holding the phone, repeating, “I didn’t mean to.”
I understood that outside the man and his girlfriend lay on the dark gravel.
My father dialed and spoke into the phone, telling what had happened, that two people had come onto his property.
Then I was waking again. Red and blue lights flashed outside, rippling in the folds of the curtains. My father was putting on his jacket, the door opening, cold night air and the smell of the river washing into the room.
At some point in the days or weeks afterward, there’d been a visit to court, my brother and I neatly dressed, our mother not wearing jeans or farm clothes but a dark outfit. She was grim and silent, trying to keep us quiet, giving us the candy she usually forbade, rotting out our teeth and bones.
Maybe the police had come to the valley because my father had beaten someone up again. For months now, my mother had been withdrawn, my father—when he was home—like a watchdog in the seconds before it snarled. Shouting woke me at night—slammed doors, my mother crossing the house, naked but for a blanket wrapped around her, telling him to leave her alone.
At times the fights were obvious: he got angry when she cooked strange meals like boiled oranges and rice, or he told her to stop harping on him for having shared his vodka with me. He’d let me have a swig on a fishing trip, and, proud of how much I could handle, I’d sneaked more, the bottle lifted above my face, a shimmering bubble rising with each gulp. My brother called out to my father, who snatched it from my hand. I became drowsy and passed out, but at school I bragged that my father had let me get drunk. My mother became furious when she heard me say this, and my father later reminded me that drinking was one of our secrets. But lately everything was becoming a secret.
✴
WE WERE DRIVING to get the mail, the five of us, my father at the wheel, my mother holding my sister on her lap, my brother and I wedged in between.
Large, distant mountains stood at the horizon, the highest already white. A few rusty leaves clung to the roadside trees, and as we drove, sunlight broke in along the clouds, flashing over the hood of the truck.
The post office was a two-story building next to the muddy slough near the house where I was born, just outside the valley. A brass bell rang when we opened the door. The owner, a bespectacled man who lived up a set of creaky stairs, was reading the paper. He got up from his stool, pushed his glasses high on the bridge of his nose, and gazed at the wooden pigeonholes on the wall. He took down a sheaf of letters.
I followed my father back outside and down the steps. He stood in the sunlight as he tore the envelopes open. One held a flowery card. He stared into it. I’d never seen him get mail like this, and I stepped in close but still couldn’t make out the words.
“What is it?”
My mother laughed. “It’s from his other family.”
The skin of his neck flushed. He didn’t appear to breathe.
“What other family?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant and tried to see inside the card. But he didn’t respond, and she stared at the ground and sighed. “It was just a joke. I was just joking.”
He folded the card and put it in his jacket pocket, and we got in the truck.
Though we often received cards from my mother’s parents in Pittsburgh, he almost never spoke of his family in Quebec, other than to say, “My brother and me, we beat up all the kids in our village, so you and your brother should stick together.” And then he’d look a little angry, probably because of all the fights he’d been in.
The only time I thought about where he came from was at school, because I spoke French there and often read about Quebec. My mother loved French but didn’t speak it, and she told me that my father grew up speaking it even if he almost never did now. He claimed it was useless, but she insisted on making me learn it.
That evening, as I did my homework, I kept thinking about the card. I approached the chair where he was watching TV.
“Est-ce que tu peux m’aider avec mes devoirs?” I said. If he checked my homework and spoke in French, I might figure something out. Maybe there were questions I could ask in French that I couldn’t in English. Besides, I was always curious to hear his voice change.
“Okay, viens,” he told me, but as soon as my workbook came into his big hands, he furrowed his brow. His eyelids drooped and he hunched in his chair as I rattled away, explaining a translation assignment. When I stopped, he made a suggestion on how to write a sentence about a moose, but accidentally used the French word for mouse instead—une souris. I corrected him, telling him that a moose was un orignal.
He lowered the book and stared at the TV. Black smoke rose from an aerial view of a city. He seemed upset, as if this were a place he knew. All around him hummed familiar danger, the electric buzz of his irritation.
When he switched to English and said, “This isn’t a good time,” I felt relieved.
✴
MY MOTHER HAD clear blue eyes, not dark like his, and silvery stripes in her light brown hair that, when she pulled it back in a ponytail, reminded me of the markings on a cat.
“Whose eyes do I have?” I asked. We were alone in the kitchen while she made goat cheese and I pretended to do my homework. I spoke as if the question weren’t a big deal, though my teacher had made us read about eye color and told us that to have blue eyes the genes had to come from both parents. My mother said that mine were probably from her, unless someone in my father’s family also had blue eyes, but she didn’t know. I didn’t bother to explain how it really worked and asked, “Why don’t you know?”
“Because I’ve never met them. He’s not close to them anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh,” I said, grudgingly. I fiddled with my pencil and considered my workbook. “And whose hair do I have?”
“I had blond hair when I was younger.”
“And my nose?” She’d often told me that I was lucky not to have her small nose. She called it a ski jump, though I saw nothing wrong with it.
“Your nose is your father’s. You have his real nose.”
“His real nose?” I repeated. “His nose isn’t real?”
“He had his real nose smashed in a fight. Doctors rebuilt it and gave him a new one that’s smaller and very straight. I never saw his real one, but I’m sure you’ll have it when you grow up.”
I was sitting at a picnic table, the kind you saw in parks but never in other kids’ houses. My life was nothing like other kids’. I never said “Mom” and “Dad,” but “Bonnie” and “André,” and no one I knew had changed homes so