On Tuesday it was raining, so Stacey and I didn’t go sit behind the garage. I took her down to Peter’s room and turned the stereo up really loud so she wouldn't hear Francie dying. The walls in our house are pretty solid, the old plaster kind. I closed Peter’s door. I locked Peter’s door. We lay down in the bed, on top of the blankets. Her face was a few inches away from mine.

“Aren’t you glad we’ll be in high school next year?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There are so many more people there,” she said. “It’ll be easier to be someone different.”

“What do you want to be?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just want to start over somewhere new.” Her fingertips were cold on my stomach. They climbed my ribs like a ladder. “Maybe I’ll cut all my hair off. Maybe I’ll dye it black.”

“I like your hair,” I said.

“Matt Cunningham asked me out today,” she said. Her hand slid around to my back. I swallowed hard.

“Did you say yes or no?”

“No, silly,” she said. “Of course I said no.” She popped the clasp on my bra open. Her hand moved up onto my barely-there breast. While we were kissing, I slid my hand up her shirt, unhooked her bra. Her breasts were soft and hard at the same time, firm doughy things.

“Can I sleep over Saturday night?” she asked me.

“Sure,” I said. She rolled on top of me and just stayed there, not moving, just breathing. I liked the weight of her on me, how when she inhaled and her body filled up with air, I thought my ribs would break.

We only have one picture of my father and me. There are other pictures of him and my mom, him and Peter, even of all of us together. But there’s just the one of the two of us, at least that I’ve seen. In the picture, he’s tossing me in the air. I’m maybe ten months old. I’m laughing and he’s laughing. In the picture, he looks like someone you would think was a great dad, but it only makes me uncomfortable, like I’m someone with amnesia, like people are showing me pictures of my family and that even though I believe they’re my family I can’t feel any of the things I’m supposed to feel.

It also makes me uncomfortable when I think that wherever he is, my father remembers me even though I don’t remember him. He changed my diapers and held my hands when I was learning to walk and zipped up my coat for me. It doesn’t seem fair that he gets to remember all that. It’s like having someone watch you when you were sleeping, they get to remember you in a way you can’t remember yourself.

“Doesn’t it make you mad?” Stacey asked me the other day. We were sitting in Peter’s car because it was cold outside and the lock on the passenger side is broken. He always said it didn’t really matter because it was such a piece of shit, whoever wanted it could have it. It’s so old, there are ashtrays even in the back seat. I like using the car lighter, the way you have to press the tip of the cigarette onto the hot red coil.

Stacey is the only person my age who’s ever asked me anything about my father, stuff like what Francie’s therapist would say. I’m not used to anyone my age talking like that, even though I know they all secretly wonder about my father. With me, they act like I’m missing half my face but they don’t want to ask how it happened.

Stacey isn’t like anyone else. Stacey says whatever she’s thinking, without worrying if it will upset someone or not. Sometimes it makes me want to smack her and hug her at the same time.

I know she thought I was just trying to change the subject when I shrugged and said not really, that it didn’t make me mad. But the thing is, you have to know someone in order to be mad at them, and I don't know my father.

What I don’t know how to explain is that when I think about my father, it’s Peter I feel mad at. Because our father stayed until Peter was almost seven. Because Peter remembers him. When we talk about our father, Peter calls him “dad.” My mom probably knew my father better than anyone, but Peter’s the only one who can tell me what it was like to be his kid. But he’s never told me enough. Maybe there’s no such thing as enough. Maybe there just aren’t words for some things.

Now Peter is gone, too, and what I still want to know won’t fit on a postcard.

“Don’t you ever want to find him?” Stacey asked me. “Aren’t you curious?”

I shrugged again. “How much would I ever really know about him, anyway?” She didn’t say anything, then, and I felt glad and sorry that I said the right thing to shut her up. She pushed the car lighter in again, and I grabbed it when it popped out. Looking at the bright coil made me want to push my fingertip into it, not to burn myself, just the same way you want to reach out and touch shiny things. But I just lit another cigarette instead.

***

Last night, my mom and I stayed up late, like we do sometimes on Fridays after Francie goes to bed. We watched one of the old Cary Grant movies she loves, My Favorite Wife. In the movie, Cary Grant is married to this bitchy woman because he thinks his first wife is dead, but really she’s just been shipwrecked for years and she comes back. It sounds all serious, but it’s mostly funny. I always wonder, though, if it reminds my mom of her husbands, even though my father probably isn’t dead or even shipwrecked.

After the movie, we were sitting there on the couch still watching the black TV, and I asked her “Did you love my father?”

And she said, very plainly, “Yes.”

Then I asked, “Did you love Francie’s father?”

That time she was quiet for a bit longer. “Yes,” she said again. “I loved him. But…” she stopped. I could see her looking through a file cabinet in her head, trying to find the words for what she wanted to say. “I loved him, but not the same. I don’t know if I was ever in love with him. Do you understand?” I nodded, even though I wasn’t completely sure. “I think maybe everyone has one great love,” she said. “The one you never get over.”

“Then why didn’t we go with my father to California?” I asked her.

“Love isn’t always as simple as that,” she said. “Even great love.”

“Do you know where he is now?” I asked.

“Kind of,” she said. “Not really.” I wondered how you could kind of know where someone was. I thought about Peter. She patted my knee. “What makes you so interested in love all of a sudden?”

“Just the movie,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if there was a boy."

“No,” I said. “There’s no boy.”

Stacey told me that people have auras, and that some people can see them, that different colored auras mean different things. I don’t really believe in that kind of stuff, but some days I feel like there’s something around me that gets snagged up on the corners of things, that gets caught on every sharp edge.

Earlier this morning, I went downstairs and sat at Peter’s computer. I opened a new document and sat there looking at the blinking cursor for a long time. I started typing a line, deleted it, started again, then deleted it again.

I typed: There are things I wish I could tell you. There are things I don’t think I would be able to tell you even if you were here.

I’m going to be fourteen next week.

I think I’m starting to understand why you left.

I stared at the screen, then deleted it all.

I typed: I feel like the older we get, the less we can say to each other.

I hit save and walked away. I laid down in Peter’s bed and pulled the blankets up to my chin. I turned my head and smashed my face into the pillow and thought how it smelled kind of like Stacey, and kind of like Peter, and kind of like me.

In my head, I’m trying to imagine myself as separate from the rest of them, from my brother and my sister and my mom and even my father, even though I can’t remember what his voice sounded like or how it felt to rush back toward him when he tossed me in the air. But they’re like parts of my skeleton. My brother is my ribs and my sister is my collarbone and my mom is my ankles and my father is my tailbone, that useless part of you that hurts like hell when you fall on it. Sometimes, I think I understand why Peter felt like he had to put oceans between us. I like to picture him waking up in his cramped tent somewhere and stretching his arms and legs and knowing that his aching bones are all his.

One time, Francie was pressed to death, like what they used to do to people sometimes back in the witch trial days. Flat board on the chest, and then they’d keep adding weight. I picture cinder blocks, but that can’t be right. I guess they must have used stones. And even though I don’t want to, I already know that’s what I’m going to think about tonight when Stacey lays her body on top of mine, when I let myself give way.

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