Memory doesn’t work like writing, one word at a time, one ant in a line. It’s more like a science-class filmstrip on fire in the projector, one image blooming orange-white and black into another. Here’s one: it’s 11am and 101° in Laredo when I steer my rented silver Hyundai to the cracked curb outside 1319 Plum Street. This is it—the last house where we all lived together—but it looks nothing like I remember. I stand on the sidewalk, a tired thirty-two-year-old who’s traveled 2,000 miles to see an empty, ugly, unfamiliar house. Then a screen door slams somewhere, and suddenly I’m small, plucked by the shoulders like the yellow Google Maps guy and dropped into another time.
I am five, a towheaded daddy’s girl squatting in our front-yard, fingers grubby from combing through the grass looking for a four-leaf clover. I told my father I would find one, and I will; I always do. It’s a game we play. Maybe this is true, and maybe it’s not, but it’s what I remember. If I’m there when my parents get mad, when my mother’s face gets stiff and squinty and my father grits his teeth, he says “Scram, Kitten, go outside and find me a four-leaf clover; I’ll give you a nickel if you can.”
I’m so sure, at five, that I am lucky. I always find one. I pluck it and hold it carefully by the tiny round stem. I roll it back and forth between my fingers, bring it to my nose and sniff its baby green. But this day, in this memory, I can’t find one. Maybe I take a break from searching to watch fire ants carry too-big twigs; maybe I watch them disappear, one by one, into the black hole in their gritty ant mountain. Maybe I try not to listen to my parents yelling inside. Maybe I put my hands over my ears, but “war” and “divorce” find their way through my fingers.
In my memory—the memory I don’t want; the one I came here to find—my father’s heavy footsteps get closer to the door. I don’t have time to stand up or to panic. The screen door squeals and he’s there, half in, half out. I can’t remember this, and yet I do.
My father holds his Air Force cap scrunched in one hand. I watch him swallow, watch the lump in his throat go up and down. His Adam’s apple, I think, and I must let out a laugh at that silly name because he turns and looks at me.
Do I do that, the grown-up me? Do I turn my father’s head for one last look before he goes?
His eyes are saying Hello, Kitten, it’s good to see you. But I think they’re saying something else, too, something I can’t hear, or maybe I don’t want to. He looks back into the house. He’s listening so hard, I imagine I see the pink, rounded edges of his big ears tremble. I’m about to be brave—about to ask What is it, Daddy?—when he shakes his head and steps onto the stoop, letting the screen door slap behind him.
That slap’s the sound I hear, the echo, the after. That’s the sound that wakes the silent sun and sets it spinning, the sound I will hear for decades, in my dreams.
In my memory, I stand up into the cold dark of my father’s shadow. I watch the outline of an arm settle a triangle of a hat on a round head, and then he bends down and he’s Daddy again.
“C’mere, kiddo,” my father says. He lifts me up, one big hand beneath each arm. Usually, he swings me into the air—my muscles get ready to fly—but this time he just holds me against him for a short minute, a minute too small to feel the press of his buttons or smell his neck, and then he puts me down.
Suddenly everything’s moving too fast, the sun across the sky, my father across the yard. His convertible’s at the curb, top back, accordion-folded; he’s creaking open the door. I start to go after him, arms outstretched. I want to say Wait, Daddy, here—I found one for you. But I didn’t; I didn’t find a four-leaf clover. At the end of my arms that can’t reach him, my hands are grubby, speckled, green, and empty, and my father climbs into his yellow Mustang, revs the angry engine, loud, and drives away.
Cathy Luna lives and writes in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth (Beautiful Things), Lunch Ticket, and Consequence Magazine. Cathy teaches memoir at Writers in Progress Studio in Florence, MA, and coaches Five College faculty writers. She is working on a memoir.
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