Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,34

rather than older. To be honest with you he looks ridiculous in this picture. Not much better in the rest.

More hospital pictures. In one he is holding me in his arms, not smiling. My mother’s parents are standing behind him, also looking stern. There are no pictures of his parents. There are pictures of me growing. My parents bathing me in the sink. This is the only picture in which my parents look happy together and I wonder who’s taking it. My father has his hand on my belly. He has a young-buck look.

There are pictures of me at my grandparents’ house. Me in a swing in someone’s backyard. Me eating in a high chair, blueberry something all over my face. Me and my mother and father at a beach. There are several more in this album but they are all of me and my mother and grandparents. In one I am turning five, judging by the number of candles on the cake. Three adults stand behind me as I blow them out. My mother has a hand over her mouth as if she is surprised or upset.

When I was a kid I kept this album under my bed and looked at it at night when I was feeling scared, imagined desperately that he would come back even though when he left he did so without a word. I have not heard from him since.

My mother does not speak of him. I used to muster up my courage several times a year to ask her a question about him. Where are Dad’s parents. Where was he born. Does he have brothers. She would always answer them, but the look on her face was so full of hurt that after a while it wasn’t worth it to me. I became a scavenger, looking for facts about my father in other places. I know they met in high school. I know they had me when they were married, but very young. My mother’s still young: twenty years younger than some of my friends’ parents. She was only twenty when she had me which makes me wonder if I was an accident. A thought I try to shut off quickly.

Things I have found in my house that I believe belong to my father: a box in the basement with baseball stuff in it, a Mets pennant and some cards, mostly Mets players. I discovered it when I was seven and it caused me to get into several fights with my friends, because of course I immediately declared myself a diehard Mets fan, and my friends liked the Yankees. I didn’t care. I fought them. Also in the box were several trophies from Yonkers High, where he and my mother went. My mother made me go to a different high school than they did, and the worst part, at first, was that I had been looking forward to going to the school my father had gone to, perhaps seeing his name on a banner or meeting a teacher who’d had him. I imagined that if I could do very well there at sports he would hear about it somehow. I was stupid. I also found some men’s razors in the back of a drawer in the bathroom when I was twelve, before I ever needed to shave, and I ran one over my chin and cut myself. They were rusty. The last thing I found is the most embarrassing: a stack of Hustlers under an old couch in our basement. I don’t know whose idea it was, my mother’s or my father’s, but someone decided to put a rough-edged carpet in one corner of our cold unfinished basement. On this carpet is the couch in question, a footstool, and a little table and a TV that doesn’t work but probably did once. And under this couch I found the Hustlers. It felt as if my father could be someplace else in the house. There were his things. Just lying around. Of course I took them for myself because I was thirteen or fourteen and they were the most amazing things I’d ever seen. Discoveries like these gave me false hope when I was a kid that my father would come back for me. He should have known when he was leaving that I would find them at a tender age and that they would hurt me. He should have known.

I have lied about my father to all of my friends at my high school.