the folding clasp on my watch and clicked it back in place. Then a grim silence fell on the room again. “What was Dad doing at the restaurant so late?” I asked. “Doesn’t Marty usually close up?”
“He wanted to install new lights he bought, so he told Marty to go home.”
And then what? He must have locked up the restaurant and walked out. Maybe he was jiggling his keys in his hands, the way he always did when he was lost in thought, or maybe he was distracted by a text on his cell phone. Either way, he didn’t hear or see the car barreling down on him until it was too late. Had he suffered? Had he called out for help? How long had he lain on the asphalt before his breath ran out? Unbidden, a memory came to me of a summer party at the neighbors’ house when I was four years old. They’d recently remodeled their backyard, and were showing off their new barbecue pit and seating nook to my parents. My sister ditched me; she was ten and wanted to play with the older kids. I started chasing after a pair of dragonflies, but just as my fingers closed around one of them, I fell into the pool. The water was icy and tasted like almonds. It drew me to the bottom with such force that I felt I would never draw another breath again. I was in the pool for only an instant before my father dove in after me, but in that instant my limbs froze, my chest burned, my heart nearly stopped. That pain came back to me now. “Something doesn’t seem right,” I said after a moment. “The one time Dad stays for close, he gets run over and killed?”
I realized too late that I had said the wrong thing, or used the wrong word. My mother began to weep. Loud, unguarded sobs that made her face flush and her shoulders heave. I crossed the living room, moved the rolled-up prayer mat out of the way, and sat beside her, holding her so close that I could feel her tremors. Everything about this moment felt strange to me—being in this house on a weekday in spring, wearing my shoes indoors, even comforting my mother as she cried. In my family, my father was the consoler. It was to him I came first whenever something bad happened to me, whether it was scraping my knee on the monkey bars when I was eight, or losing another composer competition just a month earlier.
My mother wiped her nose with a crumpled tissue. “I knew something was wrong when I came back from your sister’s house. I went there to drop off karate patches for the children, and she asked me to stay for dinner. Then I came home, and he wasn’t here.”
Yet the armchair where my father usually sat still bore the imprint of his body. It was as if he were only in the next room.
“What did the police say?” I asked. “Do they have a lead?”
“No. The detective just asked a lot of questions. Did he have money troubles, did he use drugs, did he gamble, did he have enemies. Like that. I said no.”
I remember being puzzled by these questions, which were so different from those that swirled around in my head: who was driving the car and how did they hit him and why did they flee the scene? Then my gaze was drawn to the window. Outside, two blackbirds landed one after the other on the electric wire. The neighbor across the street was deflating the giant Easter bunny that had sat for weeks in his front yard, gathering dust. It stared back with grotesque eyes as its white ears collapsed under his shoes. The wind whipped the flag on the pole, and the sun beat down without mercy.
Jeremy
Back then I was struggling with insomnia, and I would go to the gym right when it opened, at five a.m. The doctor had told me that regular exercise would help. She told me a lot of things would help. Hot baths. Blackout curtains. Reading. Chamomile. I took long baths, I read before bed, I drank cup after cup of chamomile, but most nights I still lay awake, listening to