When I was nine, my mom died. I have to tell you about my mom or the rest of it won’t really make sense: she was so cool. She had long red hair just like mine. She was a really good singer, and she was a college professor, and she used to let me come into her office and play on her phone under the desk while she talked to her students, in this perfect shadowy nook that smelled like dark wood. She used to make me this sandwich called a baby shark sandwich, because that’s what we were listening to when I was little and we made it up: Claussen’s pickles and cheddar cheese and dutch-crunch bread and yellow mustard and cucumber but just the little baby kind and avocado with just a little bit of sprouts. Dad couldn’t make it right. You couldn’t order it anywhere. She was wonderful. The thing that killed her was a weird freak brain thing: one day she was taking me to ballet, and the next she was dead.
Three months later, I walked in on my dad kissing my babysitter. She wasn’t underage or anything—her name was Hallie, and she had been one of my mom’s favorite graduate students, and before the kiss I loved her for being a great Mario Kart opponent and for teaching me stuff like that you could roll up a piece of pizza and eat it like a cannoli—but my dad still had no right to stand there and kiss her in the house where my mom used to live. I cried buckets. I broke the world’s best dad mug my mom had helped me buy for Father’s Day last year. I went to sleep every night and prayed weird, fervid, hateful prayers: please God let Hallie drop dead next, please God give Hallie cholera or leprosy or something else that would make my dad really, really sorry. It didn’t matter that my dad was really sorry, or that I hadn’t seen Hallie since the day it happened. For a week I couldn’t be in the same room as my dad at all, rage hollowing me out until I didn’t even feel like a person.
At the end of the week my grandma came and got me. I wasn’t really close to my grandma, because she lived two states away in Arizona, but Arizona was two states away from my dad, so when she asked if I wanted to come stay with her for a little bit, I said “yes please,” and I didn’t look at my dad when he packed us into the car, not even when he wrapped an arm around my stiff shoulders to hug me goodbye.
My grandma lived in Flagstaff, Arizona. I’d been there before on visits, but mostly for Thanksgiving, when it was cold and snowy. It was different in the summer, dry and hot in my grandma’s stuffy one-story house. My grandma was really nice, but I didn’t really want to talk to her very much. She was my mom’s mom, and she kept wanting to show me pictures of my mom at my age, and I didn’t want to look at them. My mom and I looked really alike, even though she was white and my dad is Mexican, so our eyes weren’t the same color and she was a lot paler than I am. I didn’t want to look at those pictures of a dead girl with my face. Instead, my grandma and I watched a lot of reruns of old TV shows, and she took me to the library a lot. Every morning, she fed me a bowl of cocoa puffs for breakfast, and the milk was choked with powdery silt. To this day what despair tastes like to me: chocolate dust.
My dad called me every night at six p.m.. It was a rule he and my grandma set together, that I had to take his phone calls. So I held the phone and listened to him pretend to be cheerful, telling me about his day—he did a job at a fancy house in Jeff Bezos’s neighborhood, wasn’t that cool? The house had a helicopter pad outside. “Uh huh,” I said. Then he told me about a different job he’d worked at the Center for Wooden Boats, and how he’d had them pay him in free visits, so when I came home we could take boats out onto Lake Washington whenever we wanted. “I don’t really like the water,” I said, even though we both knew that wasn’t true, that a few months ago I’d been begging him to let me have a pool party for my tenth birthday. I had no idea what I’d do for my birthday now. Getting older felt as impossible as going home. “Okay, mija,” he said, his voice quiet in a way I hated, even though it happened every single time we talked. “That’s okay.”
Every call ended the same way: he asked if I wanted to come home, and I said no. “I love you,” he’d finish, and I’d hang up.
Another thing about Flagstaff, Arizona: it’s full of pine trees and wolf spiders. I hated spiders. I couldn’t even stand the regular daddy longlegs that appeared in the bathroom of my house in Seattle. My grandma’s house smelled like Christmas even in July, and it was alive with brown-knuckled movement. I found spiders clinging to my dresses in the closet, crouched on the underside of the toilet paper roll, hiding in my pencil case. I shrieked every time. The spiders made me afraid to fall asleep, and then I’d be up in the middle of the night and see the shadows moving on their own in the corners of my eyes, eight legged and sinister. I’d make my grandmother get up at midnight to kill spiders, and she wasn’t even good at it. Half the time the spiders got away, and then I’d be up the rest of the night, trembling with fear.
My dad was an excellent killer of spiders. He could get them with one deft movement, a tissue held in his hand. They never got away from him. He was more than a thousand miles away, and I wanted him and his killing power so badly it made my stomach hurt.
One night I actually did manage to fall asleep pretty early. I’d done a spider sweep already, and the coast seemed clear. I had a dream about mom. The two of us were hanging out in her office at the university, the same dusty couches like always, the same comforting walls of books and funny little curios, a packed lunch of baby shark sandwiches between us. It should have been a good dream, except I knew that she was sick, that something was wrong with her brain, and I couldn’t warn her. It was like my mouth was sewn shut. Baby, she said, what’s wrong? And I tried again to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come, stifling in my throat. She put a hand on my forehead to check my temperature, and while I watched, her hair shrunk and darkened to a brown bob, her face changed shape, and she wasn’t mom at all, she was Hallie.
I woke up in a sweaty jolt, kicking hard at the blankets on my bed. Dear God, I prayed, kill Hallie, kill Hallie, kill Hallie. I rolled onto my side and blinked at the floor, my heart pounding with misery, and then I saw it—a darting movement on the bedroom’s wooden floor. I fumbled the bedside lamp on, and there it was: a wolf spider the size of a silver dollar, crouched in the center of the room. I had a library book sitting next to the bed—I picked it up and threw it blindly at the spider, my whole body tense with fear.
I missed, and I saw the spider dart under the desk in retreat. The thud shook loose more alarmed scuttling, and I saw that there was a spider under the desk, a spider on the floor right by the door, and a third spider on the floor under the window. I was surrounded—there was no corner of the room that was untouched. Please God, I prayed, hysterical with fear, please God kill the spiders, please please please, I want to be safe—
I felt something drop from the ceiling onto my shoulder. The ugliest, hairiest, biggest spider I’d ever seen was huddled there, two inches from my face. A scream tore out of my throat, and I shook it off—it landed, hideously, in the sheets, where I immediately lost it.
I kept screaming and flung myself off the bed, shadows scattering before me, thudding towards the door, and my grandma met me, bewildered, in the hallway, where I fell into her arms and started shaking. I don’t know what I told her, but it was probably something weird, like “God hates me,” or “I’m never going to be safe ever again.” I sat up in the kitchen all night hyperventilating, and my grandma eventually fell asleep in the breakfast nook, but I kept sitting there thinking.
The thing was, it really did feel like a sign. Like God was sick of me ignoring the commandment about how thou shalt not kill, and He was punishing me. Like God was telling me I couldn’t stay in my grandma’s house anymore. Like God was just another tired grownup telling me enough was enough, I had to be reasonable, I had to stop crying, it was just a bug, it was time to go home. Fathers are people, too. It was time to forgive him.
“Never,” I whispered, staring with burning eyes at the pink dawn just starting up out the window, vehement and hateful. “I’ll never stop.” I could suffer so much more. I could suffer forever. They could make me scream and they could make me cry but they could never ever ever make me forgive him.
Grandma’s phone was sitting on the table. I unlocked it and went to the university homepage, and found the right department, and then the list of graduate students. They’d taken my mom off the faculty page. I found the familiar face, brown hair and bangs, and I sent her an email:
sometimes i wish u would die.
Hallie didn’t reply.
“So, Grandma says you had a hard day,” my dad said that night on the phone, hesitant. “You know you can come home whenever you want.” I’d spent the day at the library sort of half-sleeping on the bean bags in the kid’s corner with a copy of The Hobbit in my hands in case anybody questioned me. Grandma came and picked me up for lunch, and then she asked what I wanted to do for the rest of the afternoon, and I told her to take me back to the library.
“Dad,” I said, the same ugly conviction bubbling up in my chest. “I never want to come home.”
There was a long, terrible silence. “I understand you feel like that now,” Dad said, in that same quiet voice that meant I’d really hurt him.
“I won’t change my mind,” I said. God couldn’t even change my mind.
“I love you so much,” Dad said softly, and I hung up.
The next day six p.m. came, and he didn’t call. It was a normal night, otherwise. Grandma made bean burritos that tasted weird and bland. We watched an episode of a TV show from the olden days that I didn’t understand at all. She didn’t mention dad, and neither did I. She told me she’d vacuumed my room three times, and she was sure there were no spiders left. I told her I was going to sleep in the living room.
After she went to bed, I checked my email on her phone again. Hallie had written me back.
Dear Clara,
I am so sorry about what happened. I never wanted to hurt you, not for a second. I want you to know that I loved and admired your mom very much. I hope that I was her friend, the way I hope I was your friend. Sometimes when you love people, and they pass on, the sadness you feel can be confusing. Your dad and I got confused.
I know you’re angry with me, and that’s okay. I’m really sorry about your mom, and I’m really sorry I made you feel worse. I know your dad is really sorry, too.
I hope you feel better soon.
Your friend,
Hallie
I read it three times before I realized she’d added my dad to the email. I scrolled down, and there was my original message, mean and evil and meant to be between me and God, or at least between me and Hallie. Panic flooded my body, and I threw the phone physically away from me. He knew. He knew this whole summer wasn’t just a temper tantrum, he knew I was actually awful, he knew something started rotting in me when Mom died and had spread and spread until I was beyond saving. He was probably relieved that he’d managed to get rid of me. I hated her for doing it. I hated her so much. She and Dad would probably get married, and they’d probably have kids who looked exactly like them instead of a kid who looked like nobody, good nice kids who never wished death on anyone or anything, not even a spider.
I was so wretched with it I wanted to throw up. I lay on the couch with my stomach churning for hours, not reading, not sleeping, not praying, not doing anything except being miserable. I wanted my mom, her cool hand on my forehead. I wanted my dad, the reassuring smell of him. In a weird way I even wanted Hallie. I fell asleep with the light on, waiting for the darkness to grow legs and creep closer.
I woke to the sound of a car pulling up.
It was early, still; the house was quiet. Grandma must still be asleep. I went to the window and saw my dad’s truck out front, and I started crying. I was still crying when Dad unlocked the door and came inside, big ugly heaving sobs. He caught me up in big tight familiar dad arms, and he pressed my hair down with a big dad hand, and he asked me what was wrong, what happened, what could he do.
I clung to him. I couldn’t even tell him I loved him back, I was crying so hard.
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