Hide Your Eyes Read Online Free PDF

of the farthest pile touching the end of a rusty, sad-looking trailer. Faded red letters stretched across the trailer, reading Shank’s Dredging and Construction , and a broken RK AND RIDE sign was propped up against it, even though there was nowhere to park and nowhere to ride.

    Perhaps it was the sign that drew me in. Who would ever park a car in this place? Who would ever ride away from it, knowing they had to return?

    Or it could have been the construction company’s name. Shank’s, as in butchered body parts.

    I knew these should have been reasons to leave - warning signs, literally - but they had the opposite effect on me. No one’s here. No one will be here. No one ever, except you .

    I crawled under the folded-back fence corner.

    On the other side, I stood up and took a few steps toward the trailer.

    I couldn’t quite hear the water - I was still several car lengths away from the river, and the trailer seemed to block out sounds. To the left of the trailer was a huge rusty bin that was nearly overflowing with broken chunks of cement. I wondered when they’d been dumped there, and by whom.

    I crept closer, saw some dead, brown weeds shooting through the concrete, then a few deviant, crumbling cement blocks and, finally, the oily green water of the Hudson. Placed neatly next to the bin like a spectator’s seat was a smooth, rectangular block of cement with a blue chalk scrawl of 1/3/00 across the top. More than thirteen months old. No one will be here . . .

    I sat down on the block. An icy gust flew off the river and bit at my face, but with the hood of my coat still up, I didn’t mind. No one ever, except you .

     
    My father left home when I was five years old, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s more a voice than a face to me - a loud laugh in the hallway; a hoarse, angry whisper in my parents’ bedroom; a tinny mumble on the other end of the phone, asking Sydney for help. Picturing him is difficult, but if I clear my mind and close my eyes really tight, I can sometimes see his profile.

    It’s a purely mental exercise - not emotional at all - because I really don’t feel one way or the other about him. Fact is, if Dad hadn’t left, Sydney would never have written her first book ( PMS: Post Marital Survival ) and become instantaneously famous among self-help enthusiasts. She’d still be a social worker. He’d still be spending most of her salary on twelve-packs of Mickey’s BigMouth. So it’s probably best he got out when he did.

    That said, I used to be crazy about him. One of my happiest memories was the time he’d taken me on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier. When our cage turned upside down, I’d laughed instead of screaming like the other kids. And he’d patted me on the arm and said, ‘That’s my brave girl.’

    Funny how I could remember the Ferris wheel ride as if it had just happened, but I couldn’t remember the day he took off. Especially since, according to Sydney, I’d been the first one to notice the note he’d left on the kitchen table.

    Listening to the sound of the river, I closed my eyes and tried to picture Dad. The hair was easy. It was long and dark and shiny; he usually wore it in a ponytail. But the features were blurry, and the eye color was a complete mystery. I knew they were brown, but were they amber colored like Nate’s, or were they darker? My own eyes are pale green, like Sydney’s, so they were of no help.

    I’m losing Dad, I thought. It depressed me more than it should have.

    I pressed my palms into the freezing cement block. The water sound was nice. I’d concentrate on that, block out everything else. Nate had once taught me how to meditate. It wasn’t the type of rules-driven meditation that you learn at weekend retreats in upstate New York mountain towns. It was just an inner chant that his acting teacher had come up with in order to relax the class before scene work. Breathe in, breathe out , it went. Think of anything . Think