The Flicker Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

more than we knew what to do with.
    When my father didn’t come back, it was me she woke first, barely getting the words out, collapsing in my bedroom. And I remember so little about that night, like it was part of somebody else’s story—but I remember the intake of air, her hitting the light switch, waking me—then it all pours out in words, everything, countless years of it. Lifetimes. A waterfall of words. A slow screaming that would not stop. Has never really stopped.
    And I remember the room. The color of the walls. Almost photographic details combined with odd gaps of memory—things I should know but somehow can’t see. Old cracks in the drywall. I can see them clearly. The feel of the slick wooden banister as I float down the stairs, picture frames brushing my shoulder. I see a thin layer of dust on the chandelier in the foyer, but somehow my sister is missing—erased from these memories, though she must have been there. Or perhaps that’s her, standing in the back, in the shadows.
    And then the gravel scrapes my bare feet, and Mother can’t walk, collapsing on the sidewalk outside our house. I’m standing in the driveway while red lights spin silently. There are police, but none with faces. Just flashlights and badges and underwater words.
    Your father …
    And she couldn’t finish. Couldn’t get the words out.
    And nothing after that was ever really the same again. For any of us. But for my mother most of all.
    Now she sips her tea again, and I see the happiness change to worry in her eyes. Those not-quite-hazel eyes that do not bear names well.
    â€œAre you okay, Eric?”
    I only nod and sip.
    â€œAre you sure?” she asks.
    Her father was a quarter Cherokee and looked it. She and I have this in common: we both look like our fathers.
    â€œEverything’s fine,” I say.
    She is tall and long-limbed. Her hair, once brown, is streaked with white. She is now and always has been beautiful.
    If we resemble each other, it is in our eyes—not the color, for mine are blue-gray, but in the shape. Our hooded expression. Eyes protective of their secrets.
    She never drank. Not once, not ever. Not like my father.
    She’d tell you.
    She came from a long line of alcoholics— bad alcoholics , she’d say. Get-in-fights-and-go-to-jail alcoholics. Her own father and grandfather and brothers. Some of her cousins. So she understood it. Like Huntington’s or hemophilia—a taint of the blood winding its way down through the generations. And I wonder if that was a part of it. The strange, alchemical familiarity that draws two people together. She and my father.
    Sometimes it is a thing as simple as the way you laugh. Or it’s a familiar hair color. Or the way you hold a Scotch glass, casually, fingers sprawled around the circumference of the glass’s rim, so the palm hovers above the cool brown liquid. That sense you get when you meet someone new—that feeling of … We know each other. We’ve always known each other.
    Maybe that’s what drew her. Or maybe she just thought she could fix him.
    And so Mother never drank, not once, thinking it would be enough to save her.
    She told me many times growing up that I shouldn’t drink either. Alcoholism on both sides of the family, she said, so I shouldn’t even try it. Shouldn’t risk that first swallow.
    â€œ It’s not for you ,” she said.
    But I did try it. Of course, I did.
    Not for you .
    And nothing had ever been more wrong.

 
    5
    Sounds of the lab.
    Satvik said, “Yesterday in my car I was talking to my daughter, five years old, and she says, ‘Daddy, please don’t talk.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because I am praying. I need you to be quiet.’ So I ask her what she is praying about, and she said, ‘My friend borrowed my glitter ChapStick, and I am praying she remembers to bring it back.’”
    Satvik