“Listen,” Samantha pleads directly into his ear. “You’ve got to listen. Françoise believes she is your half-sister—”
“I have no siblings, half or otherwise,” he says, and hangs up.
“What can be worse than not knowing?” Samantha’s voice asks in a rush, anticipating digital cutoff. “The deaths could have been prevented. What can be worse than that?”
The explanation might be worse, Lowell thinks.
Everywhere, his father shrugs, brightness falls from the air. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye, his father reminds, and death is merely the final cure of every ill.
But it is after a death, Lowell knows, that riddles and slow torments begin.
In the week of the thirteenth anniversary of his mother’s death—four days before the actual date—Lowell cries out in his sleep. There is a lightning flash or an explosion—he does not know what it is—some terrible intrusive slash of sound, white at the center with red capillaries rivering out. It thump-thumps at his eardrums and skin. Pain razors him, and he knows his heart is going to pop like a balloon.
“What is it, what is it, Daddy?” His daughter, barefoot and frightened, appears in the bedroom doorway and he sits bolt upright and holds the pillow like a shield. Weapon, his reflexes urge, but as he gropes for the lamp, he sees Amy’s eyes and remembers that the children are with him this weekend.
Amy, he says, but a strange sound comes out.
“Daddy, Daddy.” Amy is shivering. “Why did you scream?” She pulls at her hair, a nervous habit, and little hanks of it come away in her hand. She always has trouble sleeping at her father’s place because her father often talks unintelligibly in sleep, pleading with someone. His sheets smell of wet animal.
The pain, he tries to explain. He lurches around the room, arms outstretched. He thumps on his chest.
“Daddy, Daddy!” she quavers, throwing herself at him, hugging his thighs.
“No,” Lowell moans.
Wailing sounds, plaintive as the call of loons in fog, float through the room, and there is Jason, flannelette blanket balled into his mouth, stumbling over his pajama bottoms. Amy runs to him and holds his little face against her chest. “Jason’s scared,” she says bravely. And then, with an edge of anger: “You’re frightening him, Daddy.”
Their father turns and fixes them with his eyes. “Did you hear it?”
“Y-y-yes,” Jason blubbers, sniffling, wetting his PJs. Amy can feel a trickle of warm pee at the soles of her feet.
“We heard you scream, Daddy.”
Lowell is shaking. He bends down and hugs the children to himself. “Poor little fellas,” he says. He takes deep slow breaths. “Daddy had a bad dream, that’s all. I didn’t mean to scare you, pun’kins.”
“Daddy?”
“It’s sleepy time. Let’s go.”
He changes Jason’s pajamas and tucks the children in and kisses them and sits on the edge of his son’s bed. By the greenish glow of the night-light, he croons lullabies and pats his little boy’s behind until he hears deep even breathing.
“Daddy?” Amy whispers, as he is tiptoeing out.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“What did you dream about?”
“I can’t remember,” he says, and he really can’t. He can remember bright light, the electric sense of danger. Tree? Tree struck by lightning? Something to do with a tree and shattered glass. Pieces of metal. A great vulture overhead, as always. He can remember bloodied hands, pulsing heart, thump-thump, thump-thump. He can remember not being able to breathe.
“Where do bad dreams go?” Amy wants to know.
“They go down the garbage disposer,” Lowell says, “and they get smashed up into little pieces and then they get washed into the Charles River and carried out into Boston Harbor and they go miles and miles away into the ocean and they never come back.”
“Mine come back,” she says.
“Oh baby.” He sits on her bed and cradles her in his arms. “What do you have bad dreams about?”
“There’s one dream,” she says, and he can feel her shy away from the telling.
What rotten luck, he thinks, for Amy and Jason to have him, Lowell Hawthorne, for a father, since clearly someone, something, is a jealous keeper of the curse, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation … He wishes he had a spell to break the spell.
“Look,” he says, snapping his fingers and then blowing on them as though scattering dandelion puffs. “It’s gone now, your bad dream. And mine too.”
But she is very solemn. “You were driving away,” she says. “In my dream. You were driving away in your pickup.”
“Did I have my ladders on top?” He has to make this bright and tangibly detailed, slapstick, something light as air. He mimes the sway of the ladders as he drives.
“Yes, and all your paint cans and stuff. And the baby-sitter hasn’t come and Jason and me are running and running because we want to get in the pickup with you and you won’t stop and you keep shouting that Mommy will come.”
“Sweetheart,” he says.
“But she doesn’t. And we wait and wait, but she never comes, and we are all by ourselves and it gets dark.”
“Oh, Amy, baby.” He cups her face in his hands. “I will never drive away and leave you, never ever. And you know that Mommy and Daddy would nevernevernever—”
The phone rings and both of them jump. Amy will not let go of her father. She clings to him as he shambles down the hall.
“Yes?” he says. “What? Who is this?”
…
“Yes, this is Lowell Hawthorne.”
…
“Yes, that …”
…
“Yes.”
…
“Yes, it is.”
Amy feels the muscles in his arm flinch and go still as he listens. He hangs up.
“Daddy?”
He remains leaning against the wall, and Amy, who comes to just above his waist, holds on to him so tightly that she can feel the button on his pajama jacket like a cookie cutter against her cheek. The pain reassures her. She wants to wear his sign. She can smell the wet animal smell again, mixed in with the smell of paint and paint thinner which can never be completely scrubbed off.
“Who was it, Daddy?”
He does not hear, or at any rate does not answer, but scoops her up and carries her back to bed.
“Daddy, who was it?”
“It was nothing,” he says. “Nothing to worry your little head over.”
“Daddy, if you don’t tell me, my dream will come back.”
That is the trouble with a curse, Lowell thinks: no eject button. You’re stuck with it. Around and around and around forever and ever amen.
“It