"After Midnight"

It is after midnight, and instead of sleeping, I am thinking about my father screaming for me. The thought is unsolicited, like the news about my mother’s nail polish.



I never heard my father raise his voice until I was six years old. If he was upset or worried it’d show in the muscles along his jaw, not his voice. His voice was a steady and centered thing a person could count on—an anchor for our family. So when I heard a man’s voice screaming my name I immediately thought it was a stranger.


Fear did funny things to a person. I was on the tire swing in the back of our house, my head dipped back as the sky and crape myrtles whooshed back and forth before my eyes. The scream sounded like a crashing plane. It hurt my heart to hear. So I kept swinging.


“Amelia!”


I grazed my foot against the grass below, and froze—a veritable deer ready to be attacked.


“Amelia! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” the man growled.


I flung myself off the swing and edged slowly toward the front of the house. Our screened porch door swung closed and short, quick steps—my mother’s—made their way to the source of the guttural yelps.


“Oh, Howard!” my mother gasped.


It was only then that I had the courage to look, to see my father lying on the ground with his leg twisted in a funny way, a ladder pinned diagonally against his body.


“Don’t move!” my mother warned.


“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” my father grunted.


“Da-da, hurt,” a toddler Jack crooned.


“Howard,” she shook her head. In her mouth were all the how-many-times and I-told-you-so’s she was hungry to spew forth. But she only mumbled a quick “Oy govult” before springing into efficient action. Her eyes found me at the edge of a Jasmine tree, my fearful cover blown.


“Amelia, stay with your brother here. Howard, I’m calling an ambulance, don’t move!” she said and raced back into the house.


“Where does she think I’m going to go?” He half-smiled and winced at me.


Time is a warped thing when you’re six years old old. So the good and the bad stuff of life become hard things to measure. An hour becomes a minute if time involves a game of hopscotch. But my father staying home from work was an eternity. It was probably no more than a week, but how something feels was the only true time, at least when you’re a little kid.


After my father’s leg was put into a cast, my brother and I were taken to Grandma Ruth’s and Grandpa Frank’s for what became another kind of eternity. When I wasn’t watching mom tend to dad’s every need and completely ignoring her two kids, I was forced to eat breakfast and dinner with the coldest people on earth: my grandparents. School was my only reprieve from both eternal hells.


Vacations with my father had always meant piggy back rides, dodge-ball, hide and seek and every board game and puzzle we could get our hands on. So when I first learned that he was home-bound with two fractures in his leg I was over the moon!


How quickly the silver-lining tarnished.


My father was the worst patient—moody and withdrawn, like a giant, grunting dog. After a couple of attempts at cheering him up (an offer to color or play Boggle with me) without success (He stared out the window the whole time.), I gave up.


But my mother never did. She brought him a daily supply of his favorite things: books on European history, caramel-flavored coffee, a Fodor’s Guide to South Africa, Passover cake (made from a box—strangely enough, one of his favorite desserts!), and German chocolates which reminded him of his childhood.


I bolted up in bed. How to reconcile my mother pulling the plug on the same man she dotingly cared for more than eight years ago? The thought needled my heart until I felt it impossible to ever sleep again. Leaning my torso over the bed, I grabbed the scrapbook I’d started working on ever since Mr. McGee showed me the secret pictures and headed to the den.