The Lost Night: A Memoir - Excerpt

From Chapter One
Murder Night:
June 1986

Bobby is at my bedroom door, in his tighty-whities. “Wake up. Rachel, wake up!” he whispers. “I think Daddy cut himself shaving.”

Bobby is nine and I am ten and what he is saying makes no sense. First off, Bobby has no right to call my father “Daddy,” even if Bobby lives here year-round and I’ve only come for the summer. But as I rub the sleep from my eyes and look at the clock, the usual irritation fades into confusion. It’s three thirty a.m.—no time for a shave.

Bobby is gone. I sit up and shuffle alongside my dresser, feeling my way to the bedroom door. I can scan our entire house from my room: the living room straight across, the kitchen to the right, the bathroom and Bobby’s room down a short hallway to the left, and Dad and Sherrie’s room across from it.

It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the moonlight pouring through the living room window. I make out our powder-blue curtains first, slate gray against the darkness, and as the rest of the view falls into place, I see the house is empty and still. Then I look down the hallway, and what I find there sears itself upon my brain: huge, dark pools in the carpet, like giant grape Kool-Aid spills. Bigger around than basketballs, sticky wet and black in the colorless night. As I stare at them and remember Bobby’s nonsensical words about shaving, I know at once that they are pools of blood.

The blood is a flash, a Polaroid snapshot of a shadowy moment, and the next ten minutes come in flashes too, murky images captured and set aside to develop in slow motion. In a flash, I’m at the open door of Dad’s bedroom. Dad is standing bare-chested, deathly white, holding his throat, looking into my eyes and mouthing something I can’t understand. In a flash, the door slams in my face, and I hear Sherrie shout “I’m calling 911.”

It feels like I stare at that closed door a long time. I don’t know if I try the handle, but if I do, it’s locked. I don’t know how I step around the blood, how I decide to go back into my bedroom, how it is that I eventually walk into the living room and quietly take a seat on the couch next to Bobby. I don’t know who turned the lamp on, but the light is throwing just enough illumination around the room to make the shadows look that much deeper. And I don’t know how it is that Bobby and I are both now fully dressed. The biggest mystery of all, though, is how Bobby knows someone has tried to kill my father.

He picks up one of Dad’s sweat-stained weight-lifting gloves from the glass-top coffee table and slips it over his pudgy fingers.

“Maybe we should take these with us,” he says in a serious but steady voice, pulling the Velcro strap open and closed. “Like a keepsake.”

I pick up the other glove and let the meaning of Bobby’s strange words trickle through my mind. I slide the glove over my hand. The cutoff finger holes are too big for me; the glove is a hard, sweaty shell that doesn’t fit, that makes me feel tiny and protected.

But Bobby has a second thought. “Wait,” he says. “What if that person touched them!”

He tosses his glove so it slides off the edge of the coffee table and flaps his hands as if shaking off cooties. I set my glove down gingerly, not believing that whoever came through our house could have tarnished it but wanting to play along with Bobby’s game because playing along will let us believe that we can still play games after what we’ve just seen.

The house hums with noiselessness in the dead night of our country neighborhood. I try to think of other mementos we might want to take, to ignore the blood splattered along the wall and soaking on the carpet behind us. The couch is placed so that its back faces the open hallway. I want to curl up in a ball for fear that someone will pop up behind me, but Bobby’s presence keeps me from cowering.

Instead I search for cootie-free souvenirs, looking at the airbrushed duck decoy Bobby and I bought Dad at the flea market a few weeks ago. At Dad’s old record collection, his beloved Rod Stewart albums, leaning against the TV. At yesterday’s cold coffee cup forming a creamy brown ring on the coffee table glass.

When the paramedics charge through our living room, it’s like a scene from an action movie crashing down our hallway. A moment later Sherrie is sitting between us on the couch, wrapping her hands around our eyes and telling us, “Don’t look, kids, don’t look.” I look anyway, can just peek over her skinny pinkie and above her shoulder, and I see Dad’s legs and his feet streaking by on the gurney. I tell myself to remember that last look well. In my gut I know it will be the last I ever see of Dad.

When we arrive at the emergency room, everyone is there. My grandfather, my aunts and uncles—it’s like Christmas without the other children. Grandpa Ben gets up from the plastic waiting-room chair and steps aside with Sherrie into the hallway. Grandma Mae calls me and Bobby over to sit in her wide lap, to each slide upon her bench-sized thighs, clenching us to her enormous bosom. “Don’t you worry, kids, your daddy’s tough and he’s gonna make it!” she says, rocking. I look around the blue-gray fluorescent room at my aunts and uncles, who don’t seem to share Grandma Mae’s conviction.

It is forever and yet no time at all before a man in blue scrubs walks into the room. He stands in front of Grandma Mae, looking down on us huddled together. He acts as though he’s talking just to her. “He lost too much blood,” he says. He says something about trying to operate, about a piece of knife stuck in the vein. “I’m sorry but he just lost too much blood, and he’s passed on.”

I think I feel Grandma Mae’s heart stop beating beneath her cushiony chest. She looks up at the man, silent. “Would you like a moment alone with the body?” he asks. He’s still talking to Grandma Mae, but it will always feel as though he were asking me too, as though if I’d had the courage to pipe up, I could have visited my father one last time.

I’m not quite thinking this though. I’m thinking of cooties. I’m thinking of dead bodies. I’m thinking that it’s gross to see a dead body, even if it is my father’s. I’m thinking I have seen enough.