LITMIR.BIZ

      2

      Pittsburgh

      1990 ♦ 10 years old

      “You can tell me anything,” Mom said, her eyes wide, a flush creeping up her neck. Her cursive was bubbly, effervescent, recording everything I said. 1985–1990. The dates, she said, were for her records.

      I told her, then, about Dad’s fingers in the pool, in the car on the way to her brother’s funeral, Sunday afternoons when she left for the grocery store and he parked Ellie and Scott in front of the television, when he knew no one would come for me. Ellie and Scott and I were each two years apart but it seemed we lived in three different houses then, with three different Moms and Dads, each of us in separate, abutting childhoods.

      Mine was chocolate milk, science fairs, camping, and the rituals that kept Dad’s hot breath distinct from the rest of it. I sat on the floor of the closet and threw shoes at the wall. I ran like a deer through the woods behind my house. I picked one tiny thing to look forward to and fixated on it. From his bedspread I jumped into tomorrow and felt the soccer ball connect with my foot and fly, high and sweet, into the corner of the net.

      There are the facts of what happened, but the story is in parts. It is still hard to capture the salty terror of the worst of it, the freeze, the split: how I lost a body, or how I conflated the two ways my body was lost to me.

      I was born female, that’s a fact. I saw myself as a boy, but that made a certain kind of sense. It wasn’t until much later that the complex facts of my anatomy needled at me. Later, people would say that my manhood was always there, blueprinted in my torn-knee jeans, my He-Man castle, my short hair. Maybe that’s true, but let’s not make this the kind of story where I know all the answers.

      What you need to know is that afterwards I’d read a book in my bathtub, and my little legs, hands, torso would return to me eventually, and that was what it meant to be alive: clean and immersed in a library book I could make sense of, breathing in the sharp smell of soap, touching the warm boundary of my skin to the scratchy bottom of the tub.

      I never felt lonely when I had the damp pages of Great Expectations to keep me company, but I couldn’t expect anyone to understand the way my body spangled back to life when I saw myself in Pip’s tragic, romantic hope. I admired his dogged faith, even in failure. I liked that he believed in something. Mom called me Pip for years, but I never knew if we saw the same resemblance. After my transition, she’d call me “sweet boy” once, uncharacteristically, and I’d realize that maybe the similarity, for her, had been as simple as that.

      I didn’t tell Mom about the bathtub ritual, intuiting that to do so would encourage the cloak of guilt to hood her eyes, making her spooky and deaf to me. I didn’t want her to go mix herself a strong screwdriver and leave the lamp off in the failing light.

      Instead, I allowed her translation of the story to go forward in blue ink as her hand moved assuredly across the notebook pages, sheaths of paper stacked neatly into a folder she said she’d use to ensure that we were never left wanting. I didn’t understand it then, but we were sinking into bankruptcy, and she wanted to keep my father tethered to us. This was her version of vigilante justice, protecting us financially by hanging the threat of this story over him. In the end, it wouldn’t be my story but my silence that would keep me, all of us, alive.

      “Just tell me the truth,” she’d said, but I knew even then that most people don’t mean that exactly, so I didn’t tell her about the day in the living room, the way I retched, the terrible taste of him and the way I washed my mouth with soap and water but never got clean.

      I stared out the window into the trees beside our house, my knees scratched and my brain pulsating in a stinging drone. In 10 years, I’ll be okay, I promised myself. Ten years seemed impossibly far away, double my lifetime, but something to hitch my hope to. My heart felt strung up in my chest. Panic choked me whenever I met Mom’s eyes: she looked like a stranger. Beyond her, the house seemed tilted and too bright. I’d had a life of poetry and swim meets despite my father’s searching hands, and now I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I was about to lose.

      “I hate him,” she announced, startling me out of the gauzy silence. I nodded, but didn’t respond. I couldn’t explain to either of us why I didn’t.

      “Try to remember the first time it happened,” I heard her say, her voice businesslike, as if she were quizzing me ahead of a math test. “You can tell me anything,” she added again, softening her tone.

      I couldn’t help but think of the photographs I’d taken all summer of sticky stray dogs with matted fur and scabbed noses. The world seemed to me a place of beautiful, damaged things and I wanted to love them all.

      I fiddled with my shoelaces and met my mom’s gaze. I felt movement in my ragged chest, a whole flock of birds gearing up to depart. I let myself go.

      “I was four,” I began. “At the old house.”

      I sounded like someone else. I didn’t know how to translate the calm alongside the fear, to explain that afterwards I’d remind myself that I was stronger than him, that I could contain all of that wildness and terror until it was hard and small, until it sparked like a firework in my gut, until I could find something lovely in its wake.

      I watched her face bunch in pained concentration as I spoke about where and when and how he touched me. I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden, as I watched her transcribe each sentence, letting my eyes slowly cross until the letters blurred together, until the words quit being my own.