Danny loses his hearing after surviving a deadly car crash with his drug addicted father at the wheel.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
My father and I drove along the Western Kentucky Parkway toward Elizabethtown, where he’d arranged a pick-up with a new dealer.
“This is income,” he’d said. “You should be helping me out.”
I helped more than he did. Most of the money I earned as a waiter in Nashville went toward the essentials, but he spent his on drugs (this time “the kind of coke worth driving for”), selling what he didn’t use. Simple words couldn’t do my mother’s leaving justice, so he named his hurt with things he could snort, inhale, inject. While she drove away to stop hurting, he drove anywhere to find that hurt, and I tagged along to be close enough so it no longer looked like pain.
We’d road tripped to Kentucky before. The three of us used to go together when he played small gigs, then just the two of us when he wanted to get drunk and talk about how he played bigger gigs back in Nashville but hated the scene. That’s where he met the dealer. The best stuff he’d ever had, he said. But I knew he just wanted to forget about how unfamiliar it was to be home.
On longer trips, he’d drive for maybe the first half hour then tell me to take over for a while, only to turn up the music until it hurt my ears and sink into the passenger seat and snort a bit of coke every few songs, more frequently if a guitar solo made it hard to tell when one ended and began. When his rants about my mother’s faults had drastically declined in decibels, he’d dial the music to a hum, close his eyes, and mutter some impulsive cop-out that identified his dependency on blow.
But in Kentucky he kept driving. One hour from Elizabethtown, he still hadn’t asked to switch. I laid my head against the window.
“Stars are bright out here, aren’t they, Danny?” he said.
I turned, one eye open. He stretched his head over the steering wheel, his eyes brightening in the vividness of constellations above miles of ebony freeway.
“You’re high,” I said, both eyes open.
“Pipe’s at home,” he said. I didn’t know if it was more foolish that he wasted breath to lie or that I almost believed him.
“Let me drive.”
“Just looking, alright? I mean look at ’em.” He pointed like I didn’t know what stars were. “It’s like they’re out there just for us.”
I often think of how he looked in that moment – eyes fixed – contemplating the curve of the Earth, its ability to allure a projected meaning from his mind, to coax an effort to rename something he’d tried to unlearn.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“Watch the road.”
I lowered my head again. This was no different than all the other epiphany crap he never remembered saying, like his theory on the stars. He once said they were the countless mistakes with which he cluttered the sky and that a clear night was nature’s way of saying to him, learn from it. “It is life,” he said while high, “and the things we can’t take back. Mistakes shouldn’t have to be dark your whole life, ya know? Nature understands; she spreads the darkness thin, all those little dots for connecting – infinite interpretation.” He took a hit. “And if the stars are like my faults, mistakes – right? – then the shapes I make out of them are how I choose to see all of this, myself.”
I woke up to our headlights on a grassy median, feet away from the adjacent road. Lights blinded me. My father came to, and a pipe flew from his hand as he yelled and braced for impact.
My head bashed the window, shoulder beat the doorframe. Airbag, mind faint, tug of gravity, drifting slow and vague.
We stopped.
Bitter airbag dust forced a cough I couldn’t hear, cut short with a sting in my sternum. I winced, opened my eyes – another car near my window, molded to the guardrail as if malleable in the muggy heat, spouting smoke into the foggy still of night. A man’s bloody face on the steering wheel, and a girl, unconscious, against the passenger door.
At the hospital I still couldn’t hear. A state trooper prodded with written questions. No, I hadn’t known about the drugs in the car. Yes, I’d fallen asleep before the crash. He asked for an emergency contact. I shook my head and wrote for more painkillers.
Two weeks later, a doctor delivered my condition’s permanence on a pad of paper. I threw it against the wall. He flinched at the sound of my scream, and it felt bittersweet to know I could still make noise, even if I couldn’t hear it.
With his blood sample and killing of the other driver, my father would get negligent homicide. I didn’t ask the years he faced – I didn’t want to care. After the arraignment, I handed him a note that said I’d never visit him in prison.
Given the chance to go home, I feared normal more than new, so I’d gone even farther to Louisville and picked up busboy jobs at diners and held a trashy apartment on the edge of town. I did anything to stave off loneliness, including physical therapy. Three months after the accident, I had almost finished treatment for my rotator cuff. My balance had been restored after being hindered by the sudden loss of sound, and I could push the back of my hand against the therapist’s palm without having to sit and wait for the agony to die. If I hadn’t aggravated my shoulder so often at work (bumping into things, overestimating my range of motion), I probably would’ve gone less frequently. Routine meant progress, and progress meant there’d be a lot less to focus on, which meant there’d be a lot more to think about.
One night I stayed up thinking how not to think about it all, and then I slept through my appointment. I called. They could get me in between my afternoon shifts. I paused: self-sabotage, or progress? I like to think more of me believed in the latter, but it doesn’t matter because it – whatever collision of circumstance it was – happened.
Leaving therapy later that day, I saw a girl in the room across the hall battling each step, clutching the rails beside her. A middle-aged woman guided her from behind. The girl stopped, leaned on her painless side and turned toward another woman near the door.
I couldn’t move – the girl from the car.
Breath held, I stood against the wall out of sight but had to look back in. It was her. She furiously gestured to both women, creating shape after shape in midair, each one erasing the one before it and creating something new out of nothing.
She moved so fast, too fluently to be a new learner. Mesmerizing.
I’d thrown away the pamphlets from the doctor (what I begrudgingly thought of as a deaf starter-kit), stubbornly awaiting the return of sound. But the day I threw them away, the objects in my apartment conspired to mock me in their silence: my phone as an alarm clock, the shower spout, sitcom TV – watching her made me ache for the ability to sign everything by its name and not my circumstance.
She stopped moving. Her interpreter said something to the therapist, and the two of them helped her into a chair at a desk. The women left the room while I pretended to tie my shoe. The girl sat with her chin propped in her palm, eyes closed, a heavy head.
I took a small step forward. What if she recognized me? I knew she was unconscious between the crash and ambulance, and I’d avoided court proceedings, but I still feared a moment of infamy, like she had a headshot in a detective folder stashed in her purse, always studying, scanning for eyes so she could pinpoint me in the lineup of passersby and scold me for allowing my father to destroy her life. Half bold, half terrified, I knew it didn’t matter. Missing my appointment had me there, touching the doorframe, flirting with the allure of chance.
I walked in. She opened her eyes, and their composure startled me. Avoiding eye contact had become a habit for me, so I felt sluggish, slow to react, vulnerable, guard down, while her immediate stare had the precision of a high-noon duel. She sat up, and curly brown hair fell below her shoulders. An energy laid dormant behind her face, mired in hurt, but her mildest mannerisms seemed to ask for someone to revive it. Or I was just thrilled she wasn’t comparing my face to a folder. Still, I pulled a pen and pad from my back pocket.
“I’m Danny. I recently went deaf and saw you signing.” I handed her the note.
She looked up and nodded. I was relieved to communicate with someone who wasn’t a doctor.
She handed it back.
“Kai. Welcome to the club.”
I smiled. “How do you sign my name?”
She raised her hand in a fist and slowly formed every letter, repeating them until I perfected them in order. She grinned.
“It’ll take a while. You have to practice,” she wrote.
That’s why I threw away the pamphlets. That process scared the hell out of me as much as it angered me. Learning my surroundings all over again, a toddler being told the names of things I’d known my whole life, including myself. Only now there was no gold star for learning, just the incessant anxiety of falling farther behind. That’s why I’d been avoiding any instance where someone could mistake my willingness for small talk. Each minor failure would become another chink in my armor of silence. Everyone else wore the armor but could take it off when they were comfortable and willing. I wanted that choice again; it was the lack of one that made the world feel like too much, like armoring with paper instead of steel.
Yet I craved conversation. It troubled me that my mind could no longer eat words, digest and churn them into a response. Silence dissolved me into the ruckus of the world then taunted me to join back in new form, to hear my own sound fight back, to prove I was still there. Maybe I had more of a choice than I was willing to embrace: wear the silence to engage, or wear it to hide? It was a matter of naming it, which would mean looking at myself, living intentionally, progress.
Kai grabbed the pad from my hand.
“What’s hurting?”
“Rotator cuff, you?”
“Broken femur. Car crash.”
She had conspicuous green eyes that demanded sincerity. I thought about what needed to be said: my father drove that car, the car that killed your father, shattered your leg, ruined your life.
I wrote, “What is ‘I’m sorry?’ Sort of blew up on my therapist today.”
Kai smiled, put a fist to her chest and made a circle.
“I’m sorry,” I signed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s funny,” Kai wrote. “I’m like you in a way. My head trauma led to nominal aphasia, so I forget random words and names. I don’t realize I can’t say something until I want to say it.”
I asked her for an example.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
“Lights in the sky that make up constellations,” she wrote.
She pointed at the absurdity of her new condition, prodding me as if begging for the answer to a riddle, and she smiled, which made me wonder how often she’d done so since the crash. It didn’t feel right to coax out bits of gleam that shined brighter before that moment – I didn’t deserve it.
The interpreter walked back into the room. She and Kai signed back and forth with increasing animation. Awkwardly, I slipped away and waved goodbye, leaving the room, only then recognizing the whole interaction as a failure.
Why did I even walk in if not to apologize for real? The moment I looked in her eyes and lured a smile, my affliction with her pain surpassed abstraction – watching her limp, reading her handwriting, her fingers in the shapes of my name. I carried an apology, but I walked away from her doubling the weight with a secret.
Despite that shame, on the bus I credited my instinct for masquerading passivity, for imagining the worst. In the end, a reveal would have made her more miserable. An attempt to appear genuine would have been received as self-preservation, an exoneration, because even the perfect words couldn’t bring her father back, so what the hell did it matter if she knew?
A week later, I set three different alarms the night before my last physical therapy session. Two on my phone (with the highest vibration settings), which I nestled into a wooden edge behind my pillow to amplify its vibration, and the third was an LED orb I bought from the store that gradually lit up the darkness (which I actually remembered seeing in the medical pamphlets before tossing them out). Even though I knew to simply avoid afternoon appointments where I assumed she’d be, preempting chance made it easier to stomach my decision to avoid her.
The alarms worked. But outside the clinic on a bench, there she sat. I kept my eyes down, but before I reached the door, she popped up on crutches, touched my shoulder and stuck a blue notebook in my face, labeled Stuff in thick black marker. I grabbed it while she lifted the cover with her fingertips.
“Been waiting for you to show up,” it said on the inside. “Told them you would need to reschedule. They understood.” She tilted her head and smiled.
Without the ability to diffuse her forethought, all I could do was ask where we were going.
“To name stuff,” she wrote, poking the aptly named notebook. Her smile widened.
“Name what?”
She feigned contemplation, shrugging her shoulders, and then widened her eyes, sweeping a crutch in a half-circle, tracing the sky.
We took a bus through downtown Louisville and stopped near a park. She led me to a bench, pulled a yellow Polaroid camera from her purse and took my photo. She smiled, exposing the image with a shake, my face appearing awkward and confused. She took out a roll of tape (like she ran a damn craft store in there) and taped it onto the first page of Stuff. She wrote “About Me” next to my face and nudged my elbow, prodding me to elaborate.
“I’m 21, from Nashville.” I handed it back.
She pushed the book into my lap, teasingly shaking her head.
I took a deep breath. “Went deaf in a car crash. My father’s a drug addict. My mother left us. I miss talking, but I don’t even know what I’d talk about, or with who.”
Nestled between the lines in silence, my honesty – even in pieces – made me feel immensely close to her, but I was terrified of her connecting them, shaping them, forcing me to make them whole.
Acknowledging my improvement, she nodded and handed me the camera. She dipped a shoulder and softly smiled before the flash. We stared at each other for a moment before she grabbed the photo, shook it, and taped it next to mine.
Kai, I thought to myself. It’s Kai. I’d been subconsciously avoiding her name, protecting myself from the weight of specificity, but now she lived in my gifted book, and I was compelled to form her name the same way she’d taught me mine. I tapped her shoulder while she was writing her response, pointed at her photo and held up a ready hand.
Flattered, she dropped the pen and signed the letters slowly. The K led two separate lives into the A – a collision – the thumb poking out the side, resisting then curling around the whole, ejecting the pinky out the other side into a prominent point onward.
If my life had taught me anything (my mother leaving, my father in prison, being alone), it was that people didn’t share a path after hurting each other – they make their own, and sometimes only one gets away. If I told Kai the truth, she’d wrap tighter around the mess I left, and I’d escape like a coward. Or was I just afraid of committing to the guilt, aware the opposite was just as possible, too selfish to provide her with the chance to escape the hurt I helped create?
She finished writing and handed me the book: “I’m 20. Born deaf. My father died in a car crash – some junkie hit us. My mom left when I was little. I can’t stand my aphasia, needing to be told words I used to know. When I can’t name something, it troubles me, even if it seems insignificant.”
“I’m sorry,” I signed.
She waved it off as pity, and I wondered if anyone since the crash had talked to her about anything other than pain or death.
Kai turned her head, and she watched two young boys run teasingly run from a golden retriever. She laughed. I tried to imagine the sound of it. A high or low tone, or somewhere in between, infectious and boisterous, or a charming wheeze into a silent shake. I hoped it was something like the last – then I wasn’t missing out as much.
The dog pounced on one boy, tackling him to the grass, and the other boy wrestled the dog to its back, and in one motion they all tumbled over and up and ran farther into the park. Kai’s gaze fluttered and landed from one thing to another at a pace that made it feel like she had the ability to collect the world in snapshots, giving her the time to thank every image before it whirled back into the whole. At first I wondered if she was scanning for the words she’d lost, but that assumption quickly led to shame when realizing a patient observer could discern her tendency to see, feel, think; I was the opposite. It hurt to fathom how she’d already given me so much when I’d given her nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said aloud, feeling a slight vibration in my chest.
She continued smiling, watching the boys run off.
“I’m sorry.” It felt louder. “I’m sorry.”
She turned and looked at me curiously.
I looked away.
Kai grabbed Stuff and wrote “The Alphabet” on a blank page. She had me take a picture of her hand 26 times, 28 including the trial photos for letters J and Z, which both came out blurry when I hadn’t anticipated movement, so she grinned and drew arrows on for how a finger had to draw in the air. When we had labeled and taped each letter, she quizzed me on every one of them, her heels on the bench, knees tucked beneath her arms with Stuff propped on her thighs – facing me so I wouldn’t cheat.
Kai touched my arm and pointed to a white flying disc gliding back and forth between two young men. She motioned with the marker.
“Frisbee,” I wrote in the book, slightly amused at the randomness of her aphasia.
She walked from the bench with the camera and approached one of the men. She had him stand still with the disc and took a picture. Walking back, she stopped beneath a tree branch, stood on her toes to pluck a triangle of emerald green and returned to the bench. She held the shape before me inquisitively.
“Leaf,” I wrote.
She held it in her palm, gently turning the stem and watching the shade of green lighten to lime in the sunshine, staring with newfound delicacy.
The giving and receiving of words became addictive. Kai took a picture of anything she didn’t know, taped it to a page and had me label it. Then she taught me how to sign it, first by taking a picture of my hands in a position that would help me remember, then by signing slowly as I mimicked her. The process exhausted me, but her energy kept me invested – I had to replenish what she lost. I owed her language; she owed me nothing. Consequently, every word we manifested was a reason not to connect our full realities but also a reminder of how we came together – alchemy, but into fool’s gold – and selfishly, I usurped the value of her smiles and melted them down in my mind to coat the ugly unsaid, fearing everything we’d named, including myself, was counterfeit.
We walked into town. Wandering, we discovered a busker on a busy corner and watched her work a weathered guitar as if it were an extra limb, and for the first time since the crash, it felt liberating to just watch something, to detect passion from motion alone without the influence, or demand, of sound. Then Kai led me into a deli where I ordered by pointing on a menu for the first time. As a habitual self-checkout customer who thought eating work food was pitiful, I even smiled and welcomed the step from comfort. Small, but one I wouldn’t have taken without her. And that’s why it was so easy and satisfying to share in the collection of words. Tiny, definable steps of understanding with no clear direction, no destination. A random yet purposeful catalogue of attainable articulation. Limitless in our collaboration. If there wasn’t a building wall to write against, we used each other’s backs, and Stuff became a walking dictionary defined – unlike me – by usefulness and not its limitations.
It grew dark, and we returned to the stop and waited on a bench. Kai fixed her eyes on the evening’s first stars.
“You never told me what those are,” she wrote, pointing to the sky.
“Stars.”
She sighed like I lifted a thousand pounds from her shoulders, and her eyes welled, faintly glistening in the pale renewal of dusk.
“And how about what you dig, like in the ground?” She continued to stare at the sky as if waiting for something to appear.
“A hole.”
Kai traced the word with an elegant touch.
She wrote, “My father said the stars were the holes the sun shined through, that the black was a mesh blanket draped over the sky.”
A bloody face appeared in my mind. Then my father’s in prison. I wondered how much he’d thought about me.
I wrote, “My father once called them his mistakes, said he shaped them to make meaning of his past.”
“Must be hard on himself,” she wrote. “That’s a lot of mistakes.”
I couldn’t even remember a time when he’d admitted fault. If he’d ever been that sort of man, I wouldn’t have been deaf, and Kai would’ve still had a father.
“He’s made a lot of them,” I wrote.
Back on the bus, Kai quizzed me on the Polaroids, covering the answers and then revealing them with the dramatics of a gameshow. I was a horrible contestant, but she didn’t seem to care.
“It was a good first day,” she wrote, and handed me the notebook for safekeeping.
I nodded.
A block before my stop, she grabbed it back and scribbled, “On Saturday evenings, I visit my father’s tombstone. I’d love if you joined me this weekend.”
I envisioned grabbing Kai’s shoulders, looking her in the eyes, and telling her why I couldn’t go, hoping she’d read my lips and grasp enough to understand. Or writing a grossly condensed apology as the bus came to a stop and tossing Stuff into her lap and escaping the bus and leaving town.
But instead I wrote, “Of course.”
I couldn’t sleep. I’d be with Kai again in a few days, and I needed to know what to say and how. But the simple version didn’t seem to cut it: We went to pick up cocaine and I let my drug addict of a father smoke crack, fall asleep, and ruin your life. Sure, it was the truth, but I needed to give her more – that my father was sorry.
And if I couldn’t speak for myself, how could I possibly speak for him? I would never be able to fake it enough to appear genuine, not when conscious of his trademark ability to shirk even his worst flaws: “I didn’t leave Mom; she left us. I didn’t find drugs; drugs found me.” For all I knew, the only regret he’d mustered behind bars was botching a lucrative pick-up.
But I knew it didn’t matter. He was still the only one who could offer the words I couldn’t give to Kai.
The next morning I took a bus to downtown Eddyville, back along the Western Kentucky Parkway toward the state penitentiary. I had imagined remnants from the crash still littering the freeway like a mental diorama of loss, so it felt odd to see the world had cleaned up on my behalf. I closed my eyes and flipped through Stuff, picturing Kai’s gameshow face.
The old building, known as the Castle on Cumberland, sat on a lush hill near Lake Barkley, an inlet to the Cumberland River. It didn’t look like a prison or live where one should live, a counterfeit encased in charm, with white paint embellishing fern-green stripes that highlighted the castle contours. I wanted a flat-roofed, drab-grey box hidden from the freeway. But it stood tall, arrogant, poised in defiance, and I wondered if my father was still built the same way.
A guard took me to a room partitioned by glass. In my seat, I clutched the notebook and thought about leaving.
Then he walked in wearing a khaki jumpsuit and sat down. I couldn’t look up. I’d imagined holding a bold stare in that moment, not a weight of complexity in my gut. Part of me wanted to break the glass and punch him in the mouth. Part of me wanted to scream. Part of me, the portion most keen to how lonely I’d been, wanted a hug.
He pulled the phone from the wall, and I looked at him with an anger I didn’t know I could muster in silence. He realized his mistake and placed it back. With glossy eyes he stared down at his hands, which held a paper he’d folded into a small square.
I opened to a bookmarked page in Stuff, where I’d prepared the icebreaker: “I met the daughter of the man you killed. She asked me to visit his tombstone tomorrow. She doesn’t know I was in the car. She deserves a full apology. Mine alone isn’t enough.”
I opened the two-way drawer and slid the notebook to the other side of the glass.
Months without communication, and this was our blunt beginning. It was the first time silence had yielded such precision, like a point and ask, a tell me what I need so I can pass it along to those who need it.
After reading the terse message, he closed his eyes, running a hand through his hair. He unfolded his own paper a couple times and wrote back.
“Had this for weeks hoping you’d come,” it said. “Have her read it too.”
He couldn’t look at me. I wanted to yell at him for leaving me alone in the world and taking noise with him. I wanted to cry as a kid who lost his family. I thought of showing him all the Stuff I’d collected without his help and force him to see Kai’s face, only to realize that pushing him to see the person behind the name would make me feel luckier for meeting her, and since I only knew her name because of his disgusting selfishness, I couldn’t stomach the possibility of him deducing a false epiphany from pain, as vindication, as anything close to meaningful. I chose criticism.
“You fucked everything up,” I wrote. “For what? One more hit? Was it worth it?”
He wrote, “If I could go back, I’d change everything. I ruined everything, and I’m so sorry, Danny. You know you’re all I have.”
Maybe it was my fresh affliction with silence, or maybe it was the irony in reading an unprecedented admission of guilt when hearing it would have felt more real, but the words weren’t enough. I don’t know how they could’ve been, but I needed more. I needed more to smother what burned in me. He needed to say more, do more, but he’d already said and done so much, and it didn’t matter.
My father looked up, fraught with unsayable faults.
Unfolding his paper, I was both desperate and terrified to find honesty nestled between the creases. There would be new responsibility in managing the weight for more than myself. Whatever I carried out of the prison would also be Kai’s, and it would be used to connect our realities, to force life whole again.
Danny –
I have the same dream every night. I stand in a river, knee-high. Stars are bright. I’m holding an empty bag the size of a pillowcase and reach inside and try to stretch it out, try to make it bigger than itself. But I can’t. It’s the size it has to be. The stars flock together without touching, like birds in flight, and curl around the moon and shoot across the sky. They won’t stop moving. I yell, “Excuse me!” holding my bag up toward the sky. “Don’t I have a chance to use this?” I lower my bag and the stars cluster into an enormous ball of light and then fall down in a streaming line like sand in the middle of an hour-glass. They disappear behind a wall of trees up ahead. The sky is dark now. It’s quiet. And I wait. There’s a glisten upstream. The stars are in the river floating toward me. “This time,” I say, “I’ll choose the right ones.” But that’s the problem, Danny. I think I have a plan, but I’ve forgotten how complex it all really is. I haven’t learned. All I know is the smallest stars come first and the biggest stars come last. So I let the small ones run by. And that feels good. I’m content with my sacrifice.
But every night it’s the same. I think of all that’s passing, all the mistakes I’ll never be able to take back. I can’t stand it. I start grabbing every star I can, ashamed of all the light. Then it hits me. I need room for the big ones. So I let more drift by, and each one returns to the sky. “It’s alright,” I say. “The big ones are coming.” It all seems so clear. I prioritize. Empty the bag. I think if I can fit just one, just one big star, then fine. That’ll do. And that’s what I do. It fills the bag to the brim. But another floats by. And another. Another I never knew existed. Another I thought was hidden deep in the darkness of my brain, forgotten. And the sky grows brighter and brighter, just as vivid as it was. I’m overwhelmed. I convince myself there’s a proper way to collect the stars. Like it’s some goddamn riddle. Like I’ll just go and sleep on it. “Tomorrow night,” I say, tilting the bag upside down, “I’ll pick the right ones.” The sky is full now. It’s beautiful, Danny. It’s so goddamn bright it hurts. Then I wake up in a sweat clutching my pillow.
I’ve been trying to figure out if the regret I feel is worse at day or night. But it doesn’t matter. Or maybe that’s all that matters? That I regret my life, the things I’ve done? I don’t know. That doesn’t feel like what I need to tell you. But then I don’t know what else to tell you. I mean I’m not going to write two apologetic words over and over and over and over. You’d have every reason in the world to call bullshit on them for the rest of your life. Why wouldn’t you? All I know is I can’t let you walk out of here naming this letter an apology. I don’t know what it is. But it isn’t that. It’s much more, even if it’s not enough.
I looked up through tears. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and leaned toward the glass.
“I’m sorry,” he said slowly. I watched his lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
For as long as I could remember, there’d always been a barrier between us, created by the parts of him I hated and my fear of seeing those parts in me. But we did share similarities, and I suppose I chose to recognize only the favorable ones in his phases of progress rather than lump them in with the similarities that forged a dismally complacent view of the world. Maybe that’s what led me to align with him instead of my mother. She wanted more, and maybe I didn’t want anything at all, so I allowed the barrier between my father and I to remain obvious and transparent, content with looking through.
But in the prison, the barrier had now materialized into unbreakable glass. It was too late to do or say more, so the divided clarity had to be enough. I’d been afraid to shatter the emotional hindrance between us because the daunting task of piecing the shards back together was too much. It’d never occurred to me I was helping create our looking glass all along, staring through to a man who didn’t care enough to change, only to realize he’d likely been hoping I would do the changing for us both.
He stood, pressed a hand against the glass, and walked away.
Outside the prison, I let out a scream that startled some birds from a nearby tree. Without touching, they flew together tightly, darting from point to point in the sky, returning to their perch as if mocking my noise, unafraid I’d do it again. I shouted until they didn’t come back.
On Saturday evening, I met Kai at the bus stop near the clinic. Poking out of her purse was a small bouquet of sweet Alyssums. I grabbed her purse so she could walk easier on her crutches. She smiled.
On the bus, she wrote that her father used to line his garden beds with Alyssums every year, that she’d planted some after he died. I breathed them in and opened Stuff, gesturing for their entry.
A narrow path of pebbles curled us around rows of protruding stones. Kai led me to a small knoll claimed by an enormous oak tree, its branches looming over us. She leaned her crutches against the trunk and knelt down before a black marble stone, marked with thin veins of gold.
I handed Kai the flowers, and she rested them on the ground. Sitting behind her, I closed my eyes, afraid to name the loss I knew something – but nothing – about.
James Harris
The night flashed in my mind. Smoke. Airbag. Bloody face.
My breath shortened, and I hoped Kai wouldn’t turn around.
Below his name was an epitaph carved in white:
We may wait a lifetime to find the passion that will free us in our endeavor to name the world. While one finds it quickly, a thousand more sit lost in the dark. So break it in a million pieces, learn it, put it back together – then light it on fire. The others need that light to find and make their own.
Kai wrote, “He kept that passage above his desk. Said he wanted to use it in his first published novel.”
I wondered about the world from which I’d distanced myself – before and after the crash. How much time had I wasted pointing to my life and cheapening its name? How much more time would I have wasted if I’d never met Kai? I wouldn’t have visited my father, who I believed had taken everything from me, but there I stood, with his words in hand while reading another’s in stone, with the opportunity to connect us all into one path. The world owed me nothing I wanted but offered everything I needed.
I pulled my father’s note from my pocket, stars settling in the sky.
Kai turned and saw me crying.
Hesitant of the words I carried, I suddenly wished for the ability to sign everything to her instead, but I knew neither would be enough. All I could do was offer the words I had and hope they were useful despite their limitations.
“Kai, my father was the man who caused the accident. I fell asleep in the car and woke up as it happened. I was afraid to tell you and then I waited until I visited my father so I could bring you his words. I couldn’t give you everything you deserved by myself.”
Kai began to cry almost to the point of hyperventilation, breathing into her hand like it was a paper bag. I reached for her shoulder but pulled my hand away, haunted by my inability to hear her. She sat against the tree, closing her eyes, the hard pulse of her chest making me want to disappear.
When she finally slowed, she unfolded the note and began reading, repeatedly wiping her eyes with the edge of her sleeve.
When she finished, I had to look away and stood to walk off.
But Kai pulled at my shirt.
“I’m sorry,” I motioned before her.
She pulled at my shirt again, leading me to the grass.
For a long time, Kai looked up through tears at a clear sky and vivid stars. It looked as though she was searching for the shape of her father, where in the black my father would have outlined his worst regret.
She wrote, “What’s the word for when things move us in ways we can’t explain, things too large and connected to understand?”
“Beautiful,” I wrote, creating something new from what had once felt like nothing.
She signed the word, a fan of fingers sweeping across her face and coming together below her chin.
I copied her and looked to the stars.
We were absolutely right.
