Inescapable Things

I slide the plastic handles over her outstretched arm and she says, “More,” so I load more bags until her elbow finally bends. She turns and skips between two parked cars, then underneath the staircase that leads up to the second-story apartments. I take the remaining groceries from the passenger seat and let gravity shut the door behind me. 

“Careful,” I call out. 

I watch the hem of her rose-speckled T-shirt billow with every leap. Her hair, which naturally drapes flat and slick, frays around her head like a charcoal smear. When she lands, the strands regain their silky, somber gleam, like a reservoir striped by moonlight. 

It was the first thing I saw in the Hope’s Angels arts & crafts room a year prior: straight black hair, reflecting the cool fluorescence that spilled from an overhead panel. Despite having examined her photo to memory, speculated on the particulars of her personality based on the slight rounding of the jaw, the slanted scar above her left eyebrow, and despite having discussed every possible reason for the slightly perturbed glint in her eye, as though she’d been scolded moments prior to Smile bigger!, you leaned into me and whispered, “She’s her, right?” 

Of course she was her. Two other girls occupied the room, one with brunette curls, the other with light-auburn pigtails. I nodded and felt your fingers glide across my lower back, latching onto my hip bone. 

My father described the moment he first saw me as a refocusing that occurs not in the mind or the mind’s visualization of the heart, but within the organ itself, and within every cell that passes through it. Of course, witnessing the culmination of a full-term pregnancy was very different from what we were doing: standing behind a glass wall, watching inconspicuously as a four-year-old whom we’d selected from a stack of identical manilla folders dragged a yellow crayon across a cut-out sun. Still, a part of me hoped that tempering my expectations would amount to at least a fraction of the refocusing my father had described. But as I gazed upon our daughter for the first time, my insides writhed. A single phrase pulsed in my eardrums, repeating not the words themselves, but their combined meaning: They were right, they were right.

She turned to us. I watched the breath wedge in her throat. 

I wonder about her initial thought, her foremost observation of the two men standing before her. Perhaps it was our alikeness, not in height, posture, or style, but in the way that mattered: your hand on my hip bone. To the indiscreet whisperers, the comedian foreman at your construction site, the church moms who perpetually occupied the far back table in our hometown’s sole cafe, spewing gossip over splayed bibles and seasonal lattes, our likeness meant we were dooming our unnaturally-acquired child to a hard life of bullying and unbalanced nourishment. But Susie’s eyes did not squint with scrutiny. She looked on, her startled expression morphing into a curious one, and I began to wonder whether people her age were still taught to notice the things that mattered. Or maybe she had simply encountered countless other wannabe parents, with whom she’d had sleepovers or even week-long trial runs. Maybe, to her, our faces meant another disappointment. 

She stared at the strangers behind the glass. 

You raised a hand and waved. She waved back cautiously. 

You made a funny face. Her smile was nothing like the photo. 

---

She twirls on one heel before the door of the apartment. I slide the key into the lock and shove the door with my shoulder. She pushes ahead and bolts into the kitchen. 

“Careful,” I say again. I wonder if she hears me over the door’s creak, the rustling bags, the slaps of her dollar store flip-flops. I wonder if she knows it’s not for the jam’s sake that I say Careful, even though jam is expensive, as most things are lately. I suppose expensive means something different now. In our old two-bedroom, with its hardwood floors and sumptuous marble counters and sixth-story view of the theater, jam was another sweetness in our honeyed lives. Funny how some things you call old when they’re actually very new, and how some things that once were ours continue to be, even now.

I don’t say Careful to prevent a catastrophe, either, though it might have done just that. Whether she would have tripped on a parking stop outside, swung the bags into the wall, or in some other way demonstrated incoordination that’s only natural for humans of her age had I not said anything, I cannot say, just as I cannot predict whether, in the time it takes to dislodge my key from this prehistoric lock, she will slip backward, splatter the kitchen with jam, shatter the pane above the sink. This would be inconvenient and, perhaps, truly catastrophic. And yet, a part of me hopes for something. Accidents are inevitable; in most circumstances, they’re inescapable. To instill this crucial wisdom naturally, through the inconsequentiality of shattered glass and a bit of wasted jam, would be a welcome victory in parenting. 

You believed in inescapable things. You prided yourself on your ability to distinguish them from life’s avoidable occurrences. It was like distinguishing constants from variables in an algebraic equation. Our marriage, for instance, was an inescapable thing. You called it years before Texas would recognize it, tolerate it. According to you, marriage couldn’t be legitimized by any extrinsic power, besides God Himself. You were certain about this, as you were certain about most things.  

God, in this instance and most, was merely the overseer of some universe-spanning orchestration whom you conjured anytime you felt your morality splinter beneath unshed scripture and chronic self-hatred. Reverberations of faith, despite everything, and their numbing remedies, despite me. You never admitted it, but these things were inescapable, too. 

Inescapable things I called fate. You didn’t like that. It sounded too fantastical. Fate was something found in books or movies. It only existed in things that weren’t real. I asked you what God was, then.

---

Sweat springs along my brow: the result of a sweltering June and my loaded, striating arms. A bead tickles the side of my face before splattering the dull-gray knob which, despite my tugs and wiggles and jerks, seems intent on turning the simple task of dislodging a key into a hopeless endeavor. In the corner of my sight, Susie lowers the groceries onto a chair and removes from one a toy chest. Its miniature frame is wrapped in leopard-print faux-suede and lined with pink, wispy horsehair. What had caught her attention in the grocery store, however, was its voice recognition passcode, which guaranteed security for her most prized possessions. When I asked what she would keep in her chest, she giggled and shook her head, which stung like betrayal. I handed over the Hamilton and led her to the most patient-looking cashier. This was a deal you’d made to break her from her shyness, which I am now burdened with breaching someday, when we’re both a little older. As I surveyed the interaction, I began listing in my head the items that might suddenly vanish from her nightstand when we returned to the apartment: fairy drawings, last year’s birthday pendant. The four dollars and fifty cents the cashier handed back to her. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t encourage her to hide things from me. I only bought it because she asked, and because you used to buy her things even though she hadn’t. You entered the apartment carrying a new box of markers, a stuffed koala, a pair of cozy slippers, and her eyes brimmed with gratitude, and you combed her hair with your fingers and answered every Thank you with, “Of course, sweetie.” Then you reminded her to thank me, too, even though I’d done nothing to deserve it, and she did. 

---

Susie was an inescapable thing long before that first night when, with a lowered chin and polite voice, she told us her name was Susie. We should’ve foreseen that ‘Susan’ might only be a legal name, we later agreed. But ‘Susan’ had been the only name on her profile, and because there wasn’t some cuter, hand-written “Name” beside it, we assumed it was also preferred. So it was the name we used to refer to her as during the months of waiting, the name you sang while you cooked and mumbled in your sleep and impulsively had stitched into one of our suede sofa cushions. 

“Susie,” you said, and then said again, a little softer. “Susie.” 

I wondered if you were beginning to doubt, just as I had at the adoption agency that morning, the authenticity of inescapable things. Perhaps you were remembering all the profiles we reviewed before Susie’s, how easily we set them aside with no intentions of returning to them, and how instantly you softened for this girl you had yet to know and who could have just as easily been anybody else. I nearly laughed when you said you felt something blossoming inside you. Then, not even a minute later, I found myself nodding along to your repeated assertion: She is the one, she is the one. Watching you so effortlessly take to her made it easier to convince myself that something was blossoming inside me, too. 

You had a different revelation the night she told us her name. Names, like nail polish, are cosmetic, more a reflection of the namer than anything. That Susie had a preferred name was a display of individuality; that she told us indicated a developing trust. That Susie was no longer Susan did not suggest that we had made a mistake, or that she was the wrong child. You would later state that nothing about her profile contributed to her inescapability. It was her being, her mere existence on this planet, and some indescribable shift you underwent when you touched her page. Again, I nodded. I trusted your intuition. Or I wanted to trust your intuition, and that was enough. Your intuition was my greatest fascination, a mysterious, impossible, unattainable thing I wanted lathered over me since we were teenagers, deciding my existence, forever and before.  

As Susie skips from the kitchen to her bedroom, cradling the chest against her heart, I feel my intuition burrowing deeper. Like a parasite, plump with knowing, impervious to denial. Inescapable was your word, not mine. Perhaps the definition is malleable; inescapable things are only inescapable until they are not. When a word loses its definer, does it lose its definition too?

---

When I finally manage to dislodge the key, its jagged tip snags midway on the lock’s internal mechanisms. I pull again, deliberately this time, and I watch as the key exits the slit with painstaking slowness, the same way yours did all those years ago after you cut the engine in fear of someone in the surrounding neighborhood hearing the low, constant growl. The way you pulled it out, slow and methodical, as if purposefully accentuating the vulgarity, made me question whether you were directing a dirty insinuation at me. So I laughed, and you did too, because that was how it was to be a teenager, racing to identify the innuendo in any situation, as though acknowledging the humor first disqualified you from suspicion. Then you let go, allowing the key to cling by its most distal divot, and we watched in giggly anticipation as it drooped lower and lower before finally releasing into your cupped palm.

At sixteen, I spent the majority of my free time obsessing over the specifics of your nature. Despite lacking evidence that you were anything other than how you presented, I let myself swell and implode through bouts of hopeful suspicion. Like a beating heart, inflating from a shared look or soda, then deflating from the knowledge that we were friends, and friends enjoyed spending time together. Friends stayed in the car for curious amounts of time after you’d driven them home, prolonging the separation for as long as they could with no ulterior motive. When friends parted ways, they always turned back around to watch the other return to their truck, to observe in private the way their scapulas shifted beneath the cotton, to marvel at the way they went on existing when no one was looking.  

But, mostly, I did this for the slim chance that you would already be turned, looking back at me. 

When it finally happened, despite the years of imagining what I would say in that cool, alluring tone I only sounded like in my head, my entire body crimsoned. You kept looking at me, your eyes squinted with suspicion. 

I squinted back at you.   

At first, you said nothing, just kept looking at me like I see you. Then, your irises flickered. “Come with me. I have a surprise.”

You drove us somewhere dark, somewhere we wouldn’t be seen after sunset on a Thursday. You turned off your truck; we watched the key dangle and fall. Then you reached behind you and pulled a six-pack of beers from a bag you’d had stashed underneath the seat. You unhooked one from its plastic ring and pried the tab open with your fingernails. The can hissed as white foam oozed over your knuckles. You licked them clean and brought the tab to your lips in one fluid motion, then relaxed back into your seat and chugged the entire beer as if it were water, as if you were simply quenching a thirst. I stared at the steering wheel and listened to you drink, becoming increasingly aware of my inexperience. By the time you’d crushed the can and tossed it by your shoes, I had convinced myself that the only reason you wanted me there was to drive you home. But then you unhooked another and dropped it into my lap. 

“Try it.” 

I sipped. The warm lager sizzled on my tongue, sizzled down my throat. My chest fluttered as though you’d whispered me a secret and made me swear not to tell. Then I belched, and my face collapsed into a red-hot grimace. You laughed and showed me how to drink correctly. Don’t taste it. Hold your breath when you swallow. Pinch your nose and think of water. 

By the time I’d finished one, you were on your fourth. I was lightheaded but not tipsy. You were drunk and huffing with impatience. I never asked you the true purpose of the beers: to loosen me up, to give you courage, or to provide an alibi in case you were wrong. I was just drunk. As the fifth can disappeared between your legs, your gaze drifted to my crotch and lingered there for a moment too long. You looked up, expecting to be caught, your eyes glowing with a remorseful longing I instantly recognized, and before I could break the tension with a joke, you leaned across the cupholders, grabbed a fistful of my shirt, and kissed me hard.    

---

Years later, I’ll say I regret this evening and all the other times I enabled you. Then, standing in the doorway of my apartment, I’ll remember exactly why I did.  

We were young. By which I mean I was young. By which I mean I was oblivious to the moments that breathed life into my inanimate existence the way only a young person cannot help but mistake passing things for a motionless blur. A year ago, I realized that I’d been breathing subconsciously. That I must somehow keep breathing for her, despite your absence. So I breathe manually now, sucking more air than necessary in some desperate attempt to revitalize myself and the love that came so effortlessly before. 

One year will become two, then three. Susie will outgrow her car seat and practice times tables. She will stuff her box with secret things and say, “I miss Daddy,” and gradually forget you existed. 

And I will linger on every sky like it’s one backdropping you the evening I first noticed the pale bed of scalp underlying your hair. I will compare every smell to your vetiver-scented aftershave, every taste to your drunk breath on my tongue. I will seek your remnants and spoil them all and still not know how it happened, how my life focused for you, how it could possibly refocus for anybody else. 

---

I take the groceries into the kitchen and begin putting them away, noticing a tingle of regret as I slide the jam safely beside the peanut butter in the pantry. As I raise a half-gallon of milk to the highest shelf, that tingle morphs into a sharpness that splinters beneath my scapula and incinerates my cervical spine. I let go of the carton and begin massaging the pillowy lump of atrophied trapezius. The carton tips forward off the shelf, and my quick knee only slams it into the produce drawer’s handle. Two-percent gushes like a struck artery, pulsed and spreading across the kitchen floor. I quickly scoop the bleeding carton and take it to the sink, straddling the stream as white crawls up my forearms. Stacks of unemptied cereal bowls clutter the drain, but I drop the carton anyway. The bowls topple with a cacophonous clatter, and a wave of curdled milk sloshes onto the counter.

“Three dollars, down the drain,” I mutter. “Shit.” 

For a while, I just stand there, listening to the milk tap tap tap against the floor beneath the counter’s edge. It’s an unnerving quiet, like calm after a tornado, synchronous with the inexplicable yet creeping suspicion of being watched. I glance over my shoulder. Susie peers from the hallway, half-shielded by the wall. Watching, absorbing, memorizing. 

“It’s okay,” I say. “Everything’s okay.” 

She approaches slowly, her timid steps marked by the staccato scrapes of her soles against the vinyl floor. The kitchen’s overhead bulb gleams bubblegum-pink off her protruding bottom lip, exposing in her pupils a wariness I recognize from an evening three months ago. We had just finished emigrating from our apartment by the theater. In the parking lot, Susie pointed at a dark cloud rolling in from the east, charged and grumbling. It began to pour. We played Uno in the kitchen and watched the lights flicker and listened to the windows patter and whirr. At one point, the ceiling cracked its knuckles, sending drywall and asbestos drizzling from an invisible crevice directly above our discard pile. Her eyes queried mine for alarm, for uncertainty. Hoping to prevent a fear-ignited tantrum, I feigned indifference to the instability of our circumstances and calmly laid a blue nine atop her blue seven.  

Standing before her now, reeking of unkept composure, my harshness having already echoed throughout the apartment, my failure to prevent an accident now expanding endlessly between us, I remind myself that accidents are inescapable. A milk globule dribbles down my cheek and slithers between my lips. Her eyes widen, revealing the margins of her soft-white sclera. I try to speak again, but my throat is cinched by something raw and burning. It’s only after she has fled to her bedroom that I taste the salt.    

---

You were not an inescapable thing. Proof was the pale scar that ran down the bridge of your nose ever since the morning they sliced you open, reshaped the cartilage and shattered bone, and sutured you good-as-new for the second time that year. The first time, it was a dodgeball aimed right at your face. The second time, they were the ringed knuckles of your drunken father, who, two weeks after our drunken kiss in your truck, suspected us and accused you of lying. 

You believed him when he said you could change; you cut me off entirely. But he didn’t believe himself, and that infuriated him like nothing else. 

That night, you drove to my house, tapped on my window, and with blood-stained teeth proposed your plan to leave this world behind. I wrestled you for your keys and drove you to the emergency room. On the way, you repeatedly slapped yourself, and then proposed another plan: 

“Just keep driving west until we hit the ocean. Then, go north. We’ll sleep in parking lots until we find a town we like, maybe somewhere that isn’t so fucking hot. We’ll get jobs and work until we’ve made enough money for an apartment. We’ll change our names and lie about our ages. We’ll get tattoos and grow out our hair and dye it whatever color we want.”   

Had it not been for the possibility of some internal hemorrhage pooling inside your brain, or the gash on your nose healing incorrectly and leaving you permanently disfigured, perhaps I would have driven the fourteen hundred miles without stopping, soothed by the droning highway and your nasally sleep, watching the cloudy horizon turn endless and glimmering. I wouldn’t have exited at 205 and dragged you into the half-empty lobby where we would wait, knees-touching, for hours, listening for your name. And perhaps I wouldn’t have only nodded when, with a quart-sized bag of ice pressed into the center of your face, you apologized for believing you could change. 

---

“Alcoholism is for old people,” you had said jokingly in your truck’s cab two weeks prior. I huffed in agreement and handed you another.

“There is no one to blame for your irresponsibility but you,” I would hurl at you years later. We had become old people; drenched in morning light, our marble apartment turned incandescent and mean, and you were complaining of shakes and thirst. You stared at me for a long time after I said it, your scar spasming like you were going to cry. I continued to fix my hair in the mirror, angling strands over bald patches and pressing down with sticky fingers. 

That night, I was called to identify a body, scorched and vacant yet splayed on the stretcher as if there was still hope. Painted on the asphalt were two tread streaks that veered into a graveled shoulder. Further down the road, behind a screen of lifted sediment and billowing black smoke, your truck’s tail lights blinked. 

---

I wipe my face. I peel the socks from my feet, tiptoe around the puddle, and begin arranging words in my head that might explain adult tears to a child. Then I am knocking on her door with nothing but an apology rising like bile over the base of my tongue, spilling over my teeth.

The door opens, and her spindly arm extends towards me. Pinched in her fulcrum: three one-dollar bills. 

I kneel and cup her hand in mine, then gently push our hands back into her possession. “No, sweetie. That’s yours.”

She tilts her head as if I’ve missed the point. “For you to buy more milk.”

“I know. But I don’t need you to help me with that. I have enough.”

“But I want to help.” 

“You’re very thoughtful,” I say. “But it wasn’t your fault. It was nobody’s fault because it was an accident, and accidents aren’t anybody’s fault. Accidents are–” 

Her focus drifts to the floor behind me. I’m about to redirect her with a tap on the shoulder, when she says, “Your fault, Daddy.” She looks directly at me, smiling. “Your fault. But it’s okay because I help you make better, make everything better!”

She pushes our hands into my chest, into my heart, and holds them there. When she begins to pull away, my fingers twitch, nearly clamping her carpals and fracturing them all. But then she’s retreating into her bedroom, and I’m left pinching the fibery papers and saying “Thank you” like a beggar. I will deposit them into her chest later, I think. I will unscrew the bottom plate if I have to. But for now, I just hold them: these futile bills; this inescapable thing I have given and gotten in return.