White Knuckles

Kamryn Pitcher

“What you’re saying to me sounds traumatic. I mean, what you and your family went through was essentially trauma.” I fidget with the lid on my petal-pink thermos while her words scorch my throat like black tea. Maybe if I stare at the ceiling’s Victorian beams long enough, I won’t want to cry. Maybe if I stare I can make them split or petrify or ignite under my mind’s searing weight. Then, I wouldn’t have to consider what she is saying as something true, and a new problem, a physical one, would take me away from myself for a moment. I have never heard the incident with my father in Spokane referred to as “traumatic.” It was always “I know it’s been really hard on you guys,” and “Sorry for your troubles,” or the most touching of all, “Wow dude that sucks.” But trauma takes hold of my attention. It brands me with a large, festering T and says, “You are an owner of pain, therefore you are allowed to be sad if only for this occurrence alone.” The pink thing in my hand blends with my rosy skin, and I try to comprehend all the ways youthful frailty has diminished me. The first time we met, she told me I was guarded. I thought that was ridiculous considering nothing had happened to me. Nothing real, I mean, and definitely nothing traumatic. But I listened anyway and kept my eyes on the ceiling where not even a splinter cared to budge. 

~

I carried on by living half awake and guilty for feeling.

It was December and the world was one big blue and white crystal outside the ice-encrusted Impala windows. We were on our way to the ranch after moving back to Miles City just a month prior,  I sat miserable and jaded in my itchy periwinkle pea-coat. It was Cookie Day, a holiday original to my family on which we spend half the day baking and decorating cookies and the other half devouring them and shaming ourselves for it. Any other year, I would have been happy to go, especially in this weather when the land appeared almost inseparable from the sky like a cool, clean bed sheet. But I was cold in those days, and I didn’t want to be there or anywhere for that matter. Leaving Washington had taken an embarrassing amount out of me, and I carried on by living half awake and guilty for feeling. My younger sister sat in the back and I in the passenger seat as my mother drove down the desolate highway. My father had not come with us this time. The ranch proved a lonesome place for in-laws, and he valued cable and his own couch far more than cookies. For some reason, perhaps his absence being one, the incident was mentioned. They spoke of it for a while, their way of grieving, I presumed, and my lips moved only to quiver until my silence grew too pervasive to ignore. 

“Honey, what’s wrong? Talk to us,” my mother said. My fingers curled themselves into small, transparent balls. 

“I’m just so mad,” I spit out. I wished I hadn’t cut my nails. Maybe if I had drawn blood in the grip of my white knuckles, then my mother might have seen my pain for what it was. She had grown numb to my tears over the past two years, and I don’t blame her, but then again, maybe I do. My blurry vision stayed only on the powdered sugar road stretched out before me. 

“This woman just comes into our life and feels the right to spread lies about Dad! I know him better than anybody! She doesn’t know him at all! Or us! And she doesn’t care! She doesn’t care that she ruined someone’s career! She doesn’t care that he spent thirteen freaking years getting his PhD just to never use it again! She doesn’t care that she ruined our lives!” 

If I couldn’t make myself bleed then I would plead. I would plead and cut myself open for my mother even if she was as warm as alabaster in my mind. She didn’t understand me when it first happened. She would not understand me now. But I was a barbed wire fence in a blizzard: frozen, resigned to circumstance. And when you’re like that, you’d give what’s left of you, you’d give all of yourself for even a hope of being heard.

“She didn’t ruin my life. Why would I let her ruin my life?” 

My ears quit her after that, and we moved along like we knew how.  

~

I always anticipate the moment in a new, blossoming friendship in which I shall reveal the incident to someone. I’ve found it’s my way of offering vulnerability; I give you this story, and you get a piece of me only a select few may ever receive, but then again, that is laughably untrue. All of Spokane had a claim to the story at one point. Teachers came up to me the day after it aired on the local news. Mr. Dunn patted me on the shoulder as I was leaving his class, hood up, head down, and said, “Hang in there, kid.” He was a round, affable man with rosy cheeks and a hearty sailor laugh you’d hear booming through the halls every day without fail. Standing there before me, he was empathy itself. The incident was so pitiful to alter even Mr. Dunn’s present disposition, and that scared me just as much as anything. It was almost as bad as what happened to my sister that day. She came home with a newspaper she had found in her middle school library during reading time. It had a photo in it, not just of our father, but our whole family, the two of us included, and she had taken it home with her and hid it in her closet until she could show it to me when I got home that night. She was twelve years old and I never saw her cry over it. Not once. But for some reason, I couldn’t seem to stop. A year had melted away by the time my senior English teacher asked everyone in class a purely philosophical question: “If you were offered a thousand dollars to ruin someone’s career with a false accusation of sexual assault, would you do it?” 

I could feel the past strap itself to my skin like a straight jacket, but the comments that followed are what twisted me up good and tight. My classmates shouted “totally” and “of course” without a moment’s hesitation. I thought those goddamn idiots didn’t know a damn thing about anything-I still think that sometimes. And I don’t remember how I got to the bathroom but when I did, I shut the stall and wept, carving out eight fleshy crescents in my fists. Mrs. Camp, the teacher of my next class, found me and hugged me until I quit sobbing. I could barely tell her what happened. My throat was caught choking on everything going on around me, even that hug. Mrs. Camp was scarier than every teacher in that high school combined, but she was somehow the softest person in my life at the time. 

~

Dad called for me and my sister to come downstairs so he could speak with us. My knuckles popped and cracked as he sat like a porcelain doll, trepidatious and appalled by the awareness of his own fragility.

“What is it?” I said bluntly, pretending like I couldn’t read the person who makes up half of me. 

“There’s going to be some stuff said about me tonight on the news that isn’t true, and I just wanted to tell you girls before it got to you from someone at school.” 

“What kind of stuff?” My chest shook like concert speakers. This is the real reason he quit his job two days ago, I thought.

“Rumors about myself and a woman I worked with. None of it’s true.”

“Well, of course none of it’s true.”

Hearing his voice crack sounded like a shifting fire, and I thought that if I looked at him, I’d see my childhood home ablaze, reduced to ashy nothingness in his face.

I spoke with abrupt certainty and left him there in front of the TV, unbothered and proud that I acted in the way my mother would have. I didn’t want to hear another word. I believed him. I went back upstairs to cry, and Dad came up a few minutes later to check on me. I didn’t turn to look at him when he placed his hand on my shoulder and asked me what was wrong. What was wrong is that I didn’t have the bitch’s name and address. Curled up in my grandmother’s quilts with my childhood stuffed animal staring back at me, I imagined myself slashing a stranger’s tires or vandalizing their home or mimicking every fake jab I learned from watching Rocky with my Dad. He started crying, but even then I did not look at him. No one wants to see the strongest person they know cry. Hearing his voice crack sounded like a shifting fire, and I thought that if I looked at him, I’d see my childhood home ablaze, reduced to ashy nothingness in his face. After a while, he had to take my sister to volleyball practice. Once I was alone, I cried so hard I threw up in an empty paper bag in the corner of my room. The next few months consisted of Dad staying at my uncle’s house. He was doing some remodeling and somehow carried the incredible ability to bring my father back to himself in a way none of us ever could. The first time he left, he told me I was the man and woman of the house now. I hate that I understood exactly what he meant by that. And once he started trucking, I carried on with the things he used to do, like mowing the lawn and killing the spiders to protect all the women. It got better as things generally do with time, and he made a life for himself at home rather than on the road. He and I never spoke of it again. Why would we?

~

“I suppose it would be a little traumatic. You just kind of sweep it under the rug after a certain amount of time, ya know?” I notice how she nods her head and leaves space for silence, enough to get me to say things I wouldn’t otherwise say. She then asks if I would like to meet again next week at the same time, to which I answer yes and steal something sugary from her pumpkin-shaped candy jar on my way out. Outside on the pavement, the brisk morning air wraps lovingly around me. I feel clean but I don’t understand why since I am different from what I previously suspected. Is it wrong that I feel free in this new knowledge? That somehow in the recollection of my worst memories I am unfettered? Or that I fill my lungs and wish to scream, “I have a license to feel and I’m not afraid to use it”? It is all unknown to me. What I do know is that it’s a good thing I didn’t tell her everything I told you. I could’ve made the ceiling topple if I wanted to. I could have turned my white knuckles blue.