And then wham! The entire memory floods me at once, like torn pieces of a watercolor all whirling together in a wind tunnel, my fingers grasping and reaching to gather them all until the wind dies down and I can assemble the whole.
I inhale so sharply that a piece of the treat lodges in the back of my throat, making me choke. I cough it up immediately, but the ragged edge leaves a stinging scrape along my tonsil. Mom hands me my coffee, which is just cool enough to gulp, helping to quell the pain.
My mind, meanwhile, is like a memory factory, taking pieces along an assembly line and playing Tetris.
“I do remember being in a police station,” I say. “The police officer gave me a Dr. Pepper. I remember because you never let me have soda and he asked me if I wanted something from the machine. I thought I was being very naughty, but you also taught me that police officers were good people, so I decided it was okay.”
She makes a barking sound like laughter and tears competing to emerge from her throat.
“You remember that,” she gasps. “You were drinking it when you arrived.”
“Did this have something to do with Dad? Did that all happen on the same...” My voice trails off as I remember long walks on the sidewalk. Feeling buried in the shadows of tall buildings. Being thirsty. Needing to pee. Tripping and skinning my knee.
Being alone.
“Same day.” She reaches for my hand. “Yes.”
“The same day.” I haven’t forgotten any of it. The word forget doesn’t describe it. It’s more like all the details have been stored in different shelves in my brain, disparate places that don’t feel connected to each other.
“I went to the baseball game with my dad?”
“Yes.”
“Was that the day he left for good?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What happened, Mom?”
Her face crumples, hand covering her mouth. The long, thin veins on the back of her hand stand out in stark relief, making her seem so much older. Like grandma.
“He took you to the ball game. He had just been laid off. Drinking on the job. But he had tickets from some raffle he won at a bar, and he was determined to take you. Against my better judgment, I let him. We didn’t have money to buy a third ticket, and you were so excited.”
An eerie calm descends over the kitchen. I stop chewing. It sounds cavernous in the silence.
“We didn’t have cell phones back then. I mean, some people did, but we sure didn’t.” She makes a scoffing sound. “Your father drank away all the extra we had.”
“He was a good man, Mandy.” My skin crawls with her use of the old nickname. “He tried. But he had his own demons, and after seven years together I think they just ate him up alive.”
She’s rambling, and I let her, because this is the most I’ve ever heard about my father from her in years. My grandma has pieced together some of it for me, but when every third word out of her mouth is bastard it’s kind of hard to get a sense of anything beyond the worst.
“He got drunk at the game. Leo probably got drunk before he even left with you,” she says in a bitter tone I don’t hear often. “But at the game I’ll bet he was a big spender. Bought you anything you wanted.”
I remember popcorn. The baseball hat. An ice cream.
“I guess?”
“Here’s what we reconstructed from you, the police, and the short time Leo was here,” Mom starts.
Reconstructed?
“Your dad got drunk. You left the game. Some time between the game ending and the time we found you—”
Found me?
“—your father got in the car without you, drove home drunk, and got into a crash.”
I can’t breathe.
“I got a call from a state trooper. That call. The one no one ever wants. Leo came out of the crash with a few scratches. The car was totaled. And when I asked about you—” Her voice just halts, the sob turning into a high-pitched sound that makes my mouth fill with the acrid taste of her buried fear.
“Mom?”
“Oh, that poor state trooper. When I asked about my little girl he screamed. Screamed. He was at the scene with Leo and all those men, all those firefighters and paramedics ran back to the scene and started combing the long grasses by the side of the road and roamed into the woods, searching.”
“For me?”
Her eyes meet mine, red and wet, filled with the haunting of memory. “For your little body.”
“My body?”
“Leo was too drunk to be coherent and I just cried and prayed into the phone. I thought you were with him. We didn’t know that you weren’t. Those poor men. They spent hours looking for you. Hours, expecting to find a little girl thrown from the car from the crash’s impact.”
The full horror of what she’s saying hits me like I’ve been kicked in the chest.
“Oh, Mom.” Her words sink in. “But I wasn’t with dad?”
She shakes her head, her eyes glassy. “No. Sweet Jesus, no. Thank God, Mandy. We don’t know how, but we think Leo just left you at Fenway Park. Maybe you went to tinkle, maybe you wandered off to get an ice cream. Maybe he walked away to get a beer for the road...we don’t know. We just know that after hours of trying, those responders never found you. And then....”
“You—” She’s clinging to the kitchen island with those hands, her fingertips white with pressure. “You had walked all the way from Fenway Park to some police station in South Boston. Hell of a distance. Back then, it wasn’t safe. Southie was no place for a little kid alone. You had to cross that enormous bridge. The cop told us you walked in to the station and sweetly asked for help calling your mom. That you had lost your dad. You knew our phone number and he called and called, but it was busy.”