You Never Get It Back

“Inundate” by Blake Stolarik

You are finishing dinner when you hear a knock. The spoon slips out of your hand, clattering into the bowl. The last dregs of the split pea splashes onto your cheek. It isn’t hot anymore. You wish it was. You could use the burn.

You get up and fix your hair. It is glazed in a greasy membrane that you are surprised doesn’t peel off, like the thin film that sticks to the spoon when you boil milk. Instead, the grease coats your fingertips. You wipe it off on your shirt.

You open the door. The porch light is broken but you can still make out your father, standing there on the doorstep. He has a matted, tangled beard that you have never seen before. He reminds you of the fundamentalist Mormons from documentaries. It is a measure of time, his beard.

You move out of the doorway and he saunters in like he owns the place. You want to roll your eyes, but then you remember that he does. Own the place, that is.

You clear your throat.

For a moment, you are unsure if words will come out.

“What are you doing here?”

Your voice is deeper than you remember.

“I was close by,” he shrugs, walking through the kitchen.

“Where?” you ask, cowering. You don’t want him to look at you. You feel like the splat of mucus that old men with hacking coughs release. Thick, sticky and semifluid.

“At the lake,” your father says to you, shaking his head. He doesn’t understand why you would ask such an obvious question.

“Oh, right.”

He moves through the house, hands between his back. You slink next to him.

“I just need to borrow some things,” he tells you, like all the things in the house aren’t his.

“What do you need to borrow?”

“Some pliers, rubbing alcohol and a band-aid,” he says, heading towards the back of the house. His footsteps are loud thuds on the creaky wood floors. The sound is so familiar that it makes your throat dry.

“I’m not sure if I have those things.”

“I left some in the laundry room.”

You stand in the doorway of the laundry room while he riffles through cabinets and drawers with his left hand.

“Oh, okay,” you say to your father, as you watch him pull out the rubbing alcohol.

His right hand emerges from behind his back. It is covered in a layer of thick, dark liquid.

Blood, you realize.

You gasp, taking a step closer. In the center of his hand, right above his thumb, you see the curved half of a fish hook sticking out. And hanging from the tip, is a squirming sunfish. The point, you can see, has somehow gone through the fleshy side of his hand. You feel split pea climb up your throat. You take a step back, swallowing it back down.

“Oh my god, what happened?” You can’t look away. There is something about it, the way the fish hook dangles through his skin, that makes you want to laugh. Each time the sunfish shakes, the skin tears more. You think of all the fish you’ve seen with the end of that hook sticking cleanly through their mouths, being yanked out of the water. They must all be laughing at him now.

“Accident,” your father explains, nodding casually towards the sanguine mess. You are not surprised by his composure. When you’d broken your collarbone as a teenager, he didn’t scream, the way the soccer coach did. He just held your hand.

“You should probably go to the hospital,” you say, quietly.

“Not necessary,” he says, gruffly. The sunfish’s tail thrashes, as if arguing with him.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he tells you, with an air of finality. You nod, taking a step closer as you watch him fumble with the lid for the rubbing alcohol.

“I should probably help you,” you say, even though you want to run back upstairs and bolt the door to your bedroom.

He pauses, eyeing you warily. You swallow, suddenly reminded of the last time you were in this house, together. The summer after you graduated college, when you were on that mottled line, somewhere between a girl and a woman.

*** 

You spent every summer during college working at a bakery. You liked the way the world felt at five in the morning. Like you were the only one in it. You liked how the flour seemed to soak up all of your wetness. You were a teenager which meant that you were really just a puddle.

Mostly, though, you liked the boy who worked there with you.

He had to hunch to get through the door and he always smelled briny and sweet, like yeast. He was popular in school. Boys like him, brawny and beautiful, would always be popular.

You worked together for years. You, by the register, fumbling with crumpled dollar bills. Him, near the back, cutting and folding and scraping and dusting. He stayed in town for college. You left. You had to wait months to see him.

On your third day back from college, he pulled you into the alley behind the bakery, near the dumpsters where you’d throw out all the bread no one bought, and kissed you.

You loved the way he seemed to just know how to handle you. He used to pat you the way he patted flour into a sloppy, wet dough. He would knead you until you could sit on the counter without spilling over the edges.

When you came home after graduation, he was engaged. You walked into the bakery and saw them. Him, leaning over the counter, smiling. Her, holding a swollen stomach through the thin sundress.

You weren’t surprised. She was everything he ever wanted, you could tell. She would raise soft babies with bright eyes and dopey smiles, children who would have flour on their cheeks and help their father fold dough into triangles on Sundays. They would always buy unsalted butter, always keep bags of powdered sugar and little jars of cream of tartar in their kitchens. 

It would always impress you how men just seemed to know which girls would eventually become the kind of women you marry.

So, that summer, you quit. You left, tagging along on your father’s fishing trip. You’d packed a worn Speedo, the only swimsuit you owned that still fit you, six half-empty bottles of coconut-scented sunscreen and left.

The house hadn’t changed. It never changed. All mottled wood and shag. Ugly brown La-Z-Boys and rugs printed with aztec patterns your mother bought before you were born. Everything in this house was from before you existed. Somehow, the whole house smelled of cat piss, even though you’d never had one.

That summer, you ate lobster rolls and fried clams on the deck every night. You stole sips of your father’s beer. You didn’t even like beer but your father smiled when you reached for it.

 ***

Now, in that same house, you take a step closer to your father.

“Okay,” your father flinches when you touch him.

 “Are you in pain?” you ask your father, holding his hand carefully.

Your father shrugs.

The air smells so much of copper it makes you feel sick.

“I’m going to try and get the fish off,” you tell him, suddenly unsure. The sunfish, barely alive, shakes when you reach for it. You pry open its soft, gummy mouth, watching as the blood streams out. You can no longer tell if the blood belongs to the fish or your father. It doesn’t matter.

You wiggle it a bit, trying to dislodge it from the tip of the hook that has gone through its cheek. It doesn’t work.

You think of the summer that you were fourteen, when the algae bloomed and your father brought home coolers full of bloated, gray sunfish. The whole house smelled like your mother’s hospital room. You couldn’t eat the fish so you ordered pizza for dinner almost every night. The inside of your mouth always tasted tangy.

It still tasted tangy while you lingered in front of gas stations, outside of sports bars, in empty parks. You learned about sex in the backseat of American cars. You loved the way the men talked to you. They called you a baby and asked, Do you even know what 9/11 was?

You weren’t the most beautiful of all the girls, but you were the youngest. It felt like a sort of currency, your youth. It gave you a value that you couldn’t quite understand, but you knew it was there. You could feel the undercurrent of it everywhere. If you close your eyes, you can still feel it. The electricity of it.

*** 

You sigh, feeling the heat of your father’s eyes on you. You wonder if he is thinking of all those years that he tried to take you fishing. You could feel the way he wanted, so desperately, for you to love it, so you smiled when you reeled in bass and ignored the way the rivers of blood that streamed down to the back of the boat made you sick.

You yank, hard, and the fish comes loose, flopping to the floor. You watch it as it shivers once and then goes still. You will remember this act years later, when you are sitting next to the hospital bed, watching your father’s swollen midsection move up and down, expecting the shiver.

You stand in silence for a few moments before you realize you are the one who must pick up the fish. You pick it up, holding it between the hard, slippery ridges of the tail, and take it to the kitchen sink. You follow the droplets of blood back to the laundry room.

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. You look nothing like the woman in the picture they showed on the news. You would never admit it out loud, but it was the best photograph ever taken of you. You looked glamorous, like a celebrity who had been arrested for a DUI. Your eyeliner, smudged. Your lips, full and swollen.

The mugshot was taken the day that the boy’s mother had stormed into your classroom with her brother, the police officer, in tow. She’d been hysterical, pointing and screaming. The principal stood behind her, shaking her head.

The brother, who was barely a man himself, asked you to follow him down to the station. You stared at his acne scars the whole time he spoke.

At the station, the men watched you. You could feel their whispers like handcuffs around your wrists. The brother carted you around, taking your fingerprints and picture before letting you go.

“There’s nothing else we can really do, you know?” He said, apologetically. “He’s eighteen, so this is more a disciplinary matter for the school. I only did this because my sister made me, you know?”

You drove home. Fell asleep on the couch. When you woke up, the boy was there. You’d forgotten you’d given him a key.

“I’m so sorry,” he blubbered. His eyes were red and squinty, like he’d been crying.

You rushed to the bathroom and threw up the salad you’d had for lunch.

Behind you, the boy stood in the doorway.

“I didn’t know she would do that,” he kept talking.

You stopped listening and stared at the bits of lettuce, floating around the toilet bowl.

“Look, I can tell them it’s a lie. Or that I was the one who started it. I’ll do whatever you want,” he said, desperate.

You felt bad for him so you let him hold you. You sat on the hard linoleum floor, with his arms around you, the whole night. You told him to tell the truth. You told him it would be okay. You let him kiss you goodbye. The next time you saw him, he was in a poorly-fitted suit jacket and he couldn’t look at you.

*** 

“I’ll put some rubbing alcohol on it,” you tell your father now, picking up the dark glass bottle. He nods and you pour some of the clear liquid onto his hand. He remains stoic, but his hand shakes in yours. You hold it steady.

His hand will shake in yours again, seconds after they turn off the ventilator. You will feel this and be sure that he has forgiven you. When you tell the nurse, she will explain that this is an involuntary spasm. It happens all the time, at the end. Sometimes even after, she tells you.

“You should sit down,” you tell him, kicking out the stool under the window. You are surprised when he does. You grab the pliers and crouch down in front of him.

“I’m going to pull it out now,” you announce.

You do not feel calm or steady. You are terrified that you will pull too hard or push too deep and his hand, mangled and ugly, will fall right off his arm. He will just sigh and look at you, that same disappointment, still heavy in his features.

 You hadn’t told him about the hearing but he came anyway. You saw him slip in through the door at the last moment and take a seat near the back, next to the mothers who shook their heads at you. You closed your eyes when they asked but you told them exactly how it began.

 ***

“Nice class,” the boy told you, months before, when he passed your desk. You looked up, catching his eyes. He smiled at you and you thought about the boy from the bakery.

This boy wasn’t like that boy. He didn’t smell like yeast. This was a boy who had never been a boy. You could tell by the way he clenched his whole body, all the time.

It really started at the supermarket, though.

He worked there, bagging groceries. You hadn’t known this when you’d gone there. Or maybe you had. You can’t remember. You had three bagged salads, two cans of artichoke hearts, a tub of greek yogurt and a pound of smoked salmon in your cart.

“Hey,” he said. A girl a few years younger than you, with a nose ring and bushy eyebrows, started scanning your things.

“Hi,” you said, like you knew him. You felt like you did.

He carried your bags out to the car for you, silently. You said thank you, looking at the gravel. He grabbed your hand as you reached it out towards the car door. You let him hold it. His eyes were on you. Your cheeks flushed involuntarily. He reached out and rested the back of his other hand on one of your flushed cheeks. It was cold and you gasped. He leaned down to kiss you. You let him.

He shoved his tongue in your open mouth and pushed you against the car. The hand that was resting on your cheek clutched your breast so hard that it almost hurt.

 ***

In the lake house, you try to grab the hook with the pliers, but it is slick with blood and it slides right through the pliers. You sit, in silence, focusing on the hook. You think of the countless nights you sat on your father’s bed, watching as he held your foot up and carefully maneuvered the splinters out. You used to purposefully slide your foot against the unfinished wood deck so you could climb into his bed after your shower. You liked being taken care of.

“That’s not working,” he says, like you cannot see that.

“Yes,” you say, because you can’t think of anything else to say. After a few minutes, you manage to get a grip on the hook.

“Does it feel like it’s moving?” You ask, wiggling it. He shakes his head. You wiggle it again. Nothing.

You yank it. You hope he will scream. You have never heard him scream.

“A little,” he says, shrugging.

You watch as the skin tears around the hook, leaving little trails of blood. You aren’t sure how you will get the triangular tip of the hook back through the skin and out of the other side.

 “It’s really stuck in there,” you say, uselessly.

“Uh huh,” your father nods, watching your hands. You know he is thinking about these hands, your hands, on that boy. The way his mother, a frazzled woman in a tight dress, cried when he answered the principal’s questions.

*** 

It didn’t happen all at once. At school, you didn’t look at him. You couldn’t. At the supermarket, he walked you to the car. He asked you about your family, where you’d gone to college, what you did when you weren’t behind that desk. You made up lies. You didn’t want to disappoint him with the truth.

Eventually, you brought him to your condo. You’d started giving him a ride home at the end of his shifts and one day, he told you not to turn down his street. So you didn’t. You gripped the steering wheel as he talked about his cousin, who he’d visited at school the weekend before.

He was quick and confident and rough. You had bruises between your thighs and along your breasts for weeks.

When you asked him about it, he laughed.

“I grew up on porn, I guess.”

You wondered, out loud, if he watched porn about teachers.

“No, no,” he told you, reaching a thin arm to pull you to him. “It’s not like that. I want you because you’re you.”

You let him drag his hand along your hair and press his lips to your forehead, even though you didn’t understand what he meant. How could he know you well enough to want you?

 ***

“It’s not coming out,” you admit to your father now, pulling hard.

“Pull harder,” he tells you and you do. He grits his teeth.

“I’m pulling as hard as I can,” you tell him. You meet his eyes. This is the best you can do.

“Let me do it,” he says, reaching for the pliers.

You pull them back, relishing in the sudden power.

“You can’t.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Give me a chance,” you say, suddenly desperate. You reach for the hook and yank the end. It rips through more flesh.

“You’re only making it worse,” he tells you.

“Okay,” you say, as you wiggle it. You ignore the blood dripping onto the floor. Suddenly, this is all you need.

“Stop it!” He says, yelling now. You look up, surprised. You’ve never heard him yell. You didn’t even know he could yell.

“Just hold still!” you tell him, watching as blood-coated silver begins to emerge from his skin. You feel euphoric.

He is shaking his head.

“No, stop.”

“I’m getting there,” you tell him, pulling at the exposed hook. You’ve almost got it. You can feel it.

“Let go!” He steps back and his hand falls out of yours.“ You can’t do it.”

He is shaking his head, looking down at the red puddle below him. “I’m going to the hospital.” He stands up, wobbling a little.

“Wait,” you say, desperate. You lurch forward, compelled. You reach for the hook, wrapping your finger around the curve and pull, stepping back. It rips through the flesh and your father, because he has always known what you need, winces. You have to work to keep the grin off your face.

The hook clatters to the floor, followed by a shower of blood.

You let out a breath.

“There,” you say, proud.

Your father looks up, eyebrows furrowed.

“What did I do wrong?” he asks.

You don’t know the answer. You have never been like those girls at your college, who could point to their fathers and say exactly what they did wrong. The way their eyes lingered on their bra straps. The way they spoke to their mothers. Their frequent absences, their unbearable presence.

“I don’t know,” you tell him because you don’t. You can tell it isn’t what he wants to hear by the way his shoulders slump.

“Should I have remarried after your mom died?” he asks. You try to imagine what it would have been like, having a woman around. Would she have knocked on the bathroom door, smiled knowingly and handed you a tampon? Would she have taken you to get birth control pills the summer that you started wearing lip gloss? Would she have taught you how to want to become a wife, how to want a child?

“I don’t know,” you say, again.

“Should I have let grandma come live with us?”

“I don’t know.”

“For God’s sake, stop saying that! That’s not just something that happens. You can’t just say I don’t know.” His arms wave and his face is red. You stare at the blood on the floor. You don’t have the answer he wants. You never will.

“What do you want me to say?” you ask, because you have always wondered.

“I don’t know. Something that makes sense. Some sort of excuse, even if it’s a bad one,” he shakes his head, suddenly exhausted. You wonder what it feels like to lose that much blood. You wonder what it feels like to watch your only child fail.

“I don’t have one,” you tell him. You think of all the people who tried to make sense of what happened. The principal, the cops, the other teachers, the women on the television. All the theories. Every time you hear one of them, you think it might be true.

He nods and you can’t look him in the eyes.

“Right,” he says, walking towards the door. You follow him, like a new puppy.

He gets to the door and turns around, sighing.

“Good night,” he says, and you wonder if those are the last words you will ever hear him say.

*** 

They aren’t. Seven years after this, he will call you. He will not ask how you are, or where you live now but he will tell you that he is writing his will and is wondering if you want the lake house. You say yes. He will sigh and say goodbye.

“Night, Dad,” you tell him, holding the door open for him.

 “Be careful,” he says, shaking his head as he walks to his car.

You will say this back to him in the hospital, once they turn off the ventilator. You will sit there for two hours before you leave.

About the Author

Isa Connolly (she/her) graduated with BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Regents University London and is currently pursuing her Masters of Science in Publishing: Digital and Print Media at New York University. She grew up in Panama City, Panama and lives in Brooklyn with two roommates, three cats and a lizard.

About the Artist

Blake Noelle Stolarik is a student pursuing International Business, Finance, and Economics at Elizabethtown College. In her free time, she pursues many interests in the realms of art, writing, biology, and anything antique! Find more of her work at https://blakenoelleart.wixsite.com/website or @blakenoelleart on Instagram.