"I'd been drinking since noon. At the Polish Falcons on Parade Street. The game was on. I was driving home and I was going to stop at the beer distributor before it closed. That's what was in my head. That's all that was in my head. Getting there before they closed. I went through that light on Twelfth and I didn't even see it. I didn't see it was red. I don't remember it being any color. I just remember the side of your father's car, very close, very white, and then the sound. People think it's a bang. It's not a bang. It's a sound like the whole world tearing in half."
I sat very still.
"When I could move, I got out. I don't know how long. My head was bleeding. I couldn't see out of this eye." He touched the scar through his eyebrow. "I went around to your father's side. And I looked in. And I knew right away. I'd been in Korea, after the war, not in it, I was a kid, but I'd seen men. I knew. He was gone. He was gone before I got there." He stopped. "And then I heard you."
The rain went on and on.
"You were screaming," he said. "In the back. In your little car seat. And you were trying to see him. You kept trying to get your head around the seat to see him. You were saying Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, and your arm was all wrong, you had it bent the wrong way and you didn't even seem to feel it, you just wanted to see him. And I thought—" His voice cracked for the first time. "I don't know what I thought. I was drunk. I wasn't thinking. I just knew that if you saw him like that, you would see it for the rest of your life. That it would be the thing you saw when you closed your eyes. And I'd already done the worst thing I would ever do. I didn't want to do that too. So I opened the door and got in and put my hands on your face and turned you toward me. And I said look at me. Not at him. And you did. You looked at me. You were bleeding from here." He touched his own chin. "I could feel it on my thumb. And you looked at me and stopped screaming and you said, 'Your head is broken.' And I said, 'I know, honey. I know it is.'"
I put my hand over my mouth.
"And then the radio," he said. "The radio was still on. In your father's car. The game was still on. Somebody had scored, and the announcer was yelling, and the crowd was yelling, and it was so loud, and I couldn't stand it, so I reached over the front seat. Over him. I didn't look at him. I reached over and turned the knob until it clicked off. And then it was just you and me and the sirens. And I kept saying it. Look at me. Look at me. Until the firemen came and took you out the other side." He let out a breath. "That's the part. That's all of it. I don't get to keep it. It's not mine. I don't get to be anything in that story but what I was."
For a long time I couldn't say anything at all.
There are things about me nobody can explain. My mother couldn't. Two therapists couldn't. Why I cannot stand to have the radio on in a car when someone is talking to me. Why it is the silence after a radio clicks off, not the crash, not the sirens, that I sometimes hear in the half second before I fall asleep. Why, on calls, when people are hysterical, my voice goes low and slow and somehow I know, I always know, to tell them where to look.
"You turned off the radio," I said.
"Yes."