Hailey

My dad has a gun he thinks I don’t know about.

I found it yesterday in his bedroom. Technically, the place was supposed to be off limits, but I’m not too good with imaginary lines.  

Dad stepped out around noon—dragged his ten irons out the front door while I tiptoed down the hallway towards his room. He would’ve heard me if he’d been paying attention, but he never does.

Instead, he drowns his heart in his work, his golf, or his bourbon bottles most days. Golf days were the best days to take advantage of his distance. Golf days were the easiest days to get caught.

So I gave him a chance to catch me, to punish me, to notice me just once out of the many times I’d broken his rules. I creaked across his wooden floors before he was even out the door.

            “Hailey?”

His voice boomed up the stairs and rattled my heart against my ribcage. I plastered myself against the wall and held my breath until my lungs demanded me to breathe.

I sucked in a mouthful of dead air and waited for the sound of Dad’s footsteps to come clamoring towards me. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. So, I answered.

            “Yeah, Dad?”

I did it—gave away my position on purpose. All it took was two words.  He should’ve heard me. Questioned me. Caught me. I sounded too close to be in my bed, too close to not be standing right next to his ugly little room full of ugly little secrets. But he didn’t notice. He didn’t care to.

            “Remind the new cleaning woman that my room is off limits. I don’t want to have to fire anyone else for breaking my rules.”

He’d fired three maids in the last week because of me. Three maids who’d argued for their innocence, when their boss should’ve questioned his not so good little girl.

Three new tamper-proof locks he should’ve replaced. But he didn’t. He’d gotten sloppy lately—pre-election stress makes desperate senators fall apart at the seams. Dad was in shambles.

For five nights straight, I’d watch him bring home the kind of whispers that kept him up late on hushed phone calls, the kind that meant trouble.

Everyday, I’d ask him about work and everyday he’d say things were fine, just fine, but his lies always ended in long benders and lots of booze.

Booze meant the worst kind of secrets, the dangerous kind, the only kind worth snooping for.

            “Sure. See you later,” I said.

He answered with the click, click, clacking of the front door locking shut, so I went back to prying his bedroom door open. I pulled three bobby pins out from the long, auburn tangles of my hair and slipped the first one into his lock.

He had it manufactured special—senators-with-expensive-secrets—special, but I popped it open two bobby pins in. Persistence makes perfect, and like a cat-burglar-Alice in a Washington Wonderland, I snuck through the looking glass.

As expected, his bedroom was compulsively pristine, not a book out of place, not a drawer left unlocked, everything perfect— but only almost. A small stack of signed and stapled papers had spilled down onto his impeccably clean wooden floors.

Passable? Not even close.

Spills meant his world was off center. So I dug around for a real-life rabbit hole on the off chance that I’d find one. 

And I did—a place in the floor behind his desk where he’d removed the vent cover one too many times. I jiggled the top, popped off the smooth metal covering, and there it was—a shiny new vault.

I ran my fingers over the sliders, sweat glazing the metal as I worked, and clicked through every possible combination he could’ve set.

Click, click, click.

Click, click, click.

Click, click, clack—the downstairs door popped open before the lock on his safe did.

Bad news. Dad’s footsteps echoed through the house while he mumbled angrily into his phone.

      “This isn’t the kind of deal people like you get in writing, young man. Just make sure to keep up your end and I’ll keep up mine,” he said.

I had thirty seconds left to find a hiding place, to put his secret back exactly where I’d found it, to disappear. But my body froze and my muscles tightened harder than the pressure building in my chest. I waited for the door to open, for him to hear me, to catch me, to notice me, but nothing changed.

             “Good. That’ll be better for both of us. I’ll be there in a minute,” he said.

His footsteps slowed to a stop just outside the door, but his phone call didn’t. The stranger on the other line dragged him downstairs and back to his business. So I went back to mine.

Click, click, pop.

The lock to his safe popped open to my mom’s birthday. He’d deny that if you asked him, though. He’s been denying a lot of things lately.

I lifted the lid to find a gun—a silver secret with “Re-election Day” etched into the steel. Dad’s secrets stopped being a game the second I realized they could kill. But Andersons didn’t have enemies or at least they weren’t supposed to—that’s what he’d told me, that’s what he’d promised.

I shouldn’t have believed him—politicians never kept promises. I just wished he’d kept his. Maybe he’d always had it as a precaution. Precautions were just a way to stay safe. But this didn’t feel safe. Dad didn’t feel safe, not anymore.

Panic crawled into all the places I’d felt secure and buried itself deeper than my bones. My lungs couldn’t breathe in the air fast enough, my eyes couldn’t un-see what they’d seen, and my hands couldn’t un-touch what they’d touched.

I shoved the gun back into the vault, fingers fumbling it into place, and slammed the lid shut like closing it would close the door on my reality. For a publicly anti-gun guy, a brand new pistol was anti-common sense.

But maybe this was normal. Eighteen-year-olds find crazy stuff in their parents’ rooms all the time. Maybe Dad’s wasn’t out of the ordinary. Maybe it was a collector’s item, but he seldom brought home hobbies for pleasure, just solutions for pain.

I staggered out of the room and tried to un-freak myself out about the situation, but when weird things like guns pop up, you're supposed to pay attention. If you don't, you pay for it later. I’ve watched a lot of movies, so I know these things.

I had a gun stuck in the back of my head for the rest of the day. Dad came home, dinner was awkward and silent, but it always is. He wasn’t paying attention—not to me, not to anything. The tension didn't even register.

After thirty minutes of dry steak and burnt potatoes, I skipped out on reruns of Gossip Girl, popped a couple Benadryl and knocked out early. The drugs didn’t make Dad’s secrets any easier to sleep on, just easy to forget for a little while.

 But bad things happen to forgetful people, and bad things happen when you don’t pay attention. But maybe that’s just a movie thing. Fingers crossed.

                                                                          ***

At 6:00 a.m., the world fell apart.

Well, maybe not the world, but definitely the downstairs kitchen.

The crashing of glass against the tile floors, the rattle and bang of pots and pans, and the audible absence of my dad confirmed my worst fears—a morning break in. Very important neighborhoods begged for very important burglaries, and today, our house was that house.

I got to my feet, nervous enough to outdo Jiminy Cricket on crack, and grabbed my phone to punch in our private line to the Metropolitan Police Department. But on the off chance that I was wrong, and dad was making a very violent breakfast, I’d be the girl who cried criminal, and I couldn’t risk that. Not today.

I had a house to leave, a summer to start, and three beautiful months with the better of two parents waiting for me on the other end of a southbound Amtrak train.

In a couple hours, I’d be back in green and gorgeous Virginia, celebrating my future at UVA, and a maybe robbery, wasn’t going to ruin it. When you hate a place long enough, the goodbye isn’t bittersweet, just bitter. The sweet part comes once you’re miles away.

I tiptoed down the hallway, balancing on the balls of my feet, and reached his wide-open bedroom door—which he never left open. Ever.

I peered around the frame, pulse pounding my ribs to pieces, and found his almost perfect room in almost perfect chaos.

His king canopy had exploded into a disaster of crumpled sheets and duvet covers, pillows were scattered in every which direction, and his clothes hung like jungle vines on the lamp rungs.

He’d either turned into Donkey Kong or hit the bottle harder than usual. I kept my fingers crossed for the former. Even if he had been drinking, it was unlike him to be this messy.

Dad was a quiet drunk with quieter problems. Clutter wasn’t his thing. Neither was stink and the carpet reeked of cheap liquor. He was a blue label man, and didn't spill. I followed the stains until I tumbled over one of my mom’s old vials of lipstick lying in the doorway.

He’d hardly touched her things since she'd left; at least, that’s what I thought was the case before this morning. Something was awry in the Anderson house.

The kitchen apocalypse started up again, even louder than before. I thought about escaping the house through the nearest window until I remembered Dad’s ugly little secret.

I ran back to the rabbit hole and hopped out with a handgun.

I didn’t have a clue how to use it or how to tell if it was locked and loaded or whatever. But it felt safe. I felt safe—safer at least.

I slinked back down the hallway, praying to God that our crotchety wooden floors would keep my footsteps secret. My suitcases and a flight of stairs stood between me finding out the truth or sprinting to safety. I grabbed my stuff, and slipped downstairs without a creak.

No shoes, no problem.

The first floor had hardly seen the sunrise, aside from the low light flooding into the living room from the kitchen. I followed the florescence, hands rattling against the steady steel trigger beneath my fingers. A muffled laugh danced out into the darkness, and I stepped into the light.

Two bodies moved half-naked against each other in the half-light—my father’s and a strawberry blonde, who happened to be sprawled across the black granite counter top. She couldn’t have been much older than I was.

She couldn’t have been more shocked than I was to see her legs wrapped, ever so innocently of course, around my father while he taught her the basics of bare-assed “domestic policy”. 

Something like embarrassment flickered across her face at first but died away as quickly as it lit up her cheeks. She composed herself and smiled at me, mocking me, flashing her pearly white teeth through my mother's Chanel rouge lipstick.

So, I shot at her. 

Twice. 

With my eyes closed.

I didn’t know what I was thinking. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I was thinking—just reacting.

Click. Bang. Bang.

But nobody died. I blew up a box of Corn Flakes on the counter and grazed my Dad’s ass. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d hurt him that badly until he screamed loud enough to set the neighbor’s dog on full alert.

Bimbo-the-make-up-thief got pretty hysterical after that. She kept shouting things about me being crazy while my dad tried to figure out a way to sit down in a kitchen with nothing but thirty-six-inch high barstools. 

This situation would’ve been a riot if it wasn’t mine, if I wasn’t the girl with the gun, watching her family fall to pieces. I would’ve laughed if I could’ve, but my mouth stayed shut. Sweat rolled down my face while I turned whiter than vanilla ice cream.

I might’ve been crying. Sweat and tears weren’t all that different. But when reality settled it’s painful way into my veins, I lost it. Not because I was sorry that I shot him—because I wasn’t—but that this situation really happened.

I had a feeling he'd been messing around behind Mom’s back, but seeing it sucked. He sucked and deserved what he got. Parents move on, old guys get urges, and I get that.

But I guess there was an inner fourteen-year-old me who still wanted her parents to work things out. They were four years separated, nothing’s changed, and hope turned out to be a shitty investment.

Took him a while, but dad eventually stopped crying to his concubine and turned his anger towards me. He knocked Malibu Barbie out of his way and stumbled in my direction, shouting combinations of curse words I didn’t think were possible.

I dropped the gun, turned on my bare heels and booked it like a bat out of hell out the front door. 

 Lickity-split.

Bags in hand and heart wedged in my windpipe, I sprinted ten blocks to the nearest bus station—feet colder than the pavement.