Jake Burdick

I’m nineteen, watching bruises crawl across my father’s face like they’re long cockroaches under his skin. My four fingers are drawn perfectly across his forehead and down to the top of his cheek. We’re in the garage, the side room that he built with a door and a lock to keep my mother and me out. I’m on the outside of the doorframe, and he’s sitting in a chair, holding his face together. The Phoenix winter night slides under the garage door, and my bare feet ache against cooled concrete. I don’t notice how the blood under my nose clumps into maroon pebbles or how the knot on my head wants to break through the skin. My uncle’s with my dad—his brother, the paramedic—patching him up. While he checks my father’s eyes, he asks me to look at what I’ve done and tells me that he’d leave too if I were his son. And I’m listening, captivated, breathing steam out of a throat striped with red finger marks. I try to explain that he came at me first, and my fist clenches, knuckles drawn white, a negative of my father’s face. My hand is as numb as my feet, and neither of the two men is listening to me.

This was the night he told us he’d found someone else and was moving in with her. That he’d paid for a new house with my college money. That the girl he was going to live with was still in college. I can still hear all of that, but I don’t remember hitting him. I told him what I thought, and he moved his hand from the doorknob to my neck. The only thing felt was the scrape of Spanish tile grout when I dropped back on it. From that floor that was worth second mortgage, I watched my mother beg him to stay with us.

I’m eight, on the back patio with my father. It’s a still summer night, after monsoon rain, smelling like a last leg air conditioner. My father’s telling me how he and I are mathematically perfect. He was born in nineteen forty-seven and I was born in nineteen seventy-four. While I’m eight, he’s thirty-five; our digits always add up to the same single number. Zero plus eight and three plus five, perfect math. We watch a cicada hatch from its shell and force the blood into its wings. I’m too young to know that my father’s high.

I’m twenty-five and he’s fifty-two, and my fiancée has just left me for someone else. I’ve elevated seven thousand feet by train to Flagstaff, and I’m breathing rice paper air. I call my parents and tell them what’s happened. Dad thinks I’m going to kill myself because I used to listen to Kurt Cobain. He sends me an e-mail that just says, "Love you Jake," but I can’t stop crying after I read it. The message took less than a minute to write and less than a second to get to me. It’s not even real, just a DNA string of ones and zeros, but I wait more than three months to delete it.

I’m nineteen and he’s forty-six; it’s two months before we fight. My father drove to California with the window down and got Bell’s palsy. His face runs like syrup off his skull. He’s ashamed of himself. I feel horrible for him. He wears large rimmed, out of style hats, hoping they’ll steal attention from the soup underneath. After he heals, I’ll put my fist across the same area, peeling it back again. He’s meeting the girl he’s going to leave us for. She’s telling him that he’s still handsome. She’s giving him crystal meth for the nostril that’s still round. He’s giving her the money to get that medicine.

I’m ten and he’s thirty-seven. I’m standing on one leg in a gym, punching my karate instructor in the stomach. The instructor is smiling and telling me that it’s all about discipline. When I’m done, I sweat footprints across the safety mats to where I’m supposed to meet my father. He wanted us to both get gym passes so we could work out together, but he’s not there. It’s an hour later when he finally pulls up outside.

Days later, in my kitchen, my mother is having coffee with a blond woman I’ve never seen before. They’re both crying and holding their heads in their hands, neither one saying anything. After the woman leaves, my mother tells me that they’re both in love with my father, and that he met her at the gym.

Dad comes home that night with presents for me, and my parents fight while I play with Star Wars figures and spin board game spinners, sliding plastic pieces past GO.

I’m three and he’s thirty. He’s running to the hospital with me in his arms. It’s the first clear memory I have. I’m watching palm trees go by overhead. I’ve fallen down some stairs, and he’s too frightened to get in a car. The hospital is more than five miles away. I know; I’ve driven the route since then.

I’m twenty and he’s forty-seven. The math still works; you just have to add his numbers one more time. I’m telling my first serious girlfriend that I cheated on her. We’re parked outside of my parents’ house, and while I tell her, I get distracted by a bush across the street that looks like a face when the wind blows. She’s yelling at me, but still calling me babe, and it sounds so stupid. Hunched over at the wheel of her car, she reaches and tries to touch my chest, but twists her fingers into my shirt. I get out of her car. The bush outside still looks like a person, but blurry now under dust-colored streetlights. The desert makes us all look exactly alike.

I’m twenty-six and he’s fifty-three. I sit in a psychologist’s office and tell her about how afraid I am of people leaving me. Watching her computer’s screensaver connect lines across the monitor, I tell her that I’m an abusive person.

Dad’s written me another e-mail, and I can’t delete it this time. He tells me how he gets awkward when I’m around, and how I’m too smart for him. But, there’s another letter in the regular mail with ink that didn’t have time to dry before the paper was folded. And through Rorschach-smeared type, I learn I’ve been rejected from the University in California. I tear that one up and read my father’s instead.

Yesterday, while I was waiting to turn right in my car, I started crying.

I’m four and he’s thirty one. We’ve moved to the north edge of Phoenix. We don’t build a backyard fence because we don’t have neighbors yet. Past our grocery store, there’s a cactus and an abandoned car wrecked with rust and bee-bee holes. My father and I walk to where my elementary school is being built. He writes my name in drying cement with his finger, wiping his hand on his jeans afterwards. He takes me back there to see my name every week until school starts.

When we’re not exploring the desert, he’s drawing a picture of my family opening our new front door to the heat outside. He leaves the space beyond our figures blank, bleached by the summer. He frames the drawing, but the city grows up around us.

• Jake Burdick lives with his wife, dog, and six cats in Chandler, Arizona, where he teaches and designs curriculum for online education. Currently, he is working on several other pieces in various genres and planning a human family. This is his first publication.