Open Letter #8, to my step-father for the holidays

Do you remember our first Christmas together in Pennsylvania?  How the presents under the tree sparkled in the sunlight shining through the large wall of windows in the living room?  There were more presents under that tree than I'd seen under any tree this side of a movie screen.  I remember sitting in a great unfurling of wire-rimmed ribbons and red and green wrapping paper, how we fed the colors to the fire before I slipped into my new down jacket and winter gloves and ran out the door with Fred, both of us clutching the sleds Santa had brought us.  Mine was a sturdy plastic green dish, a shade lighter than my coat.  I remember how the snow twinkled, how I sailed down the driveway so fast, not even the wind could touch me.  I remember thinking that things had changed.  I remember feeling safe.

That Christmas came two years after the morning I woke up in my dad's bed and the cops came to take my statement and less than a year after we'd moved from Florida, where the pieces of my life lifted from their moorings and flew around me like hurricane debris.  You know what I'm talking about because you saw some of what went on, and we told you the rest to get back at our mother.  But what you don't know is that it wasn't the presents I noticed so much that Christmas in Pennsylvania; what I saw was the lights shimmering on the tree because the power hadn't been cut off, what I heard was Christmas music rather than the phone ringing with bill collectors, what I felt was a stomach full of hot chocolate and orange juice and sticky buns, and what I understood was that with you around, I would no longer have to worry about not having enough to eat or not being able to see to do my homework because Mom hadn't paid the electricity bill.  Furthermore, I knew I could count on you to ask me about my day, to take me in your arms and listen to me rattle on about my adventures in the woods behind our house and the books I was reading and what I was learning in school.  You had become, in a relatively short time, a more dependable and doting parent than the ones who'd raised me.  And this was difficult to believe because you were also a tyrant.  I knew you'd never look at me the way my molester father did, and I knew you'd never be as cold as my mother, but you ran hot, and I had plenty of reasons to hate you.  Still, you never knew, I don't think, how grateful I was and am for many of the things you did.

One of the first and most cherished things you ever did for me was teach me to fish.  I remember the slippery rubber of the squid you bought for bait, how when I grabbed it from the box you kept in the freezer, it froze my skin, and how when I dangled a thawed triangle of the flesh between my fingers, it wiggled insouciantly.  You taught me how to wrap the bait around the hook so as to hide the barb, how to cast the line off your dock, how to spin the reel and jerk the pole to tempt the fish, how to bring one in without losing it, how to free myself from a snag.

When I'd catch one, no matter whether it was a tiny sunfish, a gluttonous puffer, or something actually admirable like that barracuda we had to pull up with a net, you were always glad for me.  You showed me how to remove the hook gently so as not to tear off the fish's lip.  You urged me to put the fish back into the water quickly so it could go on taking its chances with this life, and that was part of the fun too, watching it shoot off like a backwards firework, a flash and then nothing but the brown bottom of the canal.

I remember the time Fred couldn't get hold of a particularly slippery fish, how it slapped wildly against the sea wall, how when he finally got a rag around it, he labored too long to remove the hook, and when you came outside to help, because you wanted to spare my brother, because you wanted to change things, you took the still-gilled fish gingerly in your bear-sized hand and pushed it back and forth just under the water's surface, like a kid playing with a toy truck, attempting to give it life.  I remember my brother's tight little forehead, the way he squatted on the sea wall watching your hand, watching the fish, watching the water turn red with its blood, watching it float onto its side when you let go of it, how his own mouth opened and closed and opened soundlessly as he stared at the rigid gills and the broken scales, how you said, mercifully, "He's still in shock," while moving quickly to retrieve the fish, your hand pumping that fish through the water like a doctor pumping a chest with his fists, how you wanted what we wanted, how in your better moments, you loved us.