Free Long Bright River: A Novel by Liz Moore Page A

bedtime? (This, ironically, was a parental activity very frequently mentioned in the books that we read to ourselves.) I told her all of these stories and more. I lied. And as Kacey listened, her eyes closed slightly, like the eyes of a cat in the sun.
    I do admit, with great shame, that being the bearer of family history in this way also gave me a kind of terrible power over my sister, a weapon that I wielded only once. It was at the end of a long day, and a long argument, and Kacey had been hounding me about something I can no longer recall. Finally I let out, in a fit of rage, an atrocity that I regretted at once. She told me that she loved me more, I said to Kacey. To this day, it remains the worst lie I ever told. I took it back right away, but it was too late. I had already seen Kacey’s small face turn red and then crumble. I had seen her mouth open, as if to respond. Instead, she let out a wail. It was pure grief. It was the cry of a much older person, someone who’d already seen too much. Even today, I can hear it if I try.

There was some talk, after the funeral, of our father taking us elsewhere to live. But he never seemed to have the money or the initiative to make this happen, and so instead we stayed there, the three of us, all together under Gee’s roof.
    This was a mistake.
    Our father and Gee had never gotten along, but now they fought constantly. Sometimes the fights had to do with her suspicion that he was using in her house—on this question, I assume Gee’s instincts were correct—but more than that, they were about his being late with the rent. I can still remember some of those fights, though Kacey, last I spoke to her, could not.
    Soon, the tension between them grew unbearable, and our father moved out. Abruptly, we became Gee’s responsibility. And about this, Gee was not happy. I thought I was done with all this, she said to us often, mostly when Kacey had gotten into some nonsense or other. When I picture her face, I mainly recall that her eyes were always elsewhere: she never looked at us, but above or beside us, glancingly, the way one might look at the sun. As an adult, I have, in more generous moments, wondered whether the loss of her daughter, whom she clearly loved feverishly, caused her to hold us always at a distance. To her we must have been small reminders both of Lisa and of our own mortality, the potential we held for the infliction of further pain, further loss.
    If Gee often seemed annoyed at us, most of her emotion was in factdirected away from us, at our father, for whom she reserved a kind of incredulous, powerful rage, a disbelief at the depths to which he could sink when it came to shirking his familial responsibilities. I knew it the first time I saw him, she told us, in a monologue that she delivered once a month when the child-support payment failed to come. I told Leese that I never saw a shadier character in all my life.
    The other thing that I knew about our father also came from Gee. He got her hooked on that shit, Gee said—never directly to us, but frequently on the phone, loudly enough so that we would be certain to hear. He ruined her.
    After our mother died, this Daniel Fitzpatrick became Him and He. The only He in our lives, aside from a few uncles and God. When we saw him, we called him Daddy , which seems unthinkable to me now: almost like a different person was saying it. Even at the time, it felt strange to use the word if he hadn’t been by in a while. But he called himself that too. I’m their daddy, we heard him say to Gee, often, arguing a point. And Gee would say, Then act like it.
    Eventually, he disappeared completely. We did not see him for a decade. Then, when I was twenty, a former friend of his told me casually that he had died, the same way everyone does in the northeast quadrant of Philadelphia. The same way I thought Kacey had died, the first time I found her. The second time. The third.
    My father’s friend thought I’d known already, he