What I remember about Florida is that everything sounded like paper in the wind. The palms, the grass, even the people talking, so that it seemed like it was an artificial place, like a movie set, and that I wasn't me, but someone who spoke like paper when the the wind blew.
I did not know of butter then, not the way I know of butter now, and I had not yet met Homes, or killed Tony, and so the things I said were paper thin and I moved through time as if the days were much longer than they really were. And the whole time, I thought I was moving further away from disappointment, when in actuality, I had opened its door.
But my family traveled to Florida many times and every time, we stayed in hotels with green carpets and killed the cockroaches underneath the sink, in cupboards with laminate to appear like wood. It was in Florida that I called an old woman a b**ch at a swimming pool. I was six. Didn't know what I'd said, but knew that it wasn't nice and Mom pulled me by the ear out of the pool and I screamed the whole time.
Why did Dad take us there? He went to the races. He drank cheap beer from plastic cups and held ticket stubs like they were gilded in gold. He taunted jockeys he didn't like and gazed at the horses through binoculars he'd found on a park bench in Pittsburgh. He pointed out the horses that shivered with sweat and told my sister and I that they'd never win a race. And where was Mom? I don't remember. But she wasn't there.
I was the last to fall asleep. Of that I am sure. This is because I was afraid of the dark, of all the things that could be crawling around me that I couldn't see, but my feet were always too hot to keep beneath the sheets. I had to be brave every night, to stick my feet out into the darkness, where something could take them from me. Even after I'd grown older, and the darkness did not terrify me, I was the last to fall asleep because I listened to how the wind shuffled the palms like papers.
All four of us slept in a single room, in two beds. My sister and I did not sleep so that we pointed in opposite directions, our heads and our feet on opposite ends of the bed. We were not afraid of each other's breaths. I listened to everyone in their sleep. How Dad was the first to depart into his mind, his exhalations heavier, sometimes emitting a nasally wheeze. Then Mom, breathing through clenched teeth, producing a hiss. Finally, my sister, whose breathing became quieter. Shallow.
We were so close then, so intimate. All four of us in a small space, in a paper box. But we could not contain ourselves.
