My parents divorced when I was very young, back when paper plates still cost ninety-nine cents and the gravel out by our back gate had that dry, rattle-trap sound whenever a heavy pickup rolled over it. My mom got me for most of the year, and my dad got me for the summer. Those three months felt less like a vacation and more like a sentence I had to serve until August rolled back around.
I hated going to my dad’s house. Partially because he was very stubborn and rude and always had to do things his way, but also because every time I went to my dad’s house I got violently sick.
Nausea, rashes, pain, muscle cramps, and then when I got older, I’d start missing my periods. I don’t even know why I remember this part, but my skin would break out in these hot, weeping patches behind my knees every single July, right around the second week of our routine. I went to a local doctor in our small Nebraska town, but he said it was a psychosomatic problem related to stress and directed me to see a therapist. My dad didn’t let me see a therapist because he thought it was total crap. He’d stand in the hallway with his arms crossed over his chest, his face dark, and tell me I was just being dramatic like my mother.
My mom took me to one a few times once I got back home for the school year, but by then my symptoms had cleared up so we couldn’t tell if it helped at all. Within two weeks of breathing my mom’s air and eating her home-cooked meals, the rashes would dry up and the cramps would vanish. One thing that really pissed me off was that my dad ate a lot of junk food and drank soda instead of water, and he mocked me mercilessly if I tried to eat healthy. I think it reminded him of my mom, because she’s always been a bit of a health nut. I would sneak carrots into the house, and if he found them he’d throw them straight into the bin with a snort about fancy city food.
The summers blurred together in a haze of stale ginger ale and aching joints.
I spent most of those hot months lying on the scratchy plaid sofa in his living room, watching ceiling fan blades spin slow circles while my stomach rolled over itself. Dad would bring me a glass of whatever brownish soda he had mixed up in the kitchen, ice clinking against the plastic tumbler, and tell me to drink up so I’d stop whining. “Put some meat on those bones,” he’d grumble, shoving the cup toward my face. I drank it because I was thirsty and because arguing with him took more energy than I had.
The summer I turned eighteen, I packed my bags, got into my rusted Honda, and never went back for a summer visit. My dad called me ungrateful. He told me I was abandoning him just like my mother did. But the moment I moved into my own tiny apartment for college, the nausea stopped. My periods came back like clockwork.
My skin cleared up. I figured the doctor had been right about the stress of living under his roof, and I tried to lock those wretched summers away in some dark corner of my mind.
Years passed. I built a quiet life three towns over, working as a bookkeeper and keeping my distance. Then came the Tuesday morning when the nursing facility called to say my father had suffered a mild stroke. He wasn’t bedridden forever, but he couldn’t live alone anymore. The house out on the county road had to be cleared out so it could be sold to pay for his care. My mother refused to set foot on the property, which left the job entirely to me. I drove out there on a gray October morning, the trunk of my car empty and my chest tight with a dread I thought I’d outgrown.
The house smelled just like I remembered, a heavy mix of stale tobacco, floor wax, and old dust that hadn’t seen an open window in a decade. I started in the kitchen, tossing out expired cans of corn and boxes of saltine crackers that had gone soft years ago. The refrigerator was a biohazard of science experiments in plastic containers. I bagged it all up without looking too closely, my throat tightening against the familiar, stale odor of the place.
It was when I moved down to the dark little workshop behind the kitchen that things started getting weird. Dad had always kept his extra pantry supplies down there where the old chest freezer hummed day and night. Behind a stack of rusted lawnmower parts and spare lumber, I found a padlocked wooden cabinet he must have built himself. The key was hanging right on a small nail beside the doorframe, tucked behind an old calendar from 1994. I turned the brass key in the lock, and the heavy door swung open with a dry groan.
Inside sat a row of unlabeled glass jugs and heavy metal tins, pushed way back against the dark wall. They weren’t soda cans or store-bought syrups. They were old apothecary jars filled with a thick, dark liquid that had separated into strange layers of amber and rust. I pulled one out, the glass cold and slick beneath my palm, and unscrewed the metal lid. A sharp, chemical smell hit the back of my throat, burning so fast and hard I coughed until my eyes watered. It smelled like old machine shed weed killer mixed with cheap cola syrup.
I sat back on my heels on the dusty concrete floor, my heart hammering against my ribs. I looked at the labels scrawled in black permanent marker on the backs of the jars, dates from twenty years ago written in my father’s sharp, sloping handwriting. Next to the jars sat several small plastic bottles with skull-and-crossbones warning labels peeled off halfway. Organophosphate. The word stared up at me from a faded yellow label half-hidden behind a jug of motor oil.
I didn’t throw them away. Instead, I carefully placed every single one of those suspicious containers into a heavy-duty plastic storage bin, sealing the lid tight with duct tape. I loaded the bin into the trunk of my car, right next to my spare tire where nobody would look. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but the cold weight in my gut told me I wasn’t imagining things. The next morning, I drove straight past my office and took the samples to an independent environmental toxicology lab down in Lincoln, paying for the rush analysis with my savings.
The waiting took four days. Four days of staring at my computer screen at work while my mind raced back to those endless summer afternoons on the plaid sofa, watching my father walk in with that sweating plastic tumbler of dark soda. “Drink it down, kid,” he’d say, standing over me until every drop was gone. “Do you good.”
When the lab technician called me on a Friday afternoon, his voice sounded flat and clinical over the line. “Ms. Miller? We ran the gas chromatography on all three liquid samples you brought in. The primary active ingredient in those mixtures is a high-concentration agricultural insecticide. It’s restricted-use stuff, mostly meant for clearing heavy brush or commercial grain storage. Chronic low-dose ingestion over several weeks at a time would cause severe gastrointestinal distress, autonomic neuropathy, systemic dermatitis, and hormonal suppression in adolescents.”
I just sat at my desk because my brain kind of stopped working for a second. “Is it enough to cause… to make someone chronically ill?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “At those concentrations, continuous exposure would mimic severe autoimmune illness or poisoning. In a growing teenager, it would keep the body in a constant state of systemic crisis.”
I thanked him, hung up the phone, and drove straight to the care facility where my father was staying. He was sitting in a faded vinyl armchair by the window, wearing a thin flannel shirt that hung loose on his shrunken frame. His hair was stark white now, combed straight back, but his eyes still had that sharp, stubborn glint I would know anywhere. He looked up as I pulled the heavy oak door open.
“You’re late,” he muttered, turning his head back toward the courtyard. “And you didn’t bring any coffee like I asked.”
I didn’t sit down. I walked right up to his chair and set a thick manila envelope down on his small tray table, right on top of his folded napkin. The lab report was inside, the official seal stamped in blue ink across the top page.
He glanced down at the paper, then back up at me with a frown. “What’s this junk?”
“It’s not junk,” I said, my voice steadier than my hands. “It’s the test results from the jugs you kept in the back workshop behind the freezer.”
The color didn’t drain from his face in some movie trick, but his jaw went tight and his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. For a second, the old man looked smaller, like the anger was holding him up by strings that had just frayed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You always were imaginative. Just like your mother.”
“You put it in the soda,” I said, leaning down so he had to look right into my eyes. “Every single summer. You wanted me sick. You wanted me too weak to leave the house, too sick to go back to my mom, and too broken to argue with you.”
He opened his mouth to scoff, to tell me it was total crap, just like he told the doctors when I was fifteen. But the words didn’t come out. He just stared at the manila envelope, his fingers twitching against the armrest.
“I’m done,” I whispered. “The authorities have the rest of the samples from the workshop. I’m not coming back here ever again.”
I turned around before he could say another word, walking down the linoleum-lined hallway of the facility and pushing through the heavy glass doors into the afternoon air. The sun was warm on my face, bright and clear without a cloud in the sky. I drove straight to my mother’s house, walking up the front steps and finding her out in her garden pulling up late summer tomatoes. She looked up, shading her eyes with a gloved hand, and smiled when she saw me standing there without a shadow behind me. I didn’t say a word about the lab report right then. I just reached down, picked a fresh, crisp carrot straight from the damp earth, wiped the dirt off with my thumb, and took a clean, loud bite.
