I climb out of the car and stand for a second, staring out at the line of trees in the forest: acres running down to the reservoir, public land, and my private oasis when I was little. I try and remember the last time I saw my father but I get a composite of images: his hand around my throat, the time he rooted out a thong in my underwear drawer and made me wear it around my neck at dinner for a week. The moments of kindness, strange and startling and almost more painful than the abuse: flowers gathered for me in a cup by the bed, a birthday surprise trip to a carnival in Indianapolis, the time he helped me bury Chestnut after I found him stiff and cold in the woods behind the house, his gums crusted over with vomit.

When I left town, four days after my eighteenth birthday, and two days after graduation, I drove west to Chicago with my heart in my throat and two suitcases in the trunk, certain for every second past the city that God would strike me dead. You’re only safe in Barrens. For more than half my life I thought I would be sent to hell if I jumped ship. Like leaving was the end-all sin. But then I realized hell was right here in Barrens, and that made leaving worth the risk.

Gravel crunches under my boots as I make my way up the path. There’s the bird feeder I made when I was eight. There’s a dirt patch where the grass never recovered from the kiddie swimming pool that sat there through many seasons. There’s my mother’s old wind chime clinking softly from the porch—I feel a pang at this—that she made herself out of tin and painted wood. A splintered cross is still tacked to the front door.

The air smells like charred logs, like summer. But behind the familiar smells of grass and dirt and char that I’ve always loved is another odor, thick and pungent. I know that smell. Reeds. Rot.

The smell of drought. The reservoir is less than a half mile from here, concealed from view just beyond the trees.

Inside, I find my father in the squat little living room, washed in bluish TV light that reminds me of being underwater.

My father looks small. Small, and old. The shock of seeing him nearly causes me to stumble. He was always a big guy, not tall but the kind of person who swallowed a room just by walking into it, and muscled from years of working outside: roofing, carpentry, excavating, work on the local farms. The few times a year we speak on the phone, that’s who I imagine on the other end of the line.

Now his muscles seem to have melted into folds of skin, which is gray and thin and draped like a sheet over his bones. He looks like a powdered corpse, and when he turns toward me, it takes his eyes a second to focus.