“Daddy, don’t,” she said. “You’re not good to drive.”

He started the car.

“Daddy, don’t!” she said again, both hands up at her mouth like a little mouse gnawing a crumb, but she was not little, she was already almost as tall as her father.

He rolled down his window. “Get in,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I won’t let you drive Michael like this.”

“Get in, Bunny Rabbit,” he said. His left eye was only half-open, but the right one was functioning normally.

“No, Daddy,” she said, and actually stomped her sneakered foot.

“Fine,” he said, and backed out of the spot and then drove away. We watched him as he exited the parking lot and turned onto the street without so much as jumping a curb, and then he was gone. Bunny covered her face with her hands, breathed in and out, then turned to me and said, “My purse was in the car.”

“That’s not good,” I said.

“Do you have any money?”

I admitted I did not. I had about seven dollars in my wallet, but that would not get us a cab back home.

“We’ll have to walk,” she said, which sounded crazy to me. I had no idea where we were or how we would get home, and I could not understand how she was being so calm about it.

“It’s not hard,” she said, “we just need to go north, and the ocean’s right there, so we just go that way.” She pointed into the darkness.

And so we wound up walking the four miles from Manhattan Beach to North Shore, taking Highland Street, which wove along the coast beside the sea.

“I’m just so embarrassed,” Bunny kept saying as we walked. “He must have been drinking before he even picked us up.”

“Don’t be embarrassed,” I said as we puffed up the big hill that led out of Manhattan Beach.

“How can I not be embarrassed?” she asked.

“My dad was a drunk too,” I said. “Nothing new to me.”

We walked some more, and the ocean came into view, its oil tankers glittering with pinpricks of light off the shore. Suddenly we could hear the crash of waves.

“Was?” she asked.

“Oh, he’s still alive,” I said. “I just don’t see him anymore.”

“Is that why you live with your aunt?”

And so I told her, even though I had never told anyone in North Shore what had happened, and was so unused to telling the story I wasn’t exactly sure where to start. What was hardest for me to ever adequately explain was how collaborative my father’s violence had been, how we had all conspired in it, to hide it from him, to hide it from ourselves, to edit out the frightening sequences from the filmstrips of memory. The way when I was five and we were at some family barbecue, I had frustrated him, begging for candy or something, and he had grabbed me so suddenly that I fell and scraped my back on a tree root, and how for days we all wondered aloud where I had gotten that scratch on my back and each concluded that we didn’t know where I had gotten it. I really wasn’t sure how I had.

Or when he was too drunk to hold my baby sister and he dropped her, badly, and how she cried all night, screamed, and yet no one took her to the doctor, and then how my mother observed the next day that she seemed to be fine and she wondered what that had all been about. And I had told her, quite innocently, that the baby had fallen, that my father had dropped her, surprised that she didn’t know because she had been in the room at the time, and she had said, “Oh, I don’t think she was crying because of that.”

The crux of the problem was that my mother was in love with my father, and while he was terrifying when he got too drunk, when he was only a little bit drunk he was so much fun, and when he was sober he was profoundly depressed. Because we were poor. Because raising little kids is hard. Because he hated his job as a line cook at a seafood restaurant. And so my mother, without ever consciously realizing it, did not want him to get sober. What she wanted was for him to drink without getting too drunk, in part because she drank too, and her own drinking was indispensable to her as a coping mechanism. The scarier her life became, in fact, the more she needed it, and the less able she was to suggest that either of them should be steering toward the shores of sobriety. But it was impossible to keep the worst episodes from happening, and so the easiest thing to do was to pretend they weren’t happening at all.

I told Bunny all of this as we walked, and she listened without offering sentimental interruptions or reassurances, and I was grateful for that, was so tired of earnest social workers telling me it hadn’t been my fault, or my sister’s fault, when I wanted to scream at them and tell them it was all our fault. Every single one of us participated in it. I loved my father when he was drunk. I could always tell when he was the good kind of drunk and I would run to him and climb him like a monkey and he would tickle me and body-slam me into the mattress and tell me I was a good boy. How good I was, how strong, how handsome, how smart.

I could tell these things to Bunny only because they did not strike her as scandalous but as factual. And Bunny’s very unfamiliarity with guile, her inability to dissemble to even the slightest degree, somehow gave me permission to be my unadorned self as well.

“Did your mom fight back?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were like alley cats, it was crazy, it would just explode and he would be hitting her and she would be hitting him, and we would just hide in the bathroom or lock ourselves in the bedroom and watch TV.”

“My mom didn’t,” she said. “Fight back.”

“So he hit her?” I asked.

“Not really. I mean, I’m sure he did, I’m sure some amount of hitting occurred, but it was more like he would just keep explaining to her that she didn’t love him, and then he would take her favorite vase and smash it and say she loved the vase more than him. He would stay up all night, just torturing her like that. Setting up, like, these psychological tests. He would get kind of stuck in a loop and wanted to have the same upsetting conversation over and over again. I think part of it was that she had grown up very middle class, like, safe and nice, but nothing fancy, and he had grown up much poorer than her, and I think his parents were really, I don’t know, I never met my dad’s family, he was estranged from them and he didn’t even go to his mom’s funeral when she died, but I think he got it in his head that to make my mom happy he had to earn all this money. And then he did, he earned this crazy amount of money, and it was really like he made it all appear out of nowhere, but then he hated her for it and he hated the money even though he loved the money. I don’t know. I was just about to turn eight when she died, so a lot of this is just putting pieces together and guessing.”