“I told you we were on our way,” I said, in a nervous, wavering voice. “When the front doors were locked, I found the entrance at the top of the—”
“I know what you told me, Sylvie. I asked you not to come. I said we’d see each other down the road.”
Maybe it was the empty promise of that phrase tossed out again: down the road. Maybe it was his resemblance to my father—those wrinkles in his brow, those dark eyes. Maybe it was that the last time I had seen him had been after the court hearing where Rose was appointed my legal guardian. Whatever the reason, tears welled in my eyes.
“Hey,” Howie said, coming closer. “Hey. Hey. Hey.” He wrapped his heavy arms around my body.
“You never came back,” I heard myself saying into the sudden warmth of his sweatshirt. “You told us you were going to Florida. All that talk about tidying up your affairs. All those phone calls. Then nothing.”
“But I did what I said. It took longer than planned, but here I am. This place—”
His words caused my head to whip up. I pulled away, wiping my eyes. “You never once came to see us! Or bothered to write me back! And now I come here and I find—” I didn’t know how to say the things I was thinking, so my gaze just fell to the floor, where all those headlines screamed some version of the same truth: DAUGHTER IS KEY WITNESS IN MURDER OF FAMOUS PARENTS . . . SUSPECT NAMED IN CHURCH KILLINGS . . . DRIFTER ACCUSED OF DOUBLE HOMICIDE AWAITS TRIAL IN MD MURDER CASE. I kicked them away, the words scattering across the floor, that image of my mother and Penny, which appeared in almost every article, multiplying before our eyes like a magic trick.
“I can explain, Sylvie. Please. Just give me a second.”
I waited, saying nothing. A foggy silence billowed into the room, those odd noises from somewhere in the vast belly of the building fading away. Howie pulled a chair over from the desk. I sat on the edge of that bed and he sat across from me, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. In the tattoos on his forearms, I saw dice and dollar signs and playing cards, an entire casino bursting to life on his hairy skin. “The first thing I want to say—” he began, then stopped. “I mean, the thing I might have said, should have said, on the phone if you hadn’t caught me off guard, is that I did come back to see you girls, just like I promised.”
“You came,” I said, staring at Penny’s face repeating all over the floor, my mother’s face too, and remembering my father’s promise that the photo would be just for their records. “But Rose sent you away.”
“She told you that?”
“No. It’s just, she’s done it to other people.”
“Well, my story might be a bit different from the others.”
“Different how?”
Howie paused a moment. It was an odd feeling, being so close in that small room, speaking with such a sense of exigency—a word I recalled from that English exam years before. In most ways, we were strangers.
“When I got back to Tampa,” Howie began, “I sent cards with cash to you girls any time I managed to hold on to a few bucks. Wasn’t much, but it was my way of doing something to show you were both on my mind. But there was never any word back. I called, left messages. No word then, either.”
I thought of the way Rose was always so possessive of the mail, and the way she used to roll her eyes whenever we got Howie’s messages on the answering machine.
“Eventually, I figured the calls and cards and cash—all of it was useless. I came to the conclusion that before he died, your father poisoned your minds against me. Same as he did your mother’s years before.”
“Judging from that night in Ocala, you gave my mother plenty of reasons not to like you.”
Howie stared down at those casino arms of his. Ace of spades. Queen of diamonds. Snake-eyed dice in a permanent tumble. I watched the muscles beneath his tattoos tighten as he balled his fists before lifting his head again. “I regret so many of my actions, Sylvie. You have no idea. That night is one among many. I didn’t believe the things they did, not one bit, but it wasn’t right to ruin their lecture like that.”
His voice, his expression, every part of him seemed genuinely sorry. “When you didn’t hear back from Rose and me, you gave up . . . just like that?”
“At first. And after the shock of everything that happened, I started drinking more. Doing things I’m not proud to admit. Things got so bad, there were only two ways to go: keep falling down the dark hole until it was over or crawl back out of it. It wasn’t easy. It’s still not. But I started going to meetings. I got sober. Stopped doing a lot of things I never should have in the first place. And now, here I am.”