49
After
My father gets released in the middle of August, twenty pounds lighter and considerably worse for wear. He spends most days in the living room or at physical therapy, groggy or annoyed, but he is alive, and that is good enough for now. We settle into a new routine, all of us Monteros, full of medicines and lists. I start cooking dinner. Silence descends like a shroud. A few times a week, Sawyer’s Jeep rumbles to the curb and he takes Hannah to the park or the zoo for a couple of hours.
“How are you?” he always asks, when I bring her outside.
“Fine,” I always tell him, and watch him disappear down the road.
During the day I am a dutiful daughter. I weed the garden. I salt the soup. At night I read my atlas like a Bible, imagining my escape.
It goes on like this for a while, a steady drone and the hum of the central air, until one afternoon when I come downstairs after putting Hannah down for a nap and find my dad sitting on the couch, flipping the channels. “Do you need anything?” I ask automatically. “You hungry?”
“I’m all right,” he says. Then, clicking the TV off: “Come here for a minute, daughter of mine.”
I feel the nerves stir in my stomach—a warm prickly rush of guilt and anxiety, though I know there was a time when I felt safer with my father than with anyone else on earth. “What’s up?” I ask, trying not to sound afraid. My hands move in front of me like butterflies. My toes curl down against the rug.
“Sit down,” he tells me, and I do, perching on the edge of the sofa beside him, feet still planted on the carpet like at any second I might jump up and bolt.
“I want to talk to you about that night at dinner,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say immediately, trying to avoid the inevitable lecture: If he’s going to lay into me again, I’d rather just take the blame right off the bat and be done with it, preempt the whole affair. My textbooks are piled on the desk in my bedroom. I’ve got finals starting next week. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that.”
“It’s not that,” he says, which is surprising. He shakes his head, sighs a little. “I owe you an apology.”
“It’s just been a really difficult—” I stop. “You do?”
“I do.” There’s something stilted about his speech, like he’s been practicing. I wait. “You were right, Reena,” he begins after a moment, “about what you said at the table. I didn’t protect you after—” He breaks off, tries again. “Once the baby came. I was angry. You know that. I said rotten things to you, and I’m ashamed of myself for that. I’m sorry.” He swallows. “This isn’t the life I imagined for you.”
I shrug, hands still twisting in my lap. I tuck them between my knees to still them. “It’s not the life I imagined for me, either.”
“I know. But as your dad, I think it felt—it felt like a personal failure to me, to see you lose Northwestern. A baby at sixteen—it’s not the way I raised you. I’m sorry if that’s difficult for you to hear, but it’s true.”
My cheeks feel hot. “I know.”
“But that’s not an excuse.” My father sighs again; he looks so old lately, his face gone slightly slack. “I did a terrible job once you told me you were pregnant. I did a miserable, piss-poor job. You probably needed your parents more than you’d ever needed your parents in your entire life, and what did I do? I walked away.”
I start to deny it, an absurd reflex. It’s bizarre to hear him talk this way. Finally I nod. “Yeah,” I tell him, which is about all I can manage. “It’s been hard.”
“But look at you,” he says. “You’ve handled yourself with a lot of grace. You’re responsible. You took up your cross. You do a good job with Hannah. You might think I don’t notice that, but I do.”
I feel my eyes start to well up, that familiar clog in my throat. I feel like I’ve been on the verge of crying for the last two years. “Thanks.”
“I know a lot of people have left you in your life,” he tells me, and that’s when the tears start for real. He gets a little closer, puts a heavy hand on my back. “Your mother, and Allie. Sawyer. And me, too.” His arm slides down around my shoulder, pulls me close; he smells like laundry detergent and limes. “But what I want to tell you, sweetheart, is that that’s not going to happen again, all right? I’m not going anywhere. No matter what happens, what you do or where you go—you’re not going to lose me again.”
Well, that rips it. All of a sudden it’s like he’s given me permission to let go of everything I’ve been holding on to so tightly—the guilt and fear I’ve walked around with since the night of his heart attack, the huge anger that’s burrowed in behind my ribs. I rest my head on his shoulder and let myself a cry a little, leave a wet splotch on his shirt the way I haven’t since I was a little girl. My father pets through my hair. I know this won’t fix everything between us—I know we have many, many miles to walk—but it feels, at the very least, like a start.
“There’s something else,” he tells me, once I’ve pulled it together a little bit, hiccups instead of sobs. His hand is still on my back, familiar after all this time. “It’s about Sawyer.”
“Honestly?” I groan. “There’s nothing going on between me and Sawyer.”
“It’s not that.” My father shakes his head. “Although whatever decision you make about him is just that—it’s your decision.” He clears his throat again, straightens up. “There’s something I never told you about Sawyer, about the time right before he left.”
I feel my eyebrows shoot up; I can only imagine. “What?”
My father reaches for the glass of water on the table, takes a long sip before he goes on. “He came here, to the house. Looking for you.”
“Wait,” I say, blinking. “Before he left for good?”
He nods. “This was when things between us weren’t so friendly, and I didn’t invite him in, but his car was full of all kinds of nonsense, like he was going on a trip.” He sets the water glass back down on the table. “I didn’t know then that he was leaving, but I also never told you he came by.”
I sit there for a minute, recalibrating. I feel like I’ve been hit with a wrecking ball. I think of Sawyer outside my house the other night, of him asking: If I’d asked you to come with me, would you have? I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. Maybe that’s not even what Sawyer wanted that day—maybe I’m understanding it wrong—but if there was a bunch of stuff in his car it means that the day I watched him pack up and leave the crummy stucco house forever, he came to say good-bye before he went.
“Well.” My father sits forward a bit, exhales like he’s sort of exhausted himself. “I just wanted to tell you, Reena, that I’m sorry that I’ve been so hard on you. I’ve sat in judgment, and that was a mistake. If there’s something—I’d like to try to make it up to you.”
I struggle for a moment, trying to fit all the pieces together—to come up with some cure-all, a plan for living our lives in a new way. I’m about to tell him to forget it, that both of us just need time—when all of a sudden it occurs to me, as clear and as terrifying as the Book of Revelation. “I need your blessing for something,” I tell him.
He hesitates for a moment: He thinks it’s Sawyer-related, I’m sure, but to his great credit, he comes through. “Name it.”
I raise my head, wipe my eyes, and stare at my father dead-on. “I’m going to take a trip.”