I shifted positions. ‘So was he…hurt from it?’
‘No…’ Stella didn’t meet my eye. ‘I don’t think there was a scratch on him.’
‘He talks about it sometimes,’ I said quietly.
Stella extinguished her cigarette in the pea-green ashtray. ‘So I bet you miss your mom, huh?’
I sat back. ‘Excuse me?’
She kept grinding the cigarette out. ‘I hope you know it had nothing to do with you, whatever it was or wherever she is. But you’re okay now, aren’t you?’
‘Sure,’ I said weakly.
‘And your father, too?’
‘Yeah. I guess.’
Stella smiled. ‘Well. Wonderful.’
In some ways, I wasn’t lying. Aside from the snow globe incident, my father seemed okay. He went to the lab every day now. He saw a therapist named Dr North, and I had a feeling Dr North had him on some drug. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to have to think about it. Sometimes Dr North called Steven and me. ‘If you ever want to talk, the door is open,’ he said if he happened to catch me on the phone, as if he were my roommate and was talking about the door to his bedroom. Several times, I’d dialed the first six digits of Dr North’s office number, wanting to ask him if the time I’d blamed everything on my father could have led to what happened. I always hung up, though, before I dialed the seventh digit.
My father still wrote his on-the-fly diaries on cab receipts and phone bills and on the flyers the local grocery delivery service leaves in our mailbox. He wrote one on the day of the snow globe incident, on a slip of paper from a Duane Reade drugstore. Summer is selling Toblerone chocolate for French class. I took a box into the lab and everyone bought one. They’re tearing down the deli next to the lab to build a coffee shop, probably a Starbucks. Four hours’ sleep. Nothing about whether or not I’d hurt him, blaming him like that. Nothing indicating what was to come.
I pored over the receipts like a cryptologist, certain I’d find something that would lead me to understanding him, what he was going through, or if there was something he wasn’t telling me. But there wasn’t much there. He made a lot of references to drift mines. He sometimes mentioned the name Jo or Josie or just J. He also talked about encyclopedias, Leonard Cohen, Dairy Queen.
One day, a few months ago, he and I went for a walk on the Promenade. It was one of those placid days when all the big buildings across the water had definite, flat edges, Manhattan unfurled like on a map. We leaned against the railing and looked into the oily, black water, not saying much. He took my small hand in his big, rough, squeezy one, the same hand that spliced off moles and held my mother’s body close and petted me, cradled me, when I was a baby. ‘I hope this never happens to you,’ he said.
It didn’t take me long to realize what he was talking about. I was my father’s daughter.
When Stella placed her mug of hot chocolate on the coffee table, she bumped a stack of magazines sideways. Underneath a National Geographic from 1982 was a color photograph of a young girl, about seven or eight, with dark hair chopped to her chin. She stood next to a tire swing and a rusty blue pickup truck. Its right headlight was cracked, just like the truck out front.
‘Who’s that?’ I pointed at the girl. She didn’t look like Samantha. And she certainly wasn’t me.
A muscle next to Stella’s right eye twitched. For a few seconds, she watched me searchingly, as if waiting for me to say something else. When I didn’t, she picked up the photo and slipped it into her cardigan pocket. ‘It’s just…you know. A neighbor girl.’ Her other hand fumbled for a fresh cigarette. After she lit it, she patted my hand. ‘You know what? I have just the thing for you.’
She walked into the kitchen and started to bang around through drawers. I expected her to come back with something priceless-an explanation, maybe. An old slip of paper with my father’s handwriting, perhaps an account of his accident. A recording of my mother’s voice, the last time she visited here. The answer.
Stella held two small pieces of cardboard and ceremoniously handed one to me. ‘Now. I just know you’re going to win.’
It was a scratch-off lottery ticket. The theme was ‘pot o’ gold,’ and there was a drawing of a deranged-looking leprechaun with a long goatee shooting rainbows from his fingers. Stella wordlessly passed me a penny, then turned to her own ticket and started feverishly scratching. My windows revealed $5, $15, a pot of gold, a horseshoe, and some kind of unidentifiable blob.
‘Nothing for me, I don’t think,’ I said.
‘Me neither.’ Stella brushed the rubbed-off debris onto the carpet. She sounded astonished, like she’d truly expected me to win the million bucks.