“Don’t give me too much credit,” I said. “All I’ve done is not die.”
“Still,” she said. Perhaps I imagined the melancholic note in her voice. Thinking about Zoe, I have failed to consider the grief she must feel about her father. The grief we feel when someone dies. The grief and the blame and the guilt. To tell the truth, which I’m trying my best to do if only in these pages, even now grief and its fellows are hard for me to think about.
“Well, thank you,” I said. “I’m glad you approve.”
“Could you tell my mother . . .” She paused. “Could you tell her not to call me again?”
“If I see her,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” she said.
But of course that was a lie.
Oh, Zoe, I know your longing. I recognize your need. I know you’d like to kill it, but you can’t. They say there’s peace if you can relinquish desire. For me desire’s absence has only ever left a dull persistent ache. An insistent humming insectile silence. A lonely house in the woods. But perhaps the lesson is that I never relinquished desire, and that’s why there’s been no peace.
What Zoe Did
She was looking for a hairbrush. That was all she wanted. She couldn’t find her own. The door to her parents’ room was closed. Her mother was at the mall with Milo, so she assumed her father was in there. She knocked. When there was no answer, she thought maybe he was napping, so she opened the door quietly. In the dim light she saw his figure on the bed, lying on his back, propped up on two pillows, with his injured ankle elevated by a third. Her poor father. That ankle had given him so much trouble, and her mother was a bitter, reluctant nurse. His head was turned to the side, away from her.
She crept past him slowly. Her mother kept her hairbrush on the sink in the master bath. There it was, where her mother always put it—and why don’t you have a place for your own things, Zoe, so you don’t keep having to borrow mine? Zoe brushed her hair, a bit hurriedly, as she didn’t want to wake her father or have her mother return unexpectedly to criticize. Her hair got staticky, long blond strands floating around her, sizzling. She put the brush back in place, went to the door, thought again, went back and pulled all the hair from it, balled the hair in her hand, and shoved it in her pocket so her mother wouldn’t find it in the trash. Her hair was exactly the shade of her mother’s, but still this precaution was necessary, as her mother cleaned her brush every time she used it. Every single time. She replaced the brush, moved it a few degrees to the right, looked at herself in the mirror, and, satisfied, turned to go.
What was it that told her he wasn’t just sleeping? She’d tiptoed past his bed, almost to the door, before the bad feeling hit her. He was too still, maybe. Or she registered, subconsciously, that she didn’t hear him breathing. She hasn’t been able to figure it out, though she’s returned again and again—without meaning to, without wanting to—to that moment and its question. How did she know? As if the key to the whole mystery lies in that.
First, she said, “Dad?” She said it quietly, like you do to test whether someone’s sleeping. She didn’t yet believe what she knew. Second, she said it again, this time louder than normal speech. She moved closer to the bed. “Dad?” Third, she put her hand on his shoulder, and felt no answering movement in his body. The phrase as still as death came into her head. She put her other hand on his other arm and she shook him; she said, “Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Her voice rose and rose. His head lolled as she shook him.
Fifth, or sixth, or seventh, she put her head on his chest and sobbed. She kept feeling his chest with one hand, as if she’d find his heartbeat if she just kept searching for it. A calm voice in her head said, “You need to make a call.” After a time—who knows how long a time—she said, “All right,” out loud. She stood and straightened her clothes and walked around the bed to her mother’s side, where the phone was. She turned her back on her father while she dialed 911. Talking to the operator, she lowered her voice, because she didn’t want to embarrass him.