“I want to apologize to you,” my dad said then.
“For what?”
“For lots of things. But right now—for the way I disappeared after your mom died.”
Ah. That.
“I wasn’t … okay.”
“Neither was I.”
“I was drinking a lot. Every night in my room.”
“I remember,” I said. “You’d lock the door.”
“And you’d sit outside in the hallway.”
I nodded. “And cry.”
My dad squeezed my hands, but he kept his head down. “I can still hear the sound of you crying. In my head. I can hear you calling for me, begging me to come out.”
“But you never did.”
My dad shook his head. “A doctor friend gave me some sleeping pills. I’d take them and pass out. It was the best I could do. It’s not an excuse. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I left you alone when you needed me. If I could go back in time, I would. I’d rip open that door and gather you up in my arms and say everything you needed to hear: You’re not alone. We’ll be okay. I love you.”
Then my dad pulled me into a hug, and I could feel that he was crying.
“I’m sorry, Sadie,” he said. “Your mom would hate me so much for how I failed you.”
My knee-jerk impulse was to say, You didn’t fail me.
But of course he had. Not just then, but after—over and over.
So instead I said, “But you’re here now. And you brought her favorite flowers.”
His voice was almost a whisper. “Of course.”
And then, with his bandaged hand, he broke one of the yellow marigolds out of my bouquet and tucked it behind my ear with the daisy.
Did this one moment magically make everything better?
No.
But it didn’t make things worse, either.
I’ll give it that.
And now whenever I see a marigold, I think of my mom, of course, as ever—but I think of my dad, too. Apologizing.
* * *
AFTER HE DROVE away with Lucinda, I picked up my orchid from Mrs. Kim and then eyed the gallery entrance.
There were still forty-five minutes left.
A courageous person would return and stay till the end. But I wasn’t sure how courageous I was. It was one thing to not leave my post—it was another thing to be out and then force myself back in.
I might be a few guts short of the guts I needed to do that.
But I’d barely had time to consider that before, in rapid succession, I got that primal feeling of someone watching me, turned to see who it was, and caught a fraction of a glimpse of Parker, edging around the corner, out of sight.
She was still here.
Lingering at the scene of one of her many crimes.
I took a few steps in that direction, thinking she was running away and I might chase after her. But then I saw her shadow on the sidewalk. She hadn’t run away. She was just hiding.
Hiding.
I would’ve expected her to be out here, gloating. Cackling. Savoring the misery she’d wrought.
Hiding made me wonder. Was she ashamed of herself? Could she even feel shame? Did she feel guilty? Remorseful? Even—and I shook my head, even as I thought it—sorry?
I’d overheard a few things about Parker’s life, too, during the years when we all lived in one house together. I once heard Lucinda on the phone telling a friend the whole story about how Parker’s dad walked out very dramatically one night—with his mistress waiting in the car. Parker had tried to hold on to his leg to keep him from going, but he shook her off the way you might shake off a terrier—and he had kicked so hard, Parker slammed her head against the metal doorstop and had to go to the ER.
In my more generous moments, I’d sometimes wonder if her father’s leaving like that haunted her. If she was still reckoning with that moment somehow. If she’d rather do bad things and make herself into a bad person than have to face the idea that she might’ve been unlovable just as she was.
Or maybe she was just a psychopath.
Or even a sociopath.
And yes—I’d done enough armchair research on Parker over the years to know the difference between the two. I’d once even printed out a flowchart. I guess I’d known her too long and too well to hold out hope that she might change.
That said, this moment felt like an opportunity. All our normal stories about ourselves and our family had kind of gone through a paper shredder tonight. Right now, with everything in shambles, it felt like I could say something true. And whether or not she would hear me or understand me or use it against me, I decided right then to go ahead and say it.
For my sake, if not for hers.
“Parker,” I said, watching her shadow to see if she’d run off at the sound. “I know you’re there.”
The shadow didn’t move.
I went on, “I don’t know what drives you to go after me like you do. I once read that people who hurt others think there are only two choices in the world—to hurt or to be hurt. And so they hurt others so they can feel safe. Like, if they’re the bully, they can’t be bullied. If they’re the victimizer, they can’t be the victim. As if anything in life could ever be that simple. But maybe that’s what it is for you. Maybe it’s faulty logic. Maybe it’s something that you’ll rethink in the future and regret. Or maybe there’s—I don’t know—something wrong with your brain, and this is how it’ll always be. Me, always cast as the squirrel, and you always cast as the neighborhood pyromaniac who douses the squirrel with lighter fluid…”
I paused then, in case she might have something to say.
She didn’t.
So I went on. “The irony of it is … I always wanted a sister.”
This moment was almost over—I could feel it. And the shadow was still listening.
Then something became very clear to me: As terrible as Parker made my life, she made her own even worse. Nothing she could do to me was as soul-crushing as what she did to herself. In turning away from kindness, she’d chosen a life of torment.
Maybe I didn’t have to punish her.
Maybe she was already punishing herself.
Spoiler: I would find out the next day that my portrait came in dead last in the contest. I would get a total of zero votes from the judges. But I really would come away with a whole new understanding of what it meant to win. And standing in that dark street alone, talking to Parker’s shadow, I was already getting a glimmer of what that would feel like.
“I just want you to know,” I said then, “that it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be enemies. I believe you can change, and I know I’m not vindictive. If you ever decide that you want to stop acting this way … I will genuinely try to forgive you.”
Twenty-Eight
THAT NIGHT, ON top of it all, I left the most bananas voicemail of my entire life.
Because that apology I’d gotten from my dad? It didn’t magically fix everything about my childhood—of course. We can’t go back in time.
But it did leave me thinking a little differently.
Like, hearing his side of the story changed my understanding of the story.