“And I was right because here you are. I finally made it, and you finally came back, but you know what?” I look at him, even though the tears in my eyes make him a wavering line. “I may be good enough, but you’re not.”
It’s his turn to be teary eyed. He opens his mouth and then clamps it closed. What can he say to me that will make it right? That will erase Mama’s years of back-breaking work? Of denying herself so I could have? He wasn’t worth her love. And even though maybe on some level, just about every step I’ve taken to get where I am was to prove something to him, to draw him back to me, he’s not worth mine either.
“I think you should go,” I choke out, turning my back on him, an echo of what he did to us all those years ago.
“Kai Anne, let me just say one thing before I go,” he says, voice husky with tears. “I know you’re mad at me, but I’m not giving up,”
“Oh, I think you will.” A harsh laugh abrades my lips. “Giving up is what you do best.”
“I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but you have a little sister who would love to know you. She’s your only blood left in the world, after all,” he says. “I’m leaving my number here on the table.”
For a moment I think he’s gone, and I almost let it all go, but then I hear one more broken whisper before he leaves for good.
“Bye, baby girl.”
I train my eyes on the hands fisted around each other at my waist. I didn’t get to see him leave the first time, and I don’t want to watch him go now. I hold it together until the door closes behind him, and then like the ballerina Mama gave me years ago, I shatter. I’m strewn, my broken pieces so myriad, I could never put them back together into what they were before he re-entered my life. I cry for that little girl who held on to her delusions about her father for too long, and for my mother who loved wrong and only once in her whole life, and could never let go even when that love let go of her.
I sob for hours, or it could be only minutes. I shed a billion tears, or maybe it’s just a few. This is a vacuum that has sucked away all sense of time and reality. In Mama’s shed, I’m suspended in pain and lost in regrets. Hers. Mine. Daddy’s. They’re all here. I pour them all into this room, into these jars, and it’s only once I’m empty that something begins to fill me for the first time. An understanding that I couldn’t have had without this pain at the hands of my father.
Train up a child in the way he should go.
This, like so many of the lessons from my father’s Bible, revisits me.
As a little girl I expected my father to do just that. To train me in the way I should go, but it’s only now that he’s unpacked his life, his mistakes, his weaknesses that I see he did exactly the opposite. Everything he modeled for me was all wrong, but in many ways, I was trained by his failings. Tutored by his mistakes.
Aunt Ruthie told me more than once that I’m just as much my father’s daughter as I am my mother’s. That I’m as much like him as I am like her. I didn’t believe her until now. The secrets. The lies. The hiding. The running. All a latent legacy from my father that, under pressure, has sprung to life.
Hypocrisy scents the air and turns my stomach. I’ve asked so many things of Rhyson that I haven’t been willing to do myself. I let my own fear and insecurity ruin our trust. The foundation he thought we were rebuilding, I’ve cracked with my lies and secrets. San tried to tell me. Rhyson learned from his mistakes and has done everything to show me, but it was coming face to face with my father that held the mirror up to me. My life for the last few months has been one huge blind spot with me overlooking all the ways I’ve done to Rhyson exactly what he did to me. I was blind to it, but now . . . well, now I see.
I MISSED A CALL FROM MY father.
I’m leaving the studio, debating whether to return or ignore the call. The missed call alert on my phone mocks me, daring me to respond. We’ve had a few more counseling sessions since that initial one, and things have thawed some between my father and me. My mother . . . still frozen.
I may never be able to say the word “frozen” again without laughing. I was only half-joking when I suggested animation for Kai’s acting career. Yet another bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it. That one—nudity, sex scenes, all that shit with some other guy, even if it is acting—that bridge I’ll burn. Got the match right here.
I don’t even register that I’ve dialed his number until it’s ringing. Only then do I realize it’s almost midnight. I’m about to hang up when he answers.
“Rhyson, hey.”