“I’m sorry?”
“It’s all over the news. Someone broke into Mr. Stone’s house and killed his dog. His television show is suspended indefinitely.”
***
On hearing the news of Trebuchet’s murder, Jackie was motionless. Megan told her everything she saw and heard, but it was too much for Jackie to process.
“Are you okay?” Megan’s voice was so timid, it was barely audible. She had expected her big sister to cry or scream, to do something. Instead, Jackie sat there, still as a tree on a windless night. More than anything, this frightened Megan.
“I don’t know” was the only answer Jackie could find.
“I’m scared, Jax.”
Jackie looked up and saw her sister for what she was: a thirteen-year-old girl whose life was coming apart just as quickly as her own. It triggered a protective response in Jackie that harkened back to their preschool days.
“I know, Meg, I am, too.”
“What’s going to happen now? And what’s going to happen to Daddy?” Jackie knew that she and Megan would turn back into their submissive and dominant selves in the morning, but for now she needed to be there for her little sister.
“I’m sorry, Meg,” Jackie answered, taking Megan’s hand and looking her in the eye, “but Daddy is … Daddy is …”
Megan nodded. “I know,” she whispered, “but how soon?”
“I don’t know.” Jackie paused for a long moment. She thought about how much her father had changed. Not just the forgetfulness, but his physical appearance, too. He had lost so much weight, and his skin had an almost gray quality to it. He was starting to look like a ghost. “Soon, I think.”
The sisters stayed there for a long time talking about everything that had happened and was happening in their lives until they both fell asleep in Jackie’s bed.
Jackie had strange dreams of medieval warriors killing dragons, with the dragons transforming into black Labs, their chests pierced by glowing, flaming swords. When she woke up, light was sneaking through the slits in the venetian blinds, making a television test pattern across her comforter.
Megan was gone. Probably downstairs with her parents. Jackie knew she should go to them, to see how her father was, to find out what was going on, but she wasn’t ready.
She reached for her phone and opened Facebook. She was immediately confronted by an image of Trebuchet lying in a pool of blood in her father’s office, with Jared out of focus behind the dog, palms pressed against his temples. The photo was posted by one of the entertainment blogs Jackie followed.
She screamed and dropped the phone.
“Jax?” her father asked a moment later from the other side of the door. “Are you okay? Can I come in?”
Jackie wasn’t ready to see her dad. She cleared her throat, ready to make an excuse, but it was too late; Jared opened the door and let himself in.
“Hi, Snowflake,” he said. “Are you okay?”
Jackie loved that her father still called her Snowflake. The nickname had started on a family ski trip in the Cascades when she was six years old.
“But I’ll fall and get hurt,” she had told her parents as her mother strapped on the big, clunky boots. She was terrified of getting on skis.
“Who’s going to get hurt more, you or the snowflakes, Snowflake?” her father had answered. Jackie giggled, so Jared said it again, and she giggled some more. She still didn’t want to get on the skis, but her father kept calling her Snowflake, wearing down her resistance until eventually she threw in the towel and gave the skis a try.
“Daddy,” Jackie said now, the morning after what had happened with Trebuchet, “we shouldn’t.” She motioned to the cameras.
Jared looked at his hands, like he was studying the intri-cate lines on his palms, like he was waiting for them to say something.
The silence underscored a tension that had been building between father and daughter, the first in the entire history of Jackie’s life. She wanted to collapse in his arms, bury her head in his chest, and tell him everything. She wanted to tell him how much she hated the television show and Ethan Overbee; tell him about Max and about how she and Megan had actually talked all night; tell him how sorry she was about Trebuchet. Most of all, she wanted to tell him how sad she was that he had cancer, and how scared that made her feel.
But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not with them watching.
“Just because there are cameras here, honey,” her father said as if reading her mind, “doesn’t mean that we can’t talk.” Jackie wanted to believe him, more than anything she wanted to believe him. “The TV show and the, the …”
Jackie wasn’t sure if her father couldn’t bring himself to say the word, or if he couldn’t remember it. “Cancer,” she finished. “The cancer.”
“Yes, the cancer. Those things don’t mean that we’re still not Snowflake and Daddy-Man—”