little girl little girl little girl
First thing tomorrow, she promised her dripping reflection, she would call the phone company and change her number, and if her father found her again after that she’d consider moving into a new apartment altogether. She planted her hands on the sink’s edge and felt her fear transform into anger, and without drying off her face or thinking through the consequences, she stormed out of the bathroom and dialed her teenage phone number. Raj looked up from the table but didn’t say a word.
“Thank you, sweetheart. I know that’s a hard call to make.”
That’s how her father answered the phone, a sweet greeting that derailed her intentions—please stop calling me!—and left her, after an eternity of silence, spinning in the tracks of small talk. She and David still had a corded phone and she stretched it into the bathroom, closed the door, and sat on the toilet. She thought she’d immediately question her father about the birthday photo and Moberg’s suspicions, but he didn’t give her the chance.
“I hear there’s a new library,” he said quickly, as if he were going through a list of topics he’d scribbled on his palm. “And a new ballpark under way, and a real home team that’s not the Denver Bears.”
“Tell me why you’re calling,” she said.
Her father’s response took time. She could hear Raj shuffling and reshuffling his child’s game somewhere far away.
“I have a hundred reasons for calling,” her father said, “but if I had to pick one it comes down to being proud of you.”
“Proud?”
“I mainly wanted to tell you that.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I know enough.”
“I’m a bookseller, Dad.”
“Well, you’re not a prison guard is more how I see it.”
Lydia felt her eyes close. Felt the roof lift. She slid to the bathroom floor.
Not a prison guard.
During Lydia’s childhood, being a librarian had been as intrinsic to his identity as being a father, so his choice to leave the library behind and become a prison guard was, as she’d framed it in a thousand teenage fights, a selling of his soul. His transformation had been alarming: it began with the drastic shift in his appearance—the mustache and sunglasses and uniform—and amplified over time until there was little difference between the man he was at work and the man he was at home. Beginning in middle school, whenever Lydia swept the cabin floors, he’d taken to sitting at the kitchen table, sipping his coffee and scrutinizing every swish of the broom as if they were on a cell block. On the rare occasions when she got in trouble at school—always for minor offenses, like missing the school bus or forgetting to do her algebra homework—he would remove her bedroom door from its hinges as a punishment and once even tried to take away all of her extraneous reading material. Around that same time, with the exception of the occasional back-pat hug that felt more like a playground clapping game than a paternal embrace, he simply stopped showing any affection for her at all. But maybe even worse than anything was the oppressive silence that had finally swallowed their home. After they left Denver, he just hardly ever spoke anymore about anything.
Even as an adolescent, Lydia knew that those were trying times for her father, and she knew she didn’t have the answers to the vexing questions that life had thrown at him. Far from it! But then not having answers had always been the point: the point of her childhood, the product of her hours in the library, the sum of his philosophy when she was a little girl. You leave yourself open to answers, he’d always taught her. You keep turning pages, you finish chapters, you find the next book. You seek and you seek and you seek, and no matter how tough things become, you never settle. But in becoming a prison guard Tomas had settled as dust settles, as lost hair settles. He’d settled like the bones of the dead.
And so while Lydia had always half-expected this phone call, in all of her fantasies she’d never expected this: Tomas’s terse acknowledgment that his choices had defiled their trajectory as a family. She had a hard time knowing what to say.
“Can you tell me one thing?” he said, breaking the silence. “We used to talk, so why not anymore? What is it I did that’s bugging you so much?”
She could feel years of accusations leaning forward on her tongue, waiting to be unleashed, but at the moment only one felt truly urgent.
“Detective Moberg thinks you were involved with the murders.”
Her dad was silent for a minute before saying, “You saw him?”
“I went to his cabin.”
“You believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t surprise me he’d think that. He’s always had it in for me. Apparently still does.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, and his refusal seemed so stubborn and suspicious that she found herself slipping into a different line of questioning. “How well did you know Joey?”
“Who’s that?” he said.
“Joey Molina. He was one of your prisoners.”
Her father paused on his end long enough for doubt to swell through her.
“Joey was your prisoner,” she said, “in Rio Vista.”
“Wait—are you talking about Joey the Bookworm?”
“Joey Molina.”
“That sounds right,” he said. “Just a kid? Skinny, black hair, caused some kind of a car accident? Sure, I know Joey. Question is, why do you know him?”
“From the bookstore.”
“Huh. I guess that makes sense. The kid is just a phenomenal reader.”
“He’s dead.”
Silence.
“He hanged himself,” she added.
“Joey?” he said, barely able to get the words out. “He’s dead?”
“He died with a photo of me sticking out of his pocket.”
“A photo of you?” Tomas said.
“From my tenth birthday.”
“A photo of you. No, he didn’t. Tell me he didn’t—”
“He did,” she said.
Silence.
“A birthday photo,” he said, “and you’re blowing out the candles?”
“Why’d you give him a photo of me, Dad?”
“Oh, Jesus. Lydia? Did he do something to you? Did he find you?”
“Why, Dad?”
“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” he finally said. “Let me think. Let me think.”
Lydia could hear Raj out beyond her bathroom door, shuffling cards.
“So you didn’t hire Joey to keep tabs on me?” she said.
“I worry about you like you can’t even imagine,” her father said, “but I wouldn’t do that, not in a million years. Is everything there okay? Tell me he didn’t hurt you, Lydia. Please, just—”
“I’m fine.”
Her dad sounded so concerned, so honest, it was hard for Lydia not to believe him.
“Sweetheart? I really don’t see why Joey would have tracked you down. I talked about you a lot, so maybe he wanted to meet you.”
“So you did give him a photo of me?”