I cross mine. “What do you want?”
“To see my baby.” He smiles. Sweet, open, and a little busted.
There are advantages to being Millie Oen’s daughter. My smile beats his to hell. “I’m sorry, visiting hours are over.”
I climb the steps, bypassing his.
He snags my hand, squeezing tight, arm stretching, until I have to stop. “Don’t be like that.”
I don’t squeeze back. Worse, I don’t pull away. His hands are as big as they ever were. He could lift and swing both Greg and me at once when we were little. From the intensity of his current hold, maybe he still could.
“I heard about Mom,” he says. His mom, not mine. Yonni.
When? I ask, almost scream in my head. When she died? When I sent message after message? When I would have begged on my knees for you to show?
I grab the railing for leverage, palm to rust to steel, and don’t say a word.
The “when” doesn’t matter. Not anymore.
“Must have been hard on you,” he says, “losing her like that. I’m sorry I—”
I yank free of him, push up the last two steps to the door.
Dad clambers to unsteady feet and reaches for me again. “Baby doll—”
I press back against the door, just out of grasp. “I’m not one of your girls, Dad.”
“You are my baby, though.” He goes for the patented Franks puppy-eyed look, as if I’m unaware of the con. His reaching hand finds my elbow. “I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you, especially lately—I mean, your mother. Who’d have thought?—but you can trust me, right? I love you, baby. I’m here for you.”
Right. Just like he was when I was nine, when I was alone in a house with no power and nowhere to go. I squeeze past him and slam my keypass against the security reader. Push through the door and slam it shut as his blotchy palms hit the glass.
“Kit!” Muffled through the glass. “Don’t do this.”
“Watch me.” I back up, turn for the elevator.
“I’m sorry!” he wails. The words break and my step falters. I falter—heart heavy, breath shallow.
“I know I should have come back when Mom—when she—God, I know, Kit. I know. If I could take it back I would. You’re all I have, baby. You know that, right? You’re all I’ve got.”
Skin squeaks against glass, slides down. A hand? Fingertips? I half raise my palms to cover my ears, but that never worked years ago when Mom and Dad fought. Besides, I’m not a baby anymore.
Or a damn baby doll.
I glance over my shoulder.
Dad’s on the ground, and the glass is streaked from his hand or the snot from his nose. He’s shiny red as a marzinberri. Heaving quiet, sincere sobs that twist my gut. “We’re family, Kit,” he says, or I think he says. The glass muffles everything. “We’re family. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
We were family six months ago, when he wouldn’t call me back.
Dad crumples, like so much chopped meat.
I can’t let him in. Yonni would kill me. I’d lose the suite. She wrote it into her will, blocked Dad out right along with Dee and Greg. If I let any of my family stay overnight, the place is forfeited, the will rescinded. The Record Officials could march in and kick me out.
Dad’s crying. The sun catches every awkward tear.
The Records Office never makes random tower-calls. They’ll never know.
Yonni will know.
I can’t fail her any more than I have already. She’s dead.
We’re family, Kit.
I kick the carpet, spin back around, and open the door. Dad falls onto the lobby floor.
“One night,” I say. “Tomorrow, you’re gone.”
His eyes light up. He stands, pulls me in a hug of alcohol and sweat. “Oh, baby, I love you. I love you, baby doll.”
“Whatever,” I say. “Let’s get you upstairs.”
Mom and I bracket Yonni’s bed—her on one side, me on the other. Not a proper bed, but a raised tube braced with smaller tubes for fluid drainage. It takes up most of the tiny room, leaving us to squeeze into what’s left. The air hangs stuffy, metallic. A little sweet, a little burnt.
Mom props her feet on one of the lower tubes, ankles crossed under loose slacks, shiny shoes tapered to black points. Twin soles against the pale isolation of Yonni.
I stare at Mom’s unmoving feet and then into her perfect heart face—rounded cheeks, sharp chin—the memory crisp despite the dream. Or because of it.
And I am dreaming.
“Wake up,” I tell her or me or both. “Just wake up.”
Nothing happens. The room doesn’t blink out, I don’t open my eyes somewhere else.
But I can always wake myself up.
“Have you ever seen the future, Kit?” Mom’s head tilts with her toes, which swing this way and that. “And I don’t mean the Accounting. Have you ever had a moment, where without any evidence whatsoever, you just knew?”
I lean across Yonni’s encased silence, careful not to smudge the glass bed. “Get your damn shoes off her bed.”
“What if I said you were my moment?”