I’m looking at my father, and I don’t see the god that Mila sees or the once-handsome grad student my mom fell in love with. I see a pockmarked, wrinkled, sad old man. The lies of his life, the stress of his life, they weigh down on him. He’s hunched and tired.
“How was Acapulco?”
My father shudders at this. “What are you talking about? I was in Singapore.”
“No,” I say. “You were with Paige. And Ella. And your other kids.”
My father pushes his chair back and stands up. “Who told you?” He pounds his fist on the table. “Did your mother tell you?”
“No, Dad. You might want to put a pass code on your phone.”
He sits back down in his chair. “Son of a—”
“Do you love her?”
“Who?”
“Oh my God. Mom, of course.”
He slumps over the table. He gets quiet and still.
“Did you ever love her?”
“One day you’ll understand.”
“Dad, what the hell kind of answer is that? One day I’ll understand what, exactly?”
He lifts his head and looks at me. “Responsibility, complications. It’s life as you know it, and you’re comfortable enough to be petrified of any other version. You’re close enough to withstand the other’s habits—even if it involves other entanglements—to be okay with your own version of love. You’re committed to this and there are other people—other hearts—involved. And what? Are you going to destroy their lives because of your principles? There are no principles. There’s only survival.”
“What does that even mean?” I want to cry or maybe laugh or maybe scream or maybe hit him. “Screw that, Dad! Talk to me. Answer my question: Did you ever love her? Or was your love just another lie?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Oh my God. Do you even feel bad about everything you’ve done to us? To them?”
He pushes his glasses up his nose and leans toward me. “There’s this concept—did you study it in your summer program thing?—called the ‘hindsight bias.’ We have it all the time in the engineering world. You can have all this data about the resisting forces that might weigh on your building—whether it’s gravity, wind, temperature, erosion—you still don’t know before you implement it what the real outcome will be. It’s easy to go back to a failed design and say ‘I would have done this differently’ or ‘I would have done that differently.’ It’s easy to piece the failure together later. We can predict a lot, more than ever, but the reality is that every structure in this world will fall down eventually. We still can’t predict the exact moment of collapse.”
“Are you saying we were a design experiment?”
“I’m saying that human impulses are larger than any physical reality. It’s impossible to make predictions about a human life. You just never know what the right answer is. You never know exactly what the outcome will be.” He looks at me. “I certainly couldn’t have predicted this.”
“Dad, are you ever able to give a straightforward answer?”
“I am not a liar, if that’s what you want to know. I have been honest about my love for all of you.”
“You know what? I can see that. I think you perceive the world as you want to. Someone else, who doesn’t know you as well, might say you’re lying to us, to the world. But the very sad truth is, you’re lying to yourself.” I push back my chair and stand up. “And you’re the one who’s going to collapse.”
“What do you want me to say?” He stands up and hovers over me with his height, with his anger. “I’m your father, and you can’t change that.”
“No,” I say. “You’re right. I can’t.”
“What do you want from me?”
“To go live your life with Paige and your other, perfect family. I want you to leave Mom alone. To leave us alone.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he says. “Your mother wants me here.”
“You’re only going to hurt Mila worse if you stay.”
He shifts uncomfortably. “Are you going to tell her?”
I hear myself say, “I’m not sure yet. I mean, she’ll find out eventually.”
He looks down at the table. “You disappoint me, Viviana.”
“Dad, I’m always disappointing you. All you ever wanted was for me to be like you, to be smart like you, to be exactly like you.”
“I never said I wanted you to be like me.” He looks up at me, adjusts his glasses again. “I said I wanted you to learn from your past mistakes, to learn from my past mistakes.”
“Dad, even you don’t know how to do that.”
I grab my bag and storm out of the apartment. This time, he doesn’t follow, thank goodness. I’m able to leave him there, alone with his twisted concepts and ridiculous theories about love and human impulses and right and wrong answers.
I run to the stairwell and let the door slam behind me.
But I don’t know where I want to go. Not Sammie’s. Not the pool. Not the endless, wandering streets.
I do know that I need to be alone.