And then, I’m alone. I try to study for the AP English exam that’s next week, but I can’t. I try to read, to memorize the definitions of all the tropes and schemes, but it’s all a blur. So I stay true to my promise to my mom and I close the book. I head outside and sit on our balcony. We live on the sixteenth floor in a three-bedroom apartment that my parents rent. But that might be one of the other things we’ll lose if my father doesn’t come back and they decide to divorce. I might as well enjoy it before it’s all gone.
I never do this. I never just sit. I lean my forehead against the iron railing and identify the patterns of the buses, cars, and people below me. The city below me wakes up. I start thinking about ant trails and power lines and circuitry connections, about the difference between a meandering labyrinth and a strategic maze. In the Design and Engineering Academy, we had to memorize the different patterns of nature, like the spirals and whorls that communicate regeneration and connectivity, and tessellating shapes that stack and pack and communicate stability and organization. We were instructed to use these patterns in our own designs, and the lessons are ingrained in me. My mind won’t turn off. I can’t just see the cab as a cab or the bus as a bus. Instead, I see how they move, how they’re designed, how they could be improved.
My father would love this.
If he were here.
I wish that he were here.
I try to just watch the clouds, but even they make me think about energy and movement and space.
And physics exams.
And failure.
The Academy.
My mom talked to my dad. They talked about me. They talked about what they want for me.
I haven’t talked to my dad in three months. He won’t communicate with me to tell me why he left, why he’s not coming home. I can’t think of any other reason why he left so suddenly.
I don’t know how to fix this.
And then come the palpitations. They flutter inside my chest.
It’s happening again. The panic. The worry. The dizzying nausea. The caving in.
I go inside and crawl into my bed, try to breathe like they told me to at the hospital.
Deep breaths. Belly breaths, they said.
I try, but in my belly there’s this pit of regret and disgust and exhaustion, and breathing into it only makes it worse.
I should call someone.
I shouldn’t have been left alone.
I close my eyes.
I fall into the waves.
I melt into the bed.
I’m alone.
*
The Episode lasts for what feels like hours. When it finally calms down, I move to the couch and fall asleep to old episodes of The Big Bang Theory until it’s time to pick up Mila.
She runs out of the gate toward me with a hand-drawn card made out of construction paper, and it’s taped shut with daisy and unicorn stickers. “Here’s your get-well card.” And then she places her hand on my forehead. “You still look sick. Can we play nurse today?”
We get home, and I climb into bed so she can bring me a glass of milk and toast. She pulls out a doctor kit from when she was in preschool and listens to my heart with her plastic stethoscope.
I open the get-well card she drew for me. It’s a picture of all of us—my mom, my dad, Mila, and me. We’re stick figures standing in front of a two-story house, smiling and holding hands.
My heart drops. Ever since she was in kindergarten, when her teacher gave her an assignment to find out what her parents did for work, she’s asked our dad the same question: “When will you build us a house?” He always laughs and tries to explain that he doesn’t build houses, that he works on large skyscrapers in foreign countries, but it never appeases her. “But you could if you wanted to,” she always says. “You know how.”
This house is nothing like where we live. It has a slanted roof, a picket fence, and a chimney. There’s a green yard with apple trees and purple flowers, and a rainbow arcs over our round and smiling heads. It’s nothing like Bennett Tower, where we actually live, with its cold white stone and black balconies, an ugly old skyscraper that just straight up out of the earth.
Mila leans over my shoulder. “Sorry it’s not perfect.”
“Mila, why do you say it’s not perfect?”
“I wanted to make it right for you. But I had trouble with the arms.”
“Mila, come on. I love it. And you know there’s no such thing as perfection.”
She pauses for a moment. “I think you’re perfect. I think Mommy’s perfect.” She doesn’t mention our dad.
My Academy teachers said that we’re asymmetrical beings seeking a perfect kind of symmetry that can never be attained. They showed us cracked vases as examples of the beauty of ordinary objects. No design is perfect, they said, but we still can’t help but try.
I look at Mila’s drawing. My arms have been drawn and erased so many times, I look like the ghost of a Hindu god. “How about this?” I say. “I think that your picture is perfect because you made it.”
“I guess,” she says.
I get out of bed so I can pin it to the bulletin board above my desk, but then she grabs it from me and rips it in two.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll make you a new one tomorrow,” she says, crumpling the pieces as she runs.
“But I like that one!” I chase after her down the hallway and try to pull it from her grasp, but when I finally release it from her hands, it’s completely destroyed.