“I think you know my mom?” She held out the other photo, larger, in better focus, Bev by their mantelpiece, at a party, her cloud of honey hair. “Or you knew her, I guess.”
“I don’t know you,” he said. It was like watching a man put on armor in front of you, Cassie told Peter. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here. I don’t know what you want. But I think you should go now.”
“Please, will you just look at the photo?”
He glanced, but barely, at Bev. “Who is this? What is this about? I don’t know this person.”
But Cassie told Peter that she could have sworn that he was . . . well, not that he was lying, but that he was uncertain. She could have sworn that he got weirder, although of course things were already weird.
His wife’s dark head popped around the wall at the top of the stairs. “Art, it’s time now. The kids’ll be late.” She didn’t look quite the way Cassie had pictured her—in the photos she’d been plump, but her shoulders were thin, almost frail. And she didn’t have any accent.
“Coming.” When he turned back to Cassie, Arthur Clarke Burnes held his hand up flat between them, so he couldn’t really see her face. Like she was too much to contemplate. He didn’t look again at Bev, wavering glossy between them. “I can’t help you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Look at me,” she told Peter that she told him. “Look in my eyes—your eyes—and tell me that you don’t know who I am.” That was my Cassie, fearless.
He reached around her, carefully, as if she were diseased, she said to Peter, to open the front door. He didn’t look at her at all; he averted his watery gaze. Physically, he seemed both as though he might still explode and as though he had already exploded.
“You need to leave now.” His voice was low and tight. “I am not going to ask again.” He nodded out at the gray morning, a short dip of his skull, his eyes on the pendulous ceiling of cloud.
Cassie walked out the door and he shut it firmly behind her. She heard him slip the deadbolt too. It did not start to rain and she didn’t start to cry until she’d walked all the way back into town, and she told Peter that every time a car slid alongside and passed her, she wondered if it was him, Arthur Clarke Burnes, driving his other children into the new day.
THERE AREN’T WORDS for that, for how that felt. I know that, even from afar. She didn’t need to say it to Peter—he too could imagine. Cassie was filled with knowledge and uncertainty both, and there was no way back to unknowing. She was certain, in her heart, that this man was her father. She had, all her life, counted on and trusted in her imaginary version of this man. And here he was in the flesh, on this Earth, she said to Peter (or was he? Peter said to me, because neither Peter nor I could muster even a fraction of Cassie’s certainty: why would Arthur Clarke Burnes of Bangor, Maine, be her father? Why would her father even be alive, without proof, when he’d been dead all her life?), here he was at last, her guardian angel—except he wasn’t, was he, after all? She’d been in love all her life with the doting protector of her dreams. But when she most needed him, when Anders Shute had stolen her mother’s love and attention, her father turned out to be real, a man of flesh and blood; and this man had denied her. It was like Peter denying Christ in the Bible, she told Peter. He had looked at her and refused to see her, to acknowledge her existence, even. He had turned his eyes away and closed his door in her face. And when her own mother didn’t want her! (Or, Peter said to me, Cassie might well have been inventing it all. Why? I said. And then I answered, for myself, for Cassie, because suddenly I knew: because it seemed to her she had no other choice, no story that both made sense and gave her the possibility of hope.)
Cassie had willed her father into life, and then the man she went to claim, the man she so believed in that she had given him her love long before she stood on his doorstep—that man, not imaginary but real, rejected her utterly. And then nobody wanted her, nobody wanted even to claim her; she had nowhere to go.
But she had, above all, no reason to stay in Bangor, and so she came home. She slept that Tuesday night rough in Boston, having missed the last bus back to Royston; and she showed up at Peter’s—at his window, to be precise, after climbing onto the garage roof—on Wednesday afternoon, filthy, frightened, exhausted, and half off her head. Peter thought that was the end, the dénouement; but he was wrong.
Where to go? What next? Who will open the door, and their arms, to me? I know her so well that these thoughts are my own, I can step into her skin, see the world from behind her eyes—our blue eyes that always made us sisters—and I’m grateful, and relieved, that she had the wisdom to choose Peter. Peter is who I would have chosen, if for some reason I felt I couldn’t choose me. I wish she’d chosen me. But Peter, he knew what to do, and even though they didn’t hang out anymore, he still loved her. He was a protector. She knew better than to head to the Evil Morsel in Portland, which says plenty.
Even so, on Thursday morning when finally she stirred, in a patch of April sunlight, in Peter’s room, she found herself alone there with a note from him—“Pre-cal test, gotta go; can skip Spanish & History; back by 11”—she knew she couldn’t stay. His parents, never especially fond of her—she was not the girlfriend high-key Amy Oundle envisaged for her son, “destined” as he was—wouldn’t take well to her presence in his bed. They wouldn’t be the ones to accompany her to her door and to stand at her shoulder as she confronted Bev and Anders Shute. My parents would have done that, or they might have. I would have done that, if she’d asked me.