“Lunch ready?” Dad’s buoy-head sways in Mom’s direction.
“You should sober up first,” she tells the table.
His nostrils flare. He’s a bull, ready to fight.
“Don’t you tell me what I should goddamned do first, Henney.” He snorts. He lists toward her, but I won’t let him touch her. Not this time. She’s tired. She needs to rest. Can’t he see that? Can’t he see us?
“You’re drunk, Dad.” I shove back my chair and stand face-to-face with him. I am almost as big as he is. Almost. I could take him on a good day. “Go sleep it off or something. Leave her alone.”
The air has left my body before I realize it. I’m on the floor before I realize it, staring up at a white ceiling, my chest throbbing.
He hit me, I realize, the thought coming from far away. I roll onto my side, curled into myself like a baby, and watch his work boots storm through the kitchen, rattling the glasses and my insides again.
“Wil.” Mom kneels down next to me, strokes my hot, embarrassed face with her hands. “Honey. Wil.” She bends over me and kisses my forehead and my cheeks, and I pretend to push her away.
“I’m okay.” I force the words out, don’t meet her eyes.
“He didn’t mean it, Wil. He’s drunk. He didn’t mean it.” Her voice is grainy.
I roll onto my back. From here, I can see the words carved into the kitchen table. We will go together, over the waters of time. I close my eyes and I let my mother stroke my hair. I’m not in pain. The worst of it is the surprise. Even when I knew who he was, what he could do, the truth is that I never thought he would do it to me.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
I woke up this morning with secrets under my tongue. The awful truth about Wilson; the long hug between Wil and me last night in the street in front of Buck’s house. The secrets make the world seem upside down and backward. I don’t know what to make of either of them. They seem so giant and unmanageable that it’s safest to hold on to them until I understand them better. Lock them up where no one can see them, even Leigh. And especially not my mother.
Somehow I make it through the school day without saying a word. Wil and I avoid each other’s glances, and I try not to wonder what that means. By the time I jam the key in the lock at home, my bones are tired of holding me upright. War sounds leak through the thin windows and the front door. Men killing men; boots on the ground.
“Micah. Turn it down,” I bellow as I push through the front door. I let my keys and bag drop, then step over them. The air inside is sticky and still.
He stays hunched over his video game controller.
“Micah.”
The volume dips. He keeps his gaze fixed on the screen.
“What are you doing home so early?” I fall onto the couch next to him. “No big plans with the girlfriend?” I don’t mean to say it. It just slips out.
His forehead creases. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Oh. So what I saw the other day was just a hookup, then. Classy.”
“Screw you.” He turns the volume up again. On the screen, a cartoon soldier is being split in two.
I dive for the remote and mute the sound. “Come on. Turn it off. I had a weird night last night, and if I sit here in front of the television, I’ll just obsess over it.” I’ll wonder about Wil, about whether he felt what I felt when we hugged. Was he was just looking for someone familiar, or were we becoming something entirely new altogether?
“Me too, kind of.” Micah tosses the controller to the other side of the couch. “What kind of weird?”
It’s the first time he’s asked me a real question in I can’t remember how long.
“I guess . . . some stuff came up about Wil’s dad last night. Stuff that made me sad to think about. So I tried not to.” I twist my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck, so tightly it gives me a headache.
“At least Wil had a dad for a little while.” Micah kicks at the coffee table.
“Micah.”
“I’m serious, Bridge. Wouldn’t you take a not-so-great dad over one who was never there in the first place?” When he turns to look at me, his face looks little boyish in the afternoon light.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
But I’ve felt the way Micah feels before. Once in middle school, Wil and Wilson and I had been working in the shop. When Wil went in for water, Wilson stopped sweeping long enough to ask me, “So what about your dad?”
He’d said it just like that, no extras.
I’d tightened the ridged plastic cap on the varnish can so hard my fingertips burned. “What about him?”
“You ever talk to him?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know where he is, really. Neither does Mom. She’d tell me.” For as long as I could remember, I’d gone through Mom’s drawers, her calendar, her phone, desperate for a clue about my dad. Nothing. I didn’t even care about the big questions: why he’d left, where he was, whether he had a real family now. It was the little things that interested me. Did he think the first sip of a Coke Slurpee was the best, or the last? (The last, because there was nothing more to look forward to, so you appreciated it more.) Did roller coasters make him sick? Did he ride them anyway, because he wanted to be the kind of person who loved roller coasters?
Wilson leaned his broom in the corner and sat on the workshop floor next to me. The concrete was clean and cool, and in the background, the stereo played James Taylor. The sunlight filtered through the walls and left a design on the floor. I’m having a dad moment, I thought, even though I’d had plenty of dad moments with Wilson before. And I was so intensely jealous of Wil. What’s he done, I thought, to deserve this?
I know the answer now: absolutely nothing. Wil has always been a good person, decent. There is nothing he could have done to deserve the father he was dealt. The anger I couldn’t see back then.
I shake my head to clear the memory and muss Micah’s hair. “Hey. Let’s go do something this afternoon. Just you and me. Hang out like we used to.”
“Before you got judge-y as hell?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Before you started dry-humping older women.”
He makes a gagging sound and promises to hang out with me if I stop using the phrase dry-humping.
“We still have a couple of good beach hours left.” I tug at my knotted hair and let it fall. “Or we could play Putt-Putt.”
“Putt-Putt?” Micah frowns at the screen. “What are we, seventh graders going on a second date?” Then his face lights up. “You know what we haven’t done in a while? Don’t laugh.”
I know before he says it. “I won’t, I swear.”
“Eleanor and Alastair,” he says, looking sheepish and pumped at the same time.