“I didn’t know,” she says, and when she starts to cry, I hate her deeper than I ever thought I could. “I had everything packed this afternoon, and I didn’t know that you and your dad . . . And then I came outside, and Ana was here, and I just . . . I couldn’t.”
I am not hearing this, these impossible words that she’s saying. “So you went along with it? You fucking went along with it? Do you have any idea how insane that is?” I have to find my father. He is everywhere here: leaning against the walls in small, contained stacks. But I need the real him. I dive from one room to the next, searching. “Where is he? Where’s Dad?”
“He’s not here, Wil. He went out,” she says behind me. “I don’t know if he’s coming back.”
My breath comes in gasps, so short and shallow that the room is starting to spin. “He was trying,” I say to the living room wall. “We were getting better. What have you done? What have you done to fix it?”
“It can’t be fixed, Wil.” Her voice is too steady. “He showed me that when he hit me again, after all those years. He cannot be fixed. He is an angry man who does not love me.”
I turn and we’re so close that I could just—
“I deserve better than that,” she says as if she’s trying to convince me . . . or herself.
“You’re a liar,” I tell her. “You don’t want him to be better. You’re giving up.” I feel so stupid! Why didn’t we know? The smiling and the power walking and the new jeans: Those weren’t for us. She was gone months ago.
“I have waited for your father to change my whole life,” she says sadly. “Don’t you dare.”
I shove past her. This house is a maze, walled in with his things, and I can’t find my way out. “I can’t wait to get out of this sick, fucking house.” I toss the words over my shoulder like tiny grenades. She doesn’t try to stop me.
I slam my bedroom door. Dive into my bed face-first and suck hot, wet breaths through my pillow. The worst of this isn’t that she wants a divorce. My parents have been unhappy since the beginning of time. The worst of it is that I let myself believe for a minute tonight that we were a completely different family. A family who shared first date stories and ate cheese and crackers on a sailboat while the sun set over the water! What kind of a family does that? But I let myself believe it.
I sock my pillow again and again and again. I hate her for doing this to our family. I hate myself for wanting us to be different people. I hate Ronnie Van Zant for convincing me that it was possible, to be a simple kind of man. I’ll leave this place, I decide. I’ll drop out of school. I’ll start my own workshop on another plot of land near another ocean. I will fix things for a living, without them. I’ll tell them tonight. She’s not the only one who can leave.
I take my pillow and I drag it to the floor, next to my bedroom door. I lie down and listen past my heartbeat, past my storming brain, for the vibrations of his work boots on the hardwood. Waiting for life as I know it to end.
I feel him in the house. My breath catches with the door slam. He’ll come this way. I sit up and lean against my bed, and I try to make sense of the glowing red slashes on my clock. They’re a foreign language, I think, until I flip the clock over and then I understand: 3:28. I hear my father say my mother’s name and I hear my mother say my father’s name. I wait to hear him coming for me.
Instead, I hear their underwater voices getting louder, louder until I can make out some of the words. I hear: “You fucking bitch,” but it’s warbled, like he’s having trouble getting the words out (Oh no, my body feels). I hear: the shattering of glass on the kitchen floor. I hear: my mother screaming, “Wilson, don’t, Wilson, you’re drunk, Wilson, I’ll call the cops.” I hear: the soft sounds of water lapping the bottom of a boat, and then I hear: the crack of a skull against the wall. The sharp intake of breath, like the fizz of a just-lit match.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year
TOO early the next morning, I take the turn into Sandy Shores. I haven’t slept. I snuck out of the house as soon as the tiniest bit of light crept into my room, Mom and Micah still sleeping on the couch with last night’s Chinese takeout containers open and the television blaring.
I need Minna. I need to talk to her, to let her untangle the word webs in my brain. I need her to tell me that I’m being paranoid, that the way Wil and Henney bolted from the substation yesterday was a normal part of grief. But still, I don’t understand it. If I were Wil, if a strange man had ended my family, I’d want him locked up. I’d want him dead. How could Wil and Henney just let him go? Trust him, I tell myself. But the feeling I had yesterday remains: doubt twisting in my gut. Something was strange. Something was wrong.
I roll to a stop at the guard’s cottage and tilt the rearview toward me. Minna will tell me I look like shit, which is accurate. I should look better than this on the morning of graduation rehearsal. I should look fresh-faced and excited and ready for The Future. My hair is swept into a nest on top of my head, and I’m so pale that I can see the tiny purple veins branching across my eyelids.
I look out the window. It’s too early for Rita, too: She’s curled up in her folding chair in her tiny fake cottage, her salt-and-pepper bun rising and falling with her breath. On the black-and-white Today show, Matt Lauer is staring into the camera, reporting a shooting on a military base in Texas. He is trying to give it the gravity it deserves—people are dead, and that means something—but he’s read the same story hundreds of times, replacing the words military base with school or department store or bedroom at high-school party; replacing armed assailant with suspected terrorist; with bullied teen or frat boy asshole. Minna was right. Violence happens everywhere.
“Welcome to Sandy Shores!” Rita sleep-blurts too loudly. I sit up. “Oh,” she says with a yawn. “Bridge. I thought it was somebody.”
“Nope. Nobody. Just me.” I give Rita a weak smile. “I know it’s early, but do you think she’d mind? More than usual, I mean.”
“Enter at your own risk is what I always say.” Rita leans over to flip the switch, but she stops halfway. “Oh,” she says, and her face gets cloudy.
“What’s up?”
“I, ah . . .” Rita’s mouth pinches into a frown. “I can’t let you in, actually. Miss Minna came up here last night and told me.”
“What?” I shake my head.
“You sent a letter? To her daughter, without asking her first?” Rita studies her chipped manicure. “I didn’t even know she had a daughter.”
“Well, yeah, but that was a good thing, actually.” My heart is lead. She couldn’t be angry. Maybe the Minna kind of angry, the kind that blazes fast and fades. But not a real, lasting kind of angry. “She hadn’t spoken with her daughter in years, Rita, and her daughter didn’t even know she was living here. So I wanted to—I thought—”