“Oops, no. I guess it slipped my mind. We’ll grab something in town later, huh?”
While Dad sat with his arms around his knees, I hunkered down against the blanket and tried to read my book. Tried to reread it, actually. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is one of my all-time beloved darling favorites. You know how there are precious books you hold like eggs or something, and you only read them in special places when you want to feel like a grown-up, and you wash your hands so you won’t blotch them with your terrible human fingers? Rebecca isn’t one of those. It’s stained with Pepsi and pen ink and makeup from rattling around the bottom of every backpack I’ve owned. The spine is cracked from me falling asleep on it. The fifth chapter has fallen out all apiece, so I use an alligator clip to keep it in the book when I’m not reading. My love is killing it. It’s so good that even people who look down their noses at genre stuff still call it a “modern classic.” But really it’s just an awesome mystery. It’s about a girl who goes to work in Monte Carlo and is wooed by Maximilian de Winter, a handsome, super-rich Englishman who marries her after two weeks (the thirties were a different time). They move to his giant mansion in Manderley, where the girl meets the housekeeper, who turns out to be horrible, a shrew who’s obsessed with Mr. de Winter’s dead wife, Rebecca. She convinces the girl that Rebecca was perfect, beautiful, that the husband will never love her the way he did his first wife. It’s all Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. The housekeeper even convinces the girl she should just give up and jump out a window, and then—
“Good book?” Dad interrupted.
Irritated, I refused to take my eyes off the page. “It’s not No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem.”
“You know you’re not supposed to read my stuff. All those corpses, they’ll give you nightmares.”
I could’ve reminded him of my long-retired bedtime story, but instead I huffed, “I’m seventeen. Not seven.”
He sighed. “So you are. Sometimes, Immy, I wish I could go back. Be your age again.”
“Cool. You can go to high school tomorrow, and I’ll sit around in my underwear and write all day.”
Dad laughed dryly. “Someday you’ll appreciate it. You’ll look back and remember when all these doors were open to you. You just wait and see. You get older, and you make your choices, and one by one the doors shut.”
I closed Rebecca. Dad didn’t usually talk this way. I rolled away on my side, awkward, and cramped from reading on my stomach, and annoyed. I couldn’t see what was so great about being my age anyway. I spent every morning in the bathroom cataloguing what I didn’t like about myself, I had crushes on boys who had no use for me, and I had friends I wasn’t even sure I liked half the time. “Why did you really let me skip today?”
I felt him stand, sand shifting beneath the blanket to fill the empty space he’d left behind. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I just . . . wish we had more time.”
I craned my neck over my shoulder to watch him walk down the beach, his sneakers crunching shells and seaweed strands, his head down against the wind.
By the time I picked up my book again, the sun had ducked behind the clouds, and I was colder than before. I tucked myself deeper into my jacket, pressed my sunglasses into my nose, and shut my eyes.
I woke up stiff to Dad shaking my shoulder, saying, “Immy, we have to head out. Lindy will wonder where we are.” I could tell it was late by the slant of the sun on the sand, the blue shadows that stretched behind us like our own private pools of water. There was no time to grab food in town—we’d barely beat Lindy home from work, even if we sped—so we stopped at a McDonald’s for fries to fill us up until dinner. Just before pulling out of the drive-through and back onto the highway, Dad turned off the engine, twisted in his seat, and looked me in the eyes.
“I love you, bou bui.” The Cantonese word for “darling” or “treasure,” which Dad hadn’t called me in years and years, not since Ma Ma Scott was around, and I always thought it was for my Chinese grandmother’s benefit.
“Yeah, okay,” I answered, embarrassed. “I love you too and whatever.”
“And whatever.” He sniffed.
Avoiding my stepmother’s eyes, I tell most of this to Officer Griffin.