But this isn’t helping me find the only person who I now know really needs me: my dad.
What I do is, once I’m safe in my room, door appropriately slammed, and I’ve flopped facedown on my faded bedspread, I imagine my heart in my chest. I imagine prying it open with a chisel and rock hammer, and once it splits down the seam I push out Lindy and Chad and Jessa, one by one. I fit the halves back together after them and tell myself I’ll learn to love the quiet they leave behind. I don’t need a stepmother, I don’t need a boyfriend, and I really don’t need a best friend.
Dad’s taught me a lot over the years: how to pick the lock on my old Civic, how to choose the best table at Subway. How to read. How to make a Bloody Mary. How to swim and how to breathe out and sink. How to find a woman with only a seventeen-year-old picture in the back of a mystery book and a bedtime story as clues—and I did that much at least.
But if there’s one thing Dad’s bad times have taught me, it’s this: I never, ever want to have anything I can’t survive without.
SIXTEEN
Wednesday morning, I wake up to a horrible raw ache—like Monday’s hangover but full-bodied—and Lindy standing over my bed.
“Where are your keys, Imogene?”
“What?” I mumble into my pillow. I slide my head up and feel something grind into my chest: the stone heart, crystal-side down on the mattress, trapped under me while I slept.
“Your keys. Car and house. Are they in your bag?” By the sound of her perfectly measured voice, she hasn’t forgiven me.
I nod once and pull the comforter over my head, watching through a peephole between the blanket and the mattress.
Going literally undercover doesn’t stop Lindy from monologuing while she roots through my bag. Keys jingle as she pries them out of the front pouch and tucks them in her blazer pocket. “I really wanted us to be a team, but things have to change around here. You’ve been running around without telling me, without asking permission, hardly checking in. You won’t talk to me at all. Phone?” she asks, and despite my silence spots my cell phone on the charger on my nightstand. She pockets that, too. “I don’t know what to do with you, Imogene. I don’t know how to convince you that I’m the parent and you’re the child.” Lindy crosses to my desk and unplugs my laptop, which she tucks beneath her arm. “I’m working late, and then I have my meeting with Officer Griffin. She wants to get together once a week, until this is all . . . over. I’m going to tell her I want us to go the media. Get this on the news and online. It’s time we face facts that your father isn’t going to drift back in and make everything all right on his own steam. I’ll be home before nine, and if you’d like to talk to me then, we’ll figure out what to do and where to go from here. You can spend the day at home, thinking about what you want to say to me.”
Though my own breath stales the air beneath the blankets, I wait until I hear Lindy leave my room, descend, and go out through the garage door. Not until I hear her car rumble to life and pull away do I come out.
I listen to the wind whistling through the cracks in the house and massage the spot below my collarbone where the stone definitely left a bruise. I remember taking it to bed with me, staring into the center of it until I fell asleep. I remember thinking maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time. Maybe it never meant anything that Dad left it for me. Maybe I’ve been just as crazy as he is, thinking this was some kind of mystery I was capable of solving, when really he’s god knows where in god knows what kind of shape.
I bury myself under the blankets again. Let Lindy take everything away. Who’s left to talk to? Where is there left to go? Why even bother getting out of bed? All those times I left Dad’s room, defeated, having failed to unearth him from his sheets—maybe he was onto something.
Then I sit up as I remember the last decision I made before falling asleep: to have faith in the one thing that matters. The one thing I know.
My dad is still out there, and he needs me to do my job. To take care of him.
After that, I move slowly. First I roll out of the sheets and boil myself pink under a too-hot shower. Then I take the time to dry my hair with a clunky hand-me-down blow dryer from Lindy, so it won’t freeze around me in the cold. I even dig out my makeup bag. Usually I skim from the top layer of cake-flavored ChapStick and, if I’m feeling ambitious, my un-daring and inexpertly applied brown eyeliner. This time I dig deeper for the works, a disk of blush, and even a tube of red lipstick, a castoff from Jessa I’ve always chickened out of using. Now I trace my mouth like I’m coloring with a crayon, slowly, then smack my lips the way Jessa’s fabulous aunt Annette taught us and lean in toward the mirror.