“Last month I hired this PI,” he says. “Guy I’ve consulted for my books a few times. Good at his job.”
I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry. “You’re telling me you hired a detective? Like, paid some other guy to track Mom down?” I remember one of the few facts of Dad’s disappearance. “What did it cost, fifteen hundred dollars?”
“Almost.” He stares at my mother’s picture while he speaks. “How did you find me?”
“Hard fucking work, and no cheating, that’s how!”
“Don’t swear, Imogene.”
“What are you gonna do, send me to my hotel room?” But I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I press myself tighter against him and give him the short version.
Maybe I’m looking for a little admiration, a little Boy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But I don’t get it. “You shouldn’t waste your life trying to save me,” he says, and sighs. “I never wanted that. You don’t deserve this.”
“I mean, I’m on school vacation, so there’s that. And I did other stuff. I slept over Jessa’s. Played video games. Lost my prom date.”
He jerks backward. “You have a prom date?”
“No.” I smile tightly into his shoulder. “Keep up.” We’re quiet for a moment, the only sound in the room the out-of-beat percussion of the old heating system pumping out rusty-smelling air, and then I take a deep breath of cigarettes and unwashed Dad and ask, “Why did you need to see Mom so bad? You have me. And Lindy. We’re not enough?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says dully. “I was scared. Your mother . . . she always got to me. I’d be going along just fine, and then I’d look at the calendar and it’d be her birthday, or I’d pass a store and see her favorite color in the window. I’m not saying all the bad times were about her, but remembering her . . . it could get me down. And our anniversary was coming up, but I’d been so good for so long. With you, and with your stepmother. I thought if I could know about Sid, if she could stop being this question mark, if I could just know, then I would be all right. Officially, once and for all. I hired the PI, and then I knew what I knew, what I never quite expected, that she was married and happy, and I kept waiting for the crash. But it didn’t come.”
“That’s a good thing, right? But . . . Dad, you seem a little . . . crashed.”
He nods. “I wasn’t, though. Not at first. Then I wondered, what if these aren’t my real feelings? What if it’s all just medication, and how would I know? Shouldn’t I be feeling this? I thought that would be the real test.”
“You stopped taking your meds,” I guess. “Okay, I don’t get it. Were you afraid you were going to crash, or afraid you weren’t?”
Dad drops his head back into his hands. “Both. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know you don’t get it. I don’t know how anyone could, if they haven’t been through it.”
“Like Mom has.” The realization sinks through me like a stone. “That’s why you wanted to find her. Not to save her or anything. Not like she needed it. Dad . . . you lied about the curse,” I say gently. “My whole life, I’ve been doing things . . . the way I thought she wouldn’t. Because I didn’t want to be like Mom, and I thought if I tripped one time, I’d just keep falling, like she did.”
“I shouldn’t have put that on you.” His breath hitches.
“But if you told me the truth about how bad it was for you, maybe I could’ve helped you.”
“I don’t know how. I don’t know how I expected your mother to help me. I don’t know how I could be helped.”
It’s the illness talking, I tell myself. It’s not like I’ve never heard this before during the bad times. And Dad’s right, I don’t know what it’s like to be sick that way.
But yeah, I get fear. I get being afraid that you don’t have anything to say to people, so you never talk to people. I get never going to parties because you’re afraid you won’t fit in at the party. I get loving the same boy for eight years and never doing anything about it, but that’s okay because part of the reason you love him is that he’s always around for you to not do anything about. I get closing up your heart because you’re afraid to look inside and find out it’s hollow. I get choosing to be alone because you’re afraid that if the choice is out of your hands, you’ll simply be lonely, and alone is okay, it’s almost cool, in a way. But loneliness isn’t just being alone.
That’s what my bedtime story taught me, anyway. Except I’m not so sure. I think maybe fear is worse, the useless kind that doesn’t help you cram for a test or jazz you up before bungee jumping, but sneaks in and strangles you. My mom was so afraid her own daughter would reject her, she never tried to find me, so she sat alone with her sketchbook.
If she had been less afraid to be lonely . . . If Dad hadn’t let me believe it was the most awful thing possible . . . If, if, if.