Deva got quieter. She put her head down and rested it on my thigh.
“The problem is you can’t unlearn things,” she whispered. “When I was ten my father’s best friend gave me a joint for my birthday, but now he expects me to work, stay at home, and help him with his music stuff. I have no life.” She let out a small, incredulous snigger. “My dad took me to all-night rock concerts when we were kids and now he hates the fact that I want to go to raves. Makes no sense, right? When he found out I’d been going, he freaked out. He started crying in my lap. But it’s too late for me to be a good girl, you see. I think he knows that too. And it pisses him off. He feels like he owns us because he raised us on his own. He can’t handle us having lives of our own. He feels it’s like a betrayal of him or something. Of everything he’s done for us.”
“And what do you think?”
“I mean, it’s a cycle with him. One moment he’s happy, the next he’s enraged. You just have to be smart and find him on the right swing. Nobody is perfect.”
Deva dug her fingers into the hot wax that was spilling out of the candle. She let it dry on her nails, then scraped it off. I sighed, thinking about how angry my father had sounded on the phone. I cracked a joke about his family business model and the theories about why it worked and the whole “stealing from your family is like stealing from yourself” idea.
“I mean, who says you have to be in your dad’s video and I have to be part of my dad’s film, right?” I proclaimed self-righteously.
Something in the air broke.
“I don’t think it’s the same thing,” Deva said dryly. “You have a whole family. I just have my dad and brother.”
She got up and placed the candle on the windowsill. She jumped off the bed and carved the pit from the avocado on her desk.
“In the video you looked a lot older—” I said.
“It’s the makeup.” She cut me short. She did this whenever I went on for too long about something she didn’t want to talk about anymore.
“It seemed like you were playing the role of his love interest or something,” I insisted.
“Not really. It’s more abstract.”
There was a moment of silence. Deva peeled the avocado and cut it into small pieces.
“Did your dad ever have a girlfriend after your mother left?” I asked.
“No.”
She left the avocado cubes on the table, got back into bed with her clothes still on, blew the candle out, and went to sleep.
I told myself that she was just tired, that the storm and the talking and the Vicodin had drained her. I lay awake listening to the downpour. Hours into the night, through the top corner of the cabin’s window, I saw Deva’s father standing half naked on the windowsill of the main house, swales of rain falling against him. He was drunk. He oscillated, struggling to stay on his legs, on top of a round glass table. It was unclear what he was doing at first, but when I propped myself up for a better look, I realized he had strapped on a guitar and was using the table as an improvised stage. I got off the bed and opened the cabin door a crack to take a better look. He was right above me now. With a trembling jaw, he sang a wild song in the tempest. His knees shook and his bones seemed to jump out of his body, trying to escape his limbs. It was the first time I’d heard him sing, all upward-curled lips and high-pitched vowels. The wind blew his beard and the silver leaves rustled like metal chimes to the rhythm of his music. His audience members were the spread-out branches of the swinging eucalyptus trees. He eyed the leaves seductively as they flushed water to the ground, addressing them like groupies in the first row at a concert. His performance was a lonely cry. It welled out of a debilitating pain that was hard to look at. He was drenched and disoriented. His intonation rose and fell with his jerking knees. The jolts in his legs opened a space in his voice until the whole song turned into a soaring wail. The rain was weeping with him.
I stood there for a bit, looking at his drunk concert and feeling like I should, that someone should be there for him. And just standing there, I felt good, like I was doing the right thing, supporting someone else’s father since I couldn’t support my own. I swayed my body to the slurred song. I moved from foot to foot until Deva’s father was too drunk to stand or sing.
—
I woke up the next morning and Deva wasn’t in the cabin. The weather hadn’t improved. I turned the heater on and ripped off a piece of a stale bagel. I had slept with my clothes on. I tried to fix myself up, pushing hair out of my eyes. I needed to wash.
The main house was empty. I opened the bathroom door and found Chris inside, taking a shower. I closed it and waited for my turn, leaning on the kitchen counter. There were dishes piled in the sink. None of them contained food debris except for bagel crumbs and jam slabs. The faucet was rimmed with a rubbery layer of mildew. I wrapped my fingers around it because that fungus was the only thing that seemed alive. Over the sink was a cardboard chore wheel indicating it was Chris’s turn to wash the dishes. There were recycling bins overfilled with beer bottles and cans. Above them a Post-it read: “Deva don’t forget recycling!!!” The mud from the previous day had dried on the floor. The house smelled like stale beer, but somehow I thought it was a happy smell. There were no ornaments. Nothing to give pleasure to the eyes. Yet the bareness of it all made me think there was something noble at play beneath the surface. As if that grim room was a choice, the result of some kind of idealism. This was a place where chores were divided equally and everyone took care of one another. It was crooked and imperfect and dirty, but there was a reason for it. Furniture didn’t matter because art was more important than anything. It struck me how willing I was to consider Deva’s father’s work more artful than my father’s. We’d always had paintings on the walls and books on the shelves. Our houses were cozy and tasteful. But this place made a radical statement. One that none of our houses had ever made.
In the office area beneath the framed awards, the brand-new fax machine emitted compact, electronic sounds. I walked over to the desk and looked at the framed photo of Deva, smiling from the watering hole, her father’s pictures displayed around it. The clean computer monitor reflected on the desk’s luminous metal surface, no beer-can marks there. I tested the drawers. They pulled out easily, making a smooth buttery sound.
Chris came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his hips and another one on his shoulders. I turned away from the desk, feeling as if I’d been caught in the act of unmasking a secret.
“They went to the grocery store. The canyon is still blocked,” he explained.
“I was going to take a shower. I didn’t mean to walk in on you.”