Caroline slid out of the moving van, smoothed her skirt, and checked her makeup in the side-view mirror. She then gave her brooding twelve-year-old an unsure smile. It was the false grin a stranger would give a child after making accidental eye contact in the checkout line. Lucas stared at Caroline’s face from across the truck’s interior, marveling at the way her expression failed to reach her eyes. Jeanie remained slumped against the bench seat with her arms across her chest. Waves of unruly blond splayed across the front of a black Thirty Seconds to Mars T-shirt, not at all matching the sunny halo of curls that circled her head.
Lucas looked away from his wife’s distant stare, shoved open the driver-side door, and fetched Caroline’s luggage from the back of the truck. He met her on the sidewalk beneath the United Airlines sign while Jeanie glared at them both. The black eyeliner she’d smeared around her eyes in angst-fueled defiance reminded him of when she’d played the part of a raccoon in her second-grade school play. Except back then, the raccoon had been friendly. Now, the little varmint was rabid.
“Really?” Caroline asked, frowning at her glowering daughter. “You aren’t going to see me for two months and this is the good-bye I get?”
“You want me to be happy?” Somehow, Jeanie managed to narrow her eyes more than they already were. A moment later, she glared at her phone, her fingers flying across the touch-screen keyboard, constructing a text message with the fury only a preteen girl could muster.
Lucas kept quiet, leaving a few feet between himself and the truck. He’d spent the last ten days listening to Virginia and Caroline scream at each other, amazed at how similar they were when they were angry. It was only after Caroline would retire to their bedroom to watch one of her shows—True Blood or Mad Men or Game of Thrones—that Lucas would quietly knock on Jeanie’s door. They didn’t talk during these postwar visits. Mostly, he sat at her desk and stared at posters of bands composed of angry-looking youth—Paramore and Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and Gerard Way.
Jeanie had been a happy-go-lucky girl up until her tenth birthday. That was when he and Caroline really started having problems. Their fights had bloomed from heated whispers to full-volume barn burners, no doubt audible through the walls after bedtime. But Jeanie never asked about her parents’ problems and they never sat their daughter down to talk them over. They were unable to discuss their grievances between themselves, let alone with their kid.
And so, Jeanie’s favorite colors of pink and yellow were replaced by black and red. She tore Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift from the walls and pasted up in their place boys who looked more like girls. It was Caroline’s worst nightmare: her baby girl had gone dark. Lucas was left to speculate why Jeanie seemed to prefer his company over her mother’s. Was it because he didn’t ride her about her eclectic taste in clothes and music? Or was he deemed “okay” because he happened to write about the darkest types of humankind?
Over the past few days, there had been no drama between Lucas and Virginia. There were only quiet inquiries about whether her cell phone allowed her to call her friends long-distance, whether she’d like Washington, and if—since both he and Mom were ruining her life—he’d take her to the Imagine Dragons concert in Seattle or Portland or wherever they could get tickets. She had been planning on going with her friends, but since her father was dragging her to the end of the world, alternate plans would have to be made.
“Come on, Jeanie.” Lucas nodded, goading her to give her mother a proper farewell. Jeanie exhaled a dramatic sigh, slid out of the truck, and offered her mom a hug as genuine as Caroline’s distant smile.
“Have fun on your trip.” Her words dripped with sarcasm. Before Caroline could reprimand her for acting like a condescending brat, their daughter climbed back into the van, slammed the door, and rolled up the window to avoid any more talk.
Caroline blinked a few times, as if the swing of the door had blown something into her eye. “Well,” she said after a long pause, unable to disguise the slight tremble in her voice. “That was nice.”
Lucas wished he could hate Caroline as much as it seemed their kid already did. It would have made everything easier, black and white. But he reached out to touch her arm instead, his gut telling him to comfort his wife. “It isn’t personal; you know that.”
Caroline nodded faintly, then cleared her throat, as if doing so would somehow help her regain some composure. “That angst is going to be fun for you,” she said. Her smile was cold, challenging. “Hope you’re up for it.”
He twisted up his face at the thought of Jeanie throwing herself around the new house. Emotional. Blasting her whiney, screamy music at all hours. Music that made him feel suicidal, homicidal, and painfully old, five years before hitting forty. He remembered his own father griping about the music that came flooding out of his room. There were a couple of afternoons where he and his pop had waged war—Depeche Mode and New Order vibrated Lucas’s walls while his old man tried to drown out “that electro-synthesizer crap” with Johnny Cash and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Lucas decided then and there that, if he only had Jeanie for eight weeks, he’d school her in how to be properly dark: Nine Inch Nails, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees. He had traded in the band shirts and Doc Martens for button-downs and casual oxfords long ago, but he’d never fully outgrown the sexy, sullen pull of despondent musing. He’d simply disguised it as a career.
“It’ll be okay,” Lucas said, trying to convince himself far more than he was attempting to lend Caroline assurance. “She’s a good kid.” And when he was done with her, she’d also be a good kid with a further-reaching penchant for the darkness that Caroline had rejected long ago. It was a cheap jab, one that used his and Jeanie’s common interest to his advantage. He’d break out those old boots and his vintage T-shirts all in the name of being “the cool dad.” If it meant keeping his kid close, he’d do whatever it took.