I didn’t know what to think. My whole world had flipped upside down in a week. I’d lived in that house on Linden Street my entire life. Mom’s sewing machine was still in the dining room. My bedroom still had glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that Karen helped me stick up when I was seven.
“I don’t know what I want,” I said.
“That’s okay,” Aunt Diane said. “You don’t have to know yet.”
Later that night, after Aunt Diane went to her hotel, I couldn’t sleep. The beeping machines kept me awake. My hands throbbed. My ribs ached every time I breathed.
At two in the morning, I heard voices in the hallway.
One of them was Aunt Diane. She must have come back. The other was Dad.
They were trying to whisper, but they were both too angry to do it right.
“You locked her out,” Aunt Diane was saying. “In an ice storm. Fifteen years old. No coat, no phone. Do you know what Jenny would have done to you?”
Jenny was my mom.
“I know,” Dad said. His voice was ragged.
“Do you? Because I don’t think you do. I think you’ve been sitting in that house for three years with the curtains closed, pretending you’re fine, while one of your daughters turned into a drug addict and the other one turned into a ghost.”
“Diane…”
“I begged you. At the anniversary. I begged you to get help. Grief counseling. Something. And you told me to get off your property.”
Silence.
“I know,” Dad said again. Quieter.
“You don’t get to say I know anymore, Tom. You get to fix it. Or you get to lose them both.”
There was a long silence.
Then I heard a sound I had never heard in my whole life. I didn’t recognize it at first. It was a deep, choking, gasping sound, like somebody trying to breathe underwater.
It was my father crying.
He hadn’t cried at Mom’s funeral. He hadn’t cried in the hospital when she died. He stood by the bed holding her hand, and when the machine went flat, he just nodded and walked out to the parking lot and sat in his truck.
Now he was crying in a hospital hallway at two in the morning, so loud the night nurse came out to see what was wrong.
I lay in my bed and listened. I didn’t call out to him. I didn’t know if I wanted to.
But I didn’t put my hands over my ears, either.
Chapter Nine: What Dad Said
He came in on the ninth day. Angela Reyes was there. She sat in the corner of the room with her clipboard, because those were the rules for now.
He sat down in Roz’s chair. He held his hands together between his knees. They were shaking.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said.
“Hi.”
He looked at my bandaged hands. They’d taken some of the wrapping off by then. My fingers were swollen and purple at the tips. Dr. Feldman said I’d probably keep all of them, but the two on my left hand might always be sensitive to cold.
“Do they hurt?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He nodded. He looked at the floor.
“I knew,” he said.
I looked at him.
“Not all of it,” he said. “But I knew something. When the pharmacy called on Sunday. I knew you’d never taken anything. I knew Karen had been different since her knee. I’d find her asleep in the afternoon. I’d hear her up at three in the morning. I’d count the money in my wallet and it would be wrong.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“And I didn’t want to know,” he said. “Because if I knew, I’d have to do something. And I didn’t know how to do anything. I couldn’t fix your mom. I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t even get out of my chair most nights.”
“So you picked me,” I said. “Because I was easier.”
He closed his eyes.
“When Karen came down with that bottle,” he said, “some part of me knew it wasn’t yours. Some part of me knew. But it was easier to be angry at you than to be scared for her. You were strong. You’d survive me being angry. I thought…”
He stopped.
“I thought you’d survive anything,” he said.
“You said I was sick,” I said. My voice was shaking. “You said you didn’t need a sick daughter. You said you already watched one person waste away.”
“I know.”
“You turned off the porch light.”
He made a sound like I’d punched him in the stomach.
“I know,” he whispered.
“I stood there,” I said. “On the porch. I waited. I waited for you to open the door. And you turned off the light.”
He couldn’t answer. He sat there with tears running down his face and dripping off his chin onto his knees, and he didn’t wipe them.
“I sat in that chair for three hours,” he said finally. “I told myself you were at the Hendersons’. I told myself you were fine. I told myself I was teaching you a lesson.”
He looked up at me.
“Then the phone rang,” he said. “And the officer said you weren’t breathing. And I couldn’t stand up. My legs just went. I held onto the kitchen wall and I thought, I did this. I put my baby girl in a ditch. Jenny’s baby. I locked the door and I put her in a ditch.”
He reached out his hand toward mine. Then he stopped, halfway, and pulled it back. Like he didn’t think he was allowed.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he said. “I don’t deserve it. I’m just telling you I’m sorry. I’m going to be sorry for the rest of my life.”
I looked at my father. At his gray hair and his red eyes and his rough, cracked hands.
I wanted to forgive him. Part of me did. The part that was still seven years old, the part that used to ride on his shoulders at the county fair.
But the other part of me was still lying in that ditch. Still hearing the click of the deadbolt. Still watching the porch light go off.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not yet.”
He nodded slowly. Like he’d expected it.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He stood up. At the door, he turned around.
“I’m going to fix it,” he said. “Not with words. I’m going to do the work. Whatever it takes. However long.”
Then he left.
Angela Reyes put down her clipboard and came over and sat on the edge of my bed and just held my arm while I cried.
Chapter Ten: The Hearing
I got out of the hospital on the sixteenth day. Aunt Diane drove me to Columbus in her Honda with the heat turned all the way up, even though it wasn’t that cold.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “For a while, I do.”
