SWNOVELS : Chapter 35
I READ DAD’S note in the middle of the night.
Hey, kiddo,
Sorry to take off like this—got a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Can’t wait to tell you all about it on our way back through town! Will you be around in October? Would love to see what an Up North Fall looks like. Miss you already.
Love, Dad & Starfire
He’s the same dad as ever. The one who says one thing—I love you; I miss you; we’ll stick around as long as you’ll have us—but does another.
But that’s not what bothers me about the letter.
What bothers me is one word—October—and the low, yearning ache I feel between my ribs when I read it.
I start to cry. And then, of course, I call my mom.
“Calm down,” she says, when I start blabbering. “Tell me everything.”
Finally, I do.
“You manage to get any sleep?” he asks, unlocking the automatic doors.
“A little,” I say. “You?”
“Not much,” he says, “but adrenaline will carry us through. And if not, we can take turns napping in the office.”
Inside, the fluorescent lights take their sweet time flickering on.
I feel a pang of longing. Nostalgia, I guess, for every library I’ve ever loved, and the little girl who dreamed of this: being the first person in and the last out of a building brimming with books. And feeling like it belonged to me in a way, and I to it.
A home, when nowhere else felt right.
Harvey takes a deep breath. “Don’t you love the way it smells?”
“So, so much,” I say.
“That right there,” he says, “is why I can’t retire. If I could live in this feeling, I would.”
“I know,” I say. “The kids will be living my childhood dream tonight, staying over in a library.”
He looks over. “You did well, Daphne. Really well.”
I wonder if I’m glowing. Probably it’s too early to glow. Probably I look like the ghost of a milk carton gone sour.
“Let’s get to work.”
The Fantasy team arrives first, ready to transform one corner of the library into a low-budget approximation of a castle with their prepainted butcher-paper backdrops and papier-mâché dragon, its sinuous body segmented into four little arc shapes, arranged in a row so that the floor looks like water the creature’s swimming through.
It is, by nature of being made out of paper by an amateur, utterly and wonderfully horrifying. If this thing came to life, it would do so with gruesome screams at finding itself sentient yet anatomically improbable.
I love it so much. The kids are going to lose it. Even the ones old enough to roll their eyes, like Maya.
Once, in seventh grade, Mom took me to a midnight launch party for a fantasy series. They passed out “wands,” which were just sticks they probably found in the brush behind the library. It was silly. It was also magical. I chose a twig with pale green lichen crawling over it, and Mom chose one that was bone white. I felt like I was as close as I’d ever be to true magic.
That feeling of curiosity and awe and wonder. That was where I made my home every time we moved, a sensation that couldn’t be taken away.
Ashleigh shows up eight minutes late, breakfast burritos in hand for both me and Harvey. She keeps things running at the desk while he and I coordinate the waves of drop-offs and volunteer check-ins.
Around ten thirty, the Sci-Fi and Contemporary crews show up, quickly taking over their corners, hanging their tinfoil UFOs from the drop-tile and their painted quote and cover posters from R. J. Palacio, Jasmine Warga, Jacqueline Woodson, and Jeff Kinney over in the Contemporary area.
At one p.m., the Horror team arrives with faux cobwebs and lightly spooky haunted house paraphernalia. They piece together their set in one of the two community rooms, safely tucked away from the littlest readers.
Around three, the Picture Book volunteers descend on the Story Nook. One of them—a local seamstress—has made a giant stuffed Very Hungry Caterpillar to be won by the top reader of the under-six crowd, most of whom will go home before dark, while those with older siblings hang on a bit longer.
The day’s first crisis hits at three thirty-two, and it’s a doozy.
I’m out front, helping Shirley—the ever-sticky three-year-old Lyla’s grandmother—manage drop-offs, when Ashleigh comes bustling outside, sweaty from exertion, giant topknot wobbling. She gives me a look like, We need to talk, and I excuse myself to follow Ashleigh a few yards away from the covered walkway at the front of the library.
“So,” she says, keeping her voice low, “don’t freak out.”
“Three magical words,” I say.
“Landon caught it,” she says.
I shake my head. “Caught . . . ?”
“The stomach bug,” she says. “He can’t come tonight.”
“Okay.” I nod as my brain spins through its own version of the Read-a-thon Google Doc. Landon was going to be in the other community room, the one for refreshments. He was also supposed to go pick up a lot of those refreshments.
And be our “tech guy.” Set up the projector and screen, run the videos and live streams.
“That’s not all,” Ashleigh says.
My eyes snap back to her face. The corners of her mouth pull wide in an exaggerated grimace. “Three other volunteers have called in sick too.”
“Shit.”
I should have prepared for this.
In a way, I did. I didn’t put a cap on volunteers. The more, the better. But our version of more didn’t account for losing four people, three and a half hours before start time.
I’m trying to come up with a plan, buying myself time with an evenly spaced out “Okay . . . okay,” as if some brilliant solution is in the process of being birthed.
Back under the walkway, someone calls my name.
“I’m going to take care of it,” Ashleigh tells me.
“How?” I say.
“Don’t worry about it,” she tells me.
At my snort, she says, “Fine! Worry about it. But also trust me. I’ll figure it out. You go focus on the other nine million things you need to do.”
Another volunteer walks out the front doors, scans the lawn, and heads straight for me with a look of abject panic on his face.
“Go.” Ashleigh shoves me. “You put out your fires. I’ve got this one. Tonight will be amazing.”
“I need it to be,” I say.
She sets her hands on my shoulders and looks me in the eye. “Daphne. Remember who this is for.”
“That’s why I want to get it right.”
“I get that,” she says. “But if I’ve learned anything from parenting, it’s that it matters way more that you’re present than that you’re perfect. Just be here, really be here, and the kids will love it.”
My shoulders loosen. “I can do that.”
“Of course you can,” she says. “You’re Daphne Fucking Vincent.”
“Aww.” I touch my chest. “You know my last name and my middle name.”
Dad has called three times in an hour.
My stomach plummets.
I don’t want to call him back, especially right now, but I’m more anxious about what might happen if I don’t.
I flush the toilet, wash my hands, leave the bathroom, and step outside to make the call.
The early-evening sky has a summery glow, the heat dense except when the breeze billows off the water. I sweep my hair off my neck into a bun and hit the call button.
“Heeeey, kid,” Dad says.
I bypass my own hello. “Is everything okay?”
“What do you mean?” he says.
“Is there some kind of emergency?” Then, to his nonresponse, I say, “You called me three times. Were they pocket dials?”
“No, no, no,” he says. “I just wanted to wish you luck. Or break a leg, or whatever is apropos for this situation.”
“What situation?” I ask.
“Your big . . . thing tonight,” he says. “The library thing!”
I can’t think of a single thing to say.
“Sorry we had to hightail it out of there, by the way,” he says.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I didn’t expect anything else.”
Dad laughs. “That’s what I tried to tell him. I said, I know my kid, and she doesn’t get hung up on that kind of thing. He seems to think you’re some kind of high-strung neurotic type. I mean, he must, or he wouldn’t have—”
“Wait, wait,” I say. “What are you talking about?”
“Your boyfriend,” he says.
“Peter?”
“The new guy,” he says. “Miles.”
I massage my brow. “Dad, I already told you, Miles is just a friend.”
“Well, that’s what I thought,” he says brightly, like I’ve just proved a point for him, or maybe won him a bet. “But the way he was talking—”
“Dad. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
A moment of silence. “He didn’t tell you?”
I have neither time nor energy to play Twenty Questions. “Tell me what.”
“That he was driving up to see us,” he says.
“Driving up to see you?” I repeat.
“Two weeks ago,” he says. “After we left. I’ve been trying to get ahold of you since then.”
I’m so lost. I guess I am going to play Twenty Questions. “Came up where?”
“The island,” he says. “Mackinac. Guess he left me a voice mail first, but who checks those?”
Me, I think.
Mom.
Probably a huge percentage of the world.
“Anyway, he came up and chewed me out about us having to leave early,” Dad says with a distinct air of Can you believe that?
It’s a creative use of the phrase “having to leave.”
As if he were driven out of town at gunpoint, or took an emergency flight home to be with a dying pet.
“Kid tried to guilt us into driving all the way back down to you before we headed out to meet Starfire’s family. Really upset her with the things he was saying about me, Daph. She didn’t talk to me for like half the next day. Caused all sorts of problems.”
“Wh-when did you say this happened?” I say, still reeling.
“Well, he showed up the Monday before last,” he says. “And missed the final ferry back, so we had to ask Christopher if he could stay the night. Pretty uncomfortable situation he put us in.”
“Christopher?” At this point, I really just need a buzzer to hit every time he says something that elicits a series of ???? from me.
“Our buddy!” Dad says. “The one we met at the dunes, who’s got this great house up there. And a hotel. House is putting it lightly, though. I don’t know if this guy is really an investor like he said or if that was code for mob don, but . . .” He whistles his amazement.
Well, if your dad’s going to ditch you for someone he just met, and there’s no hostage situation involved, he could at least have the decency to stay in a mansion paid for with cocaine and shakedowns.
“Dad, I have to go,” I say. “My event’s starting any minute.”
“Right, right, I won’t keep you,” he says. “Just wanted to tell you congrats and I love you. You already know that, though.”
If I had that buzzer, I might hit it now.
If I had more time, I might ask, Do you? Do you really?
Instead I push out a breathless “Yeah,” and end the call.
Monday night. That’s where Miles was. Monday night, and Tuesday morning.
That’s where Miles went. Unshakably cool, invariably well-liked, chronically fine Miles drove two hours to confront my father.
Suddenly the semi-pathetic box of fudge makes sense.
It was a consolation prize, just not in the way I thought.
He’d tried. I’d told him how I felt, how I wanted my dad to come back, and he’d tried to bring him.
And maybe I should be mad he overstepped. But I don’t feel mad. I feel raw. I feel like the boundary between me and the world is stretching thinner, making me tender and vulnerable, a water balloon fit to burst.
Why wouldn’t he have just told me?
But I know the answer.
I know Miles, and he knows me.
I look toward the road, the sparkling band of blue water, the scraggly beach trees blurring behind a wall of tears.
He knows me.
He loves me.
It wasn’t just a pretty word, thrown out in a convenient moment. It was true. And it makes me feel brave, being loved by him. It makes me safe enough to do the thing I never could.
I wipe the tears away and redial Dad.
“You forget something?” he asks.
“I only have a minute,” I say.
“Me too,” he goes on. “Star and I are going golfing—met someone who owns a course!”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” I start. “I just haven’t said this before and I don’t think I will if I wait too long trying to figure out a better way of saying it.”
I think Dad feels the seismic shift. He doesn’t rush in with a joke. My last breath feels like the one you’d take before smashing a sledgehammer into a wall.
I’d tempered my expectations, packed them tight into bricks, built a fortress to protect me. But keeping every glimmer of hope out has isolated me too, and I want to be seen. I want to be loved. I want to live with the hope that things can get better, even if, in the end, they don’t.
“You were a shitty dad,” I tell him. “You were never there. I spent so much time just waiting for you. And when you did show up, it was never when you said. You never stuck around as long as you promised. And because of you, the whole world . . . my whole world felt totally fucking unpredictable. And maybe you really do love me. But I don’t know that. How would I? I’ve never been your priority. I’m a pit stop.
“And that guy you think doesn’t know me”—I choke up here, need a second to force the emotion down—“he didn’t even tell me he tried to get you to come back for me. Because he knew it would kill me. And he wasn’t going to let you break what’s left of my heart. So now I get it. Why Mom used to make excuses for you. She wasn’t protecting you. She was protecting me. But I’m grown now. She can’t always guard me from you. It’s my job to protect myself. Not hide, not just try to stop feeling this . . . this constant ache. I can’t keep doing this. I don’t want to be a person who expects the worst. Something has to change. So the next time you come to town, ask me first. And if you want to leave, don’t be a coward. Don’t make the people who love me make your excuses. You can tell me to my face, or we can be done with this.”
Pin-drop silence.
Then, finally, he murmurs, “Oh, Daphne.”
The doors whisk open behind me and Ashleigh pops her head out. “You ready?”
“You have to understand—”
“I’ve got to go,” I tell him. “I’ll call you when it’s a good time for me.”
I hang up and square my shoulders. “Ready,” I say.