by Jason Gurley
I understood that day that what my father had done to us was, perhaps, inevitable. That I might never see him again. Was it his fault that he had a coward’s blood, that he was too weak to rise above his own genetic predispositions? I promised myself I would never do what he did, not to anyone.
That was before I shoved Cece away. Before I lied to Zach about who I was.
So.
I didn’t answer his Facebook message. I didn’t tell Mom about it, or Aaron. I thought that if I ignored my father, he might just go away. He’d already proved quite capable of doing just that.
I know you’re probably angry, he’d written. Confused, even. There are things I’d like to say, but not like this. There were plenty of other words, too, but they all faded into one another. I didn’t want to read them.
He would know, of course, that I’d seen the message. Facebook would tell him so. But I wouldn’t write back. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, I hoped he would stare at the screen for hours, waiting for my reply. For weeks. Forever. He deserved exactly that.
So I didn’t reply. I unfriended him.
Facebook was unbiased, at least. It made it easy to pretend nothing had happened. With the tap of a button, he was out of my life again. Gone, banished to his cabin in the woods, where he belonged.
Until the day I arrived home to find a Volkswagen bus parked in our driveway, and my father leaning against it.
* * *
Dot’s was nearly abandoned, to my chagrin. I’d hoped for a full house, plenty of distractions. An audience, in case I needed to make a scene. But there were only two other customers, in a corner booth. A server leaned on the lunch counter, chewing gum, swiping her phone screen lethargically. From the kitchen, I heard laughter.
I’d chosen Dot’s for the safety of a crowd, yes, but also because Zach would maybe be there. If things went badly with my father, perhaps Zach would stage an intervention. It was a lot to hope for, but I would take any lifeline I could find.
My father sat patiently across the table. Waiting, I supposed, for me to speak first. I tried to outlast him, waging my own silent war. When at last he parted his lips to speak, I blurted, “I have to pee,” and darted away. I hid in the restroom for as long as I thought I could. Splashed water on my face. When I emerged, I nearly collided with a busboy and his plastic tub of dishes. He sidestepped me with an apology and began to clean the table previously occupied by the other two customers.
“Excuse me,” I said to the young man. “Does, um, Zach work today?”
But the boy in the apron just frowned. “You want his job?”
“Want his job?”
“Yeah, girl. He quit a while ago. I heard he moved.”
I blinked. “Moved?” No, that wasn’t possible. Zach was mad at me, sure, but he wouldn’t leave town without saying good-bye. Would he? You betrayed him, Vanessa. So: Yeah, maybe he would.
I walked back to my father’s table in a daze. When I sat down, he reached for my wrist. “Cass, hon, are you okay?”
Cass. Hon.
Those words. I hadn’t heard him say them—hadn’t heard him say anything—in so long. And they resurrected memories I’d tamped down, packed away. The casual way he’d taken a shit on everything I loved. The long nights away from home that he never had an excuse for, the way he berated and gaslighted Mom when she dared ask him where he’d been.
I jerked my arm away, suddenly enraged. Just sitting there, calling me pet names. Like nothing had changed. Like he belonged.
He raised his palms. “Whoa, there.”
“Not your damn horse,” I snapped. He sighed—as if he had expected this, as if a bit of petulance was the price for seeing me—and that pissed me off, too. “Oh, excuse me,” I added. “Already had your fill? You can leave any time.”
He settled back against the booth. “I’m okay,” he said. “Are you?”
“Does Mom know you’re here?” I asked. “Because she shouldn’t, and you shouldn’t tell her. She’s finally happy, you know.” The word nearly jammed in my throat. It was true, in a broad sense, that Mom was happier now. But the last couple of months hadn’t exactly been a sitcom.
“No,” he said. “No, she doesn’t know. I came for you. Just to see you.”
“So you give a shit about one of us.” I folded my arms. “That’s nice. If you didn’t want her to know, why did you park in the driveway? Captain Obvious. Come to think of it, how did you even know where to find us? Were you stalking us?”
“I knew you’d be upset,” he said. He looked away, squinted at the afternoon sun. “You’re right to be.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t think you’d accept my Facebook thing.”
Thing. As if he wasn’t an old pro at social media, with his photo albums and blog posts and hippie-ass girlfriend. Sitting here now in his back-to-the-land getup, all hemp necklace and linen shirt and tortoiseshell glasses.
“My mistake,” I said.
“You’re…” He trailed off, and I wondered what he’d been about to say. Hostile? Vicious? Bitchier than I remember? “Can we just—talk, maybe?”
“Talk, if you want to,” I said, arms wide. “You’re here for a reason, I guess. What do you want?”
With a flicker of hope in his eyes, he leaned forward. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” he began. He must have seen the daggers in my eyes, because he put his palms up once more, as if warding off an attack. “I know you must think I’m awful, Cass. I wanted to say some things. You don’t have to say anything back. I hope you’ll just hear me.”
“Don’t call me that.”
My father looked at his hands. “You’re graduating soon,” he said. “I have a gift for you.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Hey, hear me out,” he said. “At least do that much?”
I put on my most defiant face. I knew how petulant I looked, but there’d be no better time to indulge my most base instincts. I was angry. I didn’t realize how angry I’d been, or for how long. At him. At Mom. At the world. And now he sat right there, fooling himself that he had a chance to make things right. As if he hadn’t gleefully detonated that chance years ago.
All he was now was a perfect target.
“Whatever,” I said. “Jonathan.”
He flinched. “I—want to give you Andromeda.”
I stared at him. “Your … blog?”
That made him laugh. He wasn’t allowed to be light and full of humor. Not now, not ever.
“No, Cass—Sorry. Vanessa. Not the blog, though you can have that, too, if you—”
“Fuck your blog.”
He sighed again, then nodded toward the parking lot. “The bus. That’s what I meant.”
“You’re not serious,” I said.
“I’m very serious.”
“I don’t want your shitty old van.”
“Bus,” he corrected. “And … Well, okay. That’s up to you, of course. But she’s yours. Always has been, from the moment I saw her. I just knew.”
Bullshit. I’d read what he wrote. His Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria, his Hubble on wheels, his star bus. No—he was lying to me. He wanted something.
“She’s all yours,” he said. “Arecibo on wheels. A mobile sky-watching installation.”
“Arecibo’s a radio telescope.”
“Palomar, then. Griffith. Whatever.” He pointed. “You see that skylight? Telescope goes right through there. You drive her out on the tundra, or into a canyon. No light pollution anywhere. You can see amazing things.”
This I remembered about him. The way he romanticized the sky. The woman he was sleeping with had joked about his obsession. I wondered now if he’d fucked her in the back of the van he said he’d bought for me. I was certain he had.
“You can’t buy your way back in,” I said.
“I wouldn’t expect your forgiveness to come so cheaply.”
“You can’t afford it,” I muttered. “Trust me.”
He let t
hat one go. He was quiet as the server came by to refill his water glass. When she’d gone again, he said, “You’re still all about Cornell, huh? Still the Sagan acolyte.”
That caught me unprepared. “So?”
“Don’t go.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t go,” he repeated. He’d always hated the idea. But he’d never told me not to go, even when he was mocking me. “At least … not yet.”
Don’t go. I didn’t tell him that there was an email in my inbox at this very moment from the institution he loathed. Subject line: Waitlist decision. I didn’t tell him it had been sitting there since March, that I couldn’t bring myself to open it. That I’d decided maybe it was better not to know—not yet, maybe not ever. Don’t go, indeed. No, that decision had pretty much been made for me. “You have a better idea?” I asked.
“I do.” He fanned his hands wide, like a Hollywood producer imagining a starlet’s name in lights. “Take a year off. See the world. Don’t rush into, like, six trillion dollars of personal debt.”
“Gap years are a bad idea. Everyone says so.” That wasn’t necessarily true, but I wanted to be contrarian. It didn’t matter what inarguable facts he threw at me, I wouldn’t agree with him. Had he pointed at the sun and called it a star, I’d have argued that the sun, in fact, is a butt.
“Trust me, Ca—Vanessa.”
“Trust you.”
He nodded.
“Trust,” I said. “You. Really.”
“When you’re my age, you’ll realize two things,” he went on. “One: You can always go back to school. Cornell isn’t going anywhere. They like money. They’ll take you when you’re old, too, I promise. And two: You’ll wish you’d wasted a minimum of three hundred sixty-five days of your youth.”
“That’s why you ran away?” I asked. “Because we crushed your fun?”
His face fell. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Growing up was just too hard. You wanted to be young again. That it?” I couldn’t stop going after him. It felt good. “So you just shrugged us off, was that it? Extra weight you didn’t need. Ballast. Toss the wife and the brat overboard, they’re only holding you back from—”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he repeated.
“How did you mean it?”
He looked like someone who had painted himself into a corner. “I only mean well.”
“Right,” I said. “You’ve always only meant well. Right?” I stared at him for a long time, until he looked away. “Did you really come all the way out here just to foist your shitty van on me and decide my future?”
“I only wanted to help,” he said. Then he feebly added: “I am your fa—”
There it was. I wouldn’t let him say the word.
“No,” I interrupted. “You aren’t. You never were.” I leaned forward, wishing I had claws. “A father who wanted a snowball’s chance in hell of forgiveness would have opened with an apology. Not a bribe. You said you had things to say. Well? What were they? I haven’t heard anything yet.”
“Just get behind the wheel,” he offered. Still trying to sell me. “Drive to the Rockies. Down the Alaska Highway. Park somewhere under the stars. Sleep under the Milky Way. Watch the aurora bor—”
“Jesus. You don’t stop.”
He was flailing now. “You think college has things to teach you that life won’t,” he said. “I promise you’re wrong.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I retorted. “Maybe it’ll teach me to avoid the great American art of repeating your father’s mistakes.” His face paled, and I zeroed in. “Is that what I am? Some sort of shitty sleeper agent? I’ll get married, start a family, then flip!—something in me will wake up, and I’ll just drop them on the side of the road because I never got to swim with sea turtles in Costa fucking Rica?”
I was breathing hard when I finished. The server was watching from the counter; behind her, faces gathered in the kitchen window.
He was quiet for a long time. “So you don’t want the bus.”
“Not if you come with it,” I said.
He shook his head. “That’s up to you.”
“I’m not driving you back to your dirty commune.”
“I’ll hop a Greyhound or something.” He looked hopeful now. “Does that mean you’ll take Andromeda?”
I held out my hand. “Keys.”
His face brightened. He now looked like a man who had gotten what he came for, and I realized that the bus wasn’t what I’d assumed. It wasn’t a bribe; it was an offering. His penance, his absolution. Giving me the bus got him off the hook. For everything. He dug in his pocket for a ring of keys and slipped the Volkswagen key free. He beamed as he placed it in my hand.
“Stay right here,” I said. I walked to the lunch counter and asked the server for paper and a marker. She fished a paper children’s menu from a folder and pressed a fat Sharpie into my hand. I could feel my father watching as I scribbled, my back to him. When I was finished, and without a word to him, I walked through the doors and into the sunshine.
In the parking lot, I unlocked the bus and climbed inside. The bus smelled faintly of weed and bodies, and I knew he’d lied. The bus wasn’t for me. It never had been.
That’s when I understood what Cece meant. You’re lying to yourself, she’d said.
Cornell had never been about Carl Sagan. That was what I’d told myself, and it turned out I was a pretty convincing liar. No, Cornell was about one thing and one thing only: the biggest fuck you I could manage to give my father. All those sepia-toned memories of the deck, the stars—they’d papered over the things I’d forgotten. The awful things he’d said. The way he’d taken shots at me, as if I’d disappointed him by not romanticizing the same ideals he held. He didn’t want a daughter. He wanted someone who would only ever look upon him with adoration.
A clone. I thought of the woman on his Facebook page. No. He’d wanted a groupie.
Had he ever wanted Mom? Me? How could someone ever just walk away from their family?
My father stared at me through the diner window, shielding his eyes. He wore a perplexed expression, like a man who had scripted this whole exchange in advance, only for me to set fire to the script. I started the engine and issued a jaunty wave. Confused, he returned it, his hand lingering in the air.
As he watched, I leaned forward and slid the children’s menu onto the dash, marker side out, where he could read what I’d written.
FOR SALE BY OWNER CHEAP
His face fell, and he slumped against the booth, defeated. I felt a fleeting sense of victory, but then he pushed himself to his feet, and that rush turned sour with adrenaline.
Now I just had to get out of here. The transmission made a tortured, grinding sound as I shifted into reverse. Whether my father was an inept mechanic, or because I was so inexperienced behind the wheel, I couldn’t tell. I backed out of the parking spot—thank goodness the lot was empty—then shifted into drive, handling the bus like an old pro, at least until I thumped over the curb at the exit. Somewhere behind me, on the other side of a velvet curtain—Jesus, velvet—several heavy objects clattered to the floor. If I did keep the Volkswagen, the curtain would be history. And the bus would for damn sure get a new name.
Andromeda.
My father stood on the sidewalk watching as I drove his bus away.
Jesus, what an asshole.
35
Zach
The bus to San Diego was half-full. Around me, people slept, or watched movies on little devices, or bobbed their heads to music. I watched the scenery slide by awhile, then opened my backpack, hunting for my sketchbook. Resting right on top were two yellow envelopes. I hadn’t put them there.
I thumbed open the first one and found a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills. My skin drew tight like a glove, and I cast a glance across the aisle to be certain nobody had seen. No one had. Carefully, I riffled through the stack, counting. Fifteen bills. More money than I’d ever seen in one place.
And there was a note:
Don’t spend it all on pencils, Z.
The second envelope was bulky and fastened shut with a coppery brad. I upended it and shook the contents, and Dad’s dive compass slid into my open palm.
I’d always loved this compass, had begged Dad to let me hold it. I turned it over in my hands now, traced my father’s name and the date of his first dive, etched into the back. It bore the markings of that day: the case dented, scorched in places. Little scars chipped into the surface revealed the bright brass beneath. The glass shell was cracked and fogged over, but it still worked. The dial turned lazily, pointing northward, toward Orilly. The bold S indicated the highway ahead. San Diego. The future. My future.
All this time I’d thought the compass was lost in Dad’s accident. And Derek had it all along. As I slipped it back into the envelope, I found another note:
So you can always find your way back home. Love you.
It was signed by all of them: Derek, the girls, Leah. Beneath her own signature, in tiny letters, Robin had added and Mama too.
I wiped my eyes and put the envelopes away, then leaned against the window and began to sketch. I drew Derek in profile, in shadow; I drew the girls attacking a burrito, eyes shining. In Santa Maria, I sketched a pickup trundling through acres of strawberries, birthing clouds of dust; in Santa Barbara, the missions, stark against the summer sky. I drew the ocean, placid but for threads of white foam that erased themselves against the shore.
I drew Vanessa as I remembered her, sitting on the side of Dad’s boat, legs dangling, her shoulders up. I worked on her smile for miles, trying to capture the way it hinted at things she knew that no one else did, secrets she’d never tell. It had been a mistake, I realized, to leave without seeing her one last time. To leave things like I had. And it was undeniably strange to be the one leaving Orilly, instead of her.
“Buddy, you get this?”