The Unexpected Everything

by Morgan Matson

  Three hours later I’d finished my second John Wayne movie of the day and was feeling emotionally depleted. “Man,” I said, as my dad turned off the TV and reached again for the stack of papers, pulling his reading glasses out of his pocket. “Didn’t John Wayne ever make a comedy? A musical or two?”

  My dad looked at me evenly over his reading glasses. “Don’t make me call Sabrina again.”

  “I withdraw the question,” I said, stacking up my breakfast plates and preparing to take them into the kitchen. I watched my dad reading for a few moments, making marks on the paper with his mechanical pencil, before I asked, “So what is that?” This was how I had been used to seeing my father—always working, always reading, head half-buried in a stack of papers or fixated on the news. Seeing him like this again was making me realize just how long it had been since I’d seen him in work mode.

  “This?” he asked, looking down at the sheaf of papers in his hand, and I nodded. “It’s for a case,” he said, looking back down again. “An old friend in the public defender’s office asked me to take a look at something.”

  “Oh,” I said, leaning back against my chair, trying to figure out what this meant. My dad had not been talking at all about what he was thinking about doing with regard to his job, and for the most part, it was something I’d almost forgotten about. It was like we were both on summer vacation, and none of the real rules for either of our schedules seemed to apply anymore. This was probably made much easier by the fact my dad wasn’t allowed to have any contact with his office, as it really did seem like that whole part of his life had just faded out. “Are you . . . ?” I started, then bit my lip, not sure exactly what I was trying to ask him, or what I wanted him to reply.

  “I’m just looking at something for a friend,” my dad said easily, seeming to understand what I was trying to get at. After a moment, though, he set the papers aside and took off his reading glasses, turning to face me more fully. “It is something I’ve been thinking about, though,” he said. He cleared his throat and rolled his pencil between his palms before he asked, “What would you think about that? If I didn’t run again in the fall?”

  “What about the investigation?” I asked, thrown. As far as I’d understood things, we were still waiting for the results to come back. I hadn’t known my dad not running for reelection in November was even in the cards.

  “Even if it comes back in my favor,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s just been on my mind lately.”

  I looked at him for a moment, then looked back down at the stack of plates once again, trying to get my thoughts together. It hadn’t been that long ago that I couldn’t picture my dad without his job. But now it was getting harder to remember when things hadn’t been like this, our lives overlapping. It was in the way my dad knew to make sure that the fridge was stocked with Diet Coke, the way I knew his paper-reading hierarchy—national news, sports, business, comics (he was especially invested in the family hijinks of the Grants in Grant Central Station). It was how when he’d been running late to dinner at the Crane last week, he’d called and asked me to order for him, and I’d done it without needing to ask him what he wanted. It was last Sunday, when Clark had come for dinner and then Tom and Palmer had stopped by afterward to hang out and we’d all ended up playing Pictionary, my dad teaming up with Tom and Clark, the three of them strategizing and taking it way too seriously (and winning, not that I was bitter). It was this, now, watching movies on a rainy Sunday and not wanting to be anywhere else.

  “So if you didn’t run,” I said slowly, trying this idea out, “you’d be here?”

  “I would.” My dad looked across at me. “What do you think?”

  I looked down at my hands for a moment, twisting them together, trying to gather my thoughts. The idea that this summer wouldn’t just be over as soon as news came from Washington was something I really hadn’t let myself think about before. I cleared my throat before I spoke. “It would be okay with me. If you were around, I mean.”

  “Good,” my dad said, tapping his pencil once on the coffee table.

  “After all,” I said, making my tone faux serious, “Palmer might do another scavenger hunt. And we’d need you for backup.”

  “Well,” my dad said, matching my tone, “I wouldn’t want to miss that.” He smiled at me, then settled back against the couch and picked up his papers again.

  I’d planned to bring the plates to the kitchen, take a shower, and get ready before Clark came over for dinner. But I found myself curling back up in the chair. I just wanted to sit there, in the quiet, with my dad working, letting myself imagine, for the first time, what October or February could look like. No train rides down to D.C., no Peter. Being able to tell someone who was actually interested, and not being paid to listen, how my day had been. And so, even though I knew I should probably get moving, that Clark was on his way over, I stayed there, perfectly still, letting myself picture it, playing it out in my head like a movie—seeing what, just maybe, could be.

  • • •

  The rain didn’t let up the next day. It just got heavier, which meant all my walks were much shorter than usual, and my car was now covered in muddy paw prints, despite my best efforts to keep the seats covered in towels. Since the shorter walks left me with unexpected time on my hands, Clark and I ended up getting lunch at the diner and then going to the Pearce to hang out with Toby, who was, to put it mildly, not looking forward to her date that night. She’d been sending incredibly long text messages about it, and I was spending most of my time trying to figure out what she was actually trying to say with the emojis. We found ourselves walking through the Renaissance room listening to Toby complain about what a weird name Craig was and wondering why Bri wouldn’t just let her mourn the loss of her Wyatt crush in peace.

  When a group came in for the tour that Toby had forgotten she was scheduled to give, she hustled out to the front entrance, leaving me and Clark alone to wander around the museum. Which, I realized, wasn’t actually the worst way to spend a rainy day. We walked around, making up backstories and names for the people in the paintings as we walked.

  When we reached the gallery where my mother’s picture was, I knew I could have steered him away, or told him I was museumed out, or something. But I didn’t; I took his hand and led him to where my mom’s painting was. I’d told him about it, here and there, but he’d never seen it before. And even though anyone who paid the Pearce’s entrance fee could see this picture, standing next to Clark as he looked at it, I was feeling somehow exposed—like he was seeing something I usually kept to myself.

  “So?” I asked, keeping my voice light, like I really didn’t care about the answer, even though my heart was pounding hard in my chest.

  “It’s great,” Clark said, looking at the painting for a moment longer before looking at me, and squeezing my hand. “It’s really wonderful, Andie. Your mom was so talented.”

  “She was,” I said, looking at the way the stars seemed to glow against the canvas, the way you could somehow feel the wind that was blowing through the trees.

  “So what are you looking at?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think there was meant to be something else there,” I said, gesturing to the bare section of the canvas, the faint etchings of pencil lines that I’d spent way too long trying to make sense of. “But I don’t know what it was.”

  Clark nodded, eyes still on the painting. “So did you pose for this, or . . . ?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t ever known where the inspiration for the painting had come from, only that my mother had started working on it late one night when she was sick, before my dad had quit the campaign and moved home again. “I don’t know where it came from,” I said, and as I did, I felt the hollow realization in my stomach that because I had never asked her about it when I had the chance, now I would never know.

  “Because you’re definitely looking at something,” Clark said, almost more to himself, as he leaned closer to the picture again. �
�Right? I mean, look at your sight line.”

  “I know,” I said, shaking my head. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to know what it is.”

  “Well, maybe not,” Clark said after a moment, his words coming slowly, like he was still putting something together. “Was this supposed to be somewhere? That you know of?”

  “It’s the field behind our old house,” I said. I had recognized it as soon as I’d seen my mother start sketching it out. You could see the top of our roof in the distance and the remnants of the tree house my dad had tried to build for me before he’d admitted it was outside of his capabilities and I’d admitted that I actually hadn’t wanted a tree house. “Why?”

  “Because I have an idea,” Clark said, raising his eyebrows at me.

  Twenty minutes later I sat in Clark’s passenger seat, feeling my heart beat harder the closer we got to East View. When Clark had suggested going to my old house to see if we could find out anything, I’d been ready to tell him that I didn’t want to go back there, that I’d avoided it for five years. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I’d found myself agreeing and giving him directions. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to have to hide from it any longer. And Clark seemed so convinced that we’d find our answer to what was happening in the painting that I found myself wondering if maybe this could be true. The closer we got, I found myself anticipating every turn, every landmark, even though I hadn’t been down these streets in five years.

  “You’ll be coming up to it on the left,” I said as he signaled and turned onto our street.

  “Gotcha.” The rain started to come down harder, and he increased his wiper speed.

  I turned to face the window, feeling like maybe I was ready to do this after all. That it probably had been ridiculous to avoid it for all these years.

  “Where is it?” Clark asked, looking out to the side of the road, then at me.

  I started to answer, but it got caught somewhere in my throat as I stared out through the rain-streaked window. I somehow couldn’t get my brain to understand, to process what was right in front of me. I looked around, wondering if there was any way I’d taken us down the wrong street, if we’d turned too early . . .

  But even as I thought it, I knew that wasn’t the case. Clark pulled to the side of the road, and I got out of the car as soon as he put it in park, not even caring about the rain, and walked across the street, to the spot where the farmhouse had been.

  But it wasn’t there.

  There wasn’t anything there. Just the plot of land, slightly overgrown, though I was pretty sure I could still see where the foundation had once been.

  I was getting soaked; the rain was running down my face and I wasn’t even moving to wipe it away. So the house had been torn down. My dad had sold it; I knew that much, so maybe it had been here for a while before it was knocked down? I looked around, as though I was going to get some information from the deserted street, but there wasn’t anything. Just an empty space where our house, my whole world when I was a kid, had been. And now, unless you’d known, you wouldn’t even stop to slow down and look at it. You would never have known anything was there at all.

  I waited for the devastation to come—the tears, the feeling that things were falling apart. But it didn’t.

  I looked around through the rain, at the place where our house had been, and realized that it was just a piece of land. That was all it had ever been. It was the fact that the three of us had lived there together that had made it special. But now when I thought about home . . .

  A series of images flashed through my mind. It was my dad in the kitchen, heating me up a slice of pizza, along with one for himself. It was walking back and forth with Palmer between our two houses. It was running up and down the stairs like crazy people as we gathered scavenger-hunt supplies. It was sharing a piece of cheesecake with my father. It wasn’t the farmhouse, not anymore.

  “Hi.” I turned to see Clark standing next to me, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. He looked at the empty lot, then at me, his brow furrowed, and I could see just how much he was regretting this. “Andie, I—”

  “Car,” I said, taking his hand and walking back across the street toward it, feeling like there wasn’t any need for us to get even more soaked. I climbed into the passenger seat, and Clark got behind the wheel a few seconds later. When he shut the door, it was like someone had turned off the volume—with the rain gone, it was suddenly very quiet, and much warmer.

  “I’m so sorry,” Clark said immediately. “I didn’t realize—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I gave him a half smile. “Really.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” There was just the sound of the rain, then I said, “I always thought I didn’t want to come back here. I’ve been avoiding this place for five years. And in the end . . .” I looked back at where the house had been once more. “It would have been better to do this years ago. I was making it so much harder for myself when it didn’t have to be.” What Bri had said to Toby about Wyatt flashed into my head. “I think it’s better to face it,” I said.

  Something passed over Clark’s face, and he looked down at the steering wheel.

  “I do wish I could have gone back inside before it got knocked down, though.” Clark nodded, and I knew he probably assumed it was for sentimental reasons. I paused for only a second, listening to the rain hitting the window, before telling him what I’d never told anyone. “I always thought maybe my mom left something for me in there.”

  “Like what?”

  I shrugged and turned my back to the empty space where the farmhouse had been. “I don’t even know,” I said, realizing as I did that it was the truth. I’d never gotten further in my head than “something left for me in the house.” I’d just wanted some proof—beyond my mother buying out the feminine-care aisle of CVS—that she’d left something for me, something so that I could pretend, at least for a moment or two, that she was still with me. “Just . . . something.” I gave it one last look, then turned to Clark. “We can go now,” I said, giving him a smile. “I’m good.”

  Clark squeezed my hand, then started the engine, and headed back toward the center of town. I kicked off my wet flip-flops and propped my feet on the dashboard, settling in for what I knew would be at least a half hour’s journey. I looked over and saw that he was gripping the steering wheel hard, his hands flexing against it and a muscle working in his jaw, like he was struggling with something. I started to say something, then realized that maybe I should wait for him to speak, just like he’d waited for me. I pressed my lips together and made myself sit in silence, and when I was almost sure I couldn’t take it any longer, Clark cleared his throat.

  “I was just thinking . . . what you said? About how it’s better to face it?”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. You can almost feel it coming, when someone needs to say something to you and you don’t want to spook them. It was the same way I felt whenever I picked up Fenway, the most jittery dog I walked. Any sudden movements and he’d go skittering under the bed, seeming to forget every day that it was nothing to be scared of, nothing but a walk, and that he was always happy once I got him out the door.

  Clark let out a long breath, like he was steeling himself for something. And I somehow knew that there was a reason he was telling me now, when we were driving, when he didn’t have to look directly at me, when there were other things to focus on. “My dad,” he said, and I watched as his hands gripped and flexed against the wheel again before coming to rest at ten and two. I just nodded, even as I felt my breath catch in my throat. Since the first night we’d talked, I’d known there was a story there, but Clark hadn’t offered up any more details and I hadn’t known how to ask about it.

  “What about him?” I asked, when Clark’s silence stretched on, and I started to worry that maybe he was waiting for me to say something. Clark paused at a red light and gave me a ghost of a smile before looking back at the road.

  “
He’s never read any of my books,” Clark said, his voice quiet. I blinked, just trying to understand this for a second. How was that even possible? “He always wanted to write,” Clark went on, before I could ask. And I knew, right away, that this wasn’t a story he’d told a lot—or ever. There was no easy cadence here, or practiced gloss. It felt like Clark was finding each word for the very first time. “He was doing the accountant thing to have some stability, but it was always supposed to be temporary. Until his real job could begin.” I nodded, the light changed, and Clark drove on. “But he never sold anything. Never even got an agent to take him on. But since I could remember, he was working on what he considered his masterpiece—this sci-fi epic.”

  “Sci-fi?” I asked, surprised. Clark had mentioned that first night that his father was an aspiring writer, and I’d always assumed he wrote fantasy, like Clark.

  “Yeah,” Clark said, with a half smile. “He doesn’t really get what I do, I don’t think. . . .” His voice trailed off and he cleared his throat. “Anyway, he was really happy when I started working on my book. I think I only did it because I saw my dad writing every night, and it became something we were doing together. The McCallister men and their books. My mom used to joke about it. . . .” A smile flitted across his face but was gone almost as soon as it appeared. “So when I finished, my dad had lists of agents to send it to. I didn’t think anything was going to happen—I don’t think he did either. But then the book sold.” Clark hit his blinker, and I realized we were heading toward the diner. I didn’t know if Clark was hungry, or if he was going there out of habit, but either way was fine with me. I’d had enough driving-around talks with my friends to know that sometimes you just needed somewhere to go, some destination so that you could keep the car moving and the conversation going.