It was that smile that Danny thought about as he turned to go back the way he had come.
• • •
The flight had been easy to book the following morning. Callie had a small bag packed and the address her mother had given to her, but little else.
The stewardess was saying something about emergency exits, but Callie had tuned her and everything else out as she stared unseeingly out of the window of the plane. The plane’s engines were rumbling to life in preparation for takeoff. In a matter of hours, she would touch down in Chicago and — hopefully — find her father.
But it was Danny she thought of the entire way there.
Chapter Ten
The cab let Callie out in front of an apartment complex that had seen better days. She got warily out of the car and stared up at the second floor. Somehow, she had not pictured her father living in a place as ordinary as this one, or as washed out. She had expected to find him somewhere full of life and color.
But it was just a place in which to lay one’s head, she reminded herself. She had spent time in more than one dive herself because it was cheap and available on short notice. What mattered more was how and where you spent your waking hours.
Rather than go in right away, Callie stood as if frozen, still looking up at the second floor. She had been waiting for this day for so long that she was a little embarrassed by her hesitation now. Her mother had warned her that her father might not be glad to see her, but surely there would be some part of him that was. Wouldn’t there?
Despite her mother’s advice, she found herself wishing now that she had called first.
Finally, she got her feet moving again. They carried her up the front steps and to the elevator. She rode it up to the second floor, and the doors opened to reveal a hall that was just as shabby and drab as everything else in this place. Pulling out the slip of paper with her father’s address on it, Callie glanced at it again even though she had already memorized it. She scanned the numbers painted on the doors, some peeling and hard to read, until she found the one she wanted.
Apartment 208.
There was a peephole in it, and she was tempted to press her eye to it and see if she could catch a glimpse of what lay on the other side. Stupid, she thought. Just knock and you’ll see well enough when he opens the door. But she hesitated a few moments longer before finally raising her hand — she was surprised to realize the palm was sweaty — and knocking forcefully.
There was no response right away. Maybe her timing was bad, and he was out. She checked her watch. It was mid-afternoon. He might be at work somewhere. She hadn’t thought of that when she had taken the cab over here.
But a moment later she heard the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door. Realizing that she was holding her breath, she let it out just as the door opened.
“Yes?”
There was the faintest stirring of recognition in her as she stared at the man before her, but only barely. He had changed. He was not as tall as she remembered, although maybe that was because she had been a very small child the last time she had seen him. The t-shirt and pants he wore had seen better days. His hair was thin and gray, his face half-covered by a salt-and-pepper beard, and he wore glasses now that covered hollow-looking eyes.
He also clearly didn’t recognize her. “Yes?” he repeated impatiently, squinting at her with a blank look. “What do you want?”
Her mouth was suddenly dry, but she managed to get one word out. “Dad?”
“I think there must be a mistake, miss,” he said, frowning with thinly veiled irritation. “You have the wrong apartment.”
“Are you James Sorenson?”
“Yes, but — ” He stopped abruptly, and his mouth fell open. “Callie?” he asked finally, his face draining of what little color it had.
She nodded, all of the words she had rehearsed on the way over here abandoning her.
“What … what are you doing here?”
It was not exactly a heartwarming welcome, but she hadn’t really been naïve enough to expect one. Hoped, maybe, but not expected. She felt a stab of disappointment. “Nice to see you, too, Dad.”
At least he had the grace to look embarrassed. He shuffled from one foot to the other, like a child caught in the act. “I … ”
“I know this is a bit out of the blue, but I’ve come a long way to see you. Can I come in?”
“Uh, yeah. Of course.” Standing to one side, he opened the door a little wider to let her enter. She thought she saw his hand tremble slightly on the door handle.
The apartment had a disheveled look about it with a few half-opened boxes here and some shirts tossed over there. A stack of unopened mail sat in the middle of the floor, and a few pieces had toppled off and scattered onto the carpet. As Callie watched, her father swept them aside with his foot and hastily began removing a pile of books from an armchair so there would be room for her to sit. The furniture she could see was several years out of date and had most likely come with the apartment.
A few framed photographs hung on the wall, the only personal touches in the tiny room. Callie stopped to examine them. Each one showed her father in a different place and with a different group of people. In the nearest one, her father and three other strangers, all heavily tanned, stood on a tropical beach somewhere with their arms around each other and their glasses hoisted aloft in a merry toast. “Jamaica?” she guessed conversationally, trying to cover up the mass of emotions swirling inside her.
There were no pictures of her or Elliot that she could see. Had they not been important enough to him to remember?
“Fiji,” her dad corrected, adjusting his glasses. “Please. Sit down.”
Turning away from the picture, she sat in the plain but serviceable armchair, poised on the front half of it instead of settling back into it. Having made it this far, part of her wanted to bolt out the door again.
“Can I get you something to drink? Soda? Beer?”
“No. Thank you.”
He sat across her from her on a flowered sofa, clearing his throat and clasping and unclasping his hands nervously.
It was surreal, Callie thought, sitting here at last with the man for whom she had been searching so long, and discussing beverage choices with him. There was really only one thing she wanted to ask him, but somehow it didn’t seem appropriate to open with Why did you walk out on us?
“So, how are you?” he asked her finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “You look well. All grown up, too.”
“I’m all right.” Emotionally stunted and struggling with commitment issues, she thought, but otherwise just fine.
“And your mom? How’s Liddy?”
“Recovering from a broken hip at the moment. But she’s doing okay.”
“What happened?”
“Fell off a ladder.”
She thought he might ask for more details, but he didn’t. There was another long, awkward pause. “Let’s see … you must be, what, in college now?”
He didn’t even remember how old she was, Callie realized with an inner pang. “No. I never went to college. I’ve been traveling around a lot instead. Working. Writing.” She hoped he might be curious about her writing and ask questions, or even wonder about where she had traveled. They had that much in common, didn’t they? But although his expression remained polite, there was no real flicker of interest in his eyes.
“Ah. The school of life. There’s a lot to be said for that form of education, too.”
“So I keep telling people.” Maybe he would be more interested in sharing what was going on in his life. “What about you? What do you do now?” She couldn’t even really remember what he had done before.
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that. I travel around a lot, too. I’ll actually be leaving Chicago in a few weeks. Got a thing lined
up in Quebec.”
“Quebec, huh?” She clasped her hands together much as he had done and stared at them. In another minute, she was likely to ask about the weather. She had not flown halfway across the United States to engage in idle chitchat with the man who had abandoned her as a child, but it was difficult to figure out how to transition to the real topic she wanted to discuss. Her father inadvertently came to her rescue.
“So what brings you to Chicago, Callie?”
He had asked the question pleasantly enough, but Callie stiffened. To see him, obviously. Could he really not have guessed that? “You … you have to ask?”
He frowned, looking confused.
“I wanted to meet my father,” she said bluntly. “Ask a few questions. See how you were doing.” She forced herself to look him in the eye. “Find out why you left.”
Her bluntness clearly caught him off guard. “I see,” he said, trying to suppress a wince as he looked away.
“Do you? I’ve waited nearly twenty years for some answers. Mom wouldn’t give me any.” Her voice shook. “What happened, Dad? One day you were there, and then the next day you weren’t. Why did you leave?”
A sad smile flickered across his face. “Some people just aren’t meant to be tied down. I tried my hand at domestic life, Callie. I just couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
He hesitated, his discomfort growing.
“Tell me,” she demanded, hating the fact that her eyes were growing wet. She blinked hard. “I’m a big girl. I can handle it. Was it us? Were we that awful to live with?”
“No, of course not.” He ran his fingers through his thin, gray hair. “Look, did you talk with your mother about any of this?”
“I tried. She didn’t think it was a good idea.”
He muttered something under his breath that sounded like agreement.
Callie leaned forward. “What?”
“I tried explaining it to your mother years ago, but I don’t think Liddy ever really understood. There was nothing wrong with you kids, or with her, all right? It was … that way of life, the endless sameness of it all that I couldn’t take. I was suffocating. You get one shot, kid. One life. One chance to find your happiness. I had to take it.”
It felt like someone had kicked her in the stomach. He thought they had been obstacles to his happiness? “And did you find it?”
“Sure,” he said, a little too brightly. “Sure. I found the open road. I found freedom.”
Freedom from what? she wondered. Besides his wife and children, of course. “I don’t understand. What were we to you, some sort of experiment that ended badly?”
“Now, that’s not fair — ”
“Life’s not fair. I learned that lesson at a very young age, thanks to you.” She shook her head with a bitter little laugh. “So that’s it, then, huh? You left your wife and children to follow your bliss?” She waved an arm at the barren room. “Is this your bliss, Dad? Really?”
He was silent.
“Didn’t you ever miss us, or think of us? Didn’t we mean anything to you?”
“Of course you did.”
“We just didn’t mean enough,” she finished for him. She had not intended to let her emotions get the best of her, but she had not expected to feel so rejected, either. “Do you have any idea how much time I wasted agonizing over what I must have done to make you go away? And then I blamed Mom. Man, do I owe her a huge apology over that.”
“When I left, it wasn’t my intention to hurt you.”
“Well, that makes it all better, doesn’t it?”
“Callie … ”
She bit her lip to keep from saying more angry words. They would serve no purpose beyond venting. There was one more question she needed answered, but she waited until she felt calmer before speaking again. “Do you know that Elliot’s dead?”
Pressing his lips together in a tight line, her father nodded.
If he had struck her, it would have hurt less. Had he merely read about it in some newspaper, detached and distant, or had her mother somehow contacted him and then kept that secret, too? “Why didn’t you come to his funeral?”
“I sent flowers.”
“You sent flowers,” she repeated.
“That part of my life was over, Callie. I had closed the door on it a long time ago. What would have been the point in going there then?”
“Oh, I don’t know … mourning your dead son?”
“I mourned for Elliot in my own way. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Good, because I don’t.”
Her father sat tight-lipped again. Watching him, Callie thought she understood now why her mother had thought it best not to tell her children much about him. It was a hurtful thing for a child to realize her father had never really loved her except maybe in a mild, disinterested sort of way, whether she was four years old or twenty-four.
And to think she had used to believe there was some deep meaning behind her father’s choice to abandon them. It made her feel sick to think about how much of her life she had wasted trying to understand her father, maybe even trying to emulate him. He was not at all the man she had imagined he might be. She had often pictured him as a Jack Kerouac sort of figure, searching for hidden truths behind every day experiences, and driven by that search to leave his home and family. She used to like to think that maybe that restlessness was something they had in common, but now …
Flowers, she thought to herself in numb disbelief. At least when Liddy had awakened in the hospital after surgery it was to find Callie there with her, not just an arrangement of flowers. Maybe she was less like her father than she had thought.
The man before her now struck her as a washed-out version of what she had expected. He was searching less for truth and more for a good time. And from what she could see, he was still searching. The only thing they had in common was DNA.
“What do you want from me, an apology? I’m sorry. I’m sorry you kids and Liddy were hurt by my leaving, but I had to do what I thought was best. To stay would have meant living a lie, because it would have meant denying who I really was.”
“No,” Callie said, shaking her head. “I don’t need an apology from you. I just needed to know why.” Swallowing hard, she stood up from the chair. “I think it’s time for me to go.”
There was undisguised relief on her father’s face. This had not been a happy reunion for either of them. “If you think that’s best,” he said politely, rising from his seat, too. He followed her to the door.
Once there, she stopped and turned back to him. “I didn’t come here looking for a fight. Really, I didn’t.” Her anger slowly dissipated, replaced by a deflated feeling. She felt like she was four years old again and fruitlessly waiting for her father to come home and scoop her up in his arms again. It was never going to happen. “I just — I wanted to see my father.”
“The thing is, Callie — I really think it would be better if we don’t do this again. I’m sorry.”
So was she, but she only nodded.
There was no goodbye hug at the door, or even so much as a handshake. Neither of them was sorry that she was leaving. She took one last long look at him, trying and failing to find the slightest hint of the man she thought she remembered. He looked faded somehow. Washed out and empty.
And worried, she realized with some surprise. Her presence here, however brief, had disrupted the life he had created for himself, and he was anxious for it to return to the way it was. For a man who claimed to have run away from the endless sameness of family life, she wondered if he could see that his rootlessness had a bleak sameness all its own. She glanced back into his apartment, shabby and bare of most personal touches, and she suspected it was just one in a long string of similar places. It seemed so sad to her that, hurt as she was, she couldn’t
summon any more anger toward him. “Goodbye, Dad. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“Goodbye, Callie.”
The door closed behind her as she left, and she walked away without a backward glance, thinking numbly that it was highly unlikely that she would ever see him again. She was just a chapter in his life, and one that he was done with. He had been for a long time. It was time for her to be finished with it, too.
The day in the park that she remembered spending with her father so many years ago came back to her then. She started to cry and earned a startled look from a tenant she passed on her way back to the elevator. But it was a cathartic release of long pent-up emotions, and she felt lighter somehow when she was done, if exhausted. The man for whom she had been searching for so long didn’t exist anymore, so she could finally stop trying to find him.
I hope you find what you’re looking for. Those had been Danny’s last words to her before she left.
Out on the street, she hailed a cab. She had had enough of searching. Enough traveling around. She was tired.
She wanted to go home.
Chapter Eleven
The back-to-back red-eyes along with the meeting with her father left Callie feeling exhausted. She fumbled wearily with her keys at her mother’s front door for a long time before realizing that she was trying to use the wrong key to unlock the door. While she was still trying to find the right key, the door opened to reveal Liddy’s surprised face.
“Callie? I thought maybe it was just a burglar who was lousy at his job. When did you get back?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Did you find him?”
Callie nodded without much energy.
Her mom opened the door wider. “Come inside.”
Callie stepped past her mother and let her bag drop on the floor beside the door before allowing herself to collapse on the couch.
Liddy sat down beside her. “So. Are you all right?”
“Not yet, but I’ll get there. It went pretty much the way you thought it would.”
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