“Unrequited love?” Rosalind’s mom headed for the DVDs. “Do you know what you need, Lily? Bette Davis and a big box of tissues, that’s what you need.”
Rosalind rolled her eyes, but I was fine with it. I wasn’t in the mood for any more madcap comedies, and I certainly wasn’t in the mood to talk about my brain anymore. Arguing with Rosalind took too much effort.
Rosalind turned all the lights off so she and Richard could make out discreetly without being observed, which was also fine with me. Rosalind’s mom came in every fifteen minutes or so, basically to make sure that Rosalind and Richard hadn’t escaped to Rosalind’s bedroom. On one of these trips, she left a box of tissues in front of me. I guess she knew what to expect.
We watched Now, Voyager. I liked the movie right away. The guy who played the doctor, Claude Rains, reminded me of Dr. Brainguy: small and tidy, a little snarky, his sharp eyes on the world, figuring out the dynamic of everybody and everything.
About the time Paul Henreid’s character finds the note pinned to the back of Bette Davis’s cape, and she freaks out and tells him that she’s fat and old and kind of crazy, and that no one has ever loved her, or ever will, and he just smiles and hands her his handkerchief, I lost it. Maybe because I spent most of grade school with some kind of note pinned to my shirt, and I know that nothing in the world is more humiliating than having a note pinned to your shirt.
But it was more than that. Love is about being broken beyond repair in the eyes of the world and finding someone who thinks you’re just fine. More than fine, that you are special and precious because you understand how it feels to be broken and you have a real human heart.
Like Abelard.
I wept. And Rosalind didn’t say anything to me because she is my best friend in all the world. Plus, she was busy discreetly making out with Richard.
After the movie, I felt a little better, good enough to face Iris and Mom again. I gave Mom a call. Ten minutes later, she tapped the horn lightly. Rosalind followed me to the door. Mom waited in her car parked by the curb.
“It was good seeing you, Richard,” I said.
“You too, Lily,” he replied. Richard wandered over to the built-in bookshelves and pretended to be absorbed in studying a particularly ugly piece of burnt orange pottery that Rosalind’s mom adored. It matched the room.
Rosalind stood by the open door with arms folded across her chest, a stern look on her face.
“I’m not sure the surgery is such a good idea,” she said.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
“But I do worry. Someone has to look out for you.”
Bells and whistles went off. Rosalind—always looking out for me. I saw the truth that had been before me all the time. The one person who’d always thought I was right in the head didn’t think I was so right after all.
“You put me on suicide watch, didn’t you?” I asked.
She looked away.
“I’m sorry, Lily.”
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. Rosalind, of all people.
My mother honked the horn again, and I bolted for the car.
Chapter 31
Two Saturdays before my surgery, Mom gave me money to have fun with my friends. I spent the day with Rosalind and Richard, walking up and down Congress Avenue. Since we were supposed to be having presurgical fun, I’d decided not to mention suicide watch to Rosalind. Talking about suicide and surgery—not fun.
Rosalind hadn’t brought up surgery or suicide watch either, but there was an awkwardness that hung between us.
Maybe things were different with Richard around.
We went to St. Vincent de Paul’s; to Sfanthor, the sci-fi castle; and over to Lucy in Disguise to try on wigs and military jackets. There was a surf band playing behind one of the vintage stores, and we watched for a while.
“Have you ever been to Hey Cupcake!?” I asked.
Richard shook his head.
“Then I have to buy you both a Whipper Snapper,” I replied.
“What’s a Whipper Snapper?” he asked.
“A cupcake filled with whipped cream. It’s the best.”
“Like Pingüinos?” he said.
Pingüinos, the snack cakes they sold at the convenience store down the street from us, like Hostess cupcakes, chocolate with creme—whatever creme was.
“Better,” I said.
“You don’t have to buy us a cupcake,” Rosalind said a little wearily. Both she and Richard looked like they were ready to be done with my adventure.
“Whipper Snappers, and then we’ll go,” I said. “Come on, cupcakes are essential to my presurgery best-day-ever! montage.”
“Will a cupcake really make you that happy?” Rosalind said. “Will it really complete your montage?”
We were at a stoplight, ready to walk across Congress. Rosalind stepped out just as a car turned the corner going too fast, some idiot trying to make a right turn before the crush of pedestrians started walking. Richard grabbed Rosalind’s wrist and pulled her back from the street as people around us hurled insults at the driver. Richard wrapped his arms around Rosalind and held her for a moment as though she were the most precious thing in the world. Lucky them.
And I thought of Abelard, and cupcakes, and broken snowflakes. How when Abelard was seven, his mother brought fancy cupcakes to school, but there were some in the box that were plain vanilla, no icing for Abelard, because he doesn’t like icing. I wondered if I asked at the Hey Cupcake! window for a vanilla cupcake—no icing—if they’d even have a cupcake with no icing. Maybe all the cupcakes were pre-iced. But it didn’t matter, because Abelard wasn’t with me. Which made cupcakes, or best-day-ever montages, pointless.
There was no best day ever without Abelard.
Rosalind dropped me off first. She pulled up on the street by my duplex a minute after Mom pulled into the short driveway. There was a man in the car with Mom, and when he opened the door and stood, I realized it was my father.
“Is that your dad?” Rosalind said.
“Yes . . . ?” My dad, here, right now. It didn’t make sense. I got out of the car without saying goodbye.
I rushed up to Dad. He looked the same, just tired, like his eyes were permanently worn from lack of sleep. His light brown hair was sprinkled with glints of silver. Otherwise the same. Tall. Iris’s close-set, rounded eyes.
“Lil,” he said. “Damn, you’ve grown up.”
And we hugged. Mom stood behind us, looking simultaneously nervous and in control, like a wedding planner or funeral director scoping for ways the event might detour from the schedule.
“What are you doing here?” I said. It sounded rude, but really, I was just curious. Okay, a little angry.
“Your mom sent me a ticket,” Dad replied.
Mom popped the trunk of the car, and Dad pulled out a small duffel bag, the kind of thing you pack for a weekend visit. So there were parameters to this exchange, an outline to his appearance. It seemed weird and random, but not.
I opened the door to our duplex and rushed in, concerned that I catch Iris before she could be blindsided by this sudden, unexpected reappearance of our father. Iris was in our room, lying on her bed and Skyping with Exene Ybarra.
“Dad’s here,” I whispered. “He’s here—in the house. Right now.”
“What?” Exene bellowed on the laptop. “He’s been gone like—forever.”
Exene seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation, the utter strangeness of the day more quickly than Iris, who sat up on her bed, blinking.
“You mean OUR dad?” Iris said, like she’d forgotten that we actually had a father.
Before I could elaborate, Dad came into our room.
Iris closed the lid of her laptop and stood so suddenly I put a hand out to steady her.
“Iris, so good to see you again,” Dad said.
Iris wrapped her arms around her chest and nodded. I put a hand on her shoulder and felt her lean against me, which mad
e me sad. Iris was so young when Mom and Dad split up. He’d really never been a big part of her life like he had been with mine.
“Alex, would you like a cup of coffee?” Mom said. Deus ex machina Mom. Mom—filled with as-yet unplumbed skills. I was overwhelmed by a sudden respect for Mom and her talents.
Miraculously, Dad followed Mom into the kitchen, as though someone had pushed the reset button on their relationship. Off they went on some sort of time-warp coffee date. Mom and Dad used to have late-afternoon cups of coffee on the patio on Saturdays, back when we had a patio and not just a tiny slab of concrete like we do now.
“Dad,” Iris whispered like she’d seen a ghost. Maybe she had.
She shook her head, and I realized at that moment that I’d always been Dad’s special snark buddy. The one who got all his jokes, the one who listened to The Prose Edda, and the one who imagined herself as some psychotic Viking subgoddess, good with an axe and a quip. And Iris, gifted with paperwork, patience, and with playing the long game, could never compete on our imaginary battlefield of now.
Poor Iris. I’d lived in her perfect shadow for so long, it never occurred to me that she’d lived in mine.
Mom made tea. She opened a box of Sweetish Hill gingerbread cookies she’d been hiding from me. Coffee, tea on the back porch. The back slab. A tiny little slab of concrete, opening onto a field of overgrown ivy, overlooking a sometimes stream.
“This is nice,” Dad said. Lying. Maybe not.
We stood on the back porch next to some sad abandoned patio furniture left by the previous occupants, a wrought-iron table and two chairs, staring over a field of ivy under live oaks.
“Do you still go for walks on the greenbelt?” he asked.
“No,” I said, because it was the truth.
“We’ve been in a drought,” Mom said. “But the creek should be full of water now.”
“So, Lil, maybe we should go for a hike?” he said.
Mom handed him the keys to her car. Because, really—and we all knew this—Dad was here to see me.
We drove to the greenbelt entrance on Loop 360 and walked quickly upstream past people with dogs and razor-thin guys on mountain bikes torturing their spines on rock drops. I’d forgotten how fast Dad walked. We hiked the trail as fast as I could go without breaking into a slow jog.
“You know, Portland has miles of hike and bike trails,” Dad said. “You can get just about anywhere in Portland on a bike.”
I didn’t say anything. Even the word Portland was an irritant, a cruel joke played on me by the world in general and my dad in particular. Portland was the mythical place where Abelard and I were supposed to live and be happy. I didn’t want to hear about Portland.
We walked on in silence until we reached a widening in the creek at a small swimming hole. But no one was swimming here; they were all at Campbell’s Hole or Twin Falls. Dad stopped and sat down on the place where an oversize live oak jutted almost horizontally out over the creek, forming a bench. I sat down next to him.
“Your mom told me about the surgery,” he said. “Is this what you want to do?”
I shrugged. “Want” didn’t really enter into it.
“I guess.”
“You don’t seem happy, Lil. I’m just wondering if this is the right thing for you.”
“I’m unhappy for other reasons. But I like my surgeon. So, yeah, I’m good with the surgery.”
I looked over at Dad. I really didn’t want to have the deep serious talk about my life, like he had some kind of answers. Clearly he didn’t.
Dad stood and walked to a small pile of stones by the trail, looking for one smooth enough to skip. Not good at sitting still for long, Dad. Unless he was drinking, I guess.
“So why are you unhappy?” he asked.
I sighed and gave up. Conversation was happening, apparently. We were just going to stay here and look for nice rocks until I talked about something.
“If you really want to know, I had a boyfriend, but we broke up. He’s wicked smart, and he reads actual books, but now he’s gone.” I exhaled. “So there’s that.”
Dad settled on a perfectly smooth disk, rare in the jagged white limestone.
“What’s this perfect boyfriend’s name?”
“Abelard Mitchell,” I replied.
Dad stopped sorting rocks, a momentary twitch. And I was gratified to see it. There was something oddly satisfying about knowing that I’d wormed my way into his past, even while he was off with the new family in Portland.
“Dr. Mitchell’s son?” he asked.
“Yup.”
Dad pitched a rock out across the water, but the angle was wrong. We were too high above the water here for stone skipping.
“So why did you two break up?”
“Abelard has some sort of autistic spectrum disorder, and he got invited to go to school in New Mexico.”
“Ah,” Dad said. “So he broke up with you?”
“No, he didn’t, because I told him that I was moving to Portland to live with you so he’d go to the school. I broke up with him.”
I gave the word you an extra note of bitterness, just in case Dad missed the deep irony of the whole situation. Dad threw another rock upstream with such force that he managed to skip it a couple of times.
“So you didn’t actually give the kid a choice,” Dad said. “You lied to him and then went, ‘later, dude.’”
“Said the king of ‘later, dude,’” I shot back. “How many lies did you tell us?”
Who was he to accuse me of pulling a cut and run?
“I guess that’s fair.” Dad sat down on the tree limb next to me.
I waited for him to say something else, to explain what had happened to him. But he didn’t say anything. We just sat there in the sticky May heat, waiting for god knew what.
“Can I ask you something?”
Dad nodded.
“Dr. Mitchell told me that your dissertation idea was original and brilliant. He said you were a great student. Why didn’t you finish your dissertation?”
Dad rubbed his hands over his face.
“That was such a long time ago, Lily.”
I waited. I wanted to know—really wanted to know. It seemed the most important thing in the world. I wanted to go to college, but not if I was doomed to failure.
“When I first started writing my dissertation, I was excited. But then there was so much editing and revising and research, and, in the meantime, there were students I had to teach—Dr. Mitchell’s students. And the students were horrible, Lil. Even if they were history majors, they didn’t give a shit about women in the Middle Ages, or Hildegard von Bingen, or anything past securing a teacher’s certificate. They thought it was boring. And I realized that I was spending years of my life just to get a doctorate so I could teach horrible students in some shitty little college town of fifty thousand in the Midwest—if I was lucky enough to get a teaching position at all. And your mom made it clear she didn’t want to leave Austin, but all my friends who stayed in Austin ended up teaching American History 101 at ACC for practically no money. American history to college freshmen—I mean, what the fuck? And I knew your mom wouldn’t be happy with that either. I had a band then, a really good band, and all I wanted to do was play the guitar, but I still had a metric shit ton of paperwork to do, and I’d already had all my best ideas, and I couldn’t stand to roll the same words around day in and day out. And suddenly, my best ideas began to seem pathetic to me. I had to have something new to think about.” Dad stopped. “In the end it was all too much.”
All too much. I thought about Dr. Brainguy and the tyranny of new ideas, his belief that if you think too much and too fast, you can never settle into anything long enough to bring anything to actual fruition. Finishing the doctorate. Meeting the criteria of the crappy rubric. High school. Enduring boredom.
I looked out over the blue-green pool of water as a big slow sadness replaced my anger. I’d thought Dad was a superhero of noncompliance, and then I�
�d thought Dad was a deadbeat, but really he was neither of these things.
“When Dr. Frankenstein is done fixing my brain, maybe he can do yours,” I said, only half joking.
Dad laughed.
“I think it’s a little too late for that,” he replied.
Chapter 32
Life is slow. Homework is a Sisyphean boulder of paper to push up a pointless hill. School is a molasses eternity. As bad as high school is, college is supposed to be worse. Slow, slower, slowest. There is only one possible escape from drudgery, one Kobayashi Maru scenario. Run. Make a snap judgment and take off in an entirely new direction. Decide. Break up with your boyfriend so he can attend the kind of school you can only dream about. Agree to have electrodes planted in your brain because you want to go to college and this is your only chance.
Take bold action. Run.
I woke up late the next morning. Dad and Iris were in the kitchen, talking. Iris was telling Dad a story from a Model UN conference about an imaginary, fast-moving zombie plague outbreak in Western Australia, and how quickly the crisis committee resolved to nuke Perth, and even the Australian delegation was for nuking Perth. Dad leaned against the sink, coffee cup in hand, and peppered her with questions about Model UN. Iris loves to talk about Model UN.
Dad looked tired, dark circles under his eyes, a slightly ashy tone to his skin, as though he hadn’t slept too well on our crap-ass love seat. His hair was the same rumpled mess but shot through with gray. Maybe this was just how Dad looked now. I didn’t like to think of him aging.
Instead of pouring a single cup through a drip filter, Mom had pulled down an old coffeemaker from the top of the pantry and made a full pot of coffee.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Blueberry pancakes,” Iris said. “Because you like blueberry pancakes.”
The condemned prisoner ate a hearty meal. I thought about saying it but decided not to. Iris was worried about my surgery, and I didn’t want to make it worse for her.
The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily Page 18