Heroine's Journey

by Sarah Kuhn

  Evie had finally realized I had powers—and that they’d gotten an enhancement—when I’d screamed during the climactic battle with Shasta and shattered one of her evil force fields. But we’d never quite gotten a handle on how my power level-up works. Supposedly I could do more with my power if I vocalized the emotions I was projecting in a certain way. And of course I’d experimented with that for a bit, but I hadn’t gotten very far with it—it was too vague, too nebulous, and I didn’t usually spend my days encountering gigantic, supernatural stone monsters that needed shattering. Until now.

  “I’m just saying, that was very kickass, Bea,” Aveda said, smiling at me. “A truly show-stopping—and evil-stopping—moment.”

  “So does that mean I’m ready to join the superteam?” I said, perking up. “’Cause I think y’all would have kinda been shit out of luck if I hadn’t been there today, right?”

  “We’ll talk about it,” Evie said. She gave me a slight smile. “You did great. I’m not trying to diminish that, I just don’t want us to make any snap decisions before we’ve had a chance to talk about everything that needs to be talked about.”

  I chewed on that as they walked ahead of me, side by side. Evie and Aveda always made for an interesting study in contrasts. Evie preferred the low-maintenance superhero look, and was clad in her usual jeans and sneakers, topped off with a t-shirt with a cute cartoon hedgehog on it. Her dark brown curls floated freely around her face—that face that looked like it was made up of the same components as mine, but perhaps assembled in a different order. (She also has freckles, which I’ve always been sort of jealous of.) Aveda was wearing a flashy concoction of black leather and silver spandex—and of course her fabulous boots, which had become something of a trademark. Her long black hair was pulled into a sleek power ponytail, the better to show off her flawless bone structure.

  As we reached the front door of the lower Haight Victorian that served as our HQ (and our home), Evie turned to me, a shadow passing over her face. “Um, before we discuss anything related to superheroing, there’s actually something else I need to talk to you about. I kept trying to call you earlier, but—”

  “I hung up on you,” I said. “Sorry. I was really mad.”

  “I know,” she said, gnawing on her lower lip. She suddenly looked like she was a million miles away. “It’s okay. Let’s go inside and we’ll talk there.”

  “You got it, Big Sis!” I sang out, throwing open the front door. Damn, I felt so good after my triumph. Like I’d finally proved I could be a superhero after talking about it forever. Sam and Leah had watched the whole thing on social media and sent a slew of congratulatory texts, gifs, and emojis to our group text chain. I couldn’t wait to recount my adventures for them in even more detail, to really convey the drama of it all. I started imagining how I’d tell the story as we filed into the foyer and Aveda slipped off her pinchy boots and let out a big sigh of relief and I—

  “Beatrice?”

  We all turned. And my jaw nearly hit the floor. Because standing there in front of me was pretty much the last person I ever expected to see gracing the halls of Tanaka/Jupiter HQ.

  “Dad,” Evie said through gritted teeth. “You were supposed to go take a walk or something, so I’d have time to talk to Bea. We didn’t want to freak her out with a big shock, remember?”

  “Oh, I know, dear, but you were gone for so long,” Dad said, giving her that smile that still had an unmatched ability to charm. I was trying to process the rest of his features, what he looked like now, but I couldn’t seem to get past the fact that he was actually here. “So I came back, made myself some tea. Your husband didn’t seem interested in talking to me, though. I tried to explain that it’s very important to have a true and deep bond with one’s father-in-law, but—”

  “But you have to understand that his basic knowledge of said father-in-law mostly involves you being an absentee loser who doesn’t give a shit about your children and can’t even be bothered to respond to an occasional email,” Evie said, letting out a long sigh and pinching the bridge of her nose.

  “Yes,” Aveda snarled, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at Dad. “You have not treated Evie well, Mr. Tanaka, and Nate loves her more than pretty much anything and anyone. As do I. So maybe you should consider—”

  “It’s all right, Annie,” Evie said, holding up a hand and turning to me. “I’m sorry, this is what I was trying to call you about.”

  “Bug,” my dad said, his eyes softening as he took me in. “You’ve grown up so much. Oh, my little Bug.”

  I felt myself stepping forward, hugging my dad. He was saying something else? But I was in a weird fugue state, where everything happened in a blur, and I couldn’t tell what was real and people’s words were just a bunch of “mwah-mwahs,” à la Peanuts cartoon adults. Was I dreaming? Or living in a hallucination? Were we actually still at the waterfront and the evil force behind the giant stone monsters had trapped us in some sort of ultimate fantasy holodeck situation?

  Then Evie snapped at Dad to go wait for us in the kitchen, and he left and she turned to me all concerned and asked if I actually wanted to talk to him . . .

  “Of course I do,” I said, my words robotic. “But, um. I need a moment. Alone. To process and stuff.”

  “Okay,” Evie said, patting my shoulder. “You know, if you’d just answered your phone earlier . . .” She bit her lip, as if to suppress her automatic urge to scold me.

  “Did he say why he’s back?” I said.

  “He wants to talk to us about something—he refused to say what until both of us were here,” Evie said, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. I couldn’t really blame her; Dad had not exactly shown himself to be a reliable parent. “Don’t get your hopes up for a big, sentimental reunion, though—you know how he is.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice snappier than I’d intended. “I’m aware that he hasn’t been around for most of my life, Evelyn. You don’t need to remind me, I was there.”

  “I—” She looked like she wanted to scold me again, then stopped and shook her head. “I know that. I’m sorry.” She gave me a tired smile. “Take all the time you need. Come to the kitchen when you’re ready.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.” I waved vaguely toward the stairs. “When I’m done processing.”

  I scampered up to my bedroom, shut the door behind me, and took in a few deep, cleansing breaths.

  So. Dad was back. I could barely wrap my head around that concept. I hadn’t seen him in a decade, so I was pretty used to a Dad-less state of being. He’d left when I was twelve—right after Mom died, claimed by cancer. Shattered with grief, he’d wandered the globe ever since, in search of something that would make him feel whole again.

  Evie and I had gotten various postcards over the years, always from some romantic international location and always with some starry-eyed single sentence scrawled on the back (“Peace, love, and llamas” from Peru was still my favorite). We knew he’d eventually hooked up with a self-proclaimed lifestyle guru named Yogini Lara and that he traveled the world with her doing meditation and other deep exercises in mindfulness.

  From the beginning, Evie had dismissed all of this as a total crock of shit, and I couldn’t really blame her—Dad left her with a bitchy-ass tween to raise (hello!) and a boatload of responsibilities that never should have been hers. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his finding a way to deal with Mom’s death that worked for him. I had never quite managed to do the same. I always felt like there was a big, gaping hole inside of me. The overwhelming sadness I felt when we lost her had faded to a dull ache over the years, but it was always there.

  If Dad had found something that let him outrun the pain, who was I to judge? And yes, I suppose I’d harbored this childish fantasy that he’d return someday and realize that his daughters would make him way more whole than traversing the world and doing endl
ess yoga with some faux-woke white lady ever would. But that day never came, and then Evie got badly injured saving San Francisco from a wannabe demon queen, and Dad had barely even responded to my email about it. Your oldest child who you’ve spent most of your life ignoring is at death’s door and you can’t even spring for a plane ticket? Now that’s a total crock of shit. So for the past few years, I’d put him out of my mind completely. He wasn’t coming back, so why bother thinking about him like he was a real person?

  Except now he was back. And he was real. Apparently.

  But what did he want? Could it be that after years of claiming to go on a bunch of ill-defined quests, he’d realized he barely knew his own daughters and wanted to make amends? Or was that just another childish fantasy?

  I took another few deep breaths until I felt reasonably calm. I’d just proved myself as a badass superheroine and totally slayed some giant stone monsters, hadn’t I? What was a little family drama compared to that?

  I straightened my spine and headed back downstairs. The door to the kitchen was shut, and a small crowd of three was assembled outside. Of course. At Tanaka/Jupiter HQ, there’s always someone all up in your business. Sometimes I liked that—the sense of big family chaos, the sense that something was always happening. Other times, I felt like I was surrounded by a bunch of dysfunctional weirdos who couldn’t figure out their own lives but had no problem telling me how to live mine.

  “Are you sure you want to go in there?” Scott Cameron gave me a teasing grin as he leaned against the doorframe. “Things are . . . well, ‘tense’ would be the understatement of the year. Decade. Maybe century.”

  “Move,” I commanded, waving a hand. “I need to keep Evie from setting Dad on fire.”

  Scott laughed, but I could see concern percolating in his gentle blue eyes. “You know you don’t have to talk to him, right, Bug? Him just showing up like this doesn’t automatically entitle him to your time.”

  In addition to being one of the only people in the world who could get away with calling me by my hated childhood nickname, Scott was our resident mage and husband to Aveda Jupiter. Both roles required a metric fuckton of patience, and normally I appreciated the extra level of care and empathy he gave to his interactions with people—the way he tried to make you comfortable in situations that had the potential to be the exact opposite. But right now, I felt coddled, treated like the child everyone was so intent on seeing me as. And after all I’d accomplished today, that simply wasn’t gonna fly.

  “I’m fine,” I said, making my tone breezy. “You may let me pass.”

  “Scott!” Aveda shook her head at him, ponytail twitching with annoyance. “Let her go in. Evie needs back-up. And it can’t be me, because I will telekinetically throw that man out the window. Actually, I probably don’t even need telekinesis. I could lift him, right?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, I imagine you could,” Scott said, slipping an arm around her shoulders and giving her a smile that was a perfect mix of amused and adoring.

  “I do not believe that would be a productive use of time,” Nate Jones interjected, his brow crinkling as he crossed his arms over his burly frame. Nate was Evie’s half-demon husband, my brother-in-law, and our resident physician and demonology expert. (He was also the son of the evil Shasta, but they had not exactly had the most loving of relationships.) “Physical violence would only escalate the tension between Evie and her father, when the actual end goal is—”

  “She was kidding,” Scott said hastily. “Right, Annie?”

  “I most certainly was not,” Aveda muttered. “I mean, he can’t weigh more than, what? A hundred-fifty, tops?”

  “Guys, this is all so helpful, really,” I said. “But if you’ll excuse me, I need to get in there and stop Evie from committing patricide via incineration. Oh, and talk to my dad for the first time in forever.”

  “If you’re sure, Bug,” Scott said, squeezing my arm. “We’ll give you some space for Tanaka family time.”

  “Best of luck,” Nate added. “I tried to engage Evie in meaningful conversation when your father first showed up, but she was not, ah . . . receptive.” He rocked back on his heels, his expression turning apprehensive. “So. On Aveda’s advice, I have an array of soothing candles ready to be lit, I have added several more decorative pillows to our bed, and I have stocked up on that bizarre ice cream she likes—the one with the breakfast cereal in it.”

  “Good man,” I said. “You’re doing everything right. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  I squared my shoulders and marched through the kitchen door. Scott was right about the tension. I felt it as soon as I walked in—I half expected all of our kitchen appliances to be covered in a thin layer of ice. Evie and my father were seated across from each other at the kitchen table, staring at each other in complete silence. Like they were in the middle of a particularly fraught set of business negotiations and were waiting to see who would blink first.

  “Bug!” My dad leapt from his seat and enveloped me in a hug. “There you are.” He pulled back, grasping my shoulders, eyes searching my face. “You’re so . . . well. You’ve grown up.”

  “Yes, Dad,” Evie said, her voice dry as sandpaper. “That’s what happens to kids when you abandon them for a decade. They get older.”

  “Well,” Dad said, clearly trying to keep his jovial tone going. “Well, well, well.”

  Now that I had more time to take him in, the first thing I noticed was that I was taller than him. I’d gotten all the tall genes from Mom’s side of the family, so I suppose that should have come as no surprise, but . . . when had that happened? The second thing I noticed was that he looked shrunken in every sense of the word. He’d never been a big man, but now his wrinkled skin seemed to stretch painfully over his small frame—like it had the consistency of tissue paper and would rip if I so much as sneezed on him. His clothes hung loosely over his body and his fingers resting on my shoulders felt about as substantial as twigs. Seeing him so feeble poked at the delicate places in my heart, the places that could never seem to give up on him entirely. Maybe he was feeling his own mortality, realizing everything he’d missed out on. Maybe he wanted to make up for that. I knew Evie would never give him a chance, but I . . . I couldn’t help it. That little spark of hope flared in my chest.

  “You look so much like your mother,” he said, the last word catching in his throat.

  The defenses I’d built up before marching into the kitchen crumbled in an instant, my eyes misting over. I was thrown back to being seven again, cuddled up in a blanket in the warmth of our tiny suburban kitchen. I remembered Dad sitting across from me, passing me a cup of hot cocoa, and brandishing a tiny carved wooden figure.

  “Your mom made that,” he had said, his eyes shining with pride. “She said she was just fooling around with some old scraps she found at the swap meet, can you believe it?” As I turned the figure over in my hands, marveling at the detail, his voice turned tender. “You’re just like her. You see so much beauty—so much possibility—in ordinary things.”

  The warmth I’d felt then swelled in my chest now. “Thank you, Daddy,” I said, giving him a small smile. I couldn’t look at Evie. She was probably rolling her eyes.

  “Sit down,” he said, settling back into his chair and gesturing to the seat between him and Evie. “There’s something I want to talk to you Tanaka girls about.”

  “And I guess a letter co-signed by Yogini Lara wouldn’t suffice this time,” Evie muttered, examining her nails. It was weird how the presence of our father had both of us regressing so quickly. If I was an easily manipulated seven-year-old, Evie was definitely the sulky teen she’d been so many years ago.

  “I thought it would be best to do this in person,” Dad said. “Also, Yogini Lara told me my inner selves have aligned to the point where seeking in-person closure is definitely the healthiest option.”

  Oof. I felt a tiny pin
prick in my happy seven-year-old’s bubble.

  “In any case,” Dad said, forging on just as Evie was opening her mouth to interrupt him, “I have something for you. Both of you.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled something out, and set it on the table. Evie and I leaned in to look. It was a key: small, silver, delicate—and attached to a tiny loop of velvet ribbon.

  “Okaaaay,” Evie said, sulky teenage voice still in effect. I could tell she was intrigued in spite of herself. “And what’s this, exactly?”

  “It’s the key to a box of some of your mother’s belongings,” Dad said. “I didn’t know until very recently that it existed. I thought all of Vivian’s things were gone.”

  Evie snorted, and I knew we were having a rare moment of sisterly connection, both remembering the exact same thing at the exact same time: Dad right after Mom died, plowing through our house with glassy eyes, boxing up everything she’d owned to give away. He didn’t want anything around, not a single solitary reminder. Evie and I had managed to salvage a few things, including Mom’s wedding gown. But the majority of our physical memories of Mom had disappeared almost as soon as she did, thanks to Dad’s purging crusade.

  “You girls remember that swap meet where Vivian had her crafting booth? One of her old swap meet friends found the box and the key when she was cleaning out one of her closets last month,” Dad said. “The box itself was too fragile to send, and I guess she tried to reach you by emailing through Evie and Aveda’s official website, but no one wrote back.”