“I was pretty skinny, huh?” Eric said as I leaned in to study one of the flyers, which showed Rust on stage in mid-song. My father wore baggy shorts, black combat boots, and no shirt, his hair hanging in his eyes as he pounded on the bass. And yes, he was practically emaciated. I glanced back at the present-time him, bright-eyed and healthy.
“Was that when . . . “ I let the sentence trail off. What was I supposed to say? Was that when you were a hopeless junkie?
“Yeah,” he said, gently placing the guitar back on its stand. “That was the worst of it.”
I looked back at the picture and noticed the date of the concert being promoted. Three years after I was born. So unless the picture on the flyer was an old one, he’d had a little daughter at the time, not to mention a girlfriend. But instead of going back to them after the show, he’d probably spent the rest of the night searching for the perfect high, the kind that had let him forget all about who was waiting for him at home.
Or so I assumed. Eric spoke often about his memories of me as a baby and toddler, but we never ventured any deeper than that. In the past few days, I’d learned a lot about him, little things like he went jogging every morning at six a.m., was allergic to cats, and had a weakness for mint chocolate chip ice cream. I knew some more significant things, too. He’d relapsed twice before finally getting clean, and he’d gotten my name, Lexi Claire, tattooed across his rib cage the week after I was born. I knew a lot of things, good and bad, but after dozens of emails, almost as many phone calls, and four full days together—we still hadn’t discussed his side of the story. Even though my need to hear it was the reason I’d contacted him in the first place.
It would mean a lot to me if you’d give me the opportunity to explain my side someday, he’d said during that very first phone call. Not today, but someday.
It was after ten and Renee and the kids were all upstairs. For the first time all week, it was just me and my father, alone with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Tonight, right now, was his opportunity. Someday had arrived.
Moving away from the wall, I grabbed one of the folding chairs in the corner, set it up a couple feet in front of Eric, and sat down in it, facing him. “Tell me how bad it was.”
Myriad emotions crossed his face—fear, shame, resignation—and he said, “What do you want to know, exactly?”
“You told me things had gotten really bad the year before Mom and I moved,” I reminded him. “I want to know your definition of bad. Mom said . . . well, she told me a few things about you.”
His back stiffened as if he was bracing for a hit. “Like what?”
“She said you spent all our money on drugs and that you drove drunk with me in the backseat. Did you?”
“I did a lot of things,” he muttered. Then he sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Look, Lexi. These past few days have been more than I could have ever hoped for. Having you here, getting to know you and seeing how incredible you turned out. Watching you with Willow and Jonah.” He looked at me, eyes pleading. “I don’t want to ruin it by resurrecting the past.”
It was if he’d slapped me. I’d worked up the nerve to email him, then talk to him, then see him, and he wasn’t even brave enough to tell me the truth? “But it’s my past too,” I said, that constant, familiar resentment emerging. “It’s why I contacted you. Why I came here. I deserve to know, Eric. You said you wanted to explain your side.”
“Yeah? Well, my side is totally fu—” He stopped when he realized he’d raised his voice and was about to swear in front of me. A habit from having young children around.
“Fucked up,” I finished for him. “I know. You think my side isn’t?” My voice shook as I continued. “I don’t know what my mother was like when you knew her, but growing up with her wasn’t exactly a picnic. My friend Nolan’s parents practically raised me because she was always either too drunk or too busy with one of her asshole boyfriends to bother. She didn’t even go to my graduation. Know why? Because she thinks it’s my fault her boyfriend couldn’t keep his damn hands to himself.”
Eric’s face turned pale under his tan. “I didn’t know. . . . I mean, every time I called she seemed fine. I was—”
“What?” I cut in. My heart was racing. “What do you mean, every time you called? You never called. After we left, you forgot I even existed.”
“No,” he said firmly. “No, I never forgot, not for one second. Jesus,” he muttered to himself. “You really don’t know.”
“Know what?”
He leaned forward on the stool, elbows on his knees and eyes back on me. “After I got out of rehab, I used to call your mother several times a year. Most of the time she hung up on me or avoided my calls, but I kept trying. Eventually, she changed the number and made it private so I couldn’t call anymore. You can ask Renee if you don’t believe me,” he said when I shook my head, unconvinced. “Every single year I sent you birthday and Christmas cards. I sent pictures. I never stopped trying to contact you, even after Stacey told me you hated me and pretended I was dead. The last thing she said to me before she took you away was that she’d make sure you grew up hating me as much as she did. That’s why I was so shocked when I saw your email. All these years, she let me believe you wanted nothing to do with me.”
The room was spinning, the colorful array of guitars bleeding together and then separating again, shifting sharply into focus. If my mother had been standing in front of me right then, I would have bludgeoned her with one. “How could she have kept that from me?” I asked, and then I thought, Of course she kept it from me. She kept everything from me . . . her love, my past, the truth, right down to the fact that my own father was alive, sober, and ready to be my father again.
“She wanted to protect you.”
Teresa had said the same thing, but I wasn’t buying it. Not anymore. “My mother has never protected me from anything. She hates me. I probably would have been better off with you.”
“No,” Eric said, leaning back. “You wouldn’t have been better off with me. Not back then.”
“We were close. I know we were. I have this memory of us, walking in the woods together . . . “ I blinked back tears and looked away, toward the paper-covered wall. “That was real, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was real. There was a path in the woods behind my parents’ house. We used to walk there all the time, just the two of us. You loved it.”
I thought again about how safe and happy I’d felt with him there, under a canopy of trees. It wasn’t just the walk I’d loved—it was him. “I see how you are with your kids,” I said, tearing up again. I let them come. “You’re a good dad. You’ve always been a good dad for them. Why couldn’t you do the same for me? I mean, was it my fault? What the hell is wrong with me?”
I felt his hand close over mine and then he squeezed it, willing me to look at him. When I did, his face was drawn with pain. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Lexi, and I’m sorry I made you feel that way,” he said, his voice breaking. “You know how long it took me to learn to be a good dad? There’s ten years between you and Willow. That’s how long it took. I wasn’t a good dad to you, Lexi. Not even close. Good dads don’t smoke crack in front of their three-year-olds. Good dads don’t leave syringes lying around the house for their babies to find. I did that. I drove drunk with you and exposed you to other addicts and bought eight balls instead of diapers. I put you in danger every single day, even when I knew CPS could intervene at any time and remove you from the house. And I’ll never forgive myself for that. Never.” He grasped my hand again, his warm palm enveloping my fingers just like I remembered. “Your mother did protect you, Lexi. She took you away so you could be safe and I didn’t try to fight it. You deserved better than me, so I let you go. I was a horrible excuse for a father, but I loved you so much it hurt. I always have.”
Tears rolled down our faces. I’d come to get his side of the story, and now that I had it, I realized how skewed and incomplete the other side actually was. On the outside,
my father’s life looked perfect. Normal. But on the inside, underneath the thriving business and expensive house and beautiful family, was a rotting core of guilt, shame, and regret. I knew because I had the same rotting core inside me, and the same layer of armor on the outside, hiding it from view.
“Why didn’t you come back to Alton?” I asked him a while later after we were sufficiently cried out and he was once again plucking on his guitar. The air between us felt clear, lighter. “After rehab, I mean. Why did you stay away?”
He glanced up at me, his fingers still and resting against the strings. “People, places, and things. It’s a recovery thing. Avoid people and places and things you associate with drugs and drinking. Alton was my place.”
“But you came back to run the business.”
He started strumming again. “Yes, and it wasn’t easy. It still isn’t. There are a lot of people in this town who remember the old me very clearly, and some of them assume I’m still the same troublemaking punk I was back then.”
I looked over at his picture wall and caught another glimpse of the younger, much thinner Eric. “Obviously you’re not,” I said, turning back to him. “I mean, they should be able to tell that just by looking at you.”
“True,” he said with a shrug. “But I guess I understand where they’re coming from. Sometimes you get an image of someone stuck in your head and then you can’t let go of it, even after they show you they’ve changed. All you can see is that one side of them.”
I nodded. I was guilty of that very thing myself. As a child, I’d known only one version of him, only a part of the story. But now I saw the full picture. There were two sides to everything and everyone, and somewhere in the middle was the truth.
Chapter Twenty-three
The sky was just starting to turn light as I stood in the driveway next to my father’s truck, my suitcase sitting upright at my feet. Eric picked it up and stowed it in the back of the truck while I gazed up at the dark, quiet house. Renee, Willow, and Jonah were still sound asleep inside, having said their good-byes the night before.
“Ready?” Eric asked me. “We’d better get on the road if we’re going to make it to the airport by eight.”
“Yeah,” I said, and climbed into the truck. When I was buckled in, I looked at the house one last time. When I first got here a week ago, I’d been so sure leaving would be easy. But the ache in my chest when we pulled away suggested otherwise.
Before we hit the highway, Eric pulled into a gas station on Alton’s main street and got out to fill the tank. While he was inside paying, I gazed out my window at the various storefronts, thinking about my mother and Teresa and how they’d hung out together on this very street once, so many years ago. I pictured the two of them as teenagers, girls my age. Best friends on diverging paths in life, one leading east and one beginning and ending right in Alton. Then meeting again in Oakfield a few years later, only to split apart even wider.
“How did you and my mother meet?” I asked Eric once we’d left the town behind. Mom never shared any of her happy memories of my father. Their good times, however few, would have to be recounted by him.
He accelerated, gradually inching over the speed limit. “She was waitressing at Ziggy’s Diner, that grease pit on the corner of Pike Street,” he said, eyes on the road. “Back then, the band always rehearsed in our buddy Lyle’s garage, and afterward we’d all go to Ziggy’s. It was the only place open at three or four in the morning and the food tasted damn good when you’d been drunk since the night before.” He smiled, remembering. “Your mom did the night shift, so she was usually the one who had the unfortunate experience of waiting on us. All the guys tried to date her, of course, but it was me she ended up choosing. I knew she was too good for me, but I couldn’t help myself. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t just that. She was smart and funny and feisty as hell.”
Feisty, I could see. And she’d been undeniably beautiful back then, before time and misfortune had hardened her features. But smart? Funny? Those qualities had gotten lost along the way, drowned in a bottle of wine or trampled by men like Keith Langley. The only quality she’d held on to, it seemed, was her weakness for guys like Keith and Jesse and, initially, my father. Guys with easy charm and killer smiles and an irresistible element of danger. It was the same weakness that infected me and ultimately drew me to Tyler. Hopefully, our relationship, wherever it stood, wouldn’t turn out like any of hers.
We arrived at the airport with little time to spare. Eric and I didn’t speak as we maneuvered through the crowds, both of us intent on getting me through security as soon as possible. My flight left in less than an hour and the lineup was long.
“Well,” Eric said, stopping near the security area and placing my suitcase on the floor. We stood there looking at each other much as we’d done the same time a week ago, after I’d first stepped out of the gate. We weren’t the same, though. Not even close. “I guess you should get going before the plane takes off without you.”
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard. Panic flared in my chest. I needed to say so much more, but all I could manage was, “I’m glad I came.” It wasn’t enough, but it would have to be.
“I’m glad too,” he said, and the next thing I knew my face was pressed into his shoulder as he hugged the breath out of me. “Thank you for coming here, Lexi. For giving me a second chance. I’ll never let you go again, okay? That’s a promise.”
He said those words with so much gratitude and sincerity, I couldn’t help but believe them. The panic faded and I hugged him back, breathing in the scent of Irish Spring and motor oil that would always remind me of this trip. Of him. “I’ll come back,” I promised him.
“You’re welcome anytime. We’ll always have a room for you. Remember that.”
He let me go and I shifted my attention to gathering my suitcase, giving us each time to blink the moisture out of our eyes before facing each other again. “I should go,” I said, giving him a tremulous smile.
“Text me when you land, okay?” He leaned down and kissed my forehead, a fatherly gesture I’d never experienced. “I love you, Lexi.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and then quickly got in line before I changed my mind and went back to Alton with him. By the time both pieces of my luggage had passed through the scanner, he was gone.
Teresa and Nolan were waiting for me when I landed, just as I knew they would be. Just as they’d done almost fourteen years ago, when Mom and I arrived at this very airport, tired but hopeful. It must have been scary for us, leaving everything we knew and starting over in a strange, unfamiliar place. Now, in spite of what had brought us here, it was home.
“Lexi!” Teresa folded me in her arms and squeezed. “Oh, sweetie, I know you were only gone for a week, but we missed you!”
As we hugged, I looked over her shoulder at Nolan, who grinned back at me. Would he sketch my face like this? Lit up with the sheer joy of being near them again? We didn’t share the same blood, but they’d always been my family.
“So how’d it go?” he asked as we left baggage claim and rounded the corner to the exit.
I glanced up at him, unsure of what he meant. The trip? The flight? The good-bye with my father? So I answered for all three. “Better than I’d expected.”
When we pulled into the Bruces’ driveway an hour later, I glanced across the street at my house. It was dark and quiet, our Ford nowhere to be seen. Either Mom was working until nine or she was avoiding my homecoming.
“Um, I have a few things to take care of,” I told Nolan, who was unloading my luggage from the trunk. “I’ll be over later on.”
“Sure,” he said, eyes teasing. On the way home, he’d caught me sending a quick text to Tyler, alerting him to my return. He knew exactly why I wanted to go over to my house. “See you later.”
The house was warm and slightly stuffy when I walked in. Instead of turning on the central air, I cracked open all the windows, letting in the humid breez
e. The kitchen and living room looked as neat as they did the day I left, as if they hadn’t even been used. The only thing different about the kitchen was that the note I’d written Mom had disappeared from the counter.
Downstairs, the first thing I did was check on Trevor. My bedroom was as dark and stuffy as the rest of the house, but Trevor liked the dark. I wasn’t sure if it was possible for snakes to miss people, but he seemed extra lively when I lifted him out of his tank. He twisted his body around my wrist as I wandered around my room, opening the window and unpacking my suitcase. As I was separating dirty clothes from clean, my phone dinged with a text.
i’m here
I dropped my phone and the bra I was holding, put Trevor back in his tank, and went to the window.
Within seconds, Tyler dropped to his stomach on the grass, his face suddenly inches from mine. “Hi.” His smile, which was somehow still bright after several years of smoking, looked even more brilliant against his sun-bronzed skin.
My entire body fluttered, like the butterflies weren’t satisfied with just my stomach and decided to branch out.
Just as I was about to pop my screen and yank him inside, a car door slammed out front. We both looked toward the sound. Shit. My mother. Tyler rolled away from my window and disappeared, just in case she decided to venture around the corner of the house. I listened as she walked up the driveway and entered the house, her footsteps heavy in the thick, comfortable shoes she wore for work.
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