by Hart, Callie
I manage to corral Nipper in the kitchen while Dad’s upstairs getting ready, and I have the kitchen cordoned off, the dog safely secured inside, by the time he comes down dressed in a fresh, pressed button-down shirt and a clean pair of jeans. He looks like a brand-new person. A much happier person than the man who looked down at me on the staircase just now. He even manages a smile as he snatches up his worn red Converse from the shoe rack by the door and begins to jam them onto his feet.
“I’m not sure I’d call that appropriate footwear, Dad. The weather’s not so great.”
“Don’t be such a baby. I’ve been wearing Chucks come rain or shine since the eighties. Pretty sure I’ll be fine.”
We’re laughing together, joking around, arguing about which music was better, the eighties or the nineties, when Dad pulls the front door open and a piece of debris hurtles past the doorway.
“Jesus!” He bars the doorway with his arm, halting me from stepping forward.
The projectile—probably the best term for it—turns out to be one of the fence posts from the McLaren’s yard next door…and it narrowly missed Dad’s face. The staked end of the post is now buried in our front lawn, the post itself sticking out of the lawn at a weird angle, wobbling from the force with which it hit the ground.
There’s at least four inches on fresh snow on the driveway, wet and slushy, thick as cement. In patches, the ground is visibly waterlogged and muddy. When a blast of frigid, icy wind swirls around the porch, trying to find its way inside the house, Dad issues an unspoken retreat and shuffles us back so he can slam the door closed.
“Fine,” he concedes. “I guess I’ll find my site boots.” Seconds after the words leave his lips, the lights in the hallway flicker out and die.
* * *
Me: Worried about you. Do you still have power? Ours is out.
Alex: Yep. Separate grid over here. In case you forgot, Salton Ash is a five-star trailer park.
Me: Dad and I are at the diner. Come meet us?
Alex: Doubt the wholesome Raleigh types would appreciate me bringing down the neighborhood. Have to work in a couple of hours anyway. Pick you up for school tomorrow?
Me:
Me: Yes, pls.
Alex: Silver?
Me: Yeah?
Alex: Ti Amo, Tesoro
Me: I know what that one means. And I love you, too.
In some small towns when the power goes out, the locals batten down the hatches and stay indoors, waiting out Mother Nature with their families, checking their storm lanterns, rifling in the kitchen drawers for batteries, borrowing scented candles from their bathrooms and making sure to open up the freezer door as infrequently as possible to avoid defrosting the food inside.
Not in Raleigh. For the most part, the people of Raleigh all band together, bringing whatever non-electrical entertainment they might have at home, from Scrabble boards, to decks of cards, to coloring books for the children, and everyone converges at Harry’s. It’s a community institution, and all are welcome. One year, Halliday’s mom even brought a piñata she’d purchased in advance of Halliday’s little brother’s birthday, and the kids had had an impromptu party. They chose the songs they wanted to hear on the juke box, and danced and played until they were so tired they collapsed one by one to the diner’s floor and slept, dropping like exhausted seven-year-old puppies.
As Dad and I adhere to Raleigh tradition, heading in the direction of the diner, the sky’s so dark it almost looks like dusk is approaching. The horizon is a bruised, angry looking shade of purple. Even at the beginning of winter, the days are normally bright by eleven in the morning. Not today, though. Halfway to Harry’s, the heavens grow even darker, and Dad has to turn on the van’s fog lights as we cautiously complete the rest of the drive across town. Out of the windshield, swings in front yards rock and spin crazily, trees sway wildly, bowing too far for safety, and yet, despite the madness and all of the toppled-over trash cans, there’s a stillness to the world. It feels abandoned, deserted, like the end of the world really did take place while Dad and I were holed up at the house and no one thought to tell us.
The parking lot at Harry’s is full, so we have to leave the van on the next side street over. Dad links arms with me as we make our dash from the safety and warmth of the van toward the single story building blazing light out into the late morning gloom. I shriek at the cold wind that lances through my jacket and drives its way down the back of my shirt. The sound of my cry is ripped away by the wind so quickly that I don’t even hear it.
“Cam! Silver! You made it!” Behind the counter, Harry’s wife Kaitlyn is busy setting muffins out onto a large metal catering tray. She looks a little harried, her steel-grey hair falling loose from the normally neat and tidy bun on top of her head, but her eyes are bright and she’s smiling from ear to ear. She lives for this stuff. So does Harry. It’d be easy enough for them to close up shop on a day like today. The diner invariably gets trashed by so many bodies crammed into such a small establishment, and no one pays for anything. It costs them money to host Raleigh’s residents at the diner on bad weather days; any other small business owner would see that as more of an inconvenience than a blessing.
Kaitlyn and Harry are cut from a different cloth, though. Running the diner has never been about the bottom line for them. They’ve always kept their prices as low as possible in an effort to make sure that even the families who only have a little can afford to come and eat at their place every once in a while. And it’s a point of a pride for them that people rally here. A point of pride that they’ve created a place where the people know they’ll be safe and taken care of in times of need.
“Barely, Kate. By the skin of our teeth,” my father replies to the old woman. “There’s a transformer down on Ridgehurst by the looks of things. Power company’s probably gonna take five hours to get to the damn thing. How’s the generator holding up? You got enough gas?”
Kaitlyn winks at me, laughing. “He’s a worrier, isn’t he? The generator’s fine. We have enough gas to keep it running for the next three days if needs be. Why don’t you help yourselves to a coffee and find somewhere to sit? I’m gonna need some help in an hour or so, once Harry has lunch ready, if you’d like to pitch in.”
“Of course.”
The diner’s busy, but it’s not bursting at the seams just yet. We’ve arrived just in time. In an hour, there won’t be any seats left at all, but for now I actually manage to score us our own booth. I slump against the padded back rest, groaning with relief as the first sip of the coffee Dad brought hits my lips and travels down my throat. Warmth spreads out across my chest, and the cold that sunk into the marrow of my bones outside finally begins to thaw.
Dad looks out of the window to his right, a soft smile suspended on his face, but his eyes seem distant. Sad. The chatter of our friends and neighbors surrounds us as they gossip and laugh together, but the contagious, lighthearted atmosphere inside the diner doesn’t appear to have infected my father. My heart thumps painfully, so hard it feels like it’s struggling to beat. I reach across the table and take his hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze, and he looks over at me. The smile spreads to his eyes, warming the sadness right out of his expression, but I’m no fool, and I know my father. He is not okay.
“Silver, I wanted to…I wanted to speak to you, but…I don’t really know how. I’m not very good at this kind of stuff.”
Ah, now this is a look I recognize, too. I let go of his hand, drawing back into my seat. A tightness spreads across my chest, fingers of panic clawing up my spine. He wants to talk about happened. He wants to ask again for the names of the boys who assaulted me. I can’t—I don’t think I can—
Thoughts burst inside my head like bubbles, popping before they have chance to fully form. I cannot talk to him about this. Not now. Not yet. I wish there was a way I could, but…
“Stop. I can see you shutting down already. I’m not—” He shakes his head, the muscles in his jaw popping. His frustration�
��s plain as day. “I’m not going to ask you about that. I just want to know if you’re happy, Silver. That’s all. You seem like…” He drums his fingers against the table. “You seem like you’re content enough. I hear you laugh. I see you smile. And all the while I’m thinking…fuck, I hope she’s not pretending. I hope…she doesn’t feel like she’s dying inside, and she thinks she has to fake being happy to protect us from what happened to her. Because that…I couldn’t bear that, Silver.”
My instant response is to reassure him. To jump in with a promise that I’m fine, and that I’m perfectly happy these days. But he doesn’t want to hear that. He wants the truth from me, and I owe him that much. I’ve kept so much from him for so long that imparting this small piece of honesty seems vital now. I clear my throat, leaning my temple against the window next to me; the glass is cold and spackled with condensation, but I barely even notice as I consider my father’s question.
“Some mornings, I wake up…and I can feel a pair of hands closing around my throat. It’s like the fear rises up inside me when I’m asleep and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t have nightmares about what happened anymore, but occasionally I think the truth of all that violence and panic catches up with me when I’m unconscious and it just…festers. And when it’s like that and I wake up, I can sometimes bring it all with me into the waking world, and…it’s enough to make me feel like I’m going to fucking die.”
My father’s head drops. His eyes are cast down into his coffee mug but I can read the devastation on him. These are things he never thought he’d hear me say, and it’s killing him to hear me admit the hard truth.
“But when I wake up like that, Dad…that feeling doesn’t last long. It takes less than a minute for me to remember how to breathe again, and then…” I duck down so that I’m in his field of vision, so he can see that I’m smiling and that it’s genuine. “Then, I remember that it’s all over and done with, and it’s in the past. Yes, it’s hard to be at school a lot of the time. And yes, there are moments when I’m so fucking angry that I feel like I’m going to explode. But there are far more moments, when I’m with you or I’m with Alex, when nothing affects me whatsoever. I feel invincible half the time now, and that? That feels great. I’m not saying that I’ll ever be able to forget what was done to me, or that I’ll just get past it and there’ll come a day when I don’t even think about it anymore. That’d be a lie.
“What happened to me…it is an injury. My body healed from it, but I think the scar of it will always remain inside me. But a scar is proof of healing. A scar is a testimony to strength. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. It’s a part of me, and I’m slowly figuring out how to accept all of those different, separate parts of myself, no matter how ugly or twisted they might be, because they make me who I am, right? I am okay, Dad. I promise. When you hear me laugh, when you see me smile, it is real. It is the truth. Always. Okay?”
Dad leans back in his seat, resting the coffee cup against his chest, propping it up against his solar plexus. His hair’s much darker than mine. His eyes are dark, too. It used to hurt me so fucking much that I didn’t look more like him. It never seemed right to me that I ended up looking so much like Mom, with her hair color and the same blue-grey eyes, the same shaped face even, with the same slightly upturned nose. I always felt as though, if I looked more like him, then I would belong to him more, somehow. I don’t feel that way anymore. I know I belong to him, like I know the sun is going to rise in the east and set in the west. I don’t need to see his eyes staring back at me whenever I look in the mirror, because I’ve realized I want to be like him in other, more important ways.
He's kind, and he’s strong. The man can do basically anything he sets his mind to. He’s relentless when he decides he’s going to accomplish something. He’d do anything to help someone if they needed him. He knows how to really listen when someone is speaking, and not just wait for his turn to speak. I wasn’t born with any of these qualities coded into my genetics, but my father shows me every day that there are choices I can make that will result in me being a better fucking human being because of it.
I already know it, have already felt it for years now, but I’m proud as fuck that he’s my old man. I think, from time to time, that he might be proud to have me as a daughter, too. This sneaking suspicion is confirmed when he speaks again. “You are one remarkable young woman, Silver Parisi. You know that?” he tells me.
“Of course,” I reply primly, giving him a little seated bow. “I’m one in a million.”
“You should never have had to deal with any of that shit on your own. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you thought you couldn’t come to me. I’m seriously disgusted that neither your mom nor I noticed things had changed with you. Neither of us will be winning a ‘parent of the year’ award anytime soon. That was just fucking disgraceful.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I get it. I might tease you about being old, but I know you’re still young. You want a life for yourself outside of just being someone’s Dad. You’re entitled to that. You were working on your book. Mom was—”
Mom was busy having an affair and fucking the shit out of her boss.
I shudder, closing my eyes. “It doesn’t matter what Mom was doing. I am okay now, and that’s all that matters, right?”
Dad shifts in his seat, watching me for a moment. He drains what’s left of his coffee and sets his mug down on the table between us. “It’s because of him, isn’t it? Moretti? He’s the reason why you’re okay.”
“Oh, lord.”
He smirks. “What?”
“I really don’t want to talk about Alex with you.”
“Why not?”
“When a girl has a conversation with her father about the guy she’s seeing, things inevitably jack knife and take a turn for the worse. I can’t think of anything more disturbing than you trying to give me a safe sex talk right now.”
He laughs—one single, solitary bark of laughter—and I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard that sound in what seems like months. It’s a relief to know he’s still capable. “Silver, I was seventeen not that long ago. Feels like it was last week, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to give you the safe sex talk. I’m gonna trust that you’re being smart, and we’re gonna pretend like neither of us actually even said the word ‘sex’ out loud. I only want to know if he’s made things better for you, Sil. ’Cause if he has…then I can only be grateful to the guy.”
I sit very still, staring down at my hands, thinking.
Thinking about Alex Moretti.
How can I explain to my father that Alex hasn’t just made things better for me? That’s he’s changed them entirely? How can I tell him that I know I’ve found a missing piece of my soul and I never want to be apart from him without sounding like an infatuated, simpering teenaged idiot? Do I even know the words to describe the swelling, rising, euphoric sensation in my chest whenever Alex simply looks at me, or the way I feel deeply, fundamentally, intrinsically safe whenever I find myself wrapped up in his arms?
There’s just too much to say on the topic of Alex Moretti…so I keep things simple. “Yes. It is,” I answer. “In a way, it’s because of Alex that things are better for me. He’s…mine,” I say quietly.
“He’s yours?”
I can’t decide if Dad looks like he’s about to laugh at my stupid claim, or if he’s about to yell at me for being moronic enough to think the world begins and end with a boy from high school. Bracing, I wait to see which version of him I’ll end up with, flinching a little, but Dad neither laughs nor ridicules. “Okay, kiddo,” he says simply. “I know how that feels.”
God. The poor guy. That’s how he felt about Mom. I sigh, turning to watch the snowflakes streak past the diner’s window, cringing at the sight of the bundled-up figures hunched against the cold, hurrying down the street toward the hardware store.
“You looking for him?” Dad asks quietly. “You think he’s going to show up?”
Slo
wly, kind of sadly, I shake my head. “He doesn’t know Raleigh well enough. And Raleigh doesn’t know him well enough, either. Not everyone’s as badass as you, Dad. People are judgmental assholes sometimes. I don’t think he feels welcome.”
“You should invite him,” Dad says over the top of his coffee mug.
“Oh, I already have.” I smile ruefully. “I think it would take five personal invitations from five other members of Raleigh to convince my boyfriend he was wanted here. And even then he still probably wouldn’t come.”
5
ALEX
Me: I miss you.
Me: I need you.
Me: I fucking want you.
It’s seven in the morning, still dark outside, and I’ve typed the same message to Silver at least fifteen times, asking her to come over. She’ll still be asleep, curled up in her nice warm bed, but if I could have my way, I’d disturb her slumber and ask her to come all the way across town just to see me. Pretty fucking selfish, I know. Which is why I deleted the messages I typed out, grumbling under my breath each time, groaning at the fact that I can’t get the thought of her out of my head and I keep picturing her in the little shorts she wears to bed. I’m basically about to explode.
It’s fucking freezing in the trailer, like sub-zero arctic fucking temperatures, which would usually be enough to make my dick forget how to function and have my balls retract up inside my goddamn stomach, but not this morning. Nope, this morning my raging boner is impervious to the cold. It’s demanding some hard-core attention and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.