Some days when I’ve broken through on a piece I’m learning, the melody still thrumming through the tips of my fingers like an electric shock, and I feel so happy I could dance, I want nothing more than for him to see my face. To be the bubbly kid he remembers, and for him to be the dad I remember. For us to recognize each other the way you catch sight of your reflection in paneled glass. Even for a second.
“You know Dad can fly, right?” Caleb would tell me when we were really little, tricking me into thinking it was true in the literal sense. Superman-type flying with a cape and the forehead curl and the whole shebang. “Duh,” I would say in whatever way four-year-olds do. Then my dad would get home from his trips and put me on his shoulders, and I always felt so high up that every time he lifted his foot, it seemed like we were teetering, picking up air.
All my memories until about twelve—right around when my parents separated—are like that, and then suddenly they are distant and different and tinged with this sadness, an uncertainty I can’t explain. There’s just a trace of it in every memory with my dad, like the aftertaste of something bitter you’ve eaten, and I’m only really sure he loves me because I remember he once did.
Dad is different with Caleb. Less distant. But maybe it’s because Caleb is older; maybe fathers and sons are just different. Sometimes I think my parents’ divorce split us right in half: my mother and me on one side, Caleb and Dad on the other.
My parents met at a dinner party when Mom was doing the weather for radio. Dad used to listen to the six-thirty forecast before he went up, back when he was a training pilot, and he claims he fell in love with her voice. Her calm, matter-of-fact voice, which would inch up just a little bit when there was bad news. A storm, a tornado warning, bad weather for the Fourth.
When someone introduced them, Dad exclaimed, “You’re Sandy Fairweather!”
“Sandy Houston,” she’d said, trying not to let on that she was pleased at the recognition.
“I didn’t mind bad news if your voice was the one giving it,” I remember my dad telling her as they recounted the story for the billionth time, before everything changed.
Before Dad stopped coming home and then got his own place on the far side of town.
Still, I sometimes catch him watching Mom’s report.
Dad’s apartment is eternally stuffy because every now and then he’ll get a new piece of furniture that he won’t be home to use, so the space keeps getting more cramped, the stale scent of new leather and abandoned air mixing together to form something arid and claustrophobic. When it gets bad enough for him to notice, he’ll fling open all the windows and the door that leads out to the balcony, and the apartment will sound like squealing brakes, drunk couples fighting, and too-loud ambulances for the whole weekend I’m around.
I think the worst part is that the apartments are so close together, the walls so paper-thin, that I am not allowed to practice here. We’ll watch TV on opposite ends of the new leather couch he’s just gotten, and every couple of hours, he’ll pause the show to ask if I’ve seen the new lamp he bought or a new stool for the kitchen, and I’ll say no even if I have.
Tonight we’re watching hours of home renovation shows he’s taped, eating Thai food out of Styrofoam containers.
“Are you sure your mother isn’t using it?” Dad’s question jolts me out of a trance, and I glance at him, confused.
“Addie?” I can tell from his frown that I have a glazed expression on my face, and I try to blink it away.
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I was asking about Grandpa’s clock that we used to have at home. I thought it might add a nice touch to the living room. Caleb said it was in the attic somewhere—that your mother wasn’t using it?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say unhelpfully. “I’ll look for it when I get home.”
Today has been the worst day yet since the accident. I’m not in pain, but I feel like I can’t concentrate on anything. Probably because the last really peaceful sleep I got was on the bus before it crashed. Katy is at her wit’s end with me.
I’ve been tempted to mention it to my mom, but I know she’d just freak out and send me to the ER. And Dad—well, I’m not really used to coming to him when I need help. And what exactly is my issue—that I’ve been distracted and forgetful for three days?
I shake my head when Dad pauses the show again to ask if I’ve seen the new kitchen mat.
He likes the tour more than I do, the act of convincing himself his apartment is just as full as our house used to be. Or maybe it just gives us something to say to each other. Sometimes, watching TV on the couch, I’ll pull out my bow and just hold it or swipe it against the air to threaten away the sadness.
“Did you look for the exits when you got on the bus?” Dad asks out of nowhere. It’s the first thing he’s asked me about the accident since I got here after school today.
“Yeah, I always do,” I say. For a pilot, my father has no faith in planes. He hates for any of us to fly. Years ago, before the divorce, the four of us went on vacation to visit Dad’s extended family in St. Vincent—or Vincy, as he calls it. He grew up in the States, and his parents died here when I was little, but Dad always goes back every few years, and this was one of the few times we were going with him. Dad had the three of us in a semicircle at the airport, his Hawaiian shirt odd and ill-fitting on him. I remember I’d been hopping around singing every song I knew that mentioned the beach or islands or the sun. Dad looked each of us square in the face and said, “Always assume the plane is going down.”
It was the last trip we took as a family.
But his warning worked, because none of us will enter a plane or bus or train without knowing where the exits are.
“Your mom says all the colleges you ended up applying to were in New York,” he says now. There is no feeling in his voice, and he doesn’t look at me. He never looks at me. “They have a pretty high crime rate.”
“Lots of places do,” I say.
He nods, then unpauses the TV. I steal glances at the side of his face, wondering what he would say if I did tell him I’d been feeling strange ever since the accident.
Would it make him worry about me? Maybe he’d actually be able to help?
