He glances at me, surprised. Then he says, like he’s having trouble picking out his words, “It was a lot of things.” He doesn’t deny it, though—that maybe he had trouble forgiving me. And in his non-denial, I find more truth—painful and sad—than I have since I found out about Rory. “We walked around in a fog for months. We tried for a year to get past it. All of us. Me, your mother, Caleb.
“But you were the worst, Addie. You were carrying so much blame around it was like it had contorted you. That little girl who was bursting with so much life, who burst into every room. Your eyes were glazed over. Your passion for everything, for music—it was just gone. I couldn’t bear looking at you and not recognizing you. I wanted to say the same thing my mother had said to me: ‘Open your eyes.’ To tell you it was going to be okay. And I believed that you would be okay. I really did. I thought it was possible to live through depression, because I was doing it.”
He shakes his head now. “But when your mother told me about my pills and where she’d found them—she was so convinced that if youdidn’thave to live through it, then you shouldn’t. I knew she’d never forgive me if something happened to you. And honestly, I wouldn’t have forgiven myself, either. So I let her decide.”
He looks me in the eye again. “Caleb didn’t want it and I understood why. If I couldn’t imagine having it myself, then I couldn’t force him to.”
You fought for Caleb, but not for me.
“It would have been a betrayal, unnatural,” Dad continues. “A parent doesn’t forget a child. I—we—had a responsibility to remember him.”
“So it wasn’t unnatural when you let me forget him?”
And they hadn’t just betrayed Rory by doing it; they’d betrayed me, too.
“I don’t think it was the right thing to do, Addie. Some days it eats me up inside…,” Dad says, squinting, looking past me. “Whether it was right or wrong, your mother and I just wanted you to be okay. We had a chance to take away your pain, and we did. I wish sometimes someone could have done that for me.”
His voice breaks a little then, and I swallow.
I want to shout a million things at him, to yell what that tiny voice in my head is saying:I could have done it. I could have gone through it and come out okay.But my throat burns and different words form.
“I had it done again. Ichoseto go back a second time. I didn’t know how much I had already lost,” I say, tears spilling unbidden down my cheeks.
He looks for a second like he’s going to walk across the room to me and wrap me up in his arms like he used to do.
“I know. We set you up for that. Whatever happened with the boy—you never told me the details—it tore you up inside. Anyone could see that.”
I swipe my hand across my cheek.
“Rory was the first major loss you had, and the boy—”
“Zach,” I say. I want him to say it, acknowledge the apparition I’ve being seeing.
“Zach. Because you never really dealt with the grief of losing Rory, this second heartbreak felt like it was the end of the world to you. I think the way you learn to deal with one hard thing affects the way you deal with the next and the one after that. You didn’t remember what it felt like to lose anything and come through it.” It reminds me of what Mrs. Dubois always says. About firsts and how they set the precedent. “How you learn to cope with it andlive through it,that’s important.”
Is he saying Zach is dead, too? Lost the way Rory is? Why didn’t I let Katy tell me everything she knew?
“Dad, do you knowanythingabout me and Zach?”
He shakes his head at me, like now is not the time.
“Addie, your mother was right that a number of things could be causing what you’ve been seeing,” Dad says. “Figure out why you made the choice you did to have the procedure on your own. Let’s find out what’s wrong—why you’re seeing him—first.”
BEFORE
Early September
“Come here, you love-bitten mothertrucker,” Katy says, sweeping me into an inescapable embrace. “Don’t you ever leave me again!”
“You leftme,” I point out, laughing into her shoulder as I hug her back just as tightly.
“Why? Why did I do it?” she hisses. “I nearly fell into a Depressive Episode, I missed youso much.” Which, of course, is not true since not one of her hundred messages made mention of said Depressive Episodes, or even of missing me. But her hug tells me now what her words when she was away didn’t.
I step back and say, “Zach, this is my best friend, Katy.”
Keeping one hand on my lower back, Zach reaches forward to shake Katy’s hand and grins at her. “Hi!” he says, speaking loudly to be heard over the music at the pool party we’re at. “Addie tells me you’re an actor.”
And I want to hug him because if there ever was a perfect way to introduce yourself to Katy, that was it. Not “actress,” because she finds the -ressending to be sexist, plus Zach’s comment indicates that I’ve been talking about her, which she loves.
