“I don’t understand. I did everything to keep you safe,” he says finally, and there is something almost bewildered under it. “I kept you out of the spotlight like you wanted. I never made you get on the team bus. I kept you away from the boosters. I made sure to keep you out of reach of every slimy kid who'd try to use you to get to me. I built you a quiet life. The way you wanted.”
“You built me a cage,” I say, “and you've been calling it a kindness for twenty-three years.”
He flinches. I have never in my life seen my father flinch.
“Your mother left because she couldn't do it,” he says, and his voice isn't cold anymore. It's old. “The crying. The needs. The meltdowns. The preschool calling twice a week about one thing or another. She told me she wasn't built for it, and she walked out, and she left me a four-year-old who screamed when I forgot to cut the tag out of your shirts.” He looks down at his hands. “So I sheltered you. I kept you away from anybody who might look at you the way she looked at you right before she went. I thought that was the job. I thought that was…loving you.”
It’s the most my Dad has ever said about her. About any of it. And for one terrible second, I can see what it must have been like. A frightened new dad, alone with a little girl he couldn't understand, deciding the way to love her was to hide her. He got it completely wrong for two decades with so much love underneath that no one alive could see it. Even me.
“I thought it was too,” I say. “But it’s crippling me, Dad.” He doesn't answer. In fact, he looks sad. “But I think I still have time to do something about it.”
“Jasmine.”
“I have to go.” I stand. “I have to find him before he does the thing he does when he decides he's lost everything. He burns the rest of it down so it can't burn him first. He told me that himself, weeks ago. I never thought I'd be the thing he was running from.”
“Sit down. We’re not finished.”
A few weeks ago, that voice would have put me back in the chair because his approval is the warmth I thought I needed when everything else in the world was so cold.
I don't sit.
“We're finished for today,” I say, and I walk out of my father's office, and out in the hallway, I take out my phone, and I call Caleb.
Wendy looks at me and offers a small smile.
The phone rings and rings, then drops into a voicemail that was never set up, a robotic voice reading his own number back to me.
I call again. Same robot. Pick up, I think, at a phone that will not. Pick up, please, just this once, before you do something stupid.
I text him. Words. The first text I have ever sent him with actual words in it, breaking the rule we built together, because the rule has gone to shit now, and there’s nothing left of it worth protecting.
Me: It wasn't a no. I froze. It was never a no. Please.
It sends. The little word underneath it says delivered.
But it does not say read.
I stand in that hallway, and I stare at the word delivered like wanting it badly enough will turn it into read, and it doesn't, because he’s somewhere with the phone face down, going dark before the dark can reach him first.
He warned me about this.
As I stand alone outside my father's office, watching the small safe life I spent years building coming down around me in real time, I finally understand the thing I have had backwards from the very start.
Safe was never the same as okay.
Caleb
I make it to my truck before my hands start shaking, and then I sit in the lot and don't drive anywhere, because there's nowhere to drive.
I know this part. I'm an expert at this part. This is where the old me finds a bar, or finds a guy with a smart ass mouth, or finds a warm pussy to sink into. Years of muscle memory are all pulling in the same direction, all of it whispering the same thing: You already lost everything. Might as well go out with a bang.
There's a list of hockey players across a few states, including this one, who'd be glad to give me the fight I'm hunting for. I bet I could find one in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and a split knuckle, and the whole thing stops hurting inside and only on the outside.
There's a bottle of Vodka in the glovebox, too. I put it there back in September, for exactly this kind of night, the kind I was always sure was coming because one always is. I look at it a long time. I don't open it. I don't know what that makes me. Somebody she'd be proud of, maybe, which is a stupid thing to think about a girl who couldn’t pick me.
I sit in my truck and consider the next thing on my list: pussy. Not to be conceited or anything, but it would be so easy to walk across campus and find a girl willing to spend the night with me. I don’t make the rules, but girls love athletes.
Of course, that’s a stupid idea because I don’t want any woman underneath me but Jasmine. How the hell am I ever going to get over her?
