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“Nobody knows what it’s like. You’ve got your son having a fucking meltdown and they’re calling you to say you’re fired if you’re late one more time. He was dangerous when he’d get like that.”
“Dangerous to who?”
“Himself. All of us. If he ran off and I had to leave work, we were fucked.”
We pass underneath a light hanging over the roadway. We’re getting too far from Emerson’s house. Emerson’s dad has to keep talking to me, and I need to make a plan.
“I know he loves art. Did he get that from you?”
He scoffs. “No. He found the Met one day. We had this shithole place near a train station. He must have heard about it at school, somewhere like that. After he knew, he went there all the time. I always had people showing up at my door after work.”
“People?”
Emerson’s dad looks up toward the roof of the van. “He’d skip school to go and stare at all those goddamn paintings. They’d keep track. And then I’d have officers showing up.” An undertone of fear slithers into his voice. “Always checking in and snooping around.” He mimics a fist, pounding on a door. “They’d bang on that thing. So fucking loud.”
I wonder if Emerson knows that his father also thinks about doors, and what’s on the other side.
“Emerson would wait outside on the steps for them to open. They’d have to drag him out at the end of the day. One time…” He falls silent. Swallows hard. “One time he hid behind one of the installations. They didn’t know he was in there until the alarms went off at three in the morning. Called the fucking cops on him. The boys put on height early. You’ve got to understand, the cops always make it worse. They thought he was a thief, but all they found was a fucked-up twelve-year-old boy.” I hear his teeth click together. “He ran, because the alarms set him off. Couldn’t talk to him when he was like that. They could have shot him.”
My heart breaks for Emerson. It breaks for his dad, too. My family wasn’t easy to grow up in because of my father, but we had all kinds of things Emerson didn’t. We had money and food and doctors.
“Were you okay after that?”
“No. They were after me then. Had me on some list. Bothered us constantly, and they always had a problem with what I was doing. They didn’t get that there was nothing I could do. They were wild. I couldn’t control them twenty-four hours a day. I couldn’t keep them—”
His sentence cuts off before he can say the word safe.
The silence rings between us.
In the distance, the ocean rushes against the shore. It’s a whisper beneath the tires on the road and the wind in the trees. If I don’t get out soon, I never will.
“I had to keep them inside,” Emerson’s dad said.
“You did your best.”
He stares at me. I can hardly see his face, but I can feel the way he’s looking. It’s more like Emerson than before. “Is that what you think? I did my best?”
Emerson’s father is not a good man. He’s not even a good criminal. He got caught and went to prison after barely managing to stay afloat. He’s been struggling against the tide for a long time.
I don’t forgive him for what he did to Sin and Will, or for what he’s doing to me now. But I can recognize that he’s asking for hope. Ironic that he’s asking me.
“I think we all do our best, even if we fail sometimes. We’re not always good enough. That doesn’t mean we weren’t trying.”
“I was trying.”
His eyes go distant again. He’s fled back into the past the way Emerson disappears into paintings in his mind.
My body acts before I have time to think. I throw myself against the back doors of the van, scrabbling at the handles, the zip ties slicing into my wrists, and pull.
They’re not locked.
The doors fly open and I jump. It turns into a fall and the ground rushes up to meet me. There’s no time to be afraid before I hit the asphalt.
Oh, god. It hurts. One of my knees hits first and I roll over onto my hands. The van was going faster than I thought. The impact knocks the wind out of me. Fabric tears. My snow pants, I think.
My heart is in my throat. Out of my throat. I’m dizzy from rolling but I get my feet under me, praying there’s not another car coming.
Headlights crest the hill behind us.
My ears ring. My teeth chatter. My knee hurts. One of my ankles. My wrists sting. I’m too hot in these snow things, weighed down, but I have no choice. The road tips beneath me but I run for the woods. I can hear it, I think. I can hear the option. Unless it’s just the blood pounding in my veins. Please, let it be the ocean. Please, please, please.
