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I’m lost in thought, walking slowly through a gallery filled with dark spaces, when he speaks.
“Emerson.” He blinks in the light, his brows drawn together in pain or confusion or both.
“Hello.”
He tugs at the handcuffs, his face falling into resignation. My father knows what this means. I wonder if there’s any relief in it. His life must have been a constant low-grade emergency since he was released from prison. Now he’ll go back to a predictable routine with unchanging boundaries.
We’re alike in that way, I suppose. The world feels like an emergency to me. If my father’s actions are any indication, surviving society was too much. My father might have had hope when he was granted parole, but his prison term didn’t make him into a new man. He’s not like Daphne’s brother, or even Daphne herself. They reach out into the world. Call it down to them. Bend it to their will.
“I should have done better.” My father’s eyes flutter closed, as if this statement has taken all his strength.
I sit with it in the fuzzy calm of whatever drug they gave me in the ambulance. One of the many reasons I avoid these particular tools is that they alter the distance between me and the world in a way I find unsettling, if not dangerous. After all, the time will inevitably come when the effects wear off, and I’m returned to my own mind. I don’t want to find it unfamiliar.
“You should have,” I agree.
He breathes for quite some time in silence. I start to pace the galleries in my mind.
But then he opens his eyes.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t up to the job.”
I wait.
There’s far more to say, of course. I could demand a specific apology. An itemized list of the ways he hurt me and my brothers. A confession that takes responsibility for what he did to Daphne.
But right now, I see him. I recognize that this is the most he can offer me. When I scan his face, I see it without a haze of fear. My father can’t do anything else to me. He’ll never touch Daphne again. There’s no reason to be afraid of him. Even the small, childish parts of me that exist at the back of my mind, hiding behind the gallery installations as if I can’t see them, aren’t particularly intimidated. They know what happens at the end of this story. I go on to survive the closet and the panic and the world.
I meet Daphne.
She saves me from the worst parts of myself.
My father clears his throat. “It wasn’t your fault, okay? You weren’t wild.”
“I seemed that way to you.” I have very few specific memories of the things I did when the panic attacks took over. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. “And our lives were wild. Weren’t they?”
He nods.
It’s not the evolved, grand-gesture apology I might have wished for once upon a time, but it is an understanding.
“I let all you boys down. But especially you, Emerson. I’m glad you’re nothing like me.”
He swallows hard, glancing away, and I know that these are the last words he can say on the topic. There’s no more for him to give. The well is dry. In that way, it’s very much like my childhood. He had almost nothing to offer, but he gave it regardless. He was simply no match for what life handed to him.
I’m not going to be that person. I can’t scrape his DNA out of my cells, and I won’t try, but I won’t end up like this. I won’t be too weak for my own life.
I reach out and pat his hand. “I’ll come back and visit you before you go.”
“You don’t have to do that.” His brown eyes sweep over my face, misty with sorrow and regret and painkillers.
“I don’t have to do anything. But I’ll come back and see you.”
“Okay.” He sounds relieved. “And your brothers?”
“They’ll be back, too.”
“Good,” he says. His eyes are already beginning to close. “That’s good.”
I wait until the peaks and valleys on the monitor have slowed and he’s asleep before I leave his room and go up to Daphne’s floor.
