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“It’s only you?” He stated the obvious. Gemma noticed his voice carried no disappointment, and she relaxed slightly.
“Only me.”
He gave her a soft smile that looked surprised and pleased all at once. “Well, I’m happy to have you. Sorry about your finger. Why don’t we go somewhere more comfortable?”
“Sure.”
Sometimes she hated feeling like a guest in her father’s house, but she knew most of it was her own doing. Had she been at her mom’s, she would already have her shoes off and the fridge open for snacks. Here, she was trailing her dad through his glass castle feeling like a visitor from space.
“Were you in the area?” he asked as they returned to the living room at the back of the house.
Thoughts of why she was in the area and what she had run away from fizzled in Gemma’s brain like an angry bumblebee. “Yes.”
He paused like she might add something more. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked to fill the silence and perhaps curtail the discomfort filling the big, airy room like gas.
She knew top-shelf liquor was in no short supply in his house, and the thought of a drink serving as a last-ditch buffer tempted her. But it could also make things worse, she decided.
“Water is fine.”
He left her alone, and she considered punching a rideshare order into her phone so that she had an out at the ready, but instead she found herself gravitating to the piano. She loved to play, and she did miss it dearly without a piano of her own. She’d considered an electronic keyboard with headphones for her apartment but couldn’t bring herself to buy one when she knew the sound quality, the weight of the keys, of a real piano. She and Patrick had played the old upright in the playroom for fun, Gemma teaching him “Chopsticks” because that was all he had the patience for. But when she wanted to play for real, to pretend she wasonstage at the Bowl or the Forum or Walt Disney Concert Hall, she sat at the full grand piano in the living room, dark and elegant as a black tuxedo.
She stood at it now and gently pressed her fingers into a few keys. The soft tinkle made her smile.
“Here you are,” her father said when he returned with a glass of sparkling water. “In the mood for a performance?”
Gemma found creating music too intimate to do in front of someone she felt so distant from. She stopped touching the piano and took her glass and sipped. “Not today.” She let the tiny bubbles soothe the uncomfortable burn in her throat.
Another awkward beat passed.
Her father cleared his throat. “I wasn’t expecting you and your brother until later this evening. Did Patrick decide to stay in New York?”
“No. His flight out of Lagos was delayed, and he missed his connection. He’s on standby still trying to get here. He’s having bad luck.” She sipped again, thinking theluckmight have been less luck and more fallout from her bizarre and exhausting day.
“I see. Well, I could make a call and have him on a plane in an hour.”
Gemma casually turned away so he wouldn’t see her roll her eyes. Money and ridiculous resources were his solution to every problem. The thought of asking her father for help hadn’t even entered her mind, honestly, because she had chosen not to live in a world where every issue had a remedy for the right price. And the fact that Patrick hadn’t mentioned it either put a tiny, proud smile on her lips. She had to wonder what Jack would make of factoring a private flightinto the equation. Would Patrick have gotten home that way? Or would he still have gotten stuck midcountry?
The thought that Jack was the only person, aside from Lila, she could talk to about such a thing filled her with a sense of anxious sadness. If she never got out of the day, and she didn’t want to talk to Jack, what was going to happen?
An expansive, lonely future unfolded in her mind and made her gulp at the water she suddenly wished were something stronger.
“It will be quite the change having Patrick permanently in Africa, won’t it,” her father said. He had opted for something other than water. He swirled the amber liquid in a crystal glass. His comment made Gemma wonder if he’d somehow picked up on her sense of impending loneliness.
“Patrick told you he’s moving?” she asked, surprised.
He hesitated before sipping his drink, looking like he wasn’t sure if he’d misspoken. “Yes. He told me last month.”
Gemma’s eyes bulged.
A month?Patrick had known for a month that he was moving and hadn’t said anything to her?
Don’t freak out, Gem.She heard his voice in her head, remembering what he’d said when he told her over the phone. She certainly had freaked out, and she was still recovering, but that was beside the point. She suddenly realized, if he hadn’t gotten stuck at the airport, when would he have told her he was permanently leaving? Was he going to drop that little bomb on her in front of their father?
Anger at her brother, who wasn’t even there to defend himself, made her set her glass on the coffee table and march toward the back wall. She needed some air. She sucked in a deep breath and noticed it was void of the gritty smog thatsettled over the city below. The urban mass sprawled like a tumorous growth in an unapologetic tangle of concrete and asphalt that had taken over what was once desert. The city held four million people, and any number of their hearts were broken daily, so many dreams crushed. People in the hills fancied themselves above it all, but Gemma knew it was all a charade. The façade of a big glass house and private gate was nothing more than a cage filled with loneliness. Her father was no exception, and with Patrick leaving, she wondered if she was destined to the same fate, minus the big glass house.
The delicate scratch of a needle dropping onto a record caught her attention. When the acoustic chords of one of her favorite Nigel Black songs floated into the air, she snapped her head around.
Her father stood at the record player behind the piano. The enormous box speakers of her childhood had evolved into sleeker, more modern versions of themselves, but they still filled the room with the same rich, resonant sound Gemma could feel in her bones. The purest form of recorded music, her father always said. Nigel’s gravelly voice poured into the room like a grainy syrup.
