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I shrug. “I prefer classical music.”
“Fine,” she grumbles. “Maybe you’re more of an old soul than a no soul.” She purses her lips as she gazes out of the window at the sidewalks. It’s started to rain, just a light drizzle. It makes the city look like Wren does: flushed with sweat and all the more beautiful for it. “I tried my hand at classical music once. Took piano lessons for a couple of weeks.”
That’s news to me. It strikes me suddenly that, apart from the broader strokes of her life, I really don’t know much about her. What’s weird is that I want to.
“Didn’t stick?”
“My lessons got… hijacked.” Her voice hitches strangely on that weird. “Life intervened.” When I keep looking at her, saying nothing, she sighs and concedes the rest of us. “My dad left us. Left me at piano, specifically, actually. He was supposed to pick me up after the lesson but he never showed. I was eight years old. Took a while before I actually understood what was happening.”
Her face is calm, but her hands are a writhing, wringing mess in her lap. I offer her a soft, noncommittal hum and she finally looks up at me. “I thought that there’d been an accident or something. I assumed someone was hurt. I guess we were all hurt; I just didn’t know it yet.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
Her gaze bounces everywhere, never settling in any one place for long. Certainly not on me. The more her knee pistons up and down, the stronger my desire to place my hand on her thigh grows.
“Once,” she admits. “On purpose, believe it or not.” I stop the car at a traffic light. The red shines in, casting her face and hands in a crimson glow. Her leg keeps bouncing up and down, up and down. “Five-ish years after he peaced out, I overheard my mom talking to my aunt about how he was only living a few neighborhoods over. So me and Rose rode our bikes there and went looking for him. And boy, did we find him…”
The light goes green. I don’t move. Rain keeps pattering softly on the roof of the car. “You spoke to him?”
She snorts. “The plan was to walk up to his front door and ring his doorbell. He would answer, see me standing there, and go sheet white. Maybe shit his pants, if we were lucky. Then I’d tell him that—” She twists in her seat to look at me. “—I had a whole speech planned. You want to hear it?”
I nod, not daring to speak.
“Ah-hem!” She clears her throat dramatically and stares at the windshield like she’s putting on a play. “‘Oh, hello, Father. It’s us, the daughters you abandoned. Remember? We just wanted you to know that we’re fine. As it turns out, it took you leaving to make us realize how little we needed you. Because even when you were around, you weren’t a good husband. Even when you lived at home, you weren’t a good dad. I’m here to say, no hard feelings. You did us all a big favor when you left.’”
She takes a big breath when she’s done and glances at me like she’s waiting for a review or a standing ovation. “Then I was going to turn around with my head held high and walk away with dignity while he stood there ruing the day he decided to leave us.”
I smile grimly and clap my hands. “Simple and devastating.”
She returns a soft grin of her own. “I thought it was pretty good for a thirteen-year-old. Never actually got to use it, though.”
“He didn’t come to the doorbell when you rang?”
“No. But his new wife did.” Her leg has now stopped bouncing. Somehow, that feels worse to me. Like the fight has left her altogether. “As it turns out, he had left Mom, Rose, and I in our three-bedroom house in Evanston to move five minutes away to another, almost identical three-bedroom house with Helena and her two little gremlins. Guess how old they were? The exact same age as me and Rose.”
“Fuck,” I mutter.
It’s strange—empathy has always been a foreign concept in my eyes. Something for lesser mortals to contend with.
But as rain slicks our windows and I press the gas to coax us back into motion, tires groaning on the wet asphalt, I feel a gnawing twist in my gut that must mirror Wren’s own.
She laughs ironically. “‘Fuck’ is right. Go figure, huh? He didn’t want different; he just didn’t want us.” Her voice drops to something barely audible. “We were his and he still didn’t want us.”
I’m pissed off three times over. I’m pissed off for the teenage girl who worked up the courage to confront the deadbeat father who had abandoned her.
I’m pissed off for the beautiful, heartbroken woman sitting next to me who’s still feeling so much of what her younger self felt all those years ago.
And I’m pissed off at myself, for letting her draw me into this fucked-up web of her life. For making me care.
“Goddammit,” she blurts suddenly, scrubbing her hands over her face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I just told you all that.”
“We were talking about classical music.”
She grimaces. “Right. Piano lessons.”
I park the car and come around to open her door. Just before I do, I catch sight of her sitting there. Her face is blurred by the rivulets of rainfall on the windows. She looks like an Impressionist painting, a beautiful smear of color and shadow. It’s a perfect metaphor for the situation she and I have found ourselves in.
She’s something I want more than I’ve ever wanted anything—but, stranded there on the other side of the glass, she’s just out of reach.
