My cell phone began to ring, reminding me that I’d been away from the cruiser longer than I’d intended. “Hello?”
“Dad, it’s me,” Amelia said. “Mom never picked me up.”
I glanced down at my watch. “School ended two hours ago.”
“I know. She’s not home, and she’s not answering her cell phone.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Ten minutes later, a sullen Amelia swung into the cruiser. “Great. I just love being driven home in a cop car. Imagine the rumor mill.”
“Lucky for you, Drama Queen, that the whole town knows your father’s a policeman.”
“Did you talk to Mom?”
I had tried, but like Amelia said, she wasn’t answering any phone. The reason why became crystal clear when I pulled into our driveway and saw her carefully extricating you from the backseat-not just confined by your spica cast but sporting a new bandage that bound your upper arm to your body.
Charlotte turned as she heard us drive up, and winced. “Amelia,” she said. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I totally forgot-”
“Yeah, so what else is new?” Amelia muttered, and she stalked into the house.
I took you out of your mother’s arms. “What happened, Wills?”
“I broke my scapula,” you said. “It’s really hard to do.”
“The shoulder blade, can you believe it?” Charlotte said. “Clear down the middle.”
“You didn’t answer your phone.”
“My battery died.”
“You could have called from the hospital.”
Charlotte looked up. “You can’t actually be angry with me, Sean. I’ve been a little busy-”
“Don’t you think I deserve to know if my daughter gets hurt?”
“Could you keep your voice down?”
“Why?” I demanded. “Why not let everyone listen? They’re going to hear it all anyway, once you file-”
“I refuse to discuss this in front of Willow-”
“Well, you’d better get over that fast, sweetheart, because she’s going to hear every last ugly word of it.”
Charlotte’s face turned red, and she took you out of my arms and carried you into the house. She settled you on the couch, handed you the television remote, then walked into the kitchen, expecting me to follow. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
“With me? You’re the one who left Amelia sitting for two hours after school-”
“It was an accident-”
“Speaking of accidents,” I said.
“It wasn’t a serious break.”
“You know what, Charlotte? It looks pretty fucking serious to me.”
“What would you have done if I called you, anyway? Left work early again? That would be one less day you were getting paid, which means we’d be doubly screwed.”
I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. Here was the underlying message in that goddamn lawsuit, the invisible ink that would show up between the lines of every court document: Sean O’Keefe doesn’t make enough money to take care of his daughter’s special needs…which is why it’s come to this.
“You know what I think?” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “That if the shoe was on the other foot-if I’d been with Willow when she got hurt-and I didn’t call you, you’d be furious. And you know what else I think? The reason you didn’t call me has nothing to do with my job or with your cell phone battery. It’s that you’ve already made up your mind. You’re going to do whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want, no matter what I say.” I stormed out of the house to my cruiser, still idling in the driveway, because God forbid I left my shift early.
I smacked my hand on the steering wheel, inadvertently honking the horn. The noise brought Charlotte to the window. Her face was tiny and white, an oval whose features were blurred at this distance.
I had asked Charlotte to marry me with petit fours. I went to a bakery and had them write a letter in icing on top of each one: MARRY ME, and then I mixed them up and served them on a plate. It’s a puzzle, I told her. You have to put them in order.
ARMY REM, she wrote.
Charlotte was still at the window, watching me with her arms crossed. I could barely see in her the girl I’d told to try again. I could no longer picture the look on her face when, the second time, she got it right.
Amelia
When Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer’s office we’d gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you’d been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.
I didn’t do it for the reason you’d think-to drown out the noise you were making. I knew that’s what my parents thought: that I was totally unsympathetic. I wasn’t about to try to explain it to them, either, but the truth was, I needed that music. I needed to distract myself from the fact that, when you were crying, there was nothing I could do to stop it, because that just made me hate myself even more.
Everyone-even you, in the bottom half of your spica cast, with your arm strapped up against your chest-was already sitting at the dinner table when I got there. Mom had cut your meat loaf into tiny squares, like postage stamps. It made me think of when you were little, sitting in your high chair. I used to try to play with you-rolling a ball or pulling you in a wagon-and every time I was told the same thing: Be careful.
Once, you were sitting on the bed and I was bouncing on it, and you fell off. One minute we were astronauts exploring the planet Zurgon, and the next, your left shin was bent at a ninety-degree angle and you were doing that freaky zoning-out thing you did when you had a bad break. Mom and Dad went out of their way to say this wasn’t my fault, but who did they think they were kidding? I was the one who’d been jumping, even if it had been your idea in the first place. If I’d never been there, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
I slid into my chair. We didn’t have assigned seats, like some families did, but we all took the same ones for every meal. I was still wearing my headphones, with my music turned up loud-emo stuff, songs that made me feel like there were people with even crappier lives than mine. “Amelia,” my father said. “Not at the table.”
Sometimes I think there’s a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that’s where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can’t help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite. And just at this moment, it chose to rear its ugly head. I blinked at my father, cranked the volume, and said-too loudly, “Pass the potatoes.”
I sounded like the biggest brat on earth, and maybe I wanted to be: like Pinocchio, if I acted like a self-centered teenager, eventually I’d become one, and everyone would notice me and cater to me instead of hand-feeding you your meat loaf and watching you to make sure you weren’t slipping in your chair. Actually, I’d just settle for having someone notice I was even a member of this family.
“Wills,” my mother said, “you have to eat something.”
“It tastes like feet,” you answered.
“Amelia, I’m not going to ask you again,” Dad said.
“Five more bites…”