“I was there. From the beginning until the end. I didn’t find him. I was in the room. I stayed. I saw. I didn’t understand. You have to believe me. Please, Daddy. Please. Don’t hate me anymore. I didn’t understand. I would have gotten help, but I didn’t understand. He looked so strange and I watched. I watched it all. I just sat there and watched. Oh god…it’s my fault Sammy died. I watched him die and I never got him help. Is that why you hate me? Because it’s my fault Sammy is dead?”
Jack sinks in front of me. He takes me in his arms. “No, Chrissie. I don’t hate you. It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault, baby girl. Sammy had issues. I knew it. I should have been there.”
I wipe frantically at my tears. “I didn’t find Sammy. I was in the room when he did it. I was with him when he died. And it’s been really, really hard because I’ve been so afraid you hate me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Two words. I have never let them out. I’ve guarded them inside me. It is time to let them out. I can’t hold them in any longer. It is time to let them go. To heal. To confront the pain.
“I’m sorry.”
Silence.
“Did you hear me, Daddy? I’m sorry.”
I curl against my father’s chest and I can’t stop saying it: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…
I thought I would feel better letting it out. I don’t. It is only different. A different kind of weirdness. The weirdness of letting truth into the room.
Jack and I talk through the night, until it feels like there are no words left inside either of us. I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if this helps. It doesn’t feel better yet. It only feels different.
Different. Not better. Not worse. Just a different kind of weirdness.
* * *
We sit on the terrace on a double chaise lounge waiting for the sunrise. Now that I’ve grabbed hold of Jack I can’t seem to let go. We’ve finally started the journey we need to finish together.
At some point last night, Alan quietly slipped from the terrace. Light is spreading across the sky and I stare up at Jack. He looks lost in his thoughts, his magnificent blue eyes locked on some indiscernible spot on the horizon. It feels good to hold my dad. It feels good to be held by him. It feels good that we are together.
I see something on his face, a fleeting emotion that is quickly lost behind the usual arrangement of his features. “What are you thinking, Daddy?”
Jack laughs softly and turns to fix his blue eyes on my blue eyes. “I was thinking of Grandpa Walter. How much he hated me.”
Mom’s dad. And yes, Grandpa Walter always hated Jack. I make a face because it would be pointless to pretend that Grandpa’s dislike wasn’t obvious. It was blatantly obvious. Jack laughs again.
“Today I don’t blame him. Scary thought, today I really get Walter.”
I make a pout and then a smile.
“I love you, Daddy.”
He drops a kiss on my golden brown hair. “I love you too, baby girl.” Jack smiles, stares at the sky and then sighs heavily again. “Our plane leaves at four, Chrissie. We should really get back to the apartment, pack up, and head out.”
I feel cold and shaky. I know what I want to do, I know what I need to do, and clarity is not always a peaceful thing.
“I’m not going home today.” I say it simply, no bullshit, no drama, no equivocation.
I feel Jack tense. “What are you telling me? You are not staying, Chrissie. You may be eighteen but you are still my little girl.”
I ease out of his hold until I am sitting, hugging my legs, my cheeks pressed on my knees. “There are things I’m not finished with here. There are things left for me to do. Things left for us both to do. I will see you in the morning at the apartment. We are going to clean out Mom’s things, and I think it is right that we do it together.”
If I didn’t know Jack, I wouldn’t see the pain whispering through his eyes. It is that subtle a thing. It makes me think of what Alan says he sees in my eyes. I can feel the tears, but I fiercely fight to hold them back.
“You’re not staying here, Chrissie.”
I kiss Jack on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning, Daddy. But now you need to go. Alan gave you last night. But I am keeping today for Alan.”
The look in Jack’s eyes nearly makes me crumble. I want to cry so very badly, because I think I know what I am going to do, but I don’t really, and somehow I don’t think I will know until I am there at that moment when life forces me to choose right or left.
Right or left. I stare at Jack. Is it really true that the turns we make don’t matter and that the journey will end as it should, no matter what turns we take?
I don’t think Jack is right about this. I think the turn I make will be the one I can live with, and I don’t have a clue which one that will be.
* * *
I find Alan in the bedroom sitting in a chair at the far side of the room before a window, staring out at the city below. I lean quietly back against the door and just gaze at him. He is bathed in the glow of dawn and still dressed in the clothes from last night.
The bed is exactly how I left it, his side perfectly tucked in and my side with twisted and scrunched up blankets. My side. His side. I fight back the tears. In such a short time, he’s become everything to me: the mirror I stare at myself in and the other perfect half of me.
“You OK?” he whispers.
I nod.
“Jack still here?”
I shake my head. “I sent him back to the apartment.”
Jeez, why am I standing here like a fool against the door?
“Everything OK between you and Jack?”
I shrug. “Things are OK. Sort of good, actually. We’ve still got a lot to work through.”
I wish I hadn’t said that Jack and I still have a lot to work through. For some reason I now know what I have to do. Taking in a deep breath, I move across the room until I’m sitting on my knees in the space between his legs.
There is something on his face that makes me anxious and afraid. “Are you OK?” I ask.
He runs a hand through his hair and he shrugs. “I thought I was going to go out there and just find that you’d gone. No goodbye. Just gone with Jack.”
“I could never do that.”
Suddenly he pulls me into his arms and he is kissing me, kissing me passionately, all across my face, across my tears and cheeks and lips. The fierceness hits me like a tsunami, because I can feel panic and need and love in how he kisses me.
“I love you,” I whisper against the warm flesh of his neck.
“Don’t leave,” he whispers against my lips as I am carried to the bed.
I lock my mouth to his as we frantically shed our clothes, a desperate almost frenzied passion inside of me. Alan’s breath begins to quicken in response, but he tries to whisper something.
I stop him with my kisses and the twisting urgency of my body. I don’t want to talk. I want to pull him inside of me and to feel that completeness, that total loss of emptiness that I only feel with Alan.
“Love me and be good to me, Alan,” I murmur against his skin, and I know he understands what I am asking.
He lifts me and slowly lowers me onto to him, filling me completely. I moan incoherently as I let him move and guide me.
He tilts his pelvis, guiding my hips with his hands as he moves himself in and out of me. I can’t imagine not being here with Alan. We feel so right together.
I want to consume this slowly, but I can feel my body building and building, climbing higher even as I resist it. I can’t stop myself and I explode around him. He cries out in turn.
We lie as we finish, me draped across his flesh, neither of us saying anything. He holds me and I hold him, and I realize that the tears moistening my cheeks are not only from my eyes.
“I don’t want to talk about anything,” I whisper.
“Then we won’t talk.”
I rub my cheek against his chest. I kiss the flesh above the pulse in his neck. I love him so.