Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Jack
"I'll be downstairs," I said. "Anything you need, just call me."
Lily looked up at me from the pillow. She'd gotten into bed without being asked, pulled the blankets up to her chin, and lay there with the rabbit tucked against her side like she was trying to take up as little space as possible.
I knew that posture. I'd worn it at her age, in a house that ran hot and cold depending on the day. But Lily had never had to learn it. Cassie had made sure of it.
Which meant the smallness was new. Which meant it was grief, not habit.
I didn't know which was worse.
"Okay," she said.
I left the door half open and the hall light on and came downstairs.
The house was quiet.
Not empty—just settled, holding its breath.
I stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment.
Lily's backpack was on the floor where she'd dropped it when we'd come in.
She hadn't said much on the drive from the hospital.
Hadn't said much getting out of the car, or coming through the front door, or moving through the rooms of her own house like she was visiting somewhere she used to know.
She'd stopped in the living room doorway for a long moment, looking at the coloring book on the table, the scattered crayons.
Then she'd gone upstairs without a word and I'd followed and that was that.
I didn't know if that was okay. I didn't know if any of this was okay. That was the thing I kept running up against—I had no idea what I was doing, and there was nobody left to ask.
I pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.
What I knew about raising children was nothing.
Less than nothing—I had an example and it was the wrong one.
I knew how to pack a bag in eight minutes.
I knew how to work a twelve-hour shift on four hours of sleep and a cup of bad coffee.
I knew how to be alone, how to move through places without leaving a mark, how to make myself useful to people who'd forget me in six months and not mind that.
None of that was going to help the girl upstairs.
I pushed back from the table and stood there and didn't know what to do with myself.
The kitchen felt smaller than it had that afternoon. The walls closer. I could hear the house breathing around me, the fridge hum, the tick of something cooling somewhere, all the small sounds of a life I'd walked into without an invitation and was now supposed to keep running.
My father's voice arrived the way it always did.
Life does the math eventually. You end up where you end up.
I pressed my hands flat on the table.
The thing about my father's voice was that it never shouted.
It didn't need to. It just settled in, low and even, and waited for you to run out of arguments.
And standing in that kitchen at eleven o'clock at night with a grieving five-year-old asleep upstairs and no idea what I was doing, I was running out fast.
What if he was right? What if I got six months in and the thing that had been coiled up in me my whole life finally came loose? What if I looked up one day and saw it—the way her shoulders moved when I came into a room, that small involuntary brace—and knew I'd done it, same as him, just slower?
The liquor cabinet was above the fridge. That was where Cassie had always kept it—muscle memory from a dozen visits, the layout of this kitchen burned in without trying. I knew the door was slightly warped and needed a tug to open.
I was standing in front of it before I'd decided to move.
My heart was going. That was the thing I hadn't expected—not the wanting exactly, but the pull of it, the sweet dumb promise of a couple of hours where the voice went quiet and the walls went back to their normal distance and I didn't have to know what I was doing.
I hadn't felt it in years. I'd thought I was past it.
Turns out past it and over it were two different things, and I'd been confusing them for a long time.
I stood there with my hand on the cabinet door.
Upstairs, something shifted. The small sound of Lily turning over in bed, the creak of the mattress, then nothing.
I kept seeing her face when she'd walked through the front door—the way she'd stopped in the living room and looked at the coloring book on the table like it was a message from a world that didn't exist anymore. And what she'd said in the car, quiet, looking out the window.
Are you going to stay?
Just that. Not is it going to be okay or what's going to happen—just whether I was going to be there. Like that was the only variable that mattered. Like she'd already decided, on the basis of approximately nothing, that I was the thing standing between her and the rest of it.
I opened the cabinet.
Whiskey, half a bottle. Wine, two reds. Something clear I didn't examine. I took them out one by one and lined them up on the counter, and then I unscrewed the first cap and poured it down the sink.
I wasn't an alcoholic. That wasn't what this was.
This was a man who knew the shape of his own weaknesses well enough to know when to get them out of the house.
I'd come too far and lost too much and there was a kid upstairs with a one-eyed rabbit who had asked if I was going to be there, and I was not—I was not—going to be the thing that let her down.
I poured the rest of them out. Rinsed the bottles. Put them in the recycling bin under the sink, one by one, quietly, so as not to wake her.
Then I stood at the sink for a moment with the water running.
My father had never done that. Hadn't seen the edge coming, or had seen it and not cared, or had cared and looked away. I didn't know which. It didn't matter anymore.
I dried my hands. Found a notepad in the kitchen drawer—Cassie's, a pen clipped to the cover—and sat back down at the table.
At the top of the page I wrote: Things to sort. Then I started writing.
Attorney.
Guardianship timeline.
Job—mechanic, ask around.
School—when does term start?
Doctor, dentist—find Cassie's records.
Food shop.
Fix the porch step.
Line after line. The list grew and I let it, one problem at a time, each one smaller than the fear that had been sitting on my chest an hour ago.
At some point I looked up.
The coloring book was still on the table where Lily had left it that morning—or last week, or whenever the last normal day had been. A box of crayons next to it, lid open, half of them missing or worn to stubs.
I looked at the list. Added one more line at the bottom.
Get more crayons.