I Hoped You Would
Summer
Life has felt like a montage of moments. Days where I’m working or cooking with Isolde or talking with Clarissa or sailing with Levi, chasing the joy, the fullness, the short and the sweet.
Adam’s chasing his dad, running away without even realizing it. If he really doesn’t realize…I can’t be sure. But he’s still moving, at least. I feel him leave in the mornings, then I feel him slip back in at night, small talk passing between us. He still reminds me he has lips that he can still sometimes press to mine before he leaves and when he comes back.
My pillow sees less tears until there are none.
I’m more present than I have been in a while. I’ve got a routine down again, one that doesn’t feel so robotic.
I’m breathing. I breathe, and breathe, then breathe again, remembering I can slow down.
I still take walks at night, but not every night, and I’m not looking for anybody but myself. Soaking in the town I fell for, as deeply as I did back then, before I fell for anybody in it, trying to find my smiles, alone, again. They’re coming in easier now, but still a bit shaded.
Levi himself makes them come in easier, and more often, while still being his own role in the shade.
He never leaves me; so many things have me thinking of him when I shouldn’t be.
When it storms, I watch the rain out the window, tracking the little rivers over the glass like I’ve tracked them over his skin. In the same way he’s done with me. . .
When I’m eating, I think of how he sneaks food from around me when he finds me cooking with his mom, chewing in victory with his warm chest only centimeters from my back, his dimple perfectly popped at my lukewarm scolding face before Isolde swats at him.
I’ll be doing dishes, turning a plate in my hand, and think of how close he places his body to mine, still, as he’s been helping me relearn the wheel of the Gilligan, so you can steal it —a tease, but he’s not going to be laughing if I actually take it for a solo spin.
He doesn’t give an inch, staying as near to me as possible when we’re together, his gaze never far from holding mine.
Those swirls of torment and wonder are never far, either.
I think of him with Adam lying beside me. What our life could’ve been like.
If I try to imagine what a life with Levi could be like, the images turn to acid in my chest.
I’m not crazy.
I wasn’t crazy then.
But I might be crazy for deciding to talk to my father, though I didn’t really decide, my mom did.
The box has been calling to me like the drumming of the Jumanji game, so I finally stampede through his door, having no choice but to take immediate control.
We halt at the same time, me just inside the door, him as he walks out from the kitchen, jolted by me, the water inside the glass he’s holding almost splashing over the side as his jaw pops open.
I wait with held breath to see him grab at his chest, groan loudly, and fall over with a dramatic thud .
I don’t get to find out if that only happens in the movies, because my father doesn’t have another heart attack.
“Well, that woke me up,” he jokes as he walks toward me.
“It’s midday,” I respond, my feet fearing more of the floor, my tone sprinkled with the judgment I learned from him, while knowing the many mental messes that can keep you in bed until noon. In his case, the physical.
“I know, but…” He sips his water. “I still get tired.”
A dusty feeling of concern settles in me. “How tired are you right now?”
“Not much now,” he assures me as a joke, his lips folded into a smile that lifts into his nose, while I’m keeping a tight pinch on the corners of my own lips. It’s a strange smile. And he’s being extra with his jokes. All of this reminding me how much I don’t know him anymore, how much there is to know.
“Worried about your old man?” he asks with another sip from his glass, and I almost deny the feeling, until he releases me from a response. “I’m fine.”
I scoff as I move past him, farther into the house, tugging up my feet like the floor is paste. “You’re not an old man.”
“They say a heart attack ages you,” he says, keeping his same open tone to my guarded one, to my pushing to see if he’ll go, then make me want to go. Which I admit I only half want to leave.
He makes a noise around another sip when I face him again. “My doctors,” he specifies. “You wanna shut them up too?”
I feel the stretch in my mouth and I pinch, pinch , before I take in the walls that try to make me that girl again.
I’m realizing I’ll always be that girl, but I’m also now the woman who takes care of her.
I might have the urge to smile with my father, because it’s not like we’ve never shared them, or shared laughs, but now that I’m near him, this time inside , I can see I’m a bulldozer. These walls can’t hold themselves to me anymore.
The next thing I realize is the subtle cool breeze along my skin.
The air conditioner is on.
My eyes travel the space we weren’t in long enough—I wasn’t—to have more good memories, as shallow as they might have been, before reconnecting with my father’s. He watches and waits for me with one hand in the pocket of his sweatpants, these ones a darker gray, close to the gray of my button down crop top.
It seems he has changed. He’s not saying one negative thing about me showing skin. Though it’s only an inch of my navel.
I shift the box in my arms, giving it a lift, and clear my throat to admit, “I need your help with this.” If there are things I won’t recognize, he’s the only one who will.
“I hoped you would,” he says, with a gesture for me to follow him as he starts toward the kitchen, but I step in front at the same time, making him the one to follow me.
I hoped you would. Like he wanted us to go through Mom’s things together, but as he had kept her to himself all those years, he was giving me the choice to do the same.
Not much of a choice, though, when he’s got to have her all along.
“Help yourself to anything that makes your stomach growl,” he tells me, meeting me at the table where I lay the box, and sit in the chair opposite the one he still sits in, instead of diagonal. He gives a glance to the empty chair that was mine, then swallows his last sips of water.
He’s saying similar things he used to say to me, but he keeps watch on me with a more genuine warmth, open face and open posture.
I just treat it as an observation and focus on the box. My mom.
“You hungry?” he prompts when I don’t respond or get back up to find some food.
“I can’t eat anything right now,” I mutter as that same sick bubbly feeling settles into my stomach and steals my appetite. And I know it was a mistake right as he shows me some of that concern I felt.
“Are you eating—”
I make a noise that cuts in. “Stop.” I eye him over the box, the bags under his lids, his crow’s feet now dented deep without his big smiles. “You didn’t once ask me that when I lived here.” When he was giving me silent treatment and leaving me alone for meals.
“Because I knew you were eating,” he says low, down at his glass, and I just sigh.
“Got any scissors?”
My father reaches for the box and rips the tape off like he has Hulk arms, the sudden sound a split in the strained air between us.
A scoffed laugh is jolted out of me, and he smiles.
Honeysuckle overwhelms my senses before I even fold back the flaps and look inside. I gasp in the scent as I pull out an old perfume bottle.
“I don’t need help with this one,” I breathe out, almost mesmerized, shaking my head at the bottle as I take a sniff.
Am I imagining it? This smell? Perfumes aren’t supposed to last this long.
But no…my mom’s smell is inside my nose, and my eyes sting over seeing her in my mind, a hazy flash of her picking me up and swinging me in her arms, then running around the yard with me. . .
“She wore that as long as I knew her. Wouldn’t touch anything else.”
I close my eyes at the love in my father’s voice, then blink them open with a big breath as I sit the bottle on the table. “That was her signature.”
He gives me another smile and I release one corner of my mouth as it lifts, with still some pinch.
We continue through the box, him letting me pull things out, then telling me stories behind the ones I question. There are lotions. Her hairbrush. More figurines. So many recipes. I voice my plans to bind them all into a book, and I agree to make him a copy when he asks.
There are ticket stubs. Napkins and coasters from different places. Her timestamps. Dates with Dad.
More pictures and paintings. Smaller ones than those still on the walls. Dad tells me how they looked in Mom’s eyes, what she said they meant to her. And my heart swells at the same time it yearns for her. It’s like she’s really here. Like I’m getting to talk to her again, to finally hear the stories I never got to.
There are clothes, some of her sundresses that look like they’d fit me now.
“You could try them on,” Dad suggests, reading my thoughts in my again mesmerized stare and trailing fingers along their fabrics.
Another gasp parts my trembling lips when I reach the bottom and pull out a baby name book.
“Ah, I got that for her but she didn’t need it. She said she’d look into your eyes when you were born and she’d know.”
I swallow hard at the returning sting to my lids, almost asking why she kept the book then, but this box is proof she kept everything she could.
“Summer,” my dad muses, gripping and shifting his hand on the glass I’d taken a break to refill for him, his stare on the box, glazed to a memory. “She said your eyes were so bright and alive. You were warm. Delicate.” His voice cracks off, and when I blink, a tear rolls down as I listen to him inhale deep to collect himself. “Full of light. She said she’d make sure you were never put out.”
He looks back up at me now with regret and apologies swirling in his welling stare. My throat squeezes at any words I’d be able to find and I just nod my head.
He swallows his emotions with a drink, then releases a laugh to continue. “She knew you’d be outgoing. And upbeat. A go-getter.”
I smile and wipe the residue of that rogue tear off my cheek, thinking how I have carried those traits inside me.
“Summer’s also humid and dry,” I note for what I carry inside me now.
The glass scrapes against the table as Dad grips it again. “I turned you into winter.”
I laugh with no humor at the familiar comment.
Summer with a winter soul, Clarissa teased me once.
“You didn’t do that,” I say low, my emphasis small, my sight blurred on my hand where it rests on one of my mom’s dresses.
“That boy—”
“Stop,” I say again, shutting down the defensive edge in his tone, that’s not edging toward the good man , but we’re not talking about either. My father’s one to talk, so he can’t talk about this.
And now we’re back to what he tried to turn me into, his hollow place in my heart he’s slowly been filling while I’ve been sitting here reopening.
“You hurt me,” I tell him, my voice stronger than I would’ve thought it’d be. “Parts of me never felt safe with you.” My hands slide into my lap in a kind of helpless way. “And I don’t know if I’m able to try to feel safe with you now.”
I don’t know if it’s just the mental state I’m in right now— no, Summer. Give this man his brownie points.
“I know,” he says, nodding, accepting them, his soft tone tightening me at the same time I lean into it. “I know what I’ve done and who I’ve been, and I’m sorry I ever made you feel that way. I’m your dad. You should always feel nothing but safe with me.”
Those words are staggered air into my lungs, and I don’t move back when he leans more toward me too.
“And I do know,” he says, with such a look of determination that keeps me open to this, still. “This is just a start.” He smiles, and I feel the release in a corner of my mouth again, no pinch this time, but a bit of narrowing in my eyes. “I’m happy you came in.”
Then he pushes up from the table, and I wrap my hands around the dress, holding to my mom between us, when he comes back holding his phone.
“Now, tell me all about everything you sent me that I never responded to so I can show you how proud I am,” he encourages me, an emphasis on the face to face, on me seeing his pride.
No excuses. He’s just being better.
So I tell him, as he reads off the texts I sent him over the years, his hollow place in my heart filling again, a small amount with each one.