11. Sienna
11
SIENNA
My father’s apartment isn’t much bigger than mine, but it’s in an area of Queens that I don’t know well, which, by my erratic thinking, will hopefully mean that I’ll be harder to track down.
He caught me off-guard outside the Wraith. He couldn’t have timed his exit any better if he tried; I literally collided with him as I was running away from Seamus.
“Hey, sweetheart.” He instinctively grabbed my arms to keep me on my feet and dropped them when I pulled away from him. “What are you doing here?”
I don’t remember what I said. I probably wasn’t making much sense at the time, and before I knew it, we were climbing into the back of a taxi and heading away from Manhattan.
It isn’t until I’m standing in his living room, watching him pick his laundry up off the floor and trying to hide some empty liquor bottles, that I realize how rough he looks. His face is sagging, his skin gray. His eyes are bulging, and when he turns to face me with an armful of dirty clothes, I can see that the whites have been overtaken by swarming red lines.
“I wasn’t expecting visitors.”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tidy up on my account.”
I shouldn’t be here. I understand the mixed signals I’m giving him: one moment I’m telling him I want nothing to do with him, and the next I’m hopping into a cab and coming home for breakfast. But despite the grubby carpet, and the scorch marks on the arms of the threadbare sofa, I kinda feel like I’m on neutral territory.
At least here I don’t have to think about Kyle or Nick. So long as I make it clear to my father that I just need some breathing space, he won’t get ideas that we’re rekindling our non-existent father-daughter relationship.
“Don’t be silly, sweetheart.” He stops in the middle of the room and stares at me as if he can’t remember how I got here. “I never thought… Well, I hoped that one day you’d come to visit me. You’ve made an old man very happy.”
Fuck!
“Sit down, Sienna. I’ll make coffee. I don’t know about you, but I could do with some. It’s only instant. Not sure if you’ve got a taste for the expensive stuff.”
He talks to me from the open-plan kitchen. I’ve no idea where he deposited the laundry and bottles, but he’s no longer holding them.
“Instant will be fine.”
I check out the sofa cushions. They’re smeared with something that was probably greasy and has now left dirty gray smudges in the weave of the fabric. I find a clean spot and sit down still wearing my coat. I feel uncomfortable standing in the middle of the room like I don’t belong here.
I don’t belong here. But I’m trying to think of it as a haven. A harbor in the storm. For now. Just while I get my head around what Kyle told me.
I realize as I watch my father hunched over the kettle on the counter, spooning coffee granules into two mugs, that when Kyle was talking about his father, I automatically confused the story with my own. His father almost killed his mom. I watched this man hurt my mom more times than I could count.
But they’re not the same person.
I keep this in mind as he comes into the living room and hands me a cup of coffee that has too much cream in it. I cradle it in both hands, and stare at the milky swirls on the surface of the liquid.
“You want to tell me why you were in such a hurry this morning?” He eases himself into an armchair and slurps his drink.
“Not sure I know where to start.”
“It’s easy. Start at the beginning.” He wipes his nose on the back of his hand and sniffs loudly. “Sorry. I’m a fucking idiot, I know. The beginning is the last thing you want to remember.”
I’m not reliving the car accident for him. I’m not telling him about Kyle or Nick either; I might as well sit here and spill my heart onto the floor and let him sift through the pieces. No. He doesn’t get to know everything, especially not the vulnerable parts.
“I need to find somewhere to live.”
Last night, this was a disaster. A bomb thrown into the middle of a chaotic bonfire, just to shake things up a bit and see which way the sparks would fly. This morning, it feels like the easy part. There must be plenty of affordable apartments out there even if their location isn’t exactly desirable; I’ve already made up my mind not to stay at the Wraith.
Call it pride. Call it stubbornness. Whatever.
I’m already indebted to Caleb and Victoria for the gallery. I’m not sure how much more debt I can shoulder before I crack beneath the weight.
“Why? What have you done?”
“Nothing.”
Maybe if I was thinking straight, I’d have considered the oddness of the question. But I’m not, and it fades into insignificance compared to everything else that is going on in my life.
“My time is up.” I shrug.
“Lucky for you, I came along when I did then.”
I stare at him blankly.
“I have a spare room. You can stay here, sweetheart.” He guzzles his coffee in one go and licks the dregs from his upper lip.
“I…” My pulse is racing. I walked straight into this one, and I need to dig my way out of it before it’s too late. “No, I can’t. Thank you, but?—”
“Why can’t you?” He scratches his eyebrow like I gave him a conundrum to solve rather than telling him I can’t use his spare room.
“I just can’t.”
I wish I could muster some conviction in my voice, but I’m still battling the notion that someone is having me followed. I’ve been abducted once already since Victoria met Caleb. How do people like the Murrays live with this constant threat of danger? Or do they become anesthetized to it over time? And this is the world that Victoria has brought baby Holly into.
“It wouldn’t work,” I add as an afterthought.
Because you tried to strangle my mom to death and then walked out on us.
“We want to get to know each other.” The scratching shifts to his left ear.
I don’t remind him that he wants to get to know me , and that this is one of those instances where it doesn’t work both ways.
“I can’t think of a better way, can you?” He raises a crooked eyebrow in my direction.
I feel the energy draining from me as if a plug has been pulled. “There’s too much going on right now. It wouldn’t be right. I need to handle this myself.”
He sits forward in his seat. “You said you were worried about being followed, sweetheart. That’s not the kind of situation I want my baby girl to handle alone. Not while I still have breath in my body.”
Hysterical laughter gurgles inside my chest. He’s serious, and I’m starting to wonder if he’s been in a drug-induced coma for the past twenty years.
“There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Have you seen me?” He stands up and straightens to his full, unimpressive height. He’d probably be as tall as Kyle if his shoulders weren’t quite so bowed, but he speaks with the confidence of Andre the Giant. “They’ll have to get through me first.”
“I don’t even know who they are.”
“Does it matter? I don’t see anyone else stepping up to help my little girl.”
I almost chuckle at this. I wonder what he’d say if he knew that Nick was the first to offer me his spare room, while there’s an executive suite with my name on it at the Wraith.
I know that Kyle lives in the building. Victoria and Caleb live there too with their baby daughter. So, why do I feel less exposed here in this dingy Queens apartment?
“Think about it while I make another coffee.” He peers at the cooling liquid in my cup. “You haven’t touched yours.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
He doesn’t wait around. While the kettle chugs to life in the kitchen, his phone rings. He checks the caller ID on the screen, glances at me, and says, “I have to take this, sweetheart. Make yourself at home.”
I expect him to go into the bedroom and shut the door, but instead, he goes outside and leaves me alone in the apartment.
While he’s gone, I look around the living space. The walls were probably magnolia once upon a time, or ivory, or Chantilly lace: a pretty color with a pretty name. A generic painting hangs slightly askew on one wall, a country scene with haystacks and an old-fashioned horse and cart in the foreground. The shelves are home to a tiny vase containing some dusty silk flowers, a plastic clock showing the wrong time, and a book with a cracked spine, The Richest Man in Babylon . It’s the only personal object in the entire apartment.
I hear the key turn in the lock.
“Sorry about that, sweetheart.” He drops his phone back into his pocket. “So, when do you want to move in?”
“I don’t know…” I stand up. “I should get to work.”
“Have you got appointments scheduled for today?”
“No, but I?—”
“That’s settled then. Look, stay here today. I’ll leave you alone, I promise. We can go and pick up some of your stuff later, see how you feel in the morning. Maybe then, you’ll feel comfortable enough to tell me what’s going on.”
“Just for today,” I find myself saying without fully considering the implications of spending twenty-four hours in my father’s company.
Perhaps it’s the view from the window of concrete apartment blocks. Or the sound of cars rumbling past outside. Or the Reggae music blasting from a neighbor’s stereo. Regular noises; regular lives. People running errands, preparing for their shift at work, and wondering what to cook for dinner.
I take off my coat and make myself a black coffee.
True to his word my father does leave me alone.
He showers and then disappears into his room. Within minutes, his snores are loud enough to rattle the walls.
I roll up my sleeves and clean the kitchen. I can’t sit in the living room doing nothing all day, and cleaning is therapeutic. I clear my head and convince myself that twenty-four hours will give Nick and Kyle sufficient time to back off. I don’t know if Seamus followed me here; I haven’t checked outside for fear I’ll find another jogger running back and forth and a car with tinted windows parked up on the curb. I’m hoping that if he did, he’ll report back to Kyle that I’m with my father.
This is the scariest part: everyone— Kyle and Nick —seem to have more information at their fingertips than should be legal. The fact that I haven’t seen a laptop or tablet in my father’s apartment is some small consolation.
Later that afternoon, we exit the building via the back way and take a taxi to my apartment. My father waits outside while I hastily pack a bag and then we go straight back and order a pizza takeout. We eat in front of the TV, a game show I’ve never watched before. My father guesses the answers and gets them wrong and then shakes his head every time I guess correctly.
“How did my little girl get to be so clever, huh?”
“I worked hard at school.”
The comment settles between us like a line that says DO NOT CROSS. We’ve deliberately skirted around the past, trying to keep this situation as normal as possible, but I guess it’s unavoidable.
“Your mom must’ve been so proud of you.” There are tears in his eyes again, and this time they almost seem genuine. Almost.
“She was.” I fold stringy cheese into my mouth and wipe grease from my chin with a paper napkin.
“I wish I’d gotten to tell her how sorry I was.”
Deep breath. “Why didn’t you?”
“I waited too long.” He bites off half a slice of pizza. “Then, there never seemed to be a right time, and I thought it best to leave your mom in peace.”
“What about me?”
“You were better off with your mom. I wasn’t in a good place, sweetheart. You didn’t need me walking back into your life with all the shit that was following me around.”
He replaces the lid on his empty pizza box and rises. “I’ve got to go out. Keep the door locked, and don’t wait up for me.”
He dumps the box on the kitchen counter and grabs his keys.
“Where are you going?”
“To see a man about a dog.”
The door closes behind him, and he locks me inside.
I can’t sleep. The bed is uncomfortable, my feet feel like blocks of ice, and I can’t figure out how to turn the heating on. And my father isn’t home.
I shouldn’t be concerned about him, but it feels wrong that he asked me to stay when he knew he wasn’t going to be here. He promised to look out for me—were they just words to him? A means to an end to convince me to stay? Or do the lies trip off his tongue so easily that he doesn’t bother to keep track of them and follow through with actions?
Pulling on an extra pair of socks, I wrap my coat around me and wander through to the kitchen. I boil the kettle and make a cup of coffee to keep me warm; sleep is eluding me anyway, so the caffeine won’t make any difference.
Back in my father’s spare room, I sit on the bed with the pillows propped up behind me and power up my phone. On my father’s advice, I switched it off when I arrived so that I couldn’t be tracked, but thinking about it now, even with my foggy brain cells, I’m sure that cell phones can be traced by their most recent activity.
I’ve had three missed calls and twenty-seven messages from Kyle.
Victoria tried calling six times; no doubt Kyle alerted her to my falling off the radar. I open her last message: Si, I’m worried about you. Call me!
Nothing from Nick.
I shouldn’t be disappointed. Didn’t I send a private message to the universe requesting that they both leave me alone? But it leaves me with a sense of uneasiness, nonetheless. He has texted me relentlessly since the gallery opening, turning up unannounced to take me to lunch, rocking up at my apartment with flowers.
And then silence.
I check the time on my phone. 04:57. I can’t call Victoria in the middle of the night, and I already know what she’ll say when she finds out where I am: “What the fuck, Si! Are you insane?”
I hear a crash from somewhere in the apartment, and my heart starts racing.
Fuck!
Hands trembling, I place the cup of coffee on the nightstand, and tiptoe across the room to the door. My blood is gushing in my ears so loudly I can’t hear anything else. Then, a dull thump reaches me, closely followed by, “Shh.”
I peer around the room for something I can use as a weapon, and my gaze settles on a length of curtain pole propped up against the corner of the opposite wall. I grab it quickly and go back to the door, opening it a crack, barely wide enough to allow the cool air of the apartment to brush my face.
All I can see is the dingy darkness of the hallway. Whoever it is, they haven’t switched the lights on, which means they don’t want to be seen. My mind latches on to the man in black loitering outside the gallery, and the car with the tinted windows parked outside my apartment. They know I’m alone.
Where the fuck is my father when I need him?
I lean back against the door. I wish I’d gone home, but there’s no point regretting it now. I have two choices: I wait for them to find me, or I try to catch them off-guard and use the element of surprise against them first.
My pulse is galloping. My internal temperature has gone through the roof. But I don’t consider the consequences of what I’m about to do.
I open the door and peep through again.
Nothing.
I’m about to fling the door wide open and race along the dingy hallway yelling at the top of my lungs when my father stumbles out of the kitchen with a pint glass of water in one hand and practically falls through his bedroom door.
I don’t move. I stare at the closed door until my eyes water. I’m still wielding the curtain pole in my hands like a lightsaber, waiting for him to re-emerge or for someone else to pounce on me from the shadows. But nothing happens.
There was no intruder. No man in black with a pistol in his pocket. No pretend jogger wearing a black suit under his sweatpants.
My father had clearly been drinking. He didn’t even notice me with a metal pole in my hand, and I can already hear him snoring.
I go back into my room and close the door. I drag the nightstand in front of it—it won’t stop anyone from getting in, but it will at least make a noise if someone tries to open the door. Then I sit upright in bed, drink my coffee, and wait for morning to come.
I play Candy Crush Saga on my phone until my eyes feel sore.
I scroll through social media.
I avoid reading Kyle’s messages; I don’t have the bandwidth for them while I’m still in fight-or-flight mode. They’ll have to wait until daylight at least.
My eyes feel gritty when I climb out of bed, shower, and make coffee. I find an old radio and turn the music up loud. I eat a slice of leftover pizza, cold, because I’m running on empty, but it sticks in my throat and makes me feel nauseous.
I want to get out of here, go to the gallery, immerse myself in paint and cleanse myself of the past twenty-four hours. But I’m not leaving until I’ve spoken to my father.
It’s almost lunchtime when he eventually emerges from his room like a mole burrowing out from its underground tunnel. He wanders into the kitchen scratching his head and yawning loudly.
“Morning, sweetheart.” He refills his glass with water from the cold tap.
“Where were you last night?”
He tilts his head back and drains the glass without coming up for air. “I met up with some friends.” He burps loudly.
“I thought you were an intruder.”
He blinks at me slowly. “You’re safe here, sweetheart. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you; I told you that.”
“But you weren’t here. I couldn’t sleep. So, when I heard a noise, I thought someone had broken in.”
“Now, you’re being paranoid.” He opens a cabinet, pulls out a loaf of bread, and sticks two slices into the toaster.
“Stop being so fucking paranoid! You’re the reason I don’t come home because I can’t deal with the fucking interrogation!”
The memory flashes into my head, and it’s so vivid it takes my breath away. I’ve never thought of it before. It must’ve been buried beneath layers of happy memories that I made with my mom before she died, but now that it’s there, I can’t shake it off.
That’s what he used to say to my mom. Whenever they had a fight, he’d accuse her of being paranoid, like she was the one in the wrong.
“I’m not being paranoid.” I keep my voice calm. “You didn’t come home till 5 a.m. I thought someone had broken in.”
“What are you talking about, sweetheart?” He’s holding a tub of spread from the fridge in front of him. “I was home just after midnight.”
“No. I made a coffee and checked my phone. I was waiting for you to come home. You went into the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and went to bed.”
“I always take a glass of water to bed with me. But I can assure you that I was home a little after midnight. I peeped into your room, and you were sound asleep, so I didn’t wake you. You must’ve heard me when I got up in the night because I was thirsty.”
The toaster pings, and he catches the slices of bread as they pop out. He turns his back on me to spread the butter.
I’m confused. I was awake all night and I didn’t hear him come in. And I’m positive that I’d have heard him open my bedroom door.
“I didn’t sleep.” I’m frantically trying to recall if I did doze off or not. “My brain wouldn’t switch off.”
He grins at me from over his shoulder. “Next time, I’ll record your snoring.”
“I don’t snore.”
“I’ve got news for you, sweetheart: you do.”
I’m too tired to argue with him. I know what I heard, and I know what I saw, but now I’m questioning whether he’s telling the truth, and I did maybe doze off for a while without even realizing.
“I’m going to the gallery.” I grab my purse.
“Wait for me to finish my breakfast. I’ll come with you.”