17. Dani
DANI
The nightmare came at three-eighteen in the morning.
I hadn't had it in fourteen months. I knew because I kept a record, in the back of a notebook I'd been keeping in a desk drawer since I was twenty-three.
A small private spreadsheet of dates. The nightmare had a pattern.
It came on the anniversary of bad days, the way certain knees ache on rain days.
It came when I was sick. It came when I'd been thinking about my father longer than my body could metabolize.
I'd been thinking about my father, more or less continuously, since Friday night at six-thirty.
I should have known it was coming.
It started the way it always started. With the hands. The hands on me from behind. The breath at the crook of my neck. The voice saying my name from inside my own skull, the real voice, the one I'd heard for the first time in eight years on a cell phone in Brynn's living room thirty hours earlier.
Dani.
I felt the hands.
Dani.
"No, please. Dad. Stop. I'm sorry."
Dani, it's me. You have to wake up.
"Noooooo."
Dani.
"Dad. I'm sorry. I won't do it again."
"Hartley."
"Ah!"
I bolted upright in the bed, panting, sweating through Jett's old practice shirt I'd pulled on at some point in the night when I'd gotten too cold.
The room was dim. The lamp was on the lowest setting, the one I hadn't noticed Jett turning back on.
I scrambled backward against the headboard, my arms up, my brain still in Tennessee, still in the kitchen, still in the part of the dream where the hands were coming.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Jett's voice. Low. Slow. Hands up.
"AH."
"Hartley. It's me. You're in my bed. You had a nightmare. I'm not going to touch you. I'm right here."
He was sitting up against the headboard about three feet from me, in sweatpants and a t-shirt, his hair a mess, his face the careful flat thing it had been on Friday night in the kitchen. He had his hands up the way a man holds his hands up to a spooked animal. Palms out. No sudden movements.
He waited. He'd clearly already been waiting.
I closed my eyes. I focused on my breath the way the therapist in Brooklyn had taught me years ago.
In through the nose for four. Hold for four.
Out through the mouth for six. I did it three times.
The room came back. The lamp. The bed. The dark windows above.
The valley below. The man across the bed with his hands up.
"Jett," I croaked.
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry."
"For what."
"For the. all of that."
"Hartley, you had a bad dream. You don't apologize for a bad dream. Are you back."
"I'm back."
"Okay."
I let the breath out in a long shaky line. I dragged my hand across my forehead. It came away soaked.
"Christ," I said.
"Yeah."
"How long."
"You started moving about a minute ago. Started talking about thirty seconds ago. I didn't try to wake you for the first twenty seconds because I didn't know if waking you would make it worse. Then you said the word sorry and I figured it was time."
He watched me. He did not move toward me. He let me come to him.
I crawled across the bed and tucked myself against his chest, and he put his arms around me very carefully, the way you hug someone who's just been through something nobody else was in the room for, and he didn't say anything.
He let me shake against him. He stroked my back through the practice shirt.
I cried in small ugly hiccupping bursts that lasted maybe a minute and then stopped.
When I'd stopped, he said, "Do you want to talk about it, or do you want me to make tea."
"Tea."
"Okay."
"And then talk about it."
"Okay."
He got up. Padded down the stairs barefoot.
I heard him in the kitchen, the kettle, the cabinet, the small competent sounds of a man who'd clearly thought about this exact possibility at some point on Saturday night.
Possibly while I slept with my hand in his under the duvet.
Possibly earlier. Possibly the very first time he walked me out of his house a week ago.
He came back up with two mugs. Handed me one. It had honey in it. The honey was unexpected.
He climbed back into the bed beside me. Kept the three feet of space. Sipped his tea.
"Okay," he said. "What do you want me to know."
I told him.
I told him in the dim warm yellow lamplight, with the tea in my hands and his body close to mine but not touching and the windows still dark and the valley still asleep below us.
The night-without-dinner that had started a train of punishments.
The spankings that became beatings. The wooden spoons.
The belt. The switches my mother made me pick off the trees in our backyard by myself the summer I was eleven.
The name-calling. The way I'd learned the difference between the names that were just names and the names that meant I was about to lose access to something.
Food. The TV. The use of my own room. The sleepover I'd been to the day before he took his belt to me at eleven.
The meals I was required to make before school and after.
The bleach he'd poured on a yellow sweater I liked the spring I turned thirteen, after I hadn't done the dishes right.
The way the bleach ate holes the size of dimes in it, and how I'd thrown it in the dumpster behind the gas station rather than let my mother see what he'd done.
I told him about my mother.
I told him about the nights I'd heard her downstairs, begging.
I told him about the day I turned eighteen and packed two duffel bags and took a Greyhound to Knoxville and then another to New York, and how my mother stood in the driveway crying and didn't stop me, and how that was the moment I understood she'd chosen him over me a long time before, and wasn't going to choose me now, and I should stop waiting for her to.
I told him about Brynn, freshman year of college. How Brynn was the first person in my life who ever looked at me and saw anything other than what my father had spent eighteen years training me to look like.
I told him about the homecoming dance, again, in different words than I'd used in the bathroom at his front step.
What I'd been doing in the months leading up to it.
What my father had done to my mother that fall, that had been worse than other things he'd done.
What I'd decided about my own life in the days after: that I was going to be the thing in the room that hurt other people first, on the theory that if I was the one doing the hurting, I wouldn't be the one being hurt.
I told him I'd picked him not because I hated him, but because he'd been kind to me in the hall once, and I'd wanted to break someone who wouldn't break me back, and he'd been the kindest person available.
That it was the worst thing I'd ever done, and that no matter how many times in the next forty years he told me he forgave me for it, I'd never fully forgive myself.
He listened.
He listened the way I'd imagined, at twenty-three when I started keeping the date spreadsheet, somebody might one day listen to all of it.
He did not interrupt.
He did not flinch.
He did not look away from my face.
The only thing his face did, the entire time, was the thing it had done on the bed an hour earlier when he saw the scars on the backs of my thighs. The contained fury. The fury that wasn't for me. The fury that was for the man I was describing.
When I finished, he set his tea on the nightstand. He took my mug out of my hands and set it next to his.
He did not say I'm sorry.
He did not say that's terrible.
He did not say I had no idea.
He said, "Thank you for telling me."
"Thank me?"
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because it's a thing you didn't have to tell me.
Because it's a thing nobody had earned by Saturday at three in the morning.
Because telling somebody what someone did to you is one of the hardest things a body can do, and you did it sitting up in a bed with a person you've known for nineteen days, and I'm thanking you because I know what that cost you, even if you don't know yet that I know it. "
I closed my eyes.
I'd been bracing.
I'd been bracing for I'm sorry and that's so awful and the standard scripts I'd heard, in pieces, the four times in my life I'd let anybody close enough to hear a portion of what I'd just told him whole.
I'd been bracing for the kind of compassionate horror that, however well-meant, always ended up being the listener processing something on me instead of with me.
He'd thanked me instead.
He'd thanked me, and I had not, in my entire life, been thanked for telling somebody about my father.
I started to cry again, very quietly, with no production around it.
He pulled me against him.
I let him.
We sat there in the dim warm yellow lamplight with the tea cooling on the nightstand and the valley still dark below the windows, and the man in the motel four hours into Hollis's overnight surveillance, and the woman in the bed crying very quietly against the chest of a man who'd thanked her for telling him about a thing she'd spent eight years training herself not to tell anyone.
I cried a long time.
I did not, this time, apologize for the crying.
That was the new thing. The next new thing in a week that had been nothing but new things.
When the crying stopped, I fell asleep against him.
I did not have another nightmare.
I slept until ten.
I woke up alone in the bed.
The lamp had been turned off. The morning light came in clean and gold through the windows above the bed. There was a glass of water on the nightstand on my side that I didn't remember being there. The sheets where Jett had been were cool. He'd been up a while.