28 Zara #2
I close my eyes. “There’s that word.”
“You were a child, Zae. You didn’t understand what I was trying to manage.”
I open my eyes again, staring at the wall across from me. There’s a little chip in the paint near the closet door. I’ve probably looked at it a hundred times and never noticed it until now.
“What you were trying to manage,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
“You mean her.”
“I mean everything.”
“No,” I say, and my voice comes out quieter now, which somehow feels worse. “You mean her. You were managing her feelings, her depression, her guilt, her anger, her recovery, her comfort, her pain. And I got whatever was left over, which was usually nothing unless I was being too much.”
He doesn’t answer right away. Which is fine because I don’t want him to answer too fast. Fast answers are usually lies anyway.
“I failed you,” he says finally, which I was not expecting at all.
I focus on the wall again, on that stupid paint chip that has now become the only stable thing in my life.
“I did,” he continues, and his voice sounds older than it did a minute ago. “I didn’t know how to help her and help you at the same time, and I chose wrong too many times.”
I don’t know what to do with that.
I have imagined apologies from my parents before. It’s always an angry argument, where I say everything perfectly and they finally realize they were terrible and I walk away looking amazing. But real apologies are worse. They’re messier and less satisfying.
“I’m not calling to force you to go,” he adds. “I know I don’t have that right. You made sure of that when you emancipated yourself.”
There’s that little edge underneath the apology.
It's small, but there. The reminder that he still doesn’t like the way I got myself out. He can say he failed me and still be annoyed that I stopped standing there taking it all.
“Wow,” I say, sitting down on the edge of my bed because my legs don’t feel as solid as I want them to. “You almost made it through a whole apology.”
He sighs. “Zae.”
“What? I’m giving feedback.”
“This is what I mean.”
My eyebrows lift. “Careful.”
He stops. Riley sits beside me, close enough that our knees touch, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s good at that. Being there without making me feel like I have to be grateful for it.
Dad clears his throat. “The session is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. You don’t have to decide now. I just thought you should know.”
“Does she know you’re calling me?”
“Yes.”
“Did she want you to?”
The pause is small but still enough.
I nod once, mostly to myself. “Got it.”
“She agreed to the session,” he says, like that fixes the part where she still didn’t ask for me.
“Yeah. You mentioned that.”
“I know it’s not enough.”
That shuts me up. Because it’s not enough. It will never be enough. But I didn’t expect him to know that, and now I don’t have a quick answer.
“If I go, it won’t be to make her feel better,” I say after a minute, because that’s the only thing I can say without choking on it.
“I understand.”
“No, I need you to actually hear me.” My grip tightens again, but my voice stays steadier than I feel.
“I’m not sitting in some facility room so she can feel like she checked off a healing box.
I’m not going to tell her I forgive her because there’s a therapist watching.
I’m not going to be quiet if she starts making excuses. ”
“Okay.”
“And if I leave halfway through, I leave.”
“Okay,” he repeats.
I don’t know if he means it, but he says it without arguing, so I take it. I have learned to take the smallest decent thing and not mistake it for more.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
He breathes out like he’s been holding it. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
“I know.”
“And don’t tell her I said yes. I didn’t.”
“I won’t.”
I look down at my hands. My nails are bitten shorter than they were this morning, which is annoying because I don’t remember doing that.
“I have to go.”
“Zae?”
I close my eyes. “What?”
“I am sorry.”
The words are quiet, and definitely too late.
Still, they hit something, and for a second, I hate him less than I did when I answered the phone.
“Okay,” I say.
That’s all I have. I hang up before he can say anything else.
For a moment longer, I sit there with the phone still in my hand, staring at nothing.
Riley’s desk is still there. My laundry pile is still embarrassing.
The notebook is still on the floor. Nothing actually changed, which feels wrong because I’m pretty sure something in me just got dragged across broken glass.
“You can touch me now,” I whisper.
Riley wraps her arms around me immediately, and I fold into her before I can pretend I don’t need it. I don’t cry right away. My body does that sometimes, like it has to check if we’re really doing this before it commits. Then Riley’s hand rubs between my shoulders, and I lose it.
The sound that comes out of me is ugly, and I hate that too.
I hate crying. I hate how it makes my eyes burn and my throat hurt and my nose run like my body is trying to punish me for having feelings.
Riley doesn’t pull away or tell me it’s okay when it obviously isn’t.
She just holds me, which helps more than she realizes.
I cry until my head hurts and my chest feels scraped out. Then I pull away, wiping my face with my sleeve because I’m classy and have zero tissues.
“I’m okay,” I tell her.
Riley gives me a look.
“I’m not okay,” I correct. “But I’m wearing pants and haven’t committed arson.”
“That is a very low bar.”
“Still cleared it.”
“Barely.”
“Don’t be jealous of my progress.”
She smiles, but it’s small and careful, like she doesn't want to let me off easy. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe.”
“Also okay.”
“I don’t know.”
“That one too.”
I let out a shaky breath and look down at my phone. It is still unlocked from the call, and before I can make a smart choice, I open Cass’ contact.
His picture fills the screen. He hates that picture.
I took it in his car while he was glaring at a gas pump because it put a hold on his card and he acted like the machine had personally disrespected him.
His hair is falling into his forehead, his mouth is flat, and his eyebrows are doing that angry little pull that makes him look like he’s about to start a fight with capitalism.
It is one of my favorite pictures of him.
My thumb hovers over the call button.
I want him.
Not in the simple way, or even in the sexy way, though that part is always hanging around being unhelpful.
I want his voice. I want his hand on the back of my neck.
I want his arms around me as he reminds me I’m not the burden my mother made me out to be.
I want him mad for me because being mad for myself is exhausting.
I want him sitting beside me so the room doesn’t feel like it has too much space in it.
Riley is quiet beside me. She doesn’t tell me not to call him, which almost makes me want to call him more.
But I don’t. Because as much as I need Cass in my life, this call with my dad is mine.
My mother is mine. The facility is mine.
The girl I was at fifteen, standing there with a phone in her hand and fear sitting so high in her throat she couldn’t swallow, is mine too.
Cass can’t be the only reason I stand. I lock the phone and set it facedown on the bed.
Riley lets out a slow breath. “Was that good or bad?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Fair.”
I pick up my notebook from the floor and flip to a clean page.
For a while, I just stare at it, pen in hand, waiting for my brain to do something other than replay what my dad said in that tired voice.
I don’t know if I believe him. I don’t know if believing him matters.
I don’t know if going to the facility will help me or make me want to peel my skin off and start over.
I write one sentence anyway.
I can survive things.
It looks too small for how hard it is. So I write another underneath it.
I want Cass because I love him, not because I disappear without him.
My throat tightens again, but this ache feels different from the one before. Still bad, obviously. I’m not suddenly healed because I wrote two sentences in a notebook. If emotional growth were that easy, I would buy better pens. But it feels true.
I think about Cass laying in bed with me after my night terror, not saving me, not fixing me, just there, holding me.
I think about the way he gets annoyed when I don’t eat and then buys something “extra” because he knows I’ll steal it before I admit I’m hungry.
I think about him calling me Sunshine like I really am the light in his life.
I don’t love Cass because he rescues me.
I love him because when things get bad, he doesn’t look at me like I’m hard to love.
I love him because he pretends to hate my jokes and then remembers all of them.
I love him because his first instinct is to take care of people and his second is to act annoyed about it.
I love him because he is Cass. He’s not medicine, or proof that I matter. He’s just Cass, and I want him with me even when I can stand on my own.
When I see Cass again, I want to tell him that. I want to tell him he makes me feel safer. He might believe he’s not safe for me, but it’s a lie made of his fears. I want to tell him I can handle my own ghosts, but that doesn’t mean I want to stand alone in every haunted room.
I close the notebook and press it to my chest.
“Okay,” I whisper.
Riley looks at me. “Okay?”
I nod, breathing through the ache until it settles enough to hold.
“Okay.”