Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nathan is gone in the morning.
I blink at the couch in the living room, bleary-eyed. Nathan was still asleep on it when I came back to the cottage last night.
I crept past him to the bedroom and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I didn’t even bother changing out of my
clothes.
I check my phone. No texts or missed calls. He’s just gone.
I push down the urge to go running out of the cottage again to look for him. To bang on Dina’s door to see if he’s there.
To drive over to his apartment or Cuppa Cove.
He’s not running away from me. In my heart, I know he’s not. This time, he’s not disappearing—he just needs time.
And so do I. Because there’s something else I need to do, and I can’t put it off any longer.
I brush my teeth and take a shower. Pull on fresh clothes. And then I stand in the dining room, in front of the bifold door,
and take a deep breath.
You don’t have forever, Professor MacAndrew said. So what is it you want to do?
My dad looks up from the sink as soon as I walk into the kitchen. “Morning, Harlowe. I was just about to make coffee. Would you like some?”
“Yes,” I say. “Coffee sounds great.”
He looks vaguely surprised, his eyebrows hovering above his glasses. Then he clears his throat and turns quickly to the stove,
picking up the percolator. “All right. Well, good. Would you get the coffee?”
I sidle past him and grab the bag of coffee and the milk out of the fridge. “Dad,” I say. “I need to talk to you.”
He fills the percolator with water and then steps back while I add coffee to the basket. “Is this about the thing with the
fish?”
A smile tugs at my mouth, but it feels sad. “Kind of.”
He sighs. “Look, I’m sorry I forgot about that. It’s been a while. And people’s tastes change—”
“We don’t need to talk about the fish.” I don’t want him to bring up Kendra. I don’t want him to tell me salmon is Kendra’s
favorite. If he does, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to keep going.
“Oh,” he says.
I take a breath, and I feel like it might cut me in half. “Do you remember the week you left?”
He goes very still, fingers wrapped around the handle of the percolator. So still that for a second, I wonder if he’s actually
frozen, like the cottage is having technical difficulties. Buffering like a slow internet signal.
And then he picks up the percolator, turning to the stove. His shoulders rise and he scrubs at his hair. “I do,” he says.
I was halfway through college when I got the phone call from my mom. I was sitting in the library, studying for a final, and
I had to scrape all my books and notebooks into my backpack so I could go outside and listen to her tearfully tell me that
my dad was gone.
He had told her, over breakfast that morning, that he didn’t love her anymore.
He wasn’t happy.
In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been happy.
He had all these things he’d meant to do, he told her, and instead, he had settled down and stayed in Indiana. With her. And
me. But now he needed to go. He’d been thinking about it for a long time, and he’d decided.
I sat on a bench outside the library and listened to her tell me all of this, feeling numb. And then, finally, she asked if
my dad had called me.
No, I said.
Oh, she said. I’m sure he will. He packed his suitcase and drove away. Maybe he’ll call you tonight from a hotel.
But he didn’t. I waited by my phone, my notes for my final forgotten, as it got later and later, but he didn’t call.
I talked to my mom the next day, to see how she was doing. She cried some more, and then she asked me if he had called. I
said he hadn’t.
I’m sure he’ll call today, she said.
But he didn’t.
I rub my hands on my jeans, palms too sweaty. “Why did it take you a week to call me?”
I hate the desperate, pleading note that creeps into my voice. Hate that it’s exactly how I feel.
His shoulders go higher. “It was a long time ago,” he says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m sorry it took me so long,” he says. “I . . . I had a lot to figure out. I wanted to wait to talk to you until I could . . .
gather my thoughts.”
It’s exactly what he said when he did call, after a week, to tell me he was in Alaska, of all places. He’d driven to Chicago
and bought a plane ticket to Alaska. He’d always wanted to go.
“You didn’t seem to have that many thoughts to tell me,” I say bitterly.
He scrubs at his hair again. “I wasn’t happy, Harlowe. I needed . . . I need to be happy now.”
His words slice into me like so many knives. “Is that why you invited me to Michigan?” I ask. “So you could show me how happy
you are? So you could prove to me it was worth it?”
He seems to wilt, folding in on himself. “I wanted to be with you. I’ve never invited you out before.”
My eyes sting at the corners, my throat hot. None of this is new. And I finally realize—he’s repeating things he’s already
said. This is all stuff he’s said to me in the real world, outside the cottage.
As though he can’t say anything else.
Maybe he can’t. He’s not really my dad, after all. He’s just a shadow, or a projection, or whatever the cottage can come up
with. Maybe he can’t really give me answers that I don’t have myself.
Maybe I don’t need him to.
The stinging fades from my eyes. I swallow.
“You left me,” I say. “You always talked about leaving Mom, but you also left me. You said you weren’t happy, and that means
you weren’t happy with me. I wasn’t enough for you. Sometimes I wish I knew why, and sometimes I’m afraid of what the answer
might be. And every time you pop back up—every time you show up in Boston—I let myself hope that maybe this time, you’ll remember
to take a picture of the two of us instead of showing me pictures of Kendra. I hope you’ll have more than two hours. I hope
it’ll turn out that maybe Christine and Kendra aren’t even with you—that you aren’t on your way somewhere else, and I’m not
just a brief stop on the road. That maybe for once you just came to see me. And every time I end up disappointed. I honestly
don’t know why I keep hoping. I don’t know why I still need you. I don’t know why I feel bad that I wasn’t enough, or I made
you unhappy. But here we are.”
My dad shoves his hands in his pockets and turns around to look at me.
There’s a faint coppery glow to his hair now, and it’s not just the sunlight streaming through the window over the sink.
His edges are starting to glow. The letters in Alaska on his T-shirt aren’t quite as sharp as they were a minute ago.
“Why are you telling me this?” he says.
“Because I just needed to say it.” I run a hand through my hair. “For me.”
He nods. I can see through him now, to the stove behind him, and when he turns back to the percolator, he vanishes completely.
The kitchen is empty. Finally.
I close my eyes. Let my breath out slowly. And I feel as though I’m shrugging off something heavy, something suffocating,
something I’ve grown so used to that I didn’t realize until now just how much it was dragging at me. How much it has pulled
at me for years. How much I have been trying to run from it, and never quite succeeding.
I take another slow breath, and this one feels easier. And the next one is even easier.
I turn the gas off under the percolator, changing my mind about coffee.
Sir Duke is waiting for me on the porch when I step outside. He blinks his big orange eyes, squinting in the sun.
I sit down next to him on the steps and he flops on his side, starting up that rumbling, cement-mixer purr.
I stare at my dad’s contact info on my phone screen for as long as it takes me to draw in three more deep breaths, and then
I call him.
It rings five times before it goes to voicemail. “Hi, this is Rick, leave me a message.”
I breathe out a sigh. It’s not that unusual to get my dad’s voicemail, on the few occasions I call him. He’s constantly leaving
his phone in a room and forgetting about it. And right now, that’s a relief.
“Hey, Dad,” I say. “It’s me. Sorry I haven’t returned your texts or calls.
Jackson and I broke up, and I’ve been spending the summer on Cape Cod.
My plans are kind of up in the air, so I don’t think now is a great time for a visit.
I’m—” But I pause, and change my mind, just before I say I’m sorry.
“I hope you can enjoy some time in Boston anyway, and you have a nice trip to Maine with Christine and Kendra. I’ll talk to you later. ”
And I end the call.
I don’t need to say any of the things I said in the cottage. Not now. Not yet. Maybe not ever—I don’t really know.
I said them for me. Which was what I needed to let go.
Bit by bit.
I stretch out my legs, rubbing a finger under Sir Duke’s chin. I should go over to Rika and Yasmin’s place. It’s their last
day.
But I can spend a few minutes sitting in the sun, listening to Sir Duke rumble.