14. Xander #2
Gideon is quiet. Processing. The quiet of a man who has been asked a question that matters and is not going to waste the answer.
“This is about Penny.”
“It’s about Penny and it’s about everything.
I watch Iz with her and it—” My voice catches.
The pain is physical—chest-level, the particular ache of a boy watching another boy do the thing he wants to do and doing it effortlessly.
“It kills me, G. He’s up there right now.
In her room. Behind a closed door. And he’s kind to her.
He holds her face like she’s precious. He asks before he touches her.
He makes her feel safe. And I watch it and I want to be that and I don’t know how because nobody ever showed me what that looks like.
The only model I have is a man who put his wife in a home and hit his son and married a replacement before the body was cold. ”
Gideon shifts. I can see the discomfort—not because the conversation is inappropriate, but because this is his daughter.
His Penny. And I’m sitting on his basement floor describing how another boy is in her bedroom and how I want to be the one in there and the particular intimacy of this conversation is pushing against the walls of what a father is equipped to discuss with the boy who loves his daughter.
But he doesn’t retreat. Because Gideon MacHale is the kind of man who sits in discomfort when the person across from him needs him to.
“I’m going to tell you something that Darla can’t help you with,” he says.
“Because Darla is a doctor. She can help you with the addiction, the trauma, the mental health. She’s brilliant at it.
But being a good man—being a good partner—that’s not clinical.
That’s learned. From watching. From practice.
From getting it wrong and trying again.”
He sits on an overturned bucket. Eye level with me now. Man to man. Father to son.
“First: a good man shows up. Not when it’s convenient. Not when the mood strikes. Every day. In the boring moments. In the ugly moments. In the moments when the girl you love is crying and you can’t fix it and all you can do is sit there and be present. Showing up is eighty percent of it.”
“Second: a good man listens more than he talks. Not the kind of listening where you’re waiting for your turn to speak.
The kind where you’re actually hearing what she’s saying—and hearing what she’s not saying.
Alice tells me more in her silences than in her words.
Took me five years to learn that language. ”
“Third—and this is the one that’s going to be hardest for you, Xander.
” He leans forward. “A good man asks. Every time. Not because he has to. Because he wants to. Because the asking is the respect, and the respect is the love. You don’t take.
You don’t assume. You ask. And if she says no, you say ‘okay’ and you mean it and you don’t punish her for it. Can you do that?”
The question hangs. I think about the closet. About the things I took without asking. About the damage of a boy who was never taught that consent is not the absence of “no” but the presence of “yes.”
“I want to learn. I’m asking you—man to man—to help me learn. Because you’re the only good father and good husband I’ve ever known. And if I’m going to become someone worthy of your daughter, I need a model that isn’t Lucian Anderson.”
Gideon looks at me for a long time. His eyes wet. Not with sadness—with the emotion of a man who has just been told he is someone’s definition of a good man, and the weight of that is both an honor and a responsibility he takes seriously.
“You got it, kid. I’m here. Whatever you need. Whenever you need it. That’s what fathers do.” He stands. Picks up the drill. Goes back to the shelves. “Now sort the reds. Alice uses a lot of red.”
And because Gideon MacHale is Gideon MacHale, he adds: “And Xander?”
“Yeah?”
“When Iz leaves tonight, don’t go to her room. Give her space. Being a good man starts with the things you don’t do.”
I nod. Sort the reds. And upstairs, through the ceiling, I can hear the faint sound of laughter from a bedroom I’m choosing not to enter.
The things you don’t do. The doors you don’t open. The rooms you don’t enter. The hands you keep at your sides. Being a good man starts with the things you don’t do.
I keep my promise for four hours.
Iz leaves at ten. I hear the front door. The car. The headlights sweeping across my bedroom ceiling. Gone. I stay in the guest room. I read Darla’s folder. I do the breathing exercises. I press my hand to the wall and don’t cross the hall. Gideon’s voice in my head: the things you don’t do.
But at two a.m., the things I don’t do become impossible. Because Penny is awake. And she’s not okay.
The sound starts as pacing—the back-and-forth rhythm on hardwood that I recognize because I’ve done it.
The three a.m. circuits when the craving is a living thing clawing inside your ribs.
Then drawers—opening, closing, searching for the thing Alice already cleaned out.
Then the cry—not loud, not performative.
The guttural, animal sound of a body in withdrawal being denied the only thing it knows how to want.
I’m across the hall. Hand on the knob. Gideon’s voice: the things you don’t do.
The crying gets louder. A crash—something thrown. Something breaking.
Fuck it.
I open the door and Penny is standing in the middle of her room.
Just a t-shirt—oversized, hanging to mid-thigh, the collar slipped off one shoulder.
Barefoot. Her hair is wild—down, tangled, the particular chaos of a girl who has been pulling at it for hours.
Her makeup is still on from the day—mascara tracking black rivers down her cheeks, eyeliner smudged into dark hollows around her eyes.
She looks feral. Unhinged. The beauty of a girl who has come completely undone—raw, wrecked, no performance left, just the animal underneath the person.
Her phone is in her hand. Screen lit. Reece’s contact open.
“Don’t.”
She spins. Sees me. Her face cycles through three expressions in one second: relief, fury, desperation.
“Get out of my room, Xander!”
I cross the room. Take the phone from her hand. She lunges for it—fingernails scraping my forearm, drawing thin lines of red. I hold it above her head and I know it’s a shit move but Penny calling Reece at two a.m. is a five-alarm fire that doesn’t respond to politeness.
“GIVE ME MY FUCKING PHONE!”
She punches my chest. Closed fist this time. Hard. The force of a girl who learned how to throw a punch from watching me fight and is applying the lesson with the desperate energy of withdrawal. Again. Again. My sternum absorbs the impact. My ribs absorb the next one.
“I need them, Xander! I need them to breathe! I can’t sleep—I can’t stop seeing it—I can’t make the carousel stop!”
She hits me. Palms, fists, elbows. I stand there and take it.
Every blow. The way I took Danny’s punches at the pool house.
Because this is owed. Because the girl hitting me is the girl I helped put in a treehouse with pills, and if she needs to use my body as a punching bag to get through the next hour without calling Reece, then my body is available.
She collapses. Not slowly—all at once. Gravity taking over when the rage runs out.
She crumples against me, her forehead on my chest, her fists still clenched but no longer swinging.
The crying takes over—loud, ugly, gasping.
The particular sound of a human being who has reached the bottom of what she can endure and is discovering that the bottom has a basement.
“I can’t do this, X.” Muffled. Soaked into my shirt.
“I can’t feel all of this without the pills.
The memories—Jon’s face. Alastair’s hands.
The needle. Cat screaming through the wall.
Garrett when I was thirteen. Kole’s phone above me.
Reece’s fingers on my collarbone. Every man who has ever touched me without asking.
They’re all in my head and they won’t leave and I want to die, Xander. I want to fucking die.”
I hold her. Arms around her. My hands on her back, her hair, the move of a boy trying to hold a girl together with his body because words aren’t enough.
“You can do this, Penny. You survived the treehouse. You survived the basement. You’re in it right now—this craving, this minute—and you’re still standing.”
She shoves away. The grief converting to fury at the speed of withdrawal. “Don’t fucking preach to me! You want to talk about trauma? Let’s have a contest. Who’s more fucked up, Xander?”
“That’s not what I’m—”
“You always do this! You take everybody’s problems and carry them because it makes you feel like a hero.
But nobody asked you to! Nobody asked you to beat Garrett unconscious.
Nobody asked you to fight for Reece. You chose that because being the protector is easier than being the person who needs protection. ”
The accuracy stops me cold. She’s been right about me since we were seven.
“Yeah. I know.” Quiet. “I know I do that. But I’m trying—”
“Trying to what? You don’t let anybody in! Not the boys. Not Darla. Not me. You keep me in the dark because it’s the only place you know how to handle me. The closet. The hallway at night. The alcove. I’m your dirty secret, Xander. That’s all I’ve ever been.”
She’s pacing now. The t-shirt swaying with each turn.
Mascara streaking. Hair wild. The particular energy of a girl who is going to say the thing that will cause maximum damage because withdrawal has stripped every filter and the only tool she has left is her words and she is going to use them like knives.
“Iz doesn’t keep me in the dark.”
The name. The detonator.