Staircase #3
“Right,” she said, her voice dripping with that gentle irony she used when she knew I was lying to myself. “The urgent, weekend-ruining paperwork.”
She reached over and turned the music back up, an old Fleetwood Mac track filling the small cabin of her sedan. I didn’t protest this time. I just watched the mile markers count down, twenty, nineteen, eighteen, each one dragging me closer to the house with the flickering lights.
When we reached the final mile, the regret of my choice to come started to kick in.
Zane was right, my mind returning to his words from this morning.
That town was never good to you. And, in a way, he was downplaying the truth.
Not only was the town never good to me, but it had tried to kill me.
Over, and over again. That is what made my chest start to hurt.
It wasn’t just the ghosts that scared me.
I associated West Bridge with death. My mom, Henry, Jax. Almost me.
I closed my eyes, but instead of hiding these feelings in the places of my mind I never visit, I breathed through my nose.
Three times, slowly. Three times, quickly.
I reached my hands to the door beside me, concentrating on the way the warm plastic felt on my fingertips.
I silently listed four other things I could feel.
The seat on my back, seatbelt on hip, sun on my skin, my phone against my leg.
I counted to ten. I counted to ten again.
I opened my eyes, my chest did not hurt, and I could breathe again.
Therapy, I thought. It works. Sometimes.
The tires groaned against the gravel as Cassidy pulled into my dad’s driveway. She cut the engine, the sudden absence of the music leaving a ringing silence in my ears. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice dropping all its highway energy. She was looking at me in a way that felt personal.
“Yeah,” I said. The plastic of the armrest was still warm under my fingertips. “I’m good. Go see your mom. Eat some stolen pantry food for me.”
“Eleven out of ten on the recovery,” she smiled, but her eyes stayed soft. “I’ll be back by four. If you need it, text me the code word and I will stage an emergency.”
“Deal.” I committed to her conspiracy, remembering the time we dubbed rubber-duck as the sacred word.
I grabbed my coffee, stepping out into the heavy noon air of West Bridge.
The house looked the same, a colonial that had always been too big for three people, sealed two, and was now an ocean for one.
When I let myself in through the front door, the first thing I noticed was the quiet.
It was not the tense, suffocating quiet from high school; it was something else.
Slower. My dad was sitting at the kitchen island, a folder of legal documents open in front of him.
He didn’t jump when the wooden door banged shut behind me.
He just looked up, his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose, and offered a small, unhurried smile.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. His voice was lower than I remembered, or maybe just less sharp. The word sweetheart was new, too. It landed strange in my ears, but I left it untouched. It made me wary. “You made good time.”
“Cassidy drives like she’s trying to beat a personal record,” I said, dropping my bag onto the entryway chair and walking into the kitchen.
He didn’t get up right away to grab my bag or make himself busy over the lunch he had promised.
Usually, Tom Garcia dealt with discomfort by moving.
He would be pacing, adjusting the blinds, opening, and closing the refrigerator just to have something to do with his hands.
Trying to fill the awkward silence that was permanent between us.
I noted all these things, and I hated that I had to have a pad and paper ready for a simple interaction with my own father.
“Good of her to bring you,” he said, his thumb slowly tracing the edge of a manila folder. “I put some turkey sandwiches in the fridge. Mustard is on the door.”
“Thanks.” I opened the refrigerator, pulling out the plate. When I turned back around, I noticed his coffee mug sitting next to the paperwork. It was half-full, the liquid dark and stagnant, the steam long gone.
I took a seat on the stool across from him, setting the sandwiches down between us. “You’re home on a Friday. Don’t you usually have that weekly acquisition meeting at two?”
“Gave it to Weston,” he said mildly, taking a small bite of his sandwich.
He chewed slowly, looking out the kitchen window toward the overgrown hydrangeas in the backyard.
“Decided I’m stepping away from the heavy lifting for a while.
Let the younger guys chase the deadlines.
I’m leaning into the whole work-life balance thing. ”
That phrase coming out of my father’s mouth sounded like it had been translated from a foreign language.
This was the man who used to answer emails at the dinner table and took conference calls during my middle school graduation.
A little too late. I wanted to ask him what life he had now that felt so important.
“Wow,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, matching his slow, easy rhythm. “Who are you and what have you done with Tom?”
He let out a dry chuckle, the sound brief but genuine. “Just realized the world doesn’t fall apart if I’m not at my desk by seven AM. It’s peaceful.”
He seemed calm. Entirely different in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it felt like a good kind of different.
There were no outbursts, no sighs loaded with historical resentment.
His phone sat face-down on the granite counter, completely silent.
On a weekday afternoon, that was nothing short of a miracle.
I watched him reach for his reading glasses, his movements unhurried as he slid the legal forms across the island toward me.
“Anyway,” he murmured, pointing to the bottom of the first page where a small yellow sticky note flagged the signature line. “Kal needs these signed for the trust accounts before Monday. We can look at boxes after we eat.”
“What are these for?” I asked him, knowing even a detailed answer wouldn’t land much. My dad knew money like a bird knew the sky, and it would not make sense to someone who lived in the waves, like me.
“Oh, just some accounts that I’m moving to your name, just sign here,” he answered.
The lines around his eyes were still there, deep, and permanent, but the tension behind them had cleared out.
Maybe Zane was wrong. Maybe the town hadn’t won this time.
I filed it away under a victory for both of us and reached for the pen.
After the ink met its paper, five separate times, we ate lunch. He did not say much. I didn’t either.
We still didn’t talk as we carried the three cardboard boxes from the office and set them on the living room rug.
There were no grand explanations, no preamble about why today was the day he finally needed to clear them out.
Just the sound of packing tape being sliced open with his pocketknife.
The smell hit me first. Dusty cedar, old paper, and a faint, lingering trace of the vanilla perfume.
It was an entire life compressed into three little boxes.
I sat on the floor, crossing my legs just like Cassidy had the night before, while my dad dragged over a dining room chair. He sat down, leaning his elbows on his knees, watching me touch the edges of the things we had spent years pretending didn’t exist.
There was no reminiscing. We just moved through the inventory piece by piece, our fingers doing the talking.
A stack of old recipes written in her hurried, slanting cursive.
A green wool scarf that had gone stiff with age.
A small, silver thimble that rolled out of a velvet pouch and clicked against the hardwood.
Then, near the bottom of the second box, tucked inside a faded manila envelope, my fingers caught on the corner of a glossy print.
I pulled it out. It was a photograph I had never seen before.
It was my mother, sitting out on our back porch, laughing so hard her shoulders were up around her ears.
Her dark hair was windswept, a few stray pieces catching the sunlight, and she looked younger than I usually imagine her being.
She wore a pale blue sundress, the fabric flattering her slender figure.
My eyes locked on her face for a second.
It was like looking in a mirror that slightly curved.
It was your own reflection, but something was different, you just couldn’t tell what.
But it was the background that caught my eye. Right above the porch railing, hanging from the sturdy hook that was still there today, was a wooden hummingbird feeder. I stared at it. “The bird feeder,” I murmured, my thumb resting just below the image of her face.
My dad leaned forward slightly, his eyes tracking the photo in my hand. He didn’t take it from me. He just looked at the tiny, faded wooden structure in the frame. His shoulders stayed dropped, his face completely calm, but his hand tightened slightly where it rested on his knee.
“It was your mother’s,” he said. His voice stayed steady, but it had that lower, slower drop I had noticed in people who talk about the dead.
He was carrying her name down the dark stairs, terrified of dropping it.
“She put it up the first week we moved into this house. I tried to get her a new one, something bigger. She wanted to keep that one. She painted it, I think. When she was pregnant with you.”
I looked out the living room window. Through the glass, out on the porch, the hook was still there. And hanging from it was that exact same blue feeder. The paint was peeling, the tin roof dull from decades of rainstorms, but it was full.
“You still fill it,” I said.