Toasted Coconut
Like I said, I stayed on the floor of his room for a long time.
Not because I could not get up. I had done enough of that in the last two weeks, the not-getting-up, the floor-as-destination, and I knew the difference between a collapse and a choice.
This was a choice. The photograph in my hands, the sticky note face-up on the carpet beside me, and something I had not had in a while: the quiet of a person who has run out of things to be afraid of finding.
I looked at her for a long time. The girl in the photograph.
She was laughing at something I would never know, completely unaware of the camera, completely unaware of everything. She had the face I had been looking at in mirrors my whole life except younger and unguarded, and looking at her was like looking at a version of myself I had lost the address to.
She did not know yet. That was the thing that kept snagging in my chest. She did not know any of it.
Not Jax, not the pills, not the nights in this same graveyard that would eventually stop being about her mother and start being about survival.
She had no idea what was coming. She was just a little girl in a yellow dress laughing at something in a garden, and my father had looked at that photograph and thought: keep her.
I thought about the girl I used to meet every morning in the mirror. Before I learned to avoid that appointment. Somewhere in my chest, that version of me was still alive, small, and inconvenient, wearing her feelings on her skin the way she did before she understood skin was supposed to be a wall.
She was angry at me.
Not disappointed, or not only that. Angry.
Red and specific and righteous in the way five-year-olds are righteous, because they have not learned yet that the world does not punish injustice reliably.
She was angry that I had forgotten what love tasted like.
She had known it once: hazelnuts and toasted coconut, something warm, chosen.
Something that did not require her to convince herself it was food.
And I had forgotten. I had gotten so hungry that I taught myself to taste the poison and call it a meal, and somewhere inside me she was still furious about that, still not understanding how a person lets themselves be that hungry.
I did not have a satisfactory answer for her. I still did not.
But I looked at the photograph, and I thought: she is five years old, and she is so happy, and my father kept her.
He locked her behind my own middle name and he kept her, this version of me that did not yet know what was coming, this version that existed before the hunger.
He knew what she was worth when I did not.
He carried that knowledge for years in a vault, and when he ran out of time to hand it to me in person, when I had finally remembered the taste of love, he left the combination in the only word that had ever been private.
Rose. I pressed the photograph flat against my chest and sat on the floor of his room and let that land somewhere.
The front door opened downstairs. I did not move for a second. Then I heard the familiar weight of his shoes on the floor, the way Austin Portwood’s footsteps communicate a specific kind of impatience even when he’s not in a hurry.
“Seren.” His voice came up through the house before he had even reached the stairs.
“Up here,” I called back.
I heard him on the stairs, then in the hallway, then in the doorway of Tom’s room. He took in the scene without comment. Me on the floor, the open vault in the wall, the photograph in my hands, the general evidence of a person in the middle of something she had not started on purpose.
He looked at me for a long moment, the slight shift in his eyes that meant he was deciding how hard to come in.
Then he crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside me, his back against the foot of the bed, his legs stretched out in front of him.
He did not ask what I was doing. He did not ask how I was.
He just settled himself in like he’d been planning to be here all along.
“You don’t look good,” he said. “But you’re talking to me today, so that’s something.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. “You don’t look great either.”
“Yeah, well.” He glanced around the room, taking inventory the way Austin instinctively does, quietly filing everything away. He and Zane have that in common, though neither one would ever admit it. His eyes landed on the open vault. “Find something?”
I held up the photograph. It felt heavy, though it was only a slip of paper with ink on it. He took it and looked at it for a minute, his expression doing little, which with Austin, meant it was doing a lot.
“That’s you?” he asked. “Baby Seren.”
“Five years old. Maybe. I don’t know, I can’t remember.”
He looked at it a moment longer. Then he turned it over and read the sticky note, and something in his face went quiet in a way I recognized.
Austin, who had been in the same room with me through some of the worst moments of my entire life, and who almost never let me see him be undone by any of them, very briefly looked like someone had hit him somewhere already bruised.
He handed it back without a word. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette and didn’t light it, just held it between his fingers, a habit he’d mostly broken and reached for only when he was managing something.
“He kept it in a vault,” I said. “The combination was my middle name.”
Austin turned the unlit cigarette in his fingers. “Of course it was. I don’t know your middle name. Is that weird? I thought I knew everything about you. Maybe that’s not true.”
“Maybe. I don’t think I even know everything about me.” That was a truth I accepted a long time ago. When memories are blurry from the hurricanes and storms and sea waves, tsunamis and riptides that have been frozen and thawed repeatedly… things get lost.
We sat like that for a while. The afternoon coming through Tom’s window, the awards on the shelf catching the light, the suits in the wardrobe, the whole room full of the man who had been other things before he was my father.
“I don’t really know him,” I said eventually. “This room. The person who built it. I thought I was starting to, and then.”
“Yeah,” Austin said. He knew how that sentence ended. “I know.”
“I think I’m angry.” I watched the light move on the wall. “Not at him, exactly. Just at the time. At how much of it there wasn’t. Feels like a broken promise. Feels like time shouldn’t lie to me anymore. I kind of… I don’t know.”
“That’s the one thing you can’t argue with,” he said. Not trying to fix it. Just agreeing with the shape of it. “Time.”
“Maybe it felt like time owed me something. Like I went through the bad things, and I survived them. Kinda thought that was the deal. I made it through so now I get to just stay still.”
Austin sighed, and I saw him subtly shaking his head. “Doesn’t work like that. I wish it did.”
“I think I genuinely believed I’d earned it,” I said.
“Like there was a deal. You survive the bad things, you do the work, you get three years clean and a blue apartment and a dad who’s finally learning how to hug you, and then time just lets you stay there for a while.
Lets you enjoy it. I had everything stored in after.
Lunch with him after finals. Sunday phone calls.
Another year in the apartment. I was so sure time was going to let me collect on all of it. ” I stopped.
“I just trusted in time. It took so many things from me and in some way, it felt like a test. I passed the test, didn’t I? So why did this happen?”
“I don’t know, love,” Austin told me. He was looking at me, but I knew Austin well enough to know when he was lost somewhere else, in the past and in memories. “Sometimes bad things happen. Without any reason.”
“Austin.” I looked at him. “Did you know? That he was sick?”
He met my eyes, and the answer was plain in his, the same guilted plainness it had been since the funeral. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know. If I had.” He stopped. “I didn’t know, Seren.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. And I meant it, but I had to ask the same way I had to wonder about wind.
He stopped again, jaw working in overtime. He turned the cigarette over in his hand one more time, then put it back in his pocket. “You talking to anyone? Your therapist, whatever her name is?”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy, right. You know Blair’s therapist has the same name?” Then he shook his head like that detail was not important. He tilted his head at me. “You avoiding her, like you avoid everyone when bad things happen?”
I considered lying. The old impulse, the one where lying replaced breathing. “A little.”
“Seren.”
“I know.”
“You need to call her.” Not a suggestion.
Just Austin, stating a fact like he’d state the temperature.
“You have done too much work to go back to the way you used to be. It’s different now, you know?
Back then… well, back then you really were alone.
You’re not alone now. You have people who love you.
Don’t make the choice to do everything alone. ”
“I’m not alone. You’re here,” I said.
“I’m always here, you know that. But I’m not a therapist,” he said. “I’m the guy who would burn this whole town down for you, which is a different skill set and significantly less useful for whatever you’ve got going on inside that head right now.”
A small, real laugh came out of me. He watched it happen with the faintly satisfied look he always had when he managed to extract one of those from me.
“I’ll call her,” I said. “Today.”
“Today,” he repeated, locking it in the way he did.