Chapter 31
VI
There's a photograph in my hands and my father is in it.
That's all.
I can’t think, I can’t feel, and I sure can’t fucking breathe.
I also can't make it mean anything no matter how many times I try. My father is dead. I buried that. I built a life on top of where I buried it, the way you pour a foundation over the ground you’re done digging.
And now, there's a photograph in my hands and the ground is moving under my flimsy little foundation, and I don’t know what the fuck to do.
It's him.
It is him?
Yeah, it’s him.
I can't say how I know it's him. Not yet, not in a way I can point to. The recognition comes faster than that, and dumber than that, like when you know something in your bones before your brain does. It’s the way you'd know your own father's walk in the dark, or pick him out of a crowd from behind by nothing but the set of his shoulders or his voice.
And there he is. Thinner than I remember. Grayer. But it’s fucking him. It’s my father in a chair against a blank wall, staring down the barrel of the camera like he's daring it to blink first.
Dad’s alive.
He’s older than the last time I saw him, no big surprise there.
That's the part that reaches in and twists my heart.
Not that he's alive, since I can't even really comprehend that yet.
It's the small, cruel math underneath it.
Dad got older. Time kept passing all the while I was trying to figure out what happened to him.
And I wasn't there for one single day of it.
And of all the insane things swirling in my brain right now, I think about the Saturday market on Clement Street.
The one that got smaller every week until it was just the kettle corn guy.
Dad used to walk me through it when I was small, back when it was loud and crowded and alive, and he knew every vendor by name.
He was the one who later, as mayor, stood up in front of the city and said this is happening, we are losing our home one stall at a time, it’s time to do something.
Of course, nobody did. They scrubbed him out instead. And here he is in a chair against a blank wall, looking like a man who is still, even now, trying, because that's the only way he ever knew how to exist.
Something is trying to come up out of me, and I shove it back down so hard my teeth grind.
Not here.
Rogue's still crouched in front of me, watching and careful, the way you watch something that might explode and take your fingers with it. He hasn't said anything since he gave me the envelope, and I love him a little for that, for not filling the empty air.
I can also feel the weight of the three guys like a pressure change before a storm. Rogue’s right here, and Armen and Sting are probably somewhere close by, because of course Rogue would've told them, of course this is already a thing the men know about.
And here's the stupid, prideful truth I'd never say out loud: I will not come apart in front of them. Nope. Not gonna do it. A few short months ago, I was a Runt who didn’t know how I’d survive.
I have spent every day since learning how to keep my face shut in this place, and I am not going to hand them the sight of me dissolving over a piece of glossy paper.
So I do the thing the Rot taught me. I go still.
"Okay," I hear myself say. My voice comes out level. A small miracle. "Okay."
"Vi." Rogue says it low. "You don't have to be okay."
"I know." I press the photograph flat against my chest, picture-side in, like if I hold it close enough, it can't be taken back. "I just, I need a minute. By myself."
He studies me for a second too long, deciding whether to believe me. Then he stands, and his hand lands on the top of my head, just once, heavy and warm, and he doesn't say anything else because there's nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.
"I'll be down the hall," he says, kissing me on the cheek.
The door clicks. He's gone.
And I still don't fall apart, which is its own kind of insane, because now there's no one to perform for. I just sit there on the floor of my room with my father against my heart and my whole body locked up like a fist.
Mara. I need Mara.
She's in her room with a paperback. She takes one look at me in her doorway, just one, and she's up off the bed before I've said a word.
"Vi. What happened? What's going on—"
I hold out the photograph.
She takes it. Looks. I watch her mouth open and then close again.
"Oh my God," she whispers. "Vi. Is that—"
"It's him."
And that's the thing that does it. Saying it to her. It's him. Two words, out loud, to the one person here in the Rot who knew him too, who sat at his kitchen table, who got told off by him for tracking mud through the house when we were nine.
I don't even feel myself start to go down.
One second, I'm standing. The next, Mara's got both arms around me and we're on the floor of her room.
And then I'm crying. The way I haven't cried since the silence after he disappeared, when they scrubbed his name off the world and I made myself believe it. I’m ugly crying.
The kind with no dignity in it. The kind that comes from somewhere in the depths of your gut, gooey and snotty and uncontrollable.
"I grieved him," I get out, wet and furious and broken. "Mara, I grieved him. I let him be dead. I made myself stop—" The words crack apart. "And he was out there. This whole time. He was just out there."
"My God," she says into my hair. She's crying too. She doesn't try to fix it, doesn't tell me it's okay, doesn't do anything except hold on, which is the only correct thing and she knows it because she's Mara. “I’ve got you girl. I’ve got you.”
And underneath the grief, sharp and ugly and not ready yet, something else is starting to move.
Because if he's alive, then he chose to make me think he was dead.
Every Sunday I didn't get a phone call, he was somewhere out there choosing not to make it.
I don't have a way to digest that yet. It's too big and mean, and is breaking my fucking heart.
So I shove it down with everything else, and I let Mara hold me, and I decide that tonight I'm just going to be a daughter who got her father back, and deal with the rest of it when I can stand up.
I cry until there's nothing left, and then I cry a little more out of pure momentum, and Mara holds me through every bit of it on the floor of a room in a dead mall, with my father's face pressed between us, alive.