Chapter 9
I wake from a half-remembered dream, my mouth very dry and my heart pounding in my chest.
At first, I think that the dream was what woke me up. Despite the cool temperature inside the cabin, I’m sweating, and the blankets are half kicked off, twisted between and around my legs.
I sit up in bed, pulling my lank, damp hair back from my forehead. The T-shirt I’m sleeping in, one I stole from a one-night stand’s apartment a couple of years ago as revenge for him having scoffed at the idea of getting me off, is sticking to my torso.
I pull the thin, worn cotton fabric away from my skin, trying to find my bearings in the unfamiliar room.
What was it in the dream that woke me up?
The contents of it are slipping between my fingers even as I try to grasp for it. My father was there. So was Martina Hastings, I think. Or maybe it was my mother.
But … no.
It wasn’t the dream.
It was something else. A light, or a sound.
I look around the cabin. The door is still firmly closed; so is the window. Everything is as I left it.
Still, the creeping feeling under my skin won’t leave me alone. Like someone is watching me.
I close my eyes, so hard I see stars, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. It happens instinctively, and it’s only then that I remember who taught me to do so.
I was five years old and going through a bad bout of nightmares.
I can’t remember why; maybe I’d heard a scary story or seen something frightening on the news.
My dad always argued that no child was too young to understand what was going on in the world.
Sometimes he even read me one of his stories before bed, if he was particularly proud of it, and it made me feel very grown-up, chosen, and special, like a big girl, even if the details of it left me stiff and cold with fear once he’d left and the lights were turned out.
I had woken up, several nights in a row, and gone to my parents’ room, wanting to sleep in their bed, where I’d be safe and protected.
My mom had let me crawl in with her, but my dad had gotten progressively more annoyed with me, so one morning when it was time to get up for school, he’d come into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed, smoothing my unruly morning bed head down with one hand and smiling fondly at me.
“You’re a big girl now, princess,” he told me. “And big girls don’t sleep in their mom and dad’s bed.”
The night before, I’d tried to get in with them, only for my dad, with his flinty, angry voice, to tell me to be quiet and go back to my own room, stopping my mom with a hand on her shoulder when she tried to get up to comfort me.
I was too ashamed, and too scared, to look at him, so I just sat there, studying the bruises on my knees, the mystery scrape on one shin I’d gotten at some point. It was almost healed over, and I wanted to pick at the scabs, but I knew it would just make him angrier if I did so.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
“You don’t want to bother Mommy and Daddy, do you?” he asked me, and I knew it was a trap. If I said no, it meant that I knew better but had done the bad thing anyway; if I said yes, it meant I was being bad, on purpose, and that wasn’t good either.
I went for the third option.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I just got really scared.”
I still had a slight lisp at the time, so it came out as fcared.
Dad sighed, and I tensed up.
I was an expert at managing his moods—being cute, or precocious, or funny, whichever one was needed; taking his side against Mom, or his boss, or the world; praising him, hugging him, telling him he was the best dad in the world, even when he was upsetting me.
Especially when he was upsetting me.
“Well, princess, if you wake up again tonight, you can’t come into our room,” Dad said. “I’m going to lock the door, so you can’t get in. It doesn’t matter if you scream and cry. Do you understand?”
My lips were quivering, so I pushed them together. He didn’t like crying. He didn’t care for messes in general; snot and tears were unsightly, and especially so coming from me.
“Yes,” I whispered, thinking about the monsters in my nightmares, the dark shadows at the corners of the room, which seemed to shift and whisper horrible things, the odd sounds that would mutate and multiply until I knew in my very bones that there was something very bad in the room, hiding in the dark, waiting to pounce and do painful, twisted things to me, like the things I had seen happen to other kids on the news, the things I had heard about in my father’s articles.
“Good,” my dad said, and he squished me into his side, a sudden joviality in his voice. “I’m proud of you, princess.”
Despite it all, the words felt warm, and provoked a swelling of pride in me.
“And if you get scared, you can make the scary go away,” he continued. “Just breathe in through your nose, and out through your mouth. Close your eyes really tight, and do that until you’re not scared anymore.”
I finally gathered the courage to look up at him. He was happy now, the skin around his pale blue eyes crinkling, and that made me happy.
“Is that what you do when you’re scared?” I asked him, and when he laughed, it was with genuine amusement.
He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.
“I’m never scared, princess,” he told me.
I believed him then.
It dawns on me that I’m holding my breath, grinding my teeth together, and I let out the air I’ve been holding in, easing the pain in my chest.
I wonder if it was true, what he said. If he believed it as he said it.
Maybe my father really was never scared, even when he was out there, early in his career, tailing soldiers in Lebanon and Sri Lanka.
Maybe he wasn’t even scared when he went undercover, gathering information for the in-depth investigative articles that would eventually propel him to fame.
Maybe that was the key to his success; someone who never looks inward can’t see his own inherent vulnerability, the frailty of the facade.
Maybe that’s why he got away with the lies for so long. That lack of fear. The earliest evidence that was brought up in the trial was from 1991, the year I was born; a number thrown out mid-article, exaggerated way beyond what the sources actually said for shock and dramatic value.
“He was testing the waters,” the prosecutor said at the time. “And the more he got away with, the more confident he became.”
And I think she might have been right. At least partially; he probably was testing the waters, the young hotshot journalist, wanting the attention that reporting mere reality could not get him.
Had he been born later, my father probably would have shied away from investigative reporting and pivoted, instead, to the life of a political pundit. No need to stick to the facts there.
But I think she was wrong, too. I don’t think my father became more confident over time. I think he was born that way. In the end, he had very little imagination. Enough to exaggerate and embellish, not enough to imagine what might happen the day he was caught.
Imagination is required to be truly afraid.
So maybe that is what really separates me from my father. He never saw monsters in the shadows. He never thought himself the small, frail creature hiding under the blankets.
I swing my feet off the bed, the bare floor strikingly cold against my skin, and stand up. Walk over to the door. The air in the cabin is stuffy, heavy with humidity.
When I’m about to open the door, something at the bottom of it catches my eye. I did not see it from the bed, but here, standing above it, the faint light of the moon through the window bounces off the white paper, creating its own luminescence.
Quietly, slowly, as though I’m still dreaming, hearing nothing but the ticking of my own heartbeat in my ears, I reach down and grasp the paper someone has pushed under the door.
That was what woke me up, I think. Footsteps by the door.
It’s a neat square of printer paper, folded perfectly in half. I open it.
GO HOME. THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE.
IT’S TOO LATE.