Chapter 18
I watched my mother leave and then went to sit on the futon with my head in my hands and my heart in my throat. I felt immense pity for my mother, pity for what she had gone through, and for the havoc her later decisions had wrought upon the lives of those closest to her.
My father hadn’t wanted to leave me. It was my mother who’d pushed him out.
Of all the potential reasons behind his abandonment, I had never considered anything like this. I wanted to fold myself around him and let the strength of his body support me. I wanted to press my ear to his chest and listen to his heart. The slow, dependable throb I’d come to rely on to lull me to sleep. Yet the question, why had he refused to tell me himself, was still unanswered. Perhaps, now that my mother had broken her silence, he would be willing to open up about his reasoning—assuming he wasn’t still angry with me for inviting Maddox.
Maddox. The scent of his cologne floated in the air around the futon. My skin prickled. Part of me wanted to dip my lower body in bleach, while the rest of me hummed with gratitude for his having quieted my mind. He’d left fingerprints on my body, even in places his hands hadn’t touched.
I nearly tore my dress in the process of taking it off.
I couldn’t go to my father smelling like Maddox, not because I was trying to hide something—he’d certainly seen the worst of it—but because it felt disrespectful. I slid out of my panties and into the blue robe my father kept in the supply closet. By the time I felt ready to face him again, I was a little older, a little wiser, and surprisingly sober considering how much I’d had to drink.
The elevator bell pinged as I entered the hall. Maddox stepped inside, then turned to face the open doors. His shirt and suit jacket reminding me of a Jackson Pollack painting, had Jackson Pollack ever painted with blood. The skin around his eyes appeared blueish and swollen, and he held a wad of paper towels over his nose.
“Jesus,” I said. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing a little ice and a lot of bourbon won’t take care of.” His voice sounded pinched. “Henry was just defending his territory. Pissing on hydrants, that sort of thing.”
“I assume I”m the hydrant in this scenario.” I made sure the rope around my waist was knotted tight. “Where”s Kristin?”
“I sent her home with some asshole in a fedora. She loves it when I loan her out. Your daddy used to like having her over here, though he didn’t seem too keen on the idea when I suggested we swap bedmates.”
“Was that before or after he broke your nose?”
Maddox chuckled as best he could in his current condition. He pressed a button on the inside panel. Battered and bruised, he still managed to wink at me in the seconds before the steel doors came together.
I let myself into the apartment. All the guests had gone, as if teleported elsewhere by a mysterious force. Empty glasses and wine bottles littered the living room and kitchen. My father stood at the sink with his hand beneath the faucet. I moved toward him and then stopped when I noticed the drops of crimson on the floor.
“Maddox is deeply sorry for his behavior this evening.” He cut the water and then proceeded to wrap his right hand in a dish towel. Two distinct splotches of red appeared among the blue fibers. “He regrets that he couldn’t stick around to apologize to you in person. I assured him I would extend the courtesy.”
Maddox hadn’t seemed all that sorry to me, but I suspected he would change his tune as soon as he saw his reflection. Stepping around the blood, I fetched another towel and wetted it at the sink, then knelt to clean the drops from the floor.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, but I did. I had invited a fox into our metaphorical hen house. It was only fair that I cleaned up after myself.
I rinsed the towel and squeezed out the blood, then washed my hands with soap. I couldn’t get them clean enough, no matter how hot the water or how hard I scrubbed.
Steam wafted toward my face. He shut off the tap and held my raw, reddened hands between his.
“Did he hurt you?”
“Not as bad as you hurt him,” I said.
My father dried my hands on the robe and then pulled me tight against him. “I’m so sorry, Paige. Maddox likes to assume what’s mine is his because that’s how it’s always been.”
“I know,” I said. “Mom told me.”
“She did?” He drew back and the trepidation on his face was both unmistakable and tinged with knowing. He’d predicted this moment, possibly from the start. “You’re probably wondering why I’d let someone like Maddox back into my life. Try to understand, when I left you, I had no one. Maddox was someone I knew, and I guess I figured, better the devil you know. But I’ve made it clear that he’s no longer welcome in my home. You were drunk and he knew it. He had no right to touch you. I could’ve fucking killed him. If Jeff and Michelle hadn’t pulled me off, I just might have.”
“Is that why everyone left?”
He snickered. “They all cleared out pretty quick after that.”
Shame dug its icy fingers around in my abdomen. “I’m sorry, too, Dad. I shouldn’t have invited Maddox. It was selfish. And in any case, Mom showing up sort of defeated the whole purpose.”
He palmed my cheek and studied me like he was trying to read my mind. “What else did she tell you?”
I swallowed hard. “She told me about the ultimatum. She even brought your old drawings for me to look at, like seeing them would prove something, which is ridiculous.”
He closed his eyes and freed himself from my grasp. It was as if a sinkhole had opened between us, though he was still technically within reach.
“People hear the word love and automatically think sex,” he said. “You were my daughter and I loved you. You were beautiful, so I watched you. Photography wasn’t my forte, so I found other ways of capturing you. I would”ve sooner hurt myself than let anything harm you.”
He moved into the dining area. I felt him slipping away, like air leaking slowly from a balloon.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “Maybe it was for the best that I took off. Being scrutinized like that when you’re still growing into yourself, it’s got to be hard. At least you got to have a normal adolescence.”
If normal meant happy and well-adjusted, then there’d been nothing normal about my adolescence. I’d spent most of middle and high school bouncing from one town to the next, all the while feeling like half of me was living somewhere far away.
“You really think I was better off not knowing why you left or where you’d gone?”
“Compared to the alternative? Yes. Leaving you isn’t something I’m proud of. But it beats having to tell your daughter that her mom thinks you’re a sicko.” The pain in his gaze stung me as if it were my own. “I thought about sticking it out, fighting it. But then I imagined what that would’ve been like for you. Having to answer a bunch of disgusting questions about our relationship. Not to mention the possibility that other people would see what your mom saw in those sketches. I didn’t want to put you through that, and I sure as hell didn’t want you to have to carry that around.”
I went to him and took his face into my hands. He kept his arms at his sides. I kissed his cheek and tried to kiss his lips, but he jerked away at the last second. At first, I assumed it was because of my puke-breath, but when he shook me off completely to go stand by the window, I knew it was something more.
“Dad?” I said. He stared out at the night sky, his expression impassive. I stood beside him. “Dad, talk to me.”
He rubbed his eyes. “You should’ve gone home with your mom.”
“You can’t mean that.”
He returned to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of scotch and then downed the contents in a single gulp. “I’ve spent the last six years telling myself I was in the right and that your mom was just paranoid. Then you show up here and…I can’t even say it.”
“You think she was right about you?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. When I saw you at the museum it was like waking up after having been asleep my whole life. Then later, in your room, when you asked for a hug and I was finally able to hold you, I couldn’t get close enough. I wanted to live inside that feeling. I chalked it up to missing you.”
My father poured another whisky but didn’t drink it.
“I got hard later that night just thinking about your mouth. That’s why I put on the video. I convinced myself I was projecting old feelings for Charlotte onto you.”
Gently, I pried the glass from his hand and then kissed his palm. The divot between his brows looked deeper than I was used to seeing it. I was giving him wrinkles. Good, I thought. Let me mark his outsides as permanently as he’d marked my insides. If he was going to make me leave, at least there’d be some physical evidence that I had been here.
He brushed his thumb over my cheekbone. “You know the saying, when something is so wrong it feels right? This wasn’t like that. It didn’t feel wrong, which tells you all you really need to know. I’m exactly what your mother thinks I am.”
My mother had called him a monster. Granted, if anyone had firsthand experience with monsters, it was her. I wanted to crawl out of my skin thinking about what her own father had done to her as a child. Still, that didn’t mean she was right about mine.
I, myself, had been eaten by a monster earlier that night.
My father was not a monster.
“No, you’re not. She thought you were going to abuse me, and that’s not what this is at all. We love each other. We just love each other differently than most people.”
“Different is just a nicer way of putting it.”
I pressed my hands to his chest. “Is that why you won’t have sex with me? Because you think it’ll prove her right?”
“What I’ve done has already proven her right a thousand times over.” He guided my arms to my sides and then kissed my forehead, as if that simple fatherly gesture were enough to soothe me. “I shouldn’t have let this go on. That was my mistake. I’m sorry I let you believe I could be the father you needed.”
Panic scratched along my spine at the finality in his words. “But you are. You’re exactly what I need.”
“No, sweetheart.” His voice splintered. “You deserve someone who’s capable of loving you like a normal father.”
“I don’t want a normal father. I want my father. I want you.”
A small spark of hope ignited and then fizzled in his eyes. He looked defeated.
My mother was dead-wrong about him, but she was right about one thing: there was no going back for either of us. It didn’t matter if he never touched me again. We’d altered each other irrevocably, like mixed paint on a palette. You couldn’t take violet and separate it back into blue and red. Once blended, that was it, the colors persisted.
I reached for him again, and he guided my hands away. My eyes filled with tears. I fought to keep them there, convinced that I wouldn’t be able to remain standing if he saw me crack.
But I was already broken.
As desperate as I was to be with him, I couldn’t bear the thought of my father hating himself for loving me too much, or too intensely, or whatever my mother would accuse him of next.
We were either in this together, completely and unabashedly, or not at all.
“You say you can’t love me like a normal father. Then don’t. Love me like a father and a lover and a mentor and everything else, because I need all of you. If you can’t give me that, then I don’t want any of it. Loving you halfway hurts too much.”
I turned to go. He caught my arms, his grip tight enough to pinch through the terrycloth. For a second, I thought he was going to kiss me. Please, I thought. Kiss me. Ask me to stay. I held my breath and waited for him to make a choice.
He released me.
A sob shook my chest. There was no stopping the flow of tears.
I wiped my eyes and stepped away from my father, who looked like he’d aged ten years in the last ten seconds.
“I guess this is goodbye then,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “At least I got to say it this time. That has to count for something.”