Chapter Nine Father
CHAPTER NINE
FATHER
T HE RICKETY STAIRS of the Homely Home creaked as Shunvi and Ilden led Lythlet down to the dining hall. The table was filling up, empty spots on the benches being plucked up as the seconds went by. Folk continued streaming into the hall, a thicker crowd than she had witnessed the last time.
“A couple of other safehavens are joining us for lunch,” Shunvi explained, ushering her to the bench, “so the table will be a pinch crowded today. Naya likes having these big gatherings every so often.” He gestured for her to take a seat.
But Lythlet halted, all intelligent thought vanishing. Amongst the unregistered shuffling into the room, she had just spotted a face she hadn’t seen in years. A face she had never expected to see here of all places.
“Father?” Her gasp was quiet, veering toward inaudible.
Shunvi startled, following her gaze to a rail-thin middle-aged man gently guiding a woman into the hall.
Flecks of gray were starting to stain his temples, the single indicator it had been years since last they met.
But all else remained the same, Father’s waiflike figure still all angles and bones jutting from ill-fitting clothes, his skin patchy in spots, his nose permanently red from his awful habit of rubbing it whenever he was nervous.
Beside him was Mother, as skeletal as ever, hair unwashed and stringy but tied into the neatest ponytail Father could manage.
Father’s arm was around her waist protectively as he guided her through the hall.
Ilden thumped her back. “What are you standing around for?”
She ignored him, pushing him aside.
“What’s that for?” cried Ilden, shutting up when Shunvi grabbed him aside, a finger pressed to his lips.
She left them behind, forgetting their existence as she approached the couple she was loath to believe was her parents.
Father looked up just then, and it took a moment for him to recognize her. His eyes turned wide, abnormally large in his frail, bone-edged build, and his steps slowed.
It was him, she realized with a sinking heart. She was rooted to her spot, casting a quick glance at Mother, whose bowed head gave nothing away.
“Today?” she mouthed soundlessly. A quick shorthand they had developed in her childhood to ask if Mother was well enough for Lythlet to spend time with her.
“Not today,” he mouthed back, a firm shake of his head.
She pinched her lips and stepped aside so he could lead Mother upstairs to the cots.
Guilt racked her at the sight of several long scars running along Mother’s arms, tattletale signs of those troubled days when flesh had become an unbearable cage for her spirit.
New scars had been added to the collection, scars that hadn’t been there when last Lythlet had visited them.
She had bidden farewell to her home when she was fifteen, knowing her continued presence would only burden them in a way they couldn’t cope with financially.
She should’ve returned during the Harvest Holidays to pay her respects, but as the years had gone on, she had never been able to muster the courage to face her family.
Whenever she imagined telling them the truth of how poorly her life had wound up, that little voice urging her to visit her parents would be smothered like a candle-flame in a hurricane.
As they vanished upstairs, her mind reeled with a slaughter of questions, eventually settling on the biggest one: were they unregistered?
Dread at the most probable answer rose.
Father soon returned, limping down the stairs. He paused when he reached her, and they loitered by the banisters in silence. He seemed reluctant to meet her eyes.
“Could we talk?” she said, fumbling with her sleeves.
He nodded, and it depressed her to see how hesitant he was.
They departed the dining hall to the Homely Home’s western skywell courtyard, deserted at that moment with all inhabitants inside clamoring for food at the feasting table.
A single lonely tree grew in the middle of the gray-white courtyard, centuries old with long hanging branches casting grim shadows about.
She sat herself on the stone steps, tucking her legs in primly.
Father crouched beside her to sit, resembling a willow weed bending to the wind, adopting the same posture—legs tucked in tight, as if afraid of touching her.
She swallowed hard, trying to calm herself.
The moment did not seem real, so far from all the ways she’d imagined one day reuniting with her parents, a twisted simulacrum of the homecoming she’d hoped to perform one day when her fortunes had rallied.
Her surroundings were smudged like a watercolor remastering of reality done in the dreamscape, the light of the baltascar-laden pillars blanching the canvas a dull white.
They said nothing, and that was nothing unusual for them. The courtyard seemed to close in on them, choking into quietness.
Then Father spoke. His voice was a quiet rumble that would have been lost in a crowd, but it was enough then to shatter the familiar silence. “You’ve grown taller.”
“I have.” She had taken after his tall, reedy frame in the years since leaving home.
They fell back into a silence as uneasy as it was familiar.
She stared at their knees, a frigid six inches yawning like a canyon between them.
She imagined a feeble tightrope stretching between their kneecaps, thin as a spider’s leg.
That was all their relationship had ever been through her life, a fragile connection built on their shared blood and nothing more.
One of the books Lythlet had stolen in her youth had been a treatise on modern artistic techniques written by a scholar of the inks.
Much of it had been too dense for her young mind to understand, but amidst the slurry of techniques like tenebrism and impasto layering, one thing she had grasped was the concept of negative space.
That in any artistic composition, a key element was in the absence of things, a story to be told in the undone.
She imagined then a canvas dominated by negative space, that rigid black tightrope the sole presence on it, her waiting at one end, Father at the other, and everything else, any possible words, tumbling over the sides into the white abyss.
“Why are you here?” she gathered the courage to ask, forcing herself onto the tightrope. “Are you unregistered?”
Father stared at his trousers for a long moment, as if its threadbare nature fascinated him. Her questions were teetering into the abyss, saved only when he finally gave a brisk, reluctant nod.
Her heart sank, worst fears confirmed. She fought the urge to cry by examining the mismatched patches she’d sewn into the knees of her trousers.
“Are you, too?” His question came feebly, creeping along the tightrope toward her.
“No. I know some people here, that’s all. Desil’s resting upstairs.”
She didn’t dare turn to look at him, but she heard Father heave a soft sigh of relief.
Silence fell. The tightrope lengthened between them, and she gritted her teeth, urging herself to attempt it once more.
“What happened? How long have you been unregistered for?”
“For about a year now,” he admitted, shame etched into every syllable. “Mother had a bad day. I almost didn’t get her to the health ward in time.” His voice choked, and he buried his head in his arms.
Lythlet closed her eyes, recalling those long scars on Mother’s arms. “Is she better now?”
“Still has her moments. You know. But nothing as bad as then. We’re staying in a safehaven not too far from here.
Place used to belong to the first governor of Setgad, that Hemharrow fellow who’s Governor Matheranos’s ancestor.
I think a lot of these folk running safehavens have a sense of humor, ’cause ours has a long and funny name. ”
“What happened to our house?” Lythlet asked, sneaking a glance at him.
His half-hearted rambling faded into a grimace. “Lost it to a usurer. The health ward fees to keep Mother alive drove us into debt.”
Lythlet fought the urge to bury her face in her hands.
She despised that ramshackle hovel she once called home; simply conjuring the mere memory of it would turn her claustrophobic.
As ash-hued and unimpressive as a dust rag, sunlight had always made it even more pathetic, no veil of darkness hiding its shortcomings.
Inside fared little better: small, dismally gray, awash in shadows, tilting in a way that threatened complete collapse.
Worst of all had been the pungent rotting floorboards, the sour earthy smell defining her childhood.
Yet knowing all that was gone not because her family had graduated to better things but had spiraled further into poverty was miserable knowledge to bear.
“But I have some good news,” Father said into her silence. “I’ve signed up for the construction happening down at the riverbanks—heard about it? I start tomorrow. Sounds like it’s got real promise. As long as I stick it out for two years, they’ll pay off our debt, they say.”
Lythlet could not muster a smile in response. Father was no longer young. The thought of this willow weed of a man having to perform hard labor for the hope of returning to a proper life aboveground made the weight of her unfulfilled filial piety feel like a cast-iron chain upon her neck.
“Tell me how much you need,” she said, facing him properly for the first time since entering that courtyard. “I’ll get it for you.”
Father’s dark eyes flickered at her. “Are you doing well?”
The skepticism in his voice stung.
“Not quite,” she faltered. “I have debt of my own to repay.”
A worried look crossed Father’s eyes. She regretted her honesty and turned away to her knees.
“What kind of debt?”
“Also to a usurer,” she muttered. “Also because of health ward fees.”
It was uncanny how similar her parents’ story was to hers. Perhaps our bloodline is simply destined for debt and despair , she thought bitterly.
“Then don’t worry about Mother and me,” Father said, feigning a smile that only lasted a breath, like the last gasp of sunlight before night conquered the sky. “Take care of yourself instead. Maybe I’ll make enough from the flats to help you pay off your debt.”
She wanted to argue, but there was no argument to be made. Two members of the Tairel bloodline were seated beside one another, one wishing to fulfill his paternal duty and save his daughter, the other wishing to fulfill her filial piety and save her father—neither having any capacity to do so.
She looked at him and his pitiful visage, and felt a rope of many strings twisting inside her: regret, contrition, and love, a love she had never been able to voice before for fear of being ignored. She said awkwardly, “I’m sorry you’ve been through so much while I was gone.”
He looked surprised at her words. After a moment, he replied, “I’m sorry for you, too. I suppose that’s why you never came to visit us.”
They turned away from each other, ending that uncomfortable prolonged gaze.
Once again, negative space dominated the thin black tightrope.