Chapter 8
I’m on a plane. I am probably, maybe, finally going to meet my father. Who I know will not turn out to be a good person.
Who I’ve never really wanted to know at all, except for when I was very young.
“If I find him, should I tell him anything for you?” I asked Mom on the drive to the airport.
“Yeah, tell him to go fuck himself,” she said, and laughed. She doesn’t usually swear. “And tell him I look fantastic. Did you see that photo I posted yesterday, from lunch with the girls?”
“Mom, I’m not on Facebook.”
“Oh yeah. I always forget. Who isn’t on Facebook?”
“Me.”
“Oh, Tempest, you’re so funny.” Mom is many things— flighty, self-centered, addicted to Facebook, disorganized— but she loves her family fiercely. “Okay, I’ll text you the photo. You can show him that. See what he’s missing.” She smirked, fished for her pink lip gloss in the cluttered cup holder.
“Sure,” I lied.
“I know you won’t do it,” she said, apparently knowing me fairly well. “But you should. Tell him we’re doing great without his money.” He had paid child support in the early years, or at least his lawyers had handled it for him, but it had stopped when he disappeared.
“Okay, Mom.”
“You don’t have to do this, Tempest.”
I bit my lip.
I’ve never even tried to tell her the truth. Which maybe seems stupid. But I’ve asked probing questions, many times, and she’s been vague, angry, metaphorical. I can tell she doesn’t know anything useful.
After all, she didn’t actually know him.
(Mom was a groupie. It’s a gross story that conveniently just tells itself; whatever you’re imagining based on that is probably right.)
But sometimes she’s bizarrely intuitive. She said then: “You’re trying to figure out why you have such bad luck, aren’t you?”
I hesitated and then nodded.
She nodded solemnly back.
“I was in a bad place, spiritually, during that pregnancy. I may have brought it on you myself—your bad luck with men—as much as I hate to admit it. Through my misalignment. It wasn’t until you were two that I started doing energy work, you know that.
And seeing Madame Samantha. That’s probably why Chickadee is fine. Except for her weight.”
I sighed inwardly. “It’s not your fault, Mom.” (I feel sure of this.) “And I should still meet him.”
“There’s not some law about it.”
“I want to.”
Here’s what happened: I spent hours and hours poring over the threads Grub linked to, reading every comment by the poster called OldMAGIK2001.
He did indeed sound drunk. He did indeed ramble about Gila, the deceased MMA fighter, but a lot of his posts were political rants.
Grub and I found the references to a local campaign at the same time.
Florida. Miami. Maybe South Beach. I had a feeling it was really him, despite the fact that coincidences are common, especially when you’re looking the way we’re looking—like a sixteen-year-old whose best current theory is aliens. (I don’t know what my excuse is.)
“Give me two days,” Grub said. “I’ll have his address.
” He also said he’s thinking about meeting up with the Dow in his area sometime.
He might be willing to test out my theory that his DP won’t harm one of our kind (like me, for example).
She seems nice, he wrote. And then, Be better if she was an asshole obviously. Haha.
And then, just like Sherlock Holmes would, he delivered.
Casually, showing off, no preamble, he texted me the address.
My father’s address.
And now I’m flying to Miami, but my body thinks at first that I’m going back to Arizona.
That’s the last place I flew to and away from.
I try to read my romance novel—Mountain Rose—but I keep imagining Joel’s ex-fiancée as the titular Rose, whose hair is lustrous and whose complaints are: “My curls were spilling everywhere! Why wouldn’t they be tamed?
” and “If anything, my lips seemed too full, giving my face a childlike poutiness.” Have anyone’s lips ever actually been too full?
I obsessively and methodically work through all my interactions with Joel: the conversation from the dinner at his house, after Ella left the table and before he told me he couldn’t be in a relationship.
There I am, babbling about Ella, telling him about the girl at her school who kept calling her a baby because she couldn’t read when she was only five, how she panicked when I asked her to sound things out when we first started at home.
I’m asking Joel what made him choose medicine, trying again to do what I promised Grub I would. He traces his motivation to the heart attack that ended his father’s life when he and Adam were still boys.
His mother died two days after Adam. (I wish I hadn’t asked about her.) A pulmonary embolism.
She’d been on a medication that could cause blood clots, but he had a feeling that she’d simply given up.
When he asked about my own mother, I ended up telling him too much: Her job at the front desk of the yoga studio that started because she wanted to take a free class and continued because she made friends with everyone there.
My impression of her from my childhood, always rushing out the door or in a long “me time” lavender-scented bath, leaving me to make Dee a sandwich with cucumbers in it for dinner because I knew kids need vegetables.
How she grew up in rural Ohio and still thinks of all of New Jersey as “the city.” How she tried to get people to call us sisters for a while.
Does he think I’m low-class?
Maybe I am.
I review our bulb-planting date. It wasn’t a date.
I relive my flustered feeling, introducing him to my friends in the restaurant, and then I inevitably end up at him leaning toward me, his eyes on my mouth, the molten possibility of that moment.
The plane lowers itself toward Miami. The ocean glitters in the afternoon sun—much bigger than I expect it to be. I always forget how big the world is.
I take a cab to South Beach, humid air thick in my nostrils, in my lungs. I feel like I’ve flown back in time, to summer. I realize I’m hugging my backpack on my lap, my now superfluous jacket balled up in it. I text Dee and Grub, checking in.
We bypass the beach, drive by second-tier hotels and apartment buildings in pastel shades—stucco cracking with mold around the edges, sandy patches between buildings, the sidewalks empty.
I check my phone again, compulsively, a few minutes later, and Grub has written back, but he sounds distracted.
This is how well I know him. I can tell in only a few words, from the pauses in his messages.
Sent you something, he writes. Really big.
You need to deal with it while you’re in FL.
I check my email. He’s sent me an attachment—a file that looks like one you’re not supposed to open if you don’t know exactly what it is.
Check signal, he writes.
It takes me a bit just to find the Signal app; I never use it. I only got it because Grub wanted it as backup for top secret stuff. Which, let’s be real, we don’t even actually have.
Don’t try to open it, he writes on Signal. I’m gonna send you the decryption thingy in a sec. It needs to run so you have to start it up and let it run for a while. It’s super slow. But worth it for security in case you got hacked or anything.
What are you even talking about? I type. More of his conspiracy theories.
Promise me you’ll run it while you’re there.
Is it about dick face?
No. Just do it Lorelei.
Ok ok but I’m almost there.
He texts me in the regular app again: Good luck. Remember that you don’t need him. Dads are for losers.
I look out the window, and then it’s like time speeds up, ejecting me from the cab, into the chipping art deco lobby of a crappy apartment building, where I press the buzzer of the penthouse.
I press it a few times before a deafening buzz sounds, and I yank the door open, and then I’m in the elevator.
This is the closest I’ve ever been to finding Dick Face, to meeting him.
But I can’t let myself hope that he’ll be useful.
If I hope and then he’s nothing, I’ll be worse off than I’ve ever been before—lower than zero. I’ll have no leads at all.
Wrong, I remind myself. Not worse than I’ve ever been.
I am stable. I have Ella, Dee, Alice, my doula clients, the homeschool moms. I recite the list like a spell, warding off the dark.
And then I’m standing in front of his door, and I ring the bell and hear swearing from inside, and I can’t believe I am here in this moment, I can’t arrange my thoughts.
I forget what I decided to say as my opening line, I forget everything.
He opens the door.
He’s mostly bald, only an inch or so taller than me, a curving, shriveled guy of indeterminate age; I can only barely see in him the rock star from the photos online.
“What is this? What do you want?” He sounds like I woke him up, but his voice is oddly melodious and rich.
His lips are dry and flaking, his eyes bleary.
He’s wearing stained gym shorts and a sagging T-shirt.
His eyes are dark brown like mine. The television blares somewhere behind him. A commercial for car insurance.
I’m not exactly breathing, but I get right to the point. “I think you’re my father. We need to talk.” Being direct is something I’ve gotten much better at since taking care of Ella.
His eyes narrow and he makes an annoyed hissing sound. “Great. Fantastic.” I think he’s about to shut the door in my face. Or at least deny it. But instead he says, “You want money or something? I don’t have it. I’m taking a break. Go away.”
“I don’t want money!” I cry, indignant. “Wait. Are you agreeing that you’re my father?”
This seems too easy.
“Probably.” He shrugs. He squints. “You don’t look like me.” He looks me up and down, seeming to notice me for the first time. He wrinkles his nose, his lips turning down, his whole face a frown of disapproval. “The hell are you wearing? You have no style. You’re so . . . dull.”
I am about to point out his own outfit, but he’s still going: “What was your mother? One of those camp followers? Or a stewardess? I went through a phase with those. Or a backup singer?” The richness of his voice is wasted on his words, on everything else about him.
“Carol Dunlap— ”
He waves his hand like he smells something putrid. “Forget it, forget it, I don’t remember the names. Except a few. A blond?”
I don’t want to answer this, but I nod automatically.
“Probably chesty.” Again his eyes on my body. “Didn’t inherit much from her, did ya?”
I feel my face settling into a mask. A deep, childish disappointment seeps up from my core. He is awful. I knew he would be. But some secret part of me had hoped . . . “Okay,” I say sarcastically. “Awesome. Can I come in?”
He thinks about it, looks sly. “Nah. Why don’t you take me out?”
“Out?”
“Yeah, buy your old dad a drink. You want to talk. Let’s go talk somewhere nice.” He catches my eye, and I feel something strange and wrong, a kind of gravitational pull. I want to do what he’s asking.
“Hey, stop it!” I break his gaze and the feeling drains out of me, leaving an oily residue on my insides. A tiny firework erupts in my stomach at the same moment. He is like me. He can do something impossible. Maybe he will be the answer.
He has to be the answer.
He snorts. “Good job. Very good. You’re definitely my kid.”
It’s better, I tell myself, that he’s terrible. Much better. I can focus on what I need to do. It’s time to finally figure myself out.