37. Emmy
“Want to go on a secret mission?” my father whispers.
It’s dark out, and I’m groggy. He doesn’t get me up this early unless we’re doing sandbags.
“Is it raining?” I ask, struggling to open my eyes. I’m so tired that it feels as if I’m under water.
“Different kind of mission,” my father says quietly, holding a finger to his lips. “A really big one.”
I smile despite my sleepiness. It’s been a bad week with my mother—she slapped me on the way home from the pediatrician’s yesterday, hard enough to leave a mark, and when my father asked, she lied about it, daring me to counter her. But he knew. He always seems to know when it’s a good day to swoop in and reset the balance.
He wraps my coat around my shoulders and hands me my shoes. We tiptoe out of the house, and he closes the door so quietly that even I don’t hear the sound, though I’m standing right there. Jeff is sixteen now—old enough that he’d no longer want to come anyway, but I know my dad still worries.
I buckle my seat belt and wait for him to climb in before I speak. “Where are we going?” Even as I ask, I’m nestling my face into the passenger seat, longing for bed.
“It’s a surprise,” he replies. “You can go back to sleep if you want.”
“Are we getting Bradley?” She comes along with us most of the time now.
His smile fades. I’ve never seen my father cry, but for a moment I’m worried he’s about to.
“No,” he says. “Not this time.”
We start to drive. He’s listening to one of those news stations, and every voice sounds the same. I want to stay awake; I want to try to guess the surprise, but I cannot.
I blink my eyes open for only seconds at a time—clocking the lights of Santa Cruz, the farms to its south, the big signs for Monterey.
The sky is starting to lighten when the guy on the radio says interest rates are going down. “You should buy stock, Daddy,” I mumble, rousing myself.
My father laughs. “Yeah? Why’s that?”
I rub my eyes. “Because if it costs less to borrow money, people will buy more things and the stock prices will go up.”
Once again, his smile fades. He’s sadder than usual today. “That’s probably true. What do you think I ought to buy?”
“I like Google and Apple,” I tell him, rousing to the conversation. “But I also like Disney. Kids always want to go to Disney, whether their parents have money or not. But more parents will go if they’ve got money.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice barely audible, “that’s true.”
The sky is just light enough that I can make out the ocean to my right, which means we’ve been driving south for a long time.
“Are we going to Disney?” I ask. “Is that the surprise?”
“Not this time,” he says, swallowing. “It may be a while before I can take you to Disney.”
“That’s okay. I don’t really care about Disney.” That is kind of a lie. I would like to go to Disney, but I don’t want him to think I’m disappointed.
“No?” he asks. “What would you choose for our adventure if you could choose anything?”
“Wall Street,” I say, though if I thought about it more, I could probably come up with something better. My head is just stuck on the stock market. “Do you think if I get into Harvard, I’ll be able to get a job on Wall Street when I’m grown up?”
It seems like a long time before he replies. “I’m sure you could, hon. But you don’t have to go to Harvard. You can get any job you want if you set your mind to it, no matter where you go.”
I shake my head. “Harvard has a really strong alumni network. I read about it.”
“A lot of schools do,” he says, but his mouth is tight.
“What’s an alumni network anyway?” I ask.
“It’s just people who already graduated from that school,” he says, and then he turns up the radio, which is what my mother does when she wants me to shut up, when she’s on the verge of snapping. He’s never done it before, and it hurts my feelings. I don’t understand why I’m messing up with him so much today, why I seem to be ruining this outing.
I tug my knees to my chest to make myself small, hoping that if I’m quiet long enough, he’ll forget I made him mad. It helps, sometimes, with my mom. I stay like that, watching the ocean change from charcoal to blue under the rising sun until we finally arrive in a city I’ve never been to, bigger than Elliott Springs and fancier than Santa Cruz.
“Where are we?” I ask through a yawn. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving, but I really need to pee.
He pulls into a parking lot. “Santa Barbara. Let’s see if their donuts are better than the ones near us.” His smile is forced, and he’s not quite meeting my eyes.
We find a bakery. We usually buy a dozen and he eats half of them on the way home, but today he only buys two. He says he’s not hungry and hands me both.
We walk toward the wharf. “How do you feel about trains?” he asks.
The only train I’ve ever been on is the old-timey steam train he and I sometimes take to the top of Bear Mountain. It doesn’t even have a roof. I shrug. “They’re okay.”
“They have a special train here called the Surfliner,” he says. “How would you like to take it home?”
I swallow the bite of donut in my mouth. “What about our car?”
“I have a few things to do here, so I’m going to stay a while. You take the train and tell me how it was. I’ll make sure you get picked up.”
My steps stutter. Is this because I upset him when I asked about Harvard? I want to apologize, to ask for another chance, but I’m still not even sure what I did. I follow him into the train station, worrying my lip the whole way. He buys me a ticket and stands with me while I wait to climb on the train. I must have done something wrong for him to be sending me home. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up Disney. It’s the kind of thing I’m careful about with my mom, but I’ve never had to be careful with him.
“I’d rather wait with you,” I plead.
He kneels on the ground and hugs me. “I messed some things up that I have to fix,” he says. It’s weird that he’s hugging me. His affection usually comes in the form of a pat on the head, an arm around my shoulders. He’s rising before I can ask what’s wrong. His hands shake.
“Be good, Emmy,” he says when it’s my turn to climb aboard, his voice breaking. “I love you.” When I glance out the window to watch him go, his shoulders are stooped as if he’s an old man and suddenly it all feels very final.
I still don’t know what I did wrong.
I arrive in San Jose many hours later. A nice man hands me a bag of snacks he says he’s not planning to eat and I wait, hour after hour, for my mother to show. The man sits across the way the entire time, watching me, and when a homeless guy comes over, the man tells him to move along.
It’s dark out when my mother finally arrives at the station, furious with me in her scariest sort of way—beady-eyed, silent, lips a tight line. She says nothing on the way home, but the minute we walk in the door, she slaps me so hard across the face that I fall backward and crack my head on the banister.
She doesn’t care. She’s already walking away, untroubled, pleased with herself. Please hurry home, Dad, I whisper in my head as she goes.
It’s a steady chant in my head until the police arrive…and tell me my father won’t be coming home at all. That he ran away and used me to do it.
It’s as if he never cared any more than my mother did. He was just better at hiding it.
* * *
I wakewith this sick heaviness in my chest and jump from the bed, pulling a sweatshirt over my pajamas as I head out to my car.
I don’t even question the fact that I’m knocking on Liam’s door until I hear his steps moving toward me. That’s when it hits me how fucking needy it is that I’m here like this, in my pajamas, for God’s sake. The porch light flips on, and the door opens.
“Hey,” he says. A puzzled furrow forms between his brows. “What’s up?”
It’s the middle of the night. Why the hell did I think this was okay?
“I’m sorry,” I breathe. “I shouldn’t have come.”
I step backward and he stops me with his hand wrapped around my arm before he pulls me inside and shuts the door. It’s darker in here, and I can only tell it’s him by feel as he tugs me into him. “Are you okay?” he asks.
I nod, letting my hand slide down his chest and into the waistband of his boxers. I love how quickly he responds to me. Even if he doesn’t want me here, one part of his anatomy does.
He stills my hand. “What are you doing?”
“I thought that was fairly obvious.”
“You don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s okay for you to come here without that.”
“I want to.” I need him to drive every thought out of my head and put me somewhere where it’s impossible to think of anything at all, even if it only lasts a moment. “Please.”
He pulls me back to his bedroom. He’s gentle as he removes the sweatshirt, the tank, the shorts, studying my face in the dim moonlight.
He scoops me up and sets me on the bed, pushing my knees out as he settles between them. I’ve come twice before he finishes himself, shuddering quietly above me.
He rolls to my side and pulls me onto his chest while he catches his breath. I don’t try to leave when it’s done, though part of me thinks I should.
“What happened?” he asks after a long moment.
“I just had a bad dream and wanted to get out of the house,” I reply.
“What was your dream about?”
I flop onto my back. “Nothing.”
His hand squeezes my hip. “You woke me up at two in the morning. The least you could do is tell me the truth.”
Here we go again. Liam and his tedious need for honesty and earnestness all the time. I’m half-inclined to lie, to tell him my greatest nightmare is that Elliott Springs stays as lame as it currently is.
“It was about the last time I saw my dad in Santa Barbara. I just remembered a bunch of things I’d forgotten.”
“Like what?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you pry a lot?”
He laughs, pressing his lips to my neck. “Em,” he says against my ear, “when the guy you’ve been flirting with for months and sleeping with for weeks asks you about your bad dream, it’s not prying.”
“Fine. I just remembered how sad he was when he left. And how I felt like I’d finally ruined things with him too, like he saw the things my mother did and decided to go. Obviously, he’d already planned to leave. I’ve just had it in my head for so long that I was a disappointment to both of them. It was a surprise to remember I once didn’t think so.”
“Princess, you were ten,” Liam says. “There was nothing you could have said to anyone that would make them hate you. Or leave. Whatever was going on with your dad and whatever is still going on with your mom…I don’t think it has anything to do with you.”
I force a smile. “I’m not so sure. I was asking him about the stock market. No one wants to discuss the stock market with a ten-year-old.”
“I wouldn’t mind hearing a ten-year-old Emmy talk about the stock market for hours on end,” he says, running a hand over my hip.
“I’m a little uncomfortable with the fact that you’re talking about me as a ten-year-old while you initiate sex.”
He laughs and removes his hand. “I wasn’t initiating sex, asshole. I was trying to comfort you. Do you think maybe he was trying to take you with him and changed his mind?”
I lift my shoulder. “He didn’t pack any of my stuff. He didn’t take my passport. Given how thoroughly he appeared to have planned, I don’t think he’d have just forgotten that.”
“You know he did the right thing by leaving you, yeah?” Liam asks. “What kind of life would you have had on the run like that? You had advantages here that he could never have provided.”
I sigh. “I guess.”
I have little reason to think that he made it out alive. I have little reason to think I’d have had a nice childhood on the run in South America. But I still wish he’d tried.
And I wish his final act as my dad didn’t involve using me to get away.
He ruined every good memory I have of him with that last one.
* * *
We’ve barely beenasleep for two hours when Frank wakes me up. I don’t know how Liam stands it.
“I’m going to kill that fucking rooster.”
There’s a rumbly laugh into the pillow beside mine. “No, you’re not.”
“I am. Watch me.”
He rolls to face me, his face dim in the early morning light. “Have you ever killed anything before?”
“I hit a squirrel once with my car.”
He smiles. “You’d have a hard time hitting Frank with your car. The Willoughbys have a really tall fence.”
“I don’t need the car. Do you have a gun? You seem like the kind of guy who’d have a gun.”
“And you seem like the kind of woman I wouldn’t trust with my gun, if I had one.”
I shrug. I wouldn’t trust me with a gun either. “Fine. I won’t shoot the rooster. I’ll stab it to death.”
“Just to be clear, your plan is to scale the Willoughbys’ ten-foot fence with a knife in your hand—”
“Don’t be an idiot…I can’t scale a fence one-handed. I’d carry the knife in my teeth.”
He grins wide. “Fine, you’d scale a ten-foot fence with a knife between your teeth, chase and somehow capture Frank, and stab him to death.”
“That about sums it up.”
He smooths my hair back from my face. “Ignoring the unbelievable amount of noise that would make, what would you do with the body if you got away with it? Bury it? Make it look like a suicide?”
“Of course not. I’d put its head on a spike as a warning like Henry the Eighth did to traitors. That way, they’d know not to buy a new rooster.”
“It’s truly astonishing that no man has tried to lock you down yet,” he says, pulling me closer. But there’s a smile in his voice, as if he doesn’t actually mean it.