Everyone We've Been (21 page)

My father stays the night. Or arrives bright and early the next morning to begin the work of wearing me down. I'm not sure which.

He knocks several times on my door, begging me to please open it.

I ignore him until at least midday. It's Saturday, after all.

Finally I don't hear his voice, but I see a shadow under the door, and I hear him breathing in and out. I draw the door toward me and put my face through the crack.

He is dozing, sitting on the floor with his knees pulled up, his mouth slightly open, but he jerks awake immediately.

“I need to tell you some things,” Dad says, getting to his feet. I open the door, even though I'm fairly certain I don't want to hear this.

“If you're going to lie to me, we don't have to bother with this conversation.”

“I'm not going to lie to you,” he says, actually holding my gaze. I step back and let him in.

He sits on the edge of my bed and surveys my room like he hasn't seen it in years. I don't think he has. He looks like a giant sitting on a piece of furniture that's too small for him and might break at any second.

I lean back against the wall by my door. I have so many questions for him, but I'm afraid I might cry, so I let him go first.

“You're built too much like me,” he says.

I shoot him a weird look. What is he talking about? We're nothing alike.

“It's always been my biggest fear,” he continues, “that you might end up in some of the places I have.”

I'm
too much like him? Does he not see how much Caleb looks like him? How much Caleb wants to fly?

“Dad,” I say impatiently, but he holds up a hand.

“I'm getting there,” he says. “I've suffered from pretty bad depression all my life. My brothers, too. You know about Uncle Mark.” I nod and glance away. He killed himself his second year of college, before I was born. “I had dark times, too. Your grandmother would look at me and say, ‘Open your eyes. Wake up.' And for the longest time, I had no idea why she said that. I thought she meant that I always looked like I was falling asleep.”

I bite my lower lip.

“For the most part, after your mother and I were married, I was better. Most airlines need you to be stable for a minimum of a year before you can fly, and I was. I started—and am still on—meds, but I was finally happy. And after you kids were born, I was really happy. And then Rory died….” He takes a breath in like he's been punched.

“That's why you left,” I say. “You blamed me.”

He glances at me, surprised. Then he says, like he's having trouble picking out his words, “It was a lot of things.” He doesn't deny it, though—that maybe he had trouble forgiving me. And in his non-denial, I find more truth—painful and sad—than I have since I found out about Rory. “We walked around in a fog for months. We tried for a year to get past it. All of us. Me, your mother, Caleb.

“But you were the worst, Addie. You were carrying so much blame around it was like it had contorted you. That little girl who was bursting with so much life, who burst into every room. Your eyes were glazed over. Your passion for everything, for music—it was just gone. I couldn't bear looking at you and not recognizing you. I wanted to say the same thing my mother had said to me: ‘Open your eyes.' To tell you it was going to be okay. And I believed that you would be okay. I really did. I thought it was possible to live through depression, because I was doing it.”

He shakes his head now. “But when your mother told me about my pills and where she'd found them—she was so convinced that if you
didn't
have to live through it, then you shouldn't. I knew she'd never forgive me if something happened to you. And honestly, I wouldn't have forgiven myself, either. So I let her decide.”

He looks me in the eye again. “Caleb didn't want it and I understood why. If I couldn't imagine having it myself, then I couldn't force him to.”

You fought for Caleb, but not for me.

“It would have been a betrayal, unnatural,” Dad continues. “A parent doesn't forget a child. I—we—had a responsibility to remember him.”

“So it wasn't unnatural when you let me forget him?”

And they hadn't just betrayed Rory by doing it; they'd betrayed me, too.

“I don't think it was the right thing to do, Addie. Some days it eats me up inside…,” Dad says, squinting, looking past me. “Whether it was right or wrong, your mother and I just wanted you to be okay. We had a chance to take away your pain, and we did. I wish sometimes someone could have done that for me.”

His voice breaks a little then, and I swallow.

I want to shout a million things at him, to yell what that tiny voice in my head is saying:
I could have done it. I could have gone through it and come out okay.
But my throat burns and different words form.

“I had it done again. I
chose
to go back a second time. I didn't know how much I had already lost,” I say, tears spilling unbidden down my cheeks.

He looks for a second like he's going to walk across the room to me and wrap me up in his arms like he used to do.

“I know. We set you up for that. Whatever happened with the boy—you never told me the details—it tore you up inside. Anyone could see that.”

I swipe my hand across my cheek.

“Rory was the first major loss you had, and the boy—”

“Zach,” I say. I want him to say it, acknowledge the apparition I've being seeing.

“Zach. Because you never really dealt with the grief of losing Rory, this second heartbreak felt like it was the end of the world to you. I think the way you learn to deal with one hard thing affects the way you deal with the next and the one after that. You didn't remember what it felt like to lose anything and come through it.” It reminds me of what Mrs. Dubois always says. About firsts and how they set the precedent. “How you learn to cope with it and
live through it,
that's important.”

Is he saying Zach is dead, too? Lost the way Rory is? Why didn't I let Katy tell me everything she knew?

“Dad, do you know
anything
about me and Zach?”

He shakes his head at me, like now is not the time.

“Addie, your mother was right that a number of things could be causing what you've been seeing,” Dad says. “Figure out why you made the choice you did to have the procedure on your own. Let's find out what's wrong—why you're seeing him—first.”

“Come here, you love-bitten mothertrucker,” Katy says, sweeping me into an inescapable embrace. “Don't you ever leave me again!”

“You left
me,
” I point out, laughing into her shoulder as I hug her back just as tightly.

“Why? Why did I do it?” she hisses. “I nearly fell into a Depressive Episode, I missed you
so much
.” Which, of course, is not true since not one of her hundred messages made mention of said Depressive Episodes, or even of missing me. But her hug tells me now what her words when she was away didn't.

I step back and say, “Zach, this is my best friend, Katy.”

Keeping one hand on my lower back, Zach reaches forward to shake Katy's hand and grins at her. “Hi!” he says, speaking loudly to be heard over the music at the pool party we're at. “Addie tells me you're an actor.”

And I want to hug him because if there ever was a perfect way to introduce yourself to Katy, that was it. Not “act
ress,
” because she finds the -
ress
ending to be sexist, plus Zach's comment indicates that I've been talking about her, which she loves.

One of Katy's eyebrows shoots up and she shakes hands with Zach, clearly impressed.

“I am.” She smiles back. “It's nice to meet you, finally!” Zach and I have been official for more than a month, but since she only got back last night, having spent the past three weeks with her cousins in Long Island, this is the first time we are all together.

Katy attaches herself to my side and says much louder than she realizes, “Okay, you were right about the smile. My God. But where is
the friend
?”

Zach laughs, clearly making out her every word. “Raj said—and I quote—‘I would rather die a slow and merciless death at the hands of one of Van Durgen's whimpering characters than put on a pair of pants and go to a
pool
party when I can play
Dungeon World 2 and
my mother's making aloo gobi.' ”

Zach and I laugh hard and Katy stares at us in fascination, especially at Zach's smile. She pinches my side just under my rib cage.

“I got, maybe, three words of that, but you two are
revolting,
” she says, giving Zach and me her crucially important seal of approval.

Most of the party passes uneventfully. Katy is one of about seven people who strip out of their clothes and actually get into the pool—or rather, she cannonballs in. Everybody else dances and talks, loitering around the pool or on the grass. Some people are even on the roof or the fence.

Usually I'd be trailing behind Katy at a party like this, or halfheartedly conversing with one of her the-
yo-
ter friends while Katy chats up some guy, gets wasted, or tries to convince me to loosen up. (“If you're going to New Yawk, you're going to have to learn how to party like you're from New Yawk.”) She's diagnosed me as having
at least
a mild form of agoraphobia, loosely defined as the fear of public spaces and crowds. For once, she might not be far from the truth.

That, coupled with my mom always wanting to know my whereabouts, makes me a not-so-frequent attendee of house parties.

Now, though, Zach introduces me to a few of his friends and then we find ourselves a spot underneath a peeling tree in the yard and lose track of everyone else.

We're playing One-Up, a game that Kevin, of all people, taught Zach. It's actually pretty similar to Bigger and Better. You say one thing that scares you, and the other person one-ups you until you can't think of anything worse. Our first topic is fears.

“Drowning,” I say.

“The dark,” Zach counters.

“The
dark
?” I repeat, incredulous.

“Not, like, scared-to-turn-out-the-lights dark,” Zach laughs. “I mean, like,
abject darkness.
The kind of dark that can swallow something whole. I honestly can't think of anything worse.”

“Good thing it's
my
turn. Hmmm. How to top that? Let me think of something truly scary. Oh, I know!” I say, flicking something off his jeans. “Lint. It's so terrifying. And, like, fluffy.”

“Fine. Laugh it up,” he says, rolling his eyes. “But I guarantee you that you'd freak out if you could only
fathom
the kind of darkness in my mind.”

“Okay, this is getting creepy, Zach.”

He laughs. “I'll put it in a movie someday and
then
you'll understand.”

Zach suddenly stiffens, his face rigid.

“Shit,” he murmurs under his breath.

“What's wrong?” I whirl around, following the direction of his eyes. They're right on Katy, who is leaning over the edge of the pool, still in it, and talking to a girl in a short black summer dress. As we watch, Katy talks animatedly and then gives a little squeal, putting her hands up. The girl, whose hair is midnight black with a big red flower in it, bends down to give Katy a hug.

I've seen her before, at one of their community-theater events.

The girl laughs now and steps back, the front of her dress wet from Katy's hug.

“Do you want to go?” Zach asks very quietly. The girl is moving across the lawn now, toward a group of girls lying on towels on a patch of grass. And they squeal and hug her when she reaches them. One of them pats the flower in her hair.

“Sure,” I say with feigned lightness as we both get up and dust our clothes off. “I'm going to quickly say bye to Katy, okay?”

Zach nods, still distracted, but he's no longer watching the girl. He's staring down at his sneakers.

When we leave the party a couple of minutes later, Zach is holding my hand, leading the way so we don't lose each other. We both say hi to a few people we know as we pass—Zach to people who go to his high school, me to people who go to mine. Mostly band people.

I glance one last time over my shoulder, trying to make out the red flower in the dimming light. I find it in almost exactly the same spot I saw it last, and I notice that she's a hand-talker. Her hands wave animatedly as she recounts a story to her friends, which has one of them grabbing at her sides and doubling over.

Whatever lightness or end-of-summer giddiness I entered this party with has dissipated.

Lindsay is not, in fact, horse-faced.