Fade Out (6 page)

I’m sitting in the passenger seat in such a way that I’d have to physically crank my neck all the way around to look at him, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see him with the eyes in the back of my head. That doesn’t mean I’m not aware of every single thing he does as he pulls the car onto the bridge. Like how he puts a little weight on the brake now, like how he keeps glancing at me when he really should be keeping his eyes on the road.

I can’t help but notice that he looks the same. Only a couple months have passed, and I guess I figured he’d have changed. Like he’d come pick me up with a beard or something and I’d
be like
Who’s that dude? That dude’s not my dad.
But no. He’s here and he sure looks like my dad. He has the short dark hair that sticks up on top, always, no matter if you smooth it down with gel or spit. The same brown glasses, and behind them the same pair of gray-green eyes. Somehow it feels so much worse that he looks exactly like my dad.

I aim my eyes out the window where I can see the edge of the bridge and, below and beyond that, the water. I can see the mountains—the same ones I have by my house—and up above them in the sky, all pretty just to be annoying, the orange-pinkish glow of the setting sun.

Hey, you.

Yeah, you. The one who was in the dark theater getting played. The one dragged out by her mommy. Some Rita Hayworth you turned out to be.

“Did you say something?” Dad says. We’re coasting over the bridge now.

I make a great show of adjusting the shoulder strap of my seat belt so I don’t die of suffocation. But I don’t answer.

“So it’s the silent treatment all weekend, then,” Dad says. “I thought you were more mature than that, Danielle.”

Mature.
He’s
talking to
me
about being mature. I let go of
the shoulder strap so it cuts into my throat, constricting my air passage, making it impossible for me to speak even if I wanted to. Below us is the water of the Hudson, dull and gray.

Dad says, “Fine. You don’t have to talk. I’ll do all the talking. This has been… difficult, for all of us. And I take the blame for this, Danielle, I want you to know that.”

I’ve been trying to keep absolutely silent, but I lose control for one second and let out a sound: a cross between a snort and
ha!
Like
pfffftcha
, which needs no translation.

Dad keeps talking, being all
You have every right to be mad at me.
Saying
I did some things I’m not proud of
and
I hope you can forgive me.
Adding
Blah-blah I’m your dad and I’ll always love you, blah.

If this were a movie and the heroine’s dad was being a major liar like mine, we’d throw in a car chase to get rid of him. Like maybe I’d get so mad, I’d run out to escape him and he’d go after me, do an illegal U-turn on the bridge, speed away from the cops, cause a traffic jam, run over some poor kid’s dog, and land in prison.

In real life, what I want to do is tell my dad I’m not dumb. I pay attention. If there’s anything I’ve learned from noir movies it’s that everyone lies about something. And if you lie about one thing, what’s to say you didn’t lie about it all? I’d like to hear his answer to
that
.

Of course, I don’t say any of this because I can’t: I’m still not talking to him. But I think it. I think it really, really hard and hope he hears me.

When we reach the end of the bridge, the car in front of us turns right and we keep on going straight. I don’t know where my dad lives now—except that it’s somewhere on this side of the river. I decide to close my eyes so I can’t find it, even if I was forced to.

I let the noise of this side of the river wash over me. Car noise, air-conditioner noise, radio noise, all noises we have on my side of the river.

Eventually, the car slows. I feel it turn. A touch of brakes as we come to a stop. We have arrived, I take it. We’re at his house. My eyes stay sealed.

“
Danielle
,” I hear him say.

I hear a loud sigh. Then the key being pulled from the ignition, the driver’s side door opening.

“Dani, do you want anything or what?”

He’s asking if I…
want
anything? I want more things than I can name. I want this drive never to have happened, this bridge never crossed. I want Cheryl to stay on her side of the river, and my dad on mine. I want my mom and dad
back together, but that goes without saying. I even want Casey home from soccer camp, if that’ll help return things to normal. I want a life nothing like a noir movie. I want to find out Jackson had no strange girl in the projection booth with him. That he’s in Shanosha right now eating ice cream with his girlfriend, Elissa, and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest because if he’s going to be with anyone, it should be Elissa. I want to be assured that everything’s as it should be, that everything’s fine. I want no lies and all truth, all the time. That’s what I want.

So I let my eyes come open. First one, then the other. The sight is blinding. What an ugly house Cheryl has, with sickly green floodlights, and concrete instead of grass on the lawn, and flat, smeary windows decorated with… boxes of cereal?

Oh, this isn’t the house. It’s a convenience store.

“We need eggs,” Dad says. He has his car door open, waiting for my answer. “Do you want anything from in there or not?”

Rita Hayworth would not want a thing. She’d stay strong and wouldn’t be lured by the bright lights and shelves of convenience. But Rita Hayworth was a movie star—she never got thirsty like regular people. She wouldn’t cave.

I, on the other hand…

“Chocolate milk,” I burst out. “I really want some chocolate milk.” These are the first words I’ve spoken in close to an hour.

“Then come on in,” Dad says.

And I unbuckle my seat belt, and, with the last ounce of pride I have left, I open my car door and lead the way in.

Cheryl’s actual house—the house Dad now lives in
—is not as ugly as a convenience store, but I take the time to notice as many questionable things as I can. It’s only fair to my mom, even if she did have a hand in sending me here for the weekend.

Ugly things spotted: ugly gold vase holding ugly bigheaded flowers, ugly brown carpet leading up the stairs, ugly picture of a horse in the hallway, ugly refrigerator magnets, ugly curtains, ugly deformed-looking knobs on all the doors.

I’d like to say Cheryl is as ugly as her house, but that would be a lie. She’s okay, I guess. She is blond and pointy, with long arms and long fingers, and she obviously straightens her hair because I notice a frizzy curl she missed at the back.

She has a blond and pointy sixteen-year-old daughter named Nichole. I haven’t met her yet, but I know what she looks like from the pictures in the stairwell. Her name’s not Nicole but Nic-
hole
—I see the nameplate on her bedroom door.

“Is she in there?” I say as we stand outside her closed door.

Cheryl looks anxiously at the door, but she doesn’t knock on it. “You’ll meet her later,” she says, avoiding the question. Then she sweeps me down the hall toward another door, which she opens with a flourish. “This,” Cheryl says, “is
your
room.”

She points to it, her smile eating up a full half of her face, as if she expects me to leap inside and lick the walls.

“I already have a room,” I say. I don’t budge from my spot in the hallway. Cheryl’s just my dad’s girlfriend—I don’t understand why she’s acting like this has to be my house too.

“I know you have a room at home,” Cheryl says. “But this is your room here.”

She switches on the light to reveal four walls, one tiny window, and a prison mattress. (Fine, a canopy bed, but I decide that if and when I recount this later I will tell everyone about the prison mattress.) The room is so small it fits just the bed and a dresser. You’d have to walk sideways to reach the window. You’d have to hold your breath if you wanted to do anything more.

“I don’t need two rooms,” I say.

“You can decorate it any way you like,” she says, her voice getting higher and louder with each word. “Right, honey?”

I flinch.

My dad, aka “honey,” has been hovering during this conversation. He holds my little suitcase. “It’s your room,” he says. “I want you to feel at home here.”

If I puked, it would fade in to match the blech color of the hall carpet, I realize. If I puked here and now at what my dad just said, you could walk this hall for years and never know it.

I take one step into the room. “It’s huge!” I say.

“Danielle,” my dad admonishes me. I guess he still knows me well enough to detect my sarcasm.

I sit on the bed and give it a good bounce. “Wow,” I say. “What was this room before, a shoe closet?”

Cheryl looks aghast. That’s when I realize it probably was her closet. I bet she had to move all her stuff to the basement so I could have a room to sleep in. Her winter clothes and shoes are gathering mold in the basement, all for me!

“Thanks for letting me use your closet, Cheryl,” I say with the utmost politeness. “I
really
appreciate it.”

“Danielle, please,” my dad says. He makes me feel bad. Almost.

“You have your own bathroom,” Cheryl says out of the blue. She’s quite possibly deranged. She opens a door to reveal the bathroom and then smiles, all her teeth showing.

“Actually…” she adds. “You share the bathroom with Nichole.” She motions toward a closed door at the opposite end of the bathroom, just beside the toilet. “It connects to her room too.” Then she turns to my dad. “I’ll leave you two to get settled in.”

When she steps out, it’s just me and Dad, Dad and me, chillin’ in a closet. I’d say it’s just like old times, but it’s not. Not at all.

“Is this how it’s going to be all weekend?” Dad says.

“Like what?” I say innocently.

“When your brother comes to visit I hope he’s on better behavior.”

“Casey will love it here. Does he get his own closet too?”

Dad lets out a long, low sigh. I’m his test case, I see now. I’m the first piece from his old life that’s come spilling into his new. Maybe he should have thought some on this before carting me over. Or at least waited before buying the canopy bed.

“Go ahead and unpack,” he says at last. “Come down when you’re ready.” Then he leaves, just like that. He doesn’t yell at me for being so awful. He doesn’t tell me to appreciate my closet because some kids in the world have no food and nowhere to live and they don’t even
have
closets. He’s just gone, like he’s flat-out given up on me.

This is all his fault. Could someone tell me why
I
feel bad?

I’m alone not two seconds when the door beside the toilet flips open and a girl shoves through the bathroom to gawk at me. Nichole is a younger version of her mom, her hair long, her jeans low on her hips the way my mom would never let me wear them. Her eyes are like the sharp little stones you step on when you’re running down the driveway to get the mail and you thought you didn’t need your shoes but you so totally regret it.

She speaks first. “That’s my bed.” She shoots her gaze at the canopy. “I didn’t want it anymore so they stuck it in here.”

“Okay,” I say. What, am I supposed to be grateful?

She continues. “So you’re not going to be my sister. Got it?”

“Got it,” I say, like it’s her choice what we are and we aren’t. Like I would ever think that sleeping on her hand-me-down bed makes us sisters somehow. For some reason, my mouth won’t open to say that.

There’s something about Nichole that makes me nervous. Maybe because she’s older and has on those great jeans. Or maybe it’s because this is her house and not mine.

So I add, “I never thought we would be sisters.”

She takes me in for a beat. “Huh,” she says. “You haven’t seen the ring.”

“What ring?”

“What?” she says.

“What?” I say.

“Whatever,” she says. She’s toying with me. “So how old are you again, twelve?”

“Thirteen,” I say, mortally offended. “I’m going into eighth grade.”

She doesn’t seem too impressed. “Where?”

“Shanosha.” The name of my public school is the same as the name of my town, fashioned after some Native American word I’m not even sure is for real. It’s a school in the middle of nowhere full of middle-of-nowhere kids. I wonder if she knows that.

She sniffs. I guess she does.

She doesn’t tell me what grade she’s in or where she goes to school. She just says, “If this door is closed”—she indicates the door from my room into the bathroom—“you don’t open it. I’ll let you know when and if you’re allowed in. You use that sink and don’t touch my sink. You’d better have brought your own toothpaste, I swear. If you
have
to take a shower do it before nine, so you’re not in my way. And no baths. Not ever. The only person who takes a bath in that tub is me.”

She’s acting like I’m going to spend all my time here, in this bathroom.

“Okay?” she says.

“Yeah, okay, no problem.”

I can’t figure out how I can snap out whatever thing I want when it’s to my mom or my dad or even my dad’s girlfriend, Cheryl, but just being around Nichole turns me meek.
No problem?
I don’t even know who I am anymore.

She heads back into the bathroom.

“Hey, Nichole?” I say, my voice all squeaky.

“Yeah?”

“What ring?”

She takes one last look at me and slams the door in my face.

Fine. If this were a movie, I guess I wouldn’t even be in it.

I sit beneath the pink prison canopy, alone. I have a bad feeling. I can barely breathe. I grab my bag and dig through it for my phone. This house may be on the other side of the river, which is so far from home it feels like the other side of the world, but at least it’s down out of the mountains, in civilization. I bet it gets perfect cell-phone reception.

Only—I can’t find my phone.

I dump the contents of my bag out on the bed. Lots of old
ticket stubs plus a few bits of stale popcorn. The broken headphones that go with my iPod but not the iPod itself. Wintergreen gum. Spearmint gum. A blue pencil swiped from my mom’s office, eraserless. My house key. A plastic spoon from Taco Juan’s, licked clean.