What You Have Left (25 page)

Dear Sara,

It's hard for me to imagine the person you'll be when you read this—probably on your way to college and a life of your own. Sometimes that feels like forever away. But other times—when you get into the car wearing your mom's perfume, or shush me distractedly as you study the menu at a diner, or manage to throw a baseball that goes exactly where you want it to—I feel time racing by so fast I can hardly breathe. Not knowing where things will stand between us ten years from now or how this letter will change them, I need to make sure you understand, before I go any further, how grateful I am to have you in my life, how lucky I am to be your father, how sorry I am for the way things have turned out between your mom and me since the accident. I know it's been hard. I know it's been confusing. My intention here is to be honest with you about all of it, to write down for later all the things I can't very well tell an eight-year-old now.

You may be wondering why I'm doing this. I won't pretend I'm not hoping you'll forgive me, but please don't think I'm asking for forgiveness, or that I think I deserve it. Detective Rizzo once told me that all confessions boil down to one thing: stress. People confess, he said, to relieve the psychological and physiological effects of guilt, regret, anxiety, shame. To share the burden with someone else. To at least glimpse the possibility of redemption. It's only human nature.

Remember the time you spilled orange juice on my keyboard and I didn't know why it wasn't working and you told me what you'd done, even though you could have gotten away with it? You said you
couldn't stop thinking about it. You said you felt so bad, you
had
to tell me, even if you got in trouble. That's where I am. People confess when their need for relief overrides their instinct for self-preservation. I don't claim to be any different.

Still, I'm not sure I'd be writing this if I didn't also believe that, on some level, you already know the truth about the accident. You were there, after all. I have to think someday it's all going to come clear to you, and when it does, you'll know not only why I did what I did, but also that I wasn't honest with you about it. You don't deserve to be lied to. I don't want that between us, not on top of everything else. I don't want to make the same mistakes with you that I made with your mom.

Things didn't have to turn out the way they did. The accident was no more a matter of destiny than anything else you can rightfully call an accident, just mistakes and poor judgment. With a different choice here or there—and I'm talking the small ones you wouldn't otherwise give a second thought to—I could have gotten us safely home from school like I did every other day. Sara would have done her homework at the kitchen table while I prepped dinner, then we might have gone for a bike ride over to Ivy Hill Park, or played catch in the backyard, or worked on a jigsaw puzzle. She'd have kept me company in the basement while I folded laundry, or read a book on the rug in my office while I returned calls and checked email. At 6:38 sharp, we'd have gotten back into the station wagon to go meet Liz's train, then the three of us would have sat down to stir fry or spaghetti and meatballs and talked about the positions Liz was trying to fill at the bank, or whose parents we wanted to
spend Thanksgiving with. Mostly, though, we'd have talked about Sara—which one of her friends she wanted the next play date with, what she wanted to be for Halloween, whether she was going to keep growing her hair or get it chopped off. Putting her to bed, Liz and I might even have paused to remark on how lucky we were, as we were inclined to do, but at no point would we have considered the possibility that we'd dodged a bullet that day, that we'd come
this close
to our lives veering permanently off course. That's the kind of thing you see only in hindsight.

W
ILL
A
LLISON'S
debut novel,
What You Have Left,
was selected for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Borders Original Voices, and Book Sense Picks, and was named one of 2007's notable books by the
San Francisco Chronicle.
His short stories have appeared in magazines such as
Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train,
and
One Story
and have received special mention in the
Pushcart Prize
and
Best American Short Stories
anthologies. He is the former executive editor of
Story.
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, he now lives with his wife and daughter in New Jersey. Learn more about Will Allison at
www.willallison.com.