The Best Possible Answer(57)

My dad’s not anywhere in the drawing.

Mila’s right. She’s much smarter than any of us give her credit for.

I put the picture on the fridge.

Even though Evan must think I’m a hot mess, especially now that he has the whole story about my idiotic transgressions, he was right, I think.

I’m going to be okay.

And Mila’s going to be okay, too.

*

“Did you talk to him?”

“No. We just messaged.”

“What did he say?”

We’re sitting on Sammie’s balcony. We haven’t talked about our fight. I tried to start with that, but she just pulled me out here so we wouldn’t wake her mom.

Sammie reaches into her pocket and pulls out the phone. “Here.”

Virgo: Is this really Viviana?

Sammie: Please delete it.

Virgo: Evan didn’t believe me.

Sammie: Pleeeeeeeease delete it.

Virgo: I will. I promise.

I hand it back to her. She slides it into her pocket. “I deleted the photo, too.”

“Again.”

“Yes.”

“This is going to follow me the rest of my life, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Vivi.…”

“I’m sorry I make you crazy with my drama—”

Sammie takes my hand and squeezes it. “Stop. Just stop. We both said mean things.”

“Yes,” I say. “We did.”

“We’re both impulsive, okay? It’s what makes us us.”

I nod. “I talked to my mom.”

“You did?”

“Impulsively, yes.” I tell Sammie about the conversation. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with them, but I’m going to ask her to demand that my dad pay for me to go to therapy.”

“Oh?”

“I can’t keep dumping on you.”

“You can always dump on me, but I think it would help to have someone else—someone who knows what the hell they’re doing—”

“To help me figure out what the hell I’m doing,” I say.

“Exactly.”

“I agree completely.”

I get a text from my mom: I thought I should call you: Your father’s coming home early. He’ll be here tonight. I understand that you might want to stay at Sammie’s, but I do think you should talk. I won’t be home until later, but I can try to schedule a sleepover for Mila at her friend’s house. Let me know.

I show Sammie the message. “What do you think? Should I start figuring it out tonight?”

“It’s up to you.”

Yes, I text back. Do that. I want to see him.

*

My father’s obviously nervous. He’s doing that thing where he shifts his glasses on his face and then coughs and shifts them again.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

I’m looking at my father, and I don’t see the god that Mila sees or the once-handsome grad student my mom fell in love with. I see a pockmarked, wrinkled, sad old man. The lies of his life, the stress of his life, they weigh down on him. He’s hunched and tired.

“How was Acapulco?”

My father shudders at this. “What are you talking about? I was in Singapore.”

“No,” I say. “You were with Paige. And Ella. And your other kids.”

My father pushes his chair back and stands up. “Who told you?” He pounds his fist on the table. “Did your mother tell you?”

“No, Dad. You might want to put a pass code on your phone.”

He sits back down in his chair. “Son of a—”

“Do you love her?”

“Who?”

“Oh my God. Mom, of course.”

He slumps over the table. He gets quiet and still.

“Did you ever love her?”

“One day you’ll understand.”

“Dad, what the hell kind of answer is that? One day I’ll understand what, exactly?”

He lifts his head and looks at me. “Responsibility, complications. It’s life as you know it, and you’re comfortable enough to be petrified of any other version. You’re close enough to withstand the other’s habits—even if it involves other entanglements—to be okay with your own version of love. You’re committed to this and there are other people—other hearts—involved. And what? Are you going to destroy their lives because of your principles? There are no principles. There’s only survival.”

“What does that even mean?” I want to cry or maybe laugh or maybe scream or maybe hit him. “Screw that, Dad! Talk to me. Answer my question: Did you ever love her? Or was your love just another lie?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Oh my God. Do you even feel bad about everything you’ve done to us? To them?”

He pushes his glasses up his nose and leans toward me. “There’s this concept—did you study it in your summer program thing?—called the ‘hindsight bias.’ We have it all the time in the engineering world. You can have all this data about the resisting forces that might weigh on your building—whether it’s gravity, wind, temperature, erosion—you still don’t know before you implement it what the real outcome will be. It’s easy to go back to a failed design and say ‘I would have done this differently’ or ‘I would have done that differently.’ It’s easy to piece the failure together later. We can predict a lot, more than ever, but the reality is that every structure in this world will fall down eventually. We still can’t predict the exact moment of collapse.”