The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily(48)

“He loves you,” Leeza said once he was gone.

“You shouldn’t be the one telling me that,” I replied.

“I know.”

While she went out to the closet to get some new sheets, I texted Lily with the invitation to breakfast. It was late, so I wasn’t expecting her to be up. But she responded right away, excited.

“Lily’s on board for gingerbread pancakes,” I told Leeza when she returned. Then I took the sheets out of her arms; I could make my own bed.

“Lovely!” she said with compensatory cheer. “Is there anything else I can do for you before I head to bed?”

Tell me why you’re married to my father, I didn’t say. Tell me that when I make mistakes they’re going to be my mistakes, not his mistakes.

“I’m good,” I told her.

She brought me a glass of water for my bedside anyway, and a few Tylenol. After she kissed me on the cheek good night, she pulled back and considered me one more time.

“It’s actually not a bad look for you. More bounty hunter than pirate, I’d say. Work it while you can.”

I dug out my pajamas from a drawer.

“And Dash?” Leeza said from the doorway. I looked back up at her. “You’re right about Lily. She’s a keeper.”

But why, I wondered as I began the long, long, somewhat tortured road to sleep, would she ever want to keep me, if paternity was destiny?



Tuesday, December 23rd

I hadn’t told Lily about the gingerbread pancakes; she arrived with freshly baked gingerbread muffins. I was going to explain this coincidence to her, but I was interrupted by her crying out, “YOUR FACE!”

“What about my face?” I asked. “You can’t honestly see it under all these bandages, can you? My goal is to haunt an opera house by the time I’m twenty-three.”

“It’s not funny!”

“Actually, it is. And I think in this case, we can agree that I get to be the one to determine the humor of the situation, no?”

I leaned in to kiss her. Because of the whole half-blind thing, my aim was a little off. But she was nice enough to correct my miscalculation in a rather satisfying manner.

“I may start pulling an Adam Driver,” I warned her. “Wear a mask just for the fun of it. I mean, to prove that I’m badass and evil. That’s a Star Wars reference, by the way, not a Girls reference.”

“I got that one,” Lily said. And I thought, Voila! Now you’re not thinking about my injury anymore!

Before she could start drowning me in Apology Soup, I led her into the kitchen, where Leeza was over the griddle and my father was over the Wall Street Journal.

“Great minds think alike!” Leeza exclaimed when she saw the muffins.

“More like every goddamned thing nowadays is gingerbread for Christmas,” my father added. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad it’s not pumpkin, for Christ’s sake. But still. Gingerbread’s hardly an original thought. If you ask me, I blame Starbucks.”

“Nobody’s asking you, dear,” Leeza said lightly, taking out the muffins and putting them on a serving tray.

Within a few minutes, the pancakes were ready. Leeza had even made them in the shapes of ginger people. (It seemed strange to me to gender cookies.) What then followed was something that Lily was deeply unfamiliar with—familial silence. Every now and then one of us—even my father—would compliment the pancakes. But otherwise…nothing. Lily kept staring at my bandages, horrified. My father wouldn’t stop reading his paper. Leeza smiled vaguely, as if there were invisible elves telling her gossip.

I imagined this was what every meal with Leeza and my dad was like. When it had been my dad and my mom, silence had meant a truce. Here, it was a default void.

Please may we not become like this, I wanted to say to Lily.

And maybe she got that, because when I looked back at her, she rolled her eyes.

I tried to roll my eyes back, forgetting for a second what a bad idea that was. The result was a not-so-gentle ice-pick-to-my-retina feeling.

I must have yelped, because both Lily and Leeza immediately asked if I was okay. Dad just looked annoyed.

“A-okay,” I assured them. “But I just remembered—I need to change my bandage.”

“I’ll help you,” Lily and Leeza said at the same time.

I can do it, I thought.

Then I thought, But actually, I’d rather do it with Lily.

“Thanks, Leeza,” I said. “But I don’t think I need that many hands to help out. I’m going to let Lily take this one.”

We went to my room, where I got the gauze and tape from my backpack. Then we went into the bathroom, because even though I didn’t particularly want to see it, I knew we should probably have a mirror handy. I took off my eye patch and then started to unravel what the doctor had done. But Lily stopped me, said, “Here, sit down. Let me.”

I closed my eyes. I felt her peel the tape from my skin, as carefully as she could. I felt the gauze over my eye loosening, and loosening, and then finally falling away. Lily gasped a little at what she saw—the stitches, the bruising—but instead of saying anything, she kept working. We were silent now, yes, but it was a silence of concentration, of focus. Not just on her part, as she slowly put me back together. I was also feeling her fingers as they touched the side of my head. I was hearing her breathe. I was attuned to the most basic pulse of the moment. The gauze was put in place, kept in place. The eye patch went back on top, protecting the protection. A pat on my back—All done, all good.