What to Say Next(29)

This is my home, I remember thinking. This. Here. Where there is room to breathe but no air. This is my home.

And that’s exactly how it feels when Kit’s palm touches my face. Like swimming for the very first time. Like discovering the magic that is water. Like coming home.





It turns out clichés are clichés for a reason—they are true. And this one is most definitely true: You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Jack and I are in my dad’s den, which is half office, half man cave, and it smells like before in here. We are looking for papers. A life insurance policy, information about our mortgage (though I don’t even really know what a mortgage is), bank account passwords. All important stuff Jack claims will likely be found in a single file. My mother, who has clearly reverted back to stage one, denial, or maybe pre–stage one, bacon, has taken to her bed, stuffed with an array of pig products. She’s left us alone to this masochists’ exercise.

Too many memories in here. On my dad’s desk, there’s a photo of me at the age of eight proudly holding up a rainbow lollipop the size of my head at Disney World. One of my dad and me all dressed up at my elementary school’s father-daughter dance, which I turned around as soon as we walked in so I didn’t have to look at it. Another of just him and my mom, on their honeymoon, looking ridiculously young and in love, my mom’s arms, still elaborately hennaed from the wedding, thrown around my dad’s shoulders on top of a mountain. And last, my favorite picture of my family taken at my mother’s fortieth-birthday party, which is now face down: My dad is holding me on his hip, even though I’m ten and way too big to be carried, and we’re all laughing at a joke he just cracked about my mom getting too old for him. We look happier than anyone deserves to be.

Jack and I shouldn’t be in here violating this sacred space, but my mom needs our help. When I was little, I used to beg to play in this office, right here on the beige carpet by my dad’s feet. I’d promise—cross my fingers, hope to die—not to make any noise and to let my father do whatever mysterious things he came in here to do. Of course, I never kept my mouth shut. I’d ask inane questions—did he know that octopus blood is blue? that male sea horses carry their babies?—just because I wanted to hear my dad’s voice, I guess.

I loved the sound of his voice: deep and gravelly. The sound of home.

“Sea horses can carry up to two thousand babies at a time, though it’s usually closer to fifteen hundred. And octopus blood is blue because it has a special protein to make them able to live in extreme temperatures. Now out, Kitty Cat. This is a no-kids zone,” my dad would say, ushering me through the door.

I tell myself that it’s okay to be in here. That I’m not a kid. Not anymore.

And my father’s blood, it turns out, was neither blue nor red. It was a coppery brown. The color of dirty pennies.

—

Jack and I work in silence. We have three bags: keep, donate, trash. Occasionally one of us will pick something up, like the random silver rabbit my dad used as a paperweight, and ask the other with a wordless shrug where it should go. Keep, I point, more times than I should. It’s not lost on me that I have no problem staying quiet in here now. The room seems to demand it.

I tear up when I find a file marked Kit. Inside, there are ten years’ worth of my report cards kept chronologically, pictures of my mom and me, the certificate declaring me a National Merit semifinalist, the project I did for Culture Day in kindergarten, where I drew my family holding hands and colored my dad in with a peach crayon, my mother with a brown one, and me half and half, divided straight down the middle. On my forehead, I drew a Christmas tree bindi. The picture became a running joke that my left side is Indian and Sikh and my right is American and Episcopalian.

“Get your left side ready,” my dad would joke. “Mom is taking you to temple tomorrow morning.”

This file is proof of that which I already knew: Our lives were good. Maybe even perfect.

And then, in a simple folder, I see a five-page, single-spaced legal document. I read it. There must be some mistake. This cannot be what I think it is. Jack sees my face and comes to read over my shoulder.

“Oh crap,” he says. “You shouldn’t. I mean, I didn’t know he even…Kitty Cat, don’t read that—”

“My name is not Kitty Cat!” I yell, though this is not Jack’s fault. It’s my dad’s.

On the top of the page are written the words Petition for Divorce from the Bonds of Marriage. I may not officially be a grown-up, may not be able to accurately define the word mortgage, but I am not stupid. I know what it means. And I know what this word means too, found under a section entitled “Grounds” in underline and bold: adultery.

—

I run up the stairs two at a time and bang on my mother’s door.

“Mom!” I scream, and run into her room before she even says to come in. The tears are flowing down my face, and I hate myself for it. I’ve kept it together for five weeks, have not let a single person see me cry, and it’s this that finally makes me break. Half of my friends have been here. Annie’s parents got divorced. Jack is divorced from Katie.

Marriages fall apart all the time, but I never thought it would happen to my parents. They seemed above that somehow.

And then it hits me that ironically there are no real consequences. My dad is dead. I don’t have to deal with two homes and complicated weekend arrangements and awkward Thanksgiving negotiations. This changes nothing about my future.