In an Instant(41)

She checks her watch often, knowing she should return home but each time granting herself a few more minutes, until finally, reluctantly, she returns to her life.





50

My dad is not on the couch where he should be.

He is not using the wheelchair as he was told to.

He is not resting as his doctor ordered.

Instead, he is in the back seat of a cab, his injured leg propped on the seat, and I have no idea where he is going, but wherever it is, I don’t have a good feeling about it.

Twenty minutes later, we are in Aliso Viejo and turning into an area known as the Audubon, where the streets are all named for birds. The cab turns onto Blue Heron and stops in front of a gray duplex with a brown lawn.

The cab driver helps my dad from the seat. “You sure you’re okay, man?” he asks.

My dad does not look okay. His breath wheezes, and his body shakes. For two weeks, the most he managed was to hobble from his hospital bed to the bathroom.

“Wait for me,” my dad says, ignoring the man’s concern. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

My dad bangs on the door to the duplex with his fist. Nothing. He bangs again.

He checks the door handle, and when it turns, he lets himself in.

My heart pounds. Whatever this is, it’s not good, and I want it to stop.

“Vance,” my dad bellows, and my insides go cold.

Crap. Shit. This is why I need to stay out of people’s dreams, I yell at myself, regretting very much last night’s intrusion into my dad’s thoughts. I knew talking to my dad was a bad idea, but I went ahead and did it anyways. You’d think death would make me smarter, wiser, and more provident, but nope—I’m still the same old stupid me, sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong and doing things without thinking. And now, because I’m an idiot, Chloe is home alone with her stash of pills, and my dad, who should be home resting, has broken into Vance’s house, looking like a rabid animal ready to kill the boy who hurt his daughter.

“Vance, I know you’re home. Get your ass out here.”

Nothing.

I go to where Vance is, hoping my dad is wrong and that Vance is nowhere near his home, but I find him less than twenty feet away, in his room down the hall, huddled on his bed listening to my dad holler.

I swallow at the sight of him, unable to reconcile the scarecrow in front of me with the boy Chloe loved, and if it were not for the distinct gray of his eyes, I wouldn’t know him at all. He’s gone from long and lean to skeletal, his cheeks sunken and his eyes bulging from hollowed caverns of blue. He wears plaid boxers and a torn T-shirt, both stained and loose on his emaciated body. His black hair is gone, shaved to prison camp bald, the thinnest fuzz of ash coating his head. His ears were damaged from the cold and are now misshapen and scarred.

There are no textbooks or notebooks, and I wonder if he’s dropped out of school. He was never a great student, but with Chloe’s help, he got by, and thanks to his mad tennis skills, he was accepted to UC Santa Barbara on a sports scholarship. I wonder if all that is gone now.

On his bureau, in front of his dozens of tennis trophies, is an ashtray filled with crushed cigarettes, and beside that is a wooden box, its lid open and a small baggy of lavender pills with smiley faces inside. Ecstasy. I know this from the “say no to drugs” lecture they made us attend our freshman year—smiley faces, handprints, and peace symbols engraved on pretty pastel tablets, a gateway drug to oblivion and addiction.

“Fine. I’ll come to you,” my dad yells.

Vance’s eyes twitch around in his head, and it isn’t solely from fear. He’s drugged out of his mind. I know he and Chloe smoked pot sometimes, but Chloe would never be into this.

Vance pulls his knees to his chest, and that’s when I see it: the tops of all his fingers except his index fingers and his thumbs are gone. I swallow at the sight, my throat swelling as I glance at his tennis bag in the corner.

The door bursts open, and my dad charges in, adrenaline propelling him forward and giving him strength he didn’t have a moment before. And of everything I’ve witnessed since Oz’s death, I’ve not watched anything as sad as this moment—one man and one boy, both in love with my sister and both utterly wrecked by that day and their failure to protect her.

My dad doesn’t slow. Storming the bed, he lunges onto his left crutch as the right one swipes Vance across the temple, knocking him sideways and spinning him off the bed. Vance lands on his knees, and the crutch whips back to strike him again in the ribs. The wind goes out of him as he collapses to the floor and curls into a fetal position, his deformed hands wrapping over his head.

My dad winces when he sees Vance’s fingers, so much worse than Chloe’s—his pinkies half-gone, his ring fingers remaining to just below the first knuckles, his middle fingers trimmed to the length of his index fingers—a progression of loss that has left his hands resembling a bar graph.

My dad’s pity lasts less than a second. The crutch rises again before slamming down on Vance’s back.

Stop, I scream, but my dad has only just begun, his rage blinding him as he carries out his wrath on the one person besides himself he can blame. Vance grunts with each blow, but other than to cover his head, he doesn’t even try to defend himself. Blood trickles from his lip, and welts rise on his arms and legs. I am thankful my dad is so weak, the blows a quarter the strength they would be if he were in full form.