Thank You for Listening(29)

Undampened, Sewanee said, “You don’t have to worry about Blah anymore. I’m gonna pay for her care.”

Her words hung in the air, a cluster of balloons waiting to be gathered up. But Henry let them drift. She assessed him in the silence. Still attractive for his age, a bit of a belly, some errant nose and ear hair, a little jowly, maybe, but Adaku had said once he looked like Gabriel Byrne and Sewanee hadn’t been able to unsee it since. “Where, exactly, is this windfall of money coming from, Swan?” he eventually asked.

“I found the buried treasure!” She laughed, hoping Henry would join in. He didn’t. “I got a voiceover job,” she said, happily, adding another balloon to the still-suspended collection.

“A voiceover job.”

“Yes. The voiceover job. A once-in-a-lifetime job that will cover the cost of her care. All of it!” A final balloon.

Henry looked into his coffee. His voice took on a worn quality, as if there were holes in it. “And you would take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help secure your own future and throw it away on something this unnecessary, this frivolous?”

“First of all, my future will be fine, and second of all . . . Unnecessary? Frivolous? Really?”

“You can’t know your future, Swan.”

Pop.

“You don’t know you’ll be fine.”

Pop.

“I would think you’d have learned that.”

Pop.

Then, to himself: “I swear, talking to you is like talking to her.”

And pop.

Now that her balloons no longer hung between them, she saw him clearly, even if nothing was, in fact, clear. “I don’t get you,” she gritted out. “I’ve tried . . . but I don’t.”

“Of course you don’t.” Monotone. Dead.

She shook her head. “Why can’t you be happy? I’m doing this for you as much as for her. Why can’t you see that? You’re free. No one owes anyone anything. What else do you want?”

Henry wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the ragged hem of his bathrobe belt. “I don’t want anything. Nothing, I want nothing.” He gave his coffee a swirl and downed the rest of it.

“I don’t understand. I came here so happy, so excited to tell you–”

“You’re right, you don’t understand me. None of you do.” His voice had a shakiness, as if it belonged to a child left behind in a store.

The vulnerability surprised her, which was why it took her a moment longer to stand. When she did, she reached out to him and said the only thing she could think of. “Hand me your cup, I’ll rinse it out.”

He shook his head. “I’ll take care of it. I’m not completely use–helpless, I’m not helpless.”

“Dad . . .”

Henry got up and walked into the kitchen. She heard his cup land in the sink.

Sewanee gathered herself and went to the door. But when she opened it, she couldn’t bring herself to cross the threshold. She stood there, going no farther out nor back in. She’d come to build bridges, not blow them up. Why couldn’t he at least meet her halfway? She said, staring straight ahead, “I’d thought you might be thankful.”

Henry scoffed, went back to his chair. “Appreciation is not something of which anyone in this family is capable.”

The bitterness. She felt as frayed as his bathrobe. Her anger flared. Life hadn’t gone as planned for any of them, but Henry got to be the lone injured party?

“Take care of yourself, Dad.”

Just as she entered the freshness of the morning air, her father said, “You want to take your turn, go right ahead. But it won’t matter. You’ll see. Even with one eye, you’ll see.”

She could sense his regret even before the sentence had concluded, could hear it in the weakened, thinner reiteration of “you’ll see.” She waited a moment, a moment in which a normal person would say, “Forgive me. I’m sorry. That came out wrong.” He said nothing.

She wanted to turn and face him. Scream at him. Walk back to him and loom over him in his stupid chair, yank off her eye patch and make him touch her scar, press his face to it, kiss it. Instead, she flicked away the tear that fell from her other eye and walked out. She left the door open.

THE WESTSIDE MORNING traffic was already at a standstill. Sewanee was in no mood to fight something else that morning, so she headed west instead of east. She needed the ocean. She needed space. She needed to breathe, having done so little of it since the moment she entered Henry’s apartment. She easily found street parking she would never have found an hour later, grabbed the jacket she kept in the back of her car, and made her way to the cliffside walking path of Palisades Park. The nearest bench was occupied by a man cocooned in an overused sleeping bag, so she walked to the railing and leaned her elbows on it and looked through the morning haze at the ocean.

The sky was beginning to lighten. She inhaled deeply.

She allowed the thought of committing to the June French project to take root. She felt the rising sun on her back and closed her eye, letting the rhythmic sound of the waves caress her, letting the warmth and the breeze and the crashing surf carry her to a place a June French novel would describe in gleeful detail.

It was still slightly shocking she had these new memories to return to.