The Mystery of Hollow Places(60)

The longer the silence drags on, the more stupid my words sound echoing in my own ears.

“If you didn’t want me to look for you, then why did you give me the heart?”

His hand rasps against thick stubble as he drags it down his face. “I don’t know.”

“You have to! You’re the grown-up! Isn’t it, like, your job to know what you’re doing?”

Shrinking down onto the bed, he shuts his eyes. “Maybe—I just wanted you to have something from me.”

“Why?” I ask, cold and quiet. “How long were you planning on being gone?”

He doesn’t answer.

The blood is sort of fuzzing out of my brain and toes and fingers, so I can barely feel the roughness of the stone, or the sharpness of the crystals. Just a solid, unknowable weight. “I’m your daughter. Lindy is your wife. We were pretty much falling apart. And this is what you were gonna leave us with?” I hold it up for him to see.

Dad winces.

With all my strength I hurl the thing across the room, against the wall. It dings the plaster and tiny chips of rock fly, but the geode rebounds and thumps to the floor, intact. “This is nothing!” I shriek. “It’s a stupid f*cking rock!”

“Imogene, stop!” he cries.

But I don’t. I stomp on it with my winter boot, and it only grinds into the thin carpet. “It’s a story! It isn’t Mom and it isn’t you and it doesn’t mean shit! So I don’t want it!” I don’t even look so much as feel around the room for something heavy. I land on the squat brass lamp on the bedside table and heft it, knocking off the shade and lightbulb in one swipe.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” Dad protests.

With shaking hands I raise the lamp to bring the base down on the stone as hard as I can. There’s a sound like splintering bone, and it caves. Furiously, I kick at the shards. Bits of crunched crystal and pulverized stone scatter across the carpet. I bring the lamp up again, but a sweaty band of strong fingers closes around my wrist.

“Stop, stop, stop,” he hushes, like he’s a father and I’m a newborn. Sitting back on the bed, Dad drops his head into his hands. “Uhssry,” he mumbles.

“Huh?”

He lifts his chin. “I said I’m sorry.”

“Good. So . . .” I set the lamp down and rub my palms on my pants legs. “Good.” Joining him on the bed, I sit still for a minute before tipping my head against his shoulder, my nose squashed against his chest. He hesitates, then slings his arm around me, which puts this scratchy feeling in my throat.

“What are you doing here, Dad?”

Slowly he reaches into the pocket of sweatpants I’m positive he’s been wearing for a longer stretch of time than is appropriate. He pulls out a piece of paper, one that’s clearly been folded and unfolded and refolded times infinity until the creases have become needle-sharp, and hands it to me.

On it is a printed photo of my mother, of Sidonie Malachai, outside her peach-colored condo on Pines Road. It doesn’t look like she knows her picture’s being taken. Below it, a pageful of information is typed out—phone number, address, the name of the law firm she works for. Her husband’s name.

“Last month I hired this PI,” he says. “Guy I’ve consulted for my books a few times. Good at his job.”

I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry. “You’re telling me you hired a detective? Like, paid some other guy to track Mom down?” I remember one of the few facts of Dad’s disappearance. “What did it cost, fifteen hundred dollars?”

“Almost.” He stares at my mother’s picture while he speaks. “How did you find me?”

“Hard f*cking work, and no cheating, that’s how!”

“Don’t swear, Imogene.”

“What are you gonna do, send me to my hotel room?” But I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I press myself tighter against him and give him the short version.

Maybe I’m looking for a little admiration, a little Boy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But I don’t get it. “You shouldn’t waste your life trying to save me,” he says, and sighs. “I never wanted that. You don’t deserve this.”

“I mean, I’m on school vacation, so there’s that. And I did other stuff. I slept over Jessa’s. Played video games. Lost my prom date.”

He jerks backward. “You have a prom date?”

“No.” I smile tightly into his shoulder. “Keep up.” We’re quiet for a moment, the only sound in the room the out-of-beat percussion of the old heating system pumping out rusty-smelling air, and then I take a deep breath of cigarettes and unwashed Dad and ask, “Why did you need to see Mom so bad? You have me. And Lindy. We’re not enough?”

“It wasn’t like that,” he says dully. “I was scared. Your mother . . . she always got to me. I’d be going along just fine, and then I’d look at the calendar and it’d be her birthday, or I’d pass a store and see her favorite color in the window. I’m not saying all the bad times were about her, but remembering her . . . it could get me down. And our anniversary was coming up, but I’d been so good for so long. With you, and with your stepmother. I thought if I could know about Sid, if she could stop being this question mark, if I could just know, then I would be all right. Officially, once and for all. I hired the PI, and then I knew what I knew, what I never quite expected, that she was married and happy, and I kept waiting for the crash. But it didn’t come.”