The Mystery of Hollow Places(61)

“That’s a good thing, right? But . . . Dad, you seem a little . . . crashed.”

He nods. “I wasn’t, though. Not at first. Then I wondered, what if these aren’t my real feelings? What if it’s all just medication, and how would I know? Shouldn’t I be feeling this? I thought that would be the real test.”

“You stopped taking your meds,” I guess. “Okay, I don’t get it. Were you afraid you were going to crash, or afraid you weren’t?”

Dad drops his head back into his hands. “Both. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know you don’t get it. I don’t know how anyone could, if they haven’t been through it.”

“Like Mom has.” The realization sinks through me like a stone. “That’s why you wanted to find her. Not to save her or anything. Not like she needed it. Dad . . . you lied about the curse,” I say gently. “My whole life, I’ve been doing things . . . the way I thought she wouldn’t. Because I didn’t want to be like Mom, and I thought if I tripped one time, I’d just keep falling, like she did.”

“I shouldn’t have put that on you.” His breath hitches.

“But if you told me the truth about how bad it was for you, maybe I could’ve helped you.”

“I don’t know how. I don’t know how I expected your mother to help me. I don’t know how I could be helped.”

It’s the illness talking, I tell myself. It’s not like I’ve never heard this before during the bad times. And Dad’s right, I don’t know what it’s like to be sick that way.

But yeah, I get fear. I get being afraid that you don’t have anything to say to people, so you never talk to people. I get never going to parties because you’re afraid you won’t fit in at the party. I get loving the same boy for eight years and never doing anything about it, but that’s okay because part of the reason you love him is that he’s always around for you to not do anything about. I get closing up your heart because you’re afraid to look inside and find out it’s hollow. I get choosing to be alone because you’re afraid that if the choice is out of your hands, you’ll simply be lonely, and alone is okay, it’s almost cool, in a way. But loneliness isn’t just being alone.

That’s what my bedtime story taught me, anyway. Except I’m not so sure. I think maybe fear is worse, the useless kind that doesn’t help you cram for a test or jazz you up before bungee jumping, but sneaks in and strangles you. My mom was so afraid her own daughter would reject her, she never tried to find me, so she sat alone with her sketchbook.

If she had been less afraid to be lonely . . . If Dad hadn’t let me believe it was the most awful thing possible . . . If, if, if.

Whether it’s dead or alive, we can’t change the past.

There are a million more questions I could ask, the whens and the hows and the whys. But whatever facts I might collect, however I might chip away at the pain of this past week, there’s only a single “because” that really matters. Because Dad isn’t well right now, and there are reasons for that, but no one perfect answer. So all of the truths in the world aren’t as important as this one:

“I want you to come home,” I tell him. I thought knocking on my mom’s door was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but as I sit up and look up at my dad and he stares back at me, damp-eyed and wilting, I think this might be it. “And I want you to take your meds and get help again, for me. I know it’s like . . . if you could fix whatever was wrong by pouring dry cement . . . I’m not saying it right. Just, I know it’s really hard. But . . . I’m a kid. You have to be around for me and take care of me. ’Cause you’re my dad. And I love you and whatever.”

“And whatever.” He sniffles. “I’m not right, bou bui.”

“I know. You’ll come with me?”

“I’ll come.”

“Okay. Oh, except I don’t exactly have a car, in the technical sense.” Before he can change his mind or mine, I smudge the tears out of my eyes, pick up the telephone on the lampless nightstand, and dial our home number.

“Hel-lo?” a high-pitched, un-Lindy-ish voice answers cautiously.

“Jessa?”

“Imogene-f*cking-Scott!” she screams into the speaker. “Where are you? You know everyone is going batshit over here?”

“Who’s everyone?”

“Uh, your stepmother, for one? And your actual mom? And my mom? And me?”

She tells me the story of last night. How Lindy came home to an empty house around nine and knocked on the Prices’ door right away, assuming I’d skipped out to see Jessa. Chad was staying overnight with Omar Wolcott in his dorm room at BU, and Jessa was on a date with Jeremy; still pissed after our fight, she’d officially gotten back together with him, to spite me (or so she says). They had gone to the movies in Framingham, and by the time they emerged from the theater and answered their phones, it was after ten. Under the pressure of Lindy’s Authority Voice, Jessa folded like a paper airplane. She told my stepmother we’d been searching for Dad since the start of vacation, and in the process had found my real mother. After giving Lindy my mother’s number, Jessa was promptly grounded for aiding and abetting.

It was midnight when Lindy called Sidonie, and by then I definitely should’ve made it back to Sugarbrook station. They compared notes and figured out pretty quickly that I was headed to Victory Island. This is when Lindy called the police.