When We Collided(52)

I start the car without knowing what to say. Are you okay? She clearly is not. Do you want to talk about it? She clearly does not.

I wonder how many people felt this way toward my family—unsure of what to say. Sometimes I think everyone should be handed a manual for this stuff when they turn fourteen. That seems like a good age. Starting high school. Staring at the business end of your childhood, when you have to start growing up. So maybe the school should distribute a book called The Field Guide for Broken People. Between Vivi and me alone, we could write a bunch of chapters. Dead Dad. No Dad. Despondent Mom. Flaky Mom. But each broken person is different, and there is no right way for everyone. Just a lot of wrong ways.

Viv shifts beside me. I can’t believe this is the same girl who went streaking down the beach. Who sneaked into my house in the middle of the night. Who made my little sister talk and dance and laugh again. I want to pull over to the side of the road and pull her into my arms. I want to find her in this sadness the way she did for me. For us. Another glance at her, and I have the overpowering urge to make comfort food for her. This is a legacy my dad left me. The hardwired impulse to feed people. I wish I could make the food myself, but there’s no time for that.

“Viv, have you eaten today?”

I take my eyes off the road to look for an answer on her face. She shakes her head once. Her expression doesn’t change. She looks thinner than she did the day we met. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before today.

I stop at a drugstore off the highway and buy her a pair of two-dollar flip-flops. I don’t ask where her shoes went. I also buy these things that Naomi has in our bathroom closet—makeup remover wipes. When I get back in the car, I slide the flip-flops on her dirty feet. She doesn’t move. I clean her face off. She stares ahead like I’m not there. Like I’m not touching her.

At a twenty-four-hour diner across the street, she looks out the window and I order for both of us. It’s dark enough outside that our reflections stare back in the windows. But she’s looking beyond herself. Into the recent past, into the future, I don’t know. When her pancakes come, she eats one bite. She cringes as if she’s been made to swallow soggy cardboard.

“Hey,” I say, reaching for her hand. “I know you’re not hungry, but it will make me feel better if I bring you home fed. Okay? Please?”

With a wrinkle of her nose, she slurps some of the whipped cream off her hot chocolate. I ordered it in place of coffee because I want her to sleep on the way home.

“It’s good,” she says quietly. But her hand doesn’t move to her utensils.

I use my fork to split a sausage link in half, and I run it through a puddle of maple syrup. “Don’t make me do it, Viv. I’ll do it.”

She furrows her eyebrows at me, grumpy.

“Vvvvveeewwwww.” I make my best airplane noise. Loudly. I steer the fork toward her mouth. A truck driver in a nearby booth turns to look at us. I try to make my voice sound like a pilot’s, whatever that means. “Sausage supplier asking permission to land. Over.”

She presses down a smile. “Are you kidding right now?”

“Nope! SausageFork to tower, this is an emergency. We request emergency landing.” I try to make the crackling noises of a radio transmission. Then malfunction noises. “Neeeeeeer, neeeer, ahhh, ahhh.”

Viv laughs, opening her mouth for just long enough for me to wedge the food in. The piece of sausage pushes her cheek out. “God, okay. I’ll eat it.”

She eats all her sausage and drains her hot chocolate all the way down to its powdery dregs. Then, out of nowhere, she starts laughing. It’s giggly and a little crazed and, because it’s Vivi, musical.

She gets out a few words in bursts. “I threw my shoes at his front door. I can’t believe I did that.”

“You threw your shoes?”

“Yeah. I did. Everything else is a huge blur; I barely remember it, it’s like I blacked out. But I’m sure about that part because . . . hello, my shoes are gone.” She dabs at her mouth with a paper napkin. She squints like she’s trying very hard to remember something from years ago instead of only a few hours. “I was storming away from his house, and he had closed the door behind me so he could tell lies to his wife in private or whatever. My shoes were slowing me down, and I was still so mad. So I pulled them off and ran back to the house and threw one square at his front door—SMACK!—and then the other right behind it, and I think the heel dented it. God, it felt so good. I remember that. It felt so, so good. Then I rode off on my Vespa in a blaze of glory. For a second, anyway. Then I felt so sad that it felt like my rib cage was collapsing in on itself.”

I know this feeling. I also know that emotions come from the brain. So why do people feel real aches in their chests? Why does it feel like we carry every feeling in our cores?

I pay for our meal, and we head back to the open road. There are very few cars on the highway, and Vivi plays the radio low. She talks nonstop, working through her feelings in a gush. I try not to add anything. If she’s talking, I’m not getting in the way of it.

She understands that her mom was trying to protect her. But she’s mad. She doesn’t know how she feels about her dad paying child support all this time. Or how he hid it from his wife. Is she glad that he cares enough to do that? Or does he only pay so her mom won’t tell his wife? She just doesn’t know. What she does know is that she’s not sorry if she ruined his marriage. Vivi understands secrets. But not ones like this. Not when you fail to tell your wife that you have an extramarital daughter.