In Sight of Stars(64)

She storms out, leaving the studio broken and quiet. After another moment, Dad says, “That’s your mother for you. She’ll get over it. If you’re going to paint, well, you’re not a baby. We can’t protect you from the world.”

Right. Because, I’m not a baby. I’m an artist like Dad is. Like Van Gogh was.

“We artists stick together,” I say, “because there’s more to life than we can see with our eyes.”

“You got it, kid,” my father says.

Day 12—Afternoon

I skip Group, which Dr. Alvarez says is okay. I think about looking for Sabrina and Martin after, to see how they are, but I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just need some more time to process.

I’m not ashamed of what my father was. It’s not like that at all. I’m mad at him for lying to us. For faking things. For being an imposter. For thinking he needed to be.

I’m mad because I don’t know who he was.

I stare out my window, down onto the courtyard where the brachiosaurus is in motion, loud and rumbling, chomping up sections of earth.

Memory after memory seeps in, with my parents in role reversal, a personal Freaky Friday where Dad is moody and absent, and my mother is the one trying to be cheerful, the one trying to hold everything together.

Why did I make her out to be the villain, sticking up for him over her, over and over again?

Did I think he needed protecting?

My chest constricts.

If those were Dad’s letters, how could he live that way, and not tell us? Tell me.

Didn’t he think I deserved to know?

Day 12—Evening

“You awake?” Sister Agnes Teresa’s familiar voice asks after a soft knock.

I’m already dressed in the swim trunks, hoping she might drop in.

“Rough day?” she asks, when she sees me.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I say.

*

I wade forward, letting the cool water envelop me. When I turn back, Sister Agnes Teresa is folding her habit over the side of a chair. She wears the same serviceable navy one-piece she had on the other night.

I dive under and swim the length of the pool and back without coming up for air, letting it wash away the images from the past few days that play on a loop in my head.

“My dearest man, I could breathe in your deep, musky scent forever…”

I try not to imagine anything. Try not to think beyond the words.

I wouldn’t have cared. Not one iota if it meant him sticking around.

Still, Jesus, I should have known.

I resurface in the shallow end, gasping for breath.

“You okay?” Sister Agnes Teresa asks, looking down with concern.

“Yeah, better now,” I say. “I just need to swim.”

“Then swim we shall,” she says.

She wades in next to me and swims a lap of breast stroke, far more gracefully than I could have imagined a few short days ago. After several more laps in silence, we meet in the deep end, where I float on my back and she paddles around until she’s close enough to flip over and float next to me

“Tell me everything,” she says. “If you want to.”

And I do, and it’s not as hard to tell as I thought it would be. The more I repeat the details, the more they lose their power, become a story of my past, a piece of history. Words dissolving away in the water.

“So that’s it,” I finally say, righting myself so I can see her. “Though my mom tells me there’s more. She says my father wasn’t depressed because of that, that he was lying about a lot of things. Money. I don’t know what.”

Sister Agnes Teresa rights herself, too. The look she gives me is full of grief and of understanding.

We swim together to the shallow end, and she climbs up the steps ahead of me.

“So now what, Mr. Alden?” she says. “What are you going to do about all of this?”

That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? I mean, what am I supposed to do? Everything is fucked-up and my father is gone. How can I tell him now that it would have been okay? How does he give me that chance? How do we see that we could have figured it out, together? That we would have still loved him, even if we couldn’t be the same kind of family anymore?

I make my way toward Sister Agnes Teresa, but I’m not quite ready to get out. Maybe I’ll swim a few more laps before going back to my room for bed.

“You know, Klee, we all have hardships,” she says, calling me by my first name for the first time that I can remember. She grabs her towel and dries off. When she’s done, she holds a second one out to me. I reluctantly haul myself out, sit on a chair, and dry my hair. “We get what we’re dealt in this life, that’s what I’ve learned. So, the way I see it, there are only two choices in the end: Pity yourself and shut down, or put a smile on your face and keep going. I suggest the latter. It works better. You’re only seventeen. As they say, you have your whole future ahead of you. And, there’s a whole wide world of tragedy and heartbreak ahead. But there’s adventure, too. There’s love and joy and discovery. And plenty of good living still to be done.”

Day 13—Morning

“Mom?” I stand at the nurses’ station. Shelly, the weekend nurse, is dispensing colored pills into paper cups.

“Klee? I’m so glad you called. It’s … just really good to hear your voice.”