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I did owe him for the window, after all.
The sky was beginning to lighten as I climbed back through the window. My T-shirt snagged on the latch, jerking me back, and I kicked my desk lamp trying to regain my balance.
The lamp didn’t break, but the accompanying crash as it hit the floor was loud enough that I wasn’t surprised when my bedroom door swung open and Dad burst in brandishing a baseball bat.
“Jill, what...?”
Under different circumstances, a father catching his daughter sneaking into her bedroom in the wee hours of the morning would be followed by a lot of yelling. Dad took one look at me crouched on my desk and sighed. “Still with the roof?”
I could hear the weariness in his voice. He didn’t get enough sleep as it was without me waking him up early. He worked all the time, partly for the money—stupid Pep Boys had opened a shop two blocks from us and we were starting to feel the pinch—but also so he wouldn’t have to think about Mom leaving him. Leaving us.
“Sorry, Dad.” I closed the window behind me and hopped off my desk.
He raked a hand over his wild mess of dark, bent tangles. It was getting long in the back. Mom always had him keep it neat and short, but it was starting to brush past his collar. “You can’t keep doing this. Not at five o’clock in the morning. Only serial killers get up this early.”
I didn’t try to follow that line of logic. “Or cross-country runners. You remember which one I am, right?”
Dad yawned wide enough that I could count the fillings in his teeth. He shuffled farther into my room and set the lamp back on my desk. “Didn’t Dahmer run track in high school?”
“Ha-ha. You’re funny at five o’clock in the morning.”
“I should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning. You should be catatonic at five o’clock in the morning.”
“I’ll be quieter next time,” I said. “Promise.”
Dad made an odd growling noise as he yawned again and arched his back until it cracked. “Mmm...would it kill you to sleep in the house again? It’s gotta be ninety-five degrees and the sun isn’t even up.”
I didn’t care how hot it was. I wasn’t ready to come back yet. I watched him, waiting for him to say it, to bring up Mom.
But he didn’t.
He never had. Not in the five months since she’d left. Not a word, like it was totally normal for us to wake up one day and find her gone. Had he known she was leaving? Did he know why? Did he want to? I didn’t know the answers, and I really didn’t know how to ask the questions. So we lived like that. We pretended and ignored the little and not-so-little reminders of her that we inevitably encountered every day.
Slowly but surely she was disappearing from our house just as she had from our lives. Sometimes I’d notice a picture missing, or a pillow. We were both doing it. Purging her. Last month I took her favorite coffee mug up on the roof with me and dropped it on the driveway to watch it break apart. If Dad saw the pieces, he never said anything. I was going to break her reading glasses next. Maybe back over them with Dad’s truck.
But she wasn’t gone yet. There were the things I couldn’t get rid of as easily as dropping them from the roof.
The things I saw in the mirror.
Sean.
“It’s not that hot,” I said. Which was comparatively true when we considered how hot it would get, but not really the point, and we both knew it. I could tell by the pinched frown on Dad’s face that he wasn’t happy with my response. Neither was I, but sleeping inside wasn’t going to change that. The utter silence in the house at night crawled under my skin like tiny fire ants biting and stinging whenever I tried. And sometimes I’d hear Dad pacing at all hours. Maybe he wasn’t able to sleep in their bed alone. Maybe the quiet ate at him too. Either way, I couldn’t stand to hear it. Or not hear it.
I pulled a smile onto my face. I didn’t want Dad to have to worry about me any more than he already did. “And I promise not to ritualistically murder and eat anyone this morning, no matter how great the temptation is.”
Dad’s own smile took longer than I would have liked to match mine, but it got there. Better. I needed to find a way to keep it there.
“You want me to make you something—” he yawned “—for breakfast?”
I raised an eyebrow. Mom was the cook, which maybe explained why I’d never wanted to learn. Dad’s culinary skills were only slightly less hazardous than mine, which meant we were on a first-name basis with all of the take-out restaurants within a fifteen-mile radius of our house. Still, he tried. Or at least, he offered.
In response to my undisguised skepticism, Dad half smiled, half yawned and then stared again at my still-made bed. He let out a soft sigh and looked at me.
I held my breath.
So did he.
But all he did was sigh again. “I’ll leave the cereal box on the counter for you.” Then his face scrunched up. “I forgot to get your Froot Loops. Sorry, honey. We’ve got some chocolate-sugar-cinnamon things though. You like those, right?” He kissed the top of my head and disappeared down the hall.
I shut my bedroom door and leaned my palms against it.
We were never going to talk about it.
Why she left.
My dark red Schwinn was parked in the garage next to Dad’s current project. I eyed one with disdain and the other with enough desire to make my mouth water. The truck was a big, beautiful beast. Large enough that I had to hop up when I got into it. Driving it was like trying not to get bucked off a wild animal. No power steering and the brakes were a tad temperamental. Little by little it was becoming street safe, but not, according to Dad, daughter safe yet.
Details.
The bike was the same one I’d had since junior high and I took it as a deep, personal insult that I still had to ride it most mornings even though I had a driver’s license and a revolving supply of vehicles in varying stages of drivability at my disposal.
Dad had yet to agree. I’d keep working on him.
The wheels clicked softly as I rolled my bike out of the garage. At least the temperature hadn’t reached lethal limits yet. The wind that whipped my ponytail around didn’t feel like a hair dryer in my face. That fun would come on the bike ride home.
I turned into my high school parking lot ten minutes later and saw a lone figure jogging around the track by the canals. Her hair was pulled back in a French braid with a few wispy curls escaping around her face. She looked like she’d stepped out of a toothpaste commercial with her big blue eyes, white-blond hair and matching smile.
She’d been my best friend since the day her family moved in down the street from my old house. She’d knocked on my door with her mom in tow and introduced herself to my mother. “Hi, I’m Claire Vanderhoff. Do you have any kids I can play with?”
She’d been six at the time and was still every bit as forthright at sixteen.
She waved and hurried to meet me.
“Hey! Look at you almost being on time.” Claire bounced in front of me, her body in perpetual movement. “Be careful, waking up this early is addictive. I alphabetized my entire pantry already this morning, and tried out a new juicing recipe. Here.”
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