Be Not Afraid (27 page)

“It can’t …,” I started.

Dad sat down on the edge of the bed again, taking my hand in his. “Why can’t it?” he asked. “Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense!” I cried. “It doesn’t … It’s not me! It’s not who I am!”

“Do you know who you are?” Dad’s gaze was steady, his jaw set tight. “Do you, Rinny?”

I inhaled sharply, not letting go of his hand. The truth was simple. Awful. I had no idea who I was. But I didn’t want to tell him that. I didn’t even want to admit it to myself.

“It’s okay,” Dad said. His voice was tender. He reached out, cupping my cheek against his palm. “It’s okay, baby. I’m here.” I closed my eyes. “I’m here.”

Somehow, I slept. When I woke again, it was dark. The room smelled different, like salt and grease. I tried to sit, keeping my arm close to my stomach, and startled as Dad stood up from the corner. “Oh!” I said. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry.” He held out a white paper sleeve of fries. “I went to Burger King. Got some food. You hungry at all?”

I took a fry. It was hot and soft and salty. I took another. And then one more.

Dad reached into the bag, pulling out various items. He unwrapped a burger and put it on a napkin, tipped over another sleeve of fries, inserted a straw into a plastic cup. “Here, I got you a chocolate shake too. Extra thick, no whipped cream. Eat up.”

I picked up the burger, took a little bite, pulled on the straw inside the shake. Even my teeth felt sore. “How’s Nan?” I asked.

He smiled. “I just checked on her a little while ago. She was sitting up. Eating pudding. They had to practically tie her down so she wouldn’t get out of bed and come find you.”

I smiled at the thought of Nan elbowing a nurse, getting loud with a doctor. It wasn’t often, but sometimes Nan could get ornery with people who told her she couldn’t do certain things. Especially when it came to her family. “I’ll get out of here soon, won’t I?” I said. “We can go down and see her?”

“Absolutely. And then she’ll be home in a few more days and things can start getting back to normal.”

Normal? What was normal? I wasn’t sure if I knew what that was anymore. Dad grabbed his drink and sat down on the edge of his chair. For a moment he slurped on his straw, watching the floor. Then he set the cup down, balanced his elbows on top of his knees. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what we talked about yesterday,” he said.

What had we talked about yesterday? I couldn’t remember.

“About Mom,” he prodded. “And God. About how He could have helped her, made her think differently before she went and did what she did?”

I nodded, looking down at my hamburger bun.

“The truth is …” He hesitated. “Well, you were right.
About me not having an answer for any of it. I didn’t have one. And I’m sorry for that. But I don’t think anyone does, Rinny. That’s just the way it is. Life is full of questions that don’t have answers. I have a ton of them.”

“Like what?” My voice was a whisper.

He looked at me with shiny eyes. “Like why someone I loved so much would choose to leave without even saying goodbye. Like why I couldn’t help her, why I couldn’t be enough to lift some of her sadness. Like why you can see pain in people.” He swallowed with difficulty. “I don’t have answers for any of those questions, Marin. But, you know, I’ve also started to think that if I can accept that, try to come to terms with the fact that an answer just doesn’t exist, I can sort of come to peace with it too.”

He took a breath, studied his intertwined fingers. “You remember that day when you came and told Nan and me about your eyes?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know what to tell you or not to tell you. Half of me was scared to death, thinking you had come down with some kind of terminal illness, and the other half was pissed off because I thought you were just making it up, trying to get attention or something.” He clenched his jaw. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so hopeless. So inept as a father. As a man. Again.”

I could feel the tears coming, and I made no move to stop them.

“I couldn’t sleep for weeks after you told us, just kept
tossing and turning, thinking about you and your eyes, and then all of a sudden, right out of the blue, I remembered something your mother told me once.” He hung his head, his lips wobbling the way they did when he sometimes fought back tears. “It was during one of her episodes, when she would withdraw and shut me out, and I kept trying, trying to get through to her, to help her out. But things just kept getting worse, and I kept getting angrier and angrier. We got into a big fight, and I ended up screaming, ‘What do you want me to
do
?’ And she raised her head off the top of her knees—she was sitting there in the window, with her head pressed down on her knees—and she said, ‘Just love me. Please. Just keep loving me.’ ”

His mouth trembled as he stared at me from across the room. “That’s what I remembered that night, lying there, thinking about you. And that’s when I realized that I had to make a decision. I could either love you the way you were—no matter how weird or strange that might be—or I could shut you out.” He took a deep breath. “I fell asleep, thinking about it. And when I woke up the next morning, I realized that I had turned a corner. I’d made the choice to hold on to something again, even if I wasn’t one hundred percent sure of it. I think in that moment I decided to find a road somewhere between denial and despair. I’m not saying I became some kind of saint afterward.” He shook his head, made a little snorting sound through his nose. “All the arguing we’ve been doing has proved that. But it helped. A little. It did. It still does.” He moved forward,
taking my hand in his. “The point is that I had to make the choice. And it made all the difference. You could try to do the same thing with me, Marin. If you want.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?” His hold tightened. “Why can’t you?”

“Because I don’t deserve to.” My voice welled with tears.

“You do deserve to!”

“I don’t! I
left
her, Dad! I left Mom. Even after you asked me not to.” I leaned forward, speaking with a ferocity that I did not know I possessed. But there was nothing left to lose now. “And I wanted to leave. I
wanted
to. I couldn’t stand being around her anymore. All her moods and the sleeping and …” I could feel myself unraveling, a thread loosened from the skein. Any moment, the whole thing would give and collapse to the floor, a pile of loose ends. “I just didn’t care anymore. I didn’t. And so I left. And now she’s dead.”

“Marin.
I
left her that day.” Dad’s voice was cracking. “
I
left. And do you want to know why? Because I felt the same way. I was sick of it too. I was worn down by her sickness, of not being able to help her, and I gave up. I rationalized it all the way to work that day, too, telling myself that you were there, that things would be fine. But the truth was, I had no right to put you in that kind of situation. I was the adult. I did it because I was weak, because I was selfish. Because I was tired.”

Could I believe him? Had he been carrying this around too? Something so similar, all this time?

“We’re human, Marin. Which means that sometimes we fail the people we love the most. But Mom’s death wasn’t your fault. Do you understand me? It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t ever your fault.” I clung to him, the weight of something deep lifting, a boulder shifting. “The other truth here, Marin, is that Mom failed herself. Not you. Not me. Not God. She decided to give up. That was her choice.”

I cried with him for a long time then, not because I was afraid or ashamed or even angry, but because for the first time in a very, very long time, it felt as though something inside of me was starting to open.

And maybe even breathe again.

“Now you listen to me,” Dad said after I had stopped, drying my tears on the edge of his sleeve, blowing my nose into a tissue on the bedside table. “It’s over now, okay?”

I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “What’s over?”

“The whole thing with Cassie. With Dominic. That whole family. It’s over for you. Do you understand? You’re not to go back there. Ever. You’re finished with it. Finished.” He shoved his hands deep inside his pockets. “I told that kid the same thing, too, in no uncertain terms.”

“You mean Dominic?”

“Yes. Dominic.”

“You weren’t …” I winced. “You weren’t like, really rude to him or anything, were you?”

“No.” Dad stood up. “I just told him that if I saw him anywhere around you again, I’d break his neck.”

“Dad!”

He smiled. “I was polite,” he assured me. “But he got the idea. Believe me.”

I let my head fall back against the pillow and emitted a deep sigh. I wondered how Dominic was doing,
what
he was doing. It wasn’t his fault that the exorcism had gone so terribly awry. What would he do, now that the buried heart and hidden trinity hadn’t worked? What
could
he do? There were no other options left. We had to tell Father William to get someone. An expert, just as he’d promised he would. It would take a while for everything to start falling into place, months, maybe, for the bishop to be petitioned and a real exorcist assigned to the case. Still, it was the only way. There was nothing left.

I cringed, imagining the look Dad must have given Dominic in the hospital, the uncertain way he’d probably reached up to pull on his earlobe.

“Marin.”
Dad’s voice was a warning. “I mean it.”

“I know.” I looked at him. “I know. All right.”

I was in bed at home the next morning when the doorbell rang. The hospital had discharged me the night before with a prescription for painkillers and strict instructions to rest. Nan had seconded the order from her hospital bed, making me promise that I would stay in my bed for the day, getting up only to use the bathroom. I smiled, thinking of her. She looked good when we’d gone up to see her, the color back in her cheeks, her eyes bright again. She’d gripped my hand when I stood by her bedside, her eyes roving over my cast, but I assured her that I was okay. Which I kind of was, somehow. Or at least I wasn’t as panicked as I had been the day before. Something had shifted a little after the talk between Dad and me. If I still wasn’t sure about all of the things he had said, some of it had resonated. Some of it had helped.

It was early, especially for a Saturday, not even eight
o’clock yet. Outside, the morning was full of new light, the sun already low in the sky. I could hear Dad going down the hall, muttering to himself. There was no telling what he might say or do if it was Dominic out there on the porch. My stomach twisted, thinking about it.

“Hey, Lucy!” He sounded pleased, but my stomach plummeted at the name. I’d treated my friend so poorly, doing everything I could to avoid her over the last few days, and now I would have to answer for it. Well, I deserved to. It was time to pay the piper. “Yeah, yeah, she’s here,” Dad said. “Come on in.”

I sat up against the pillow, my upper body movements still clumsy from the cast, and crossed my legs. My heart thumped under my pajama shirt, and my palms were sweaty. “Hey,” I said when Lucy appeared in the doorway.

She hung back for a moment, as if frightened. She was wearing a red T-shirt with a picture of the Grinch on the front and an old pair of faded jeans. Her hair had been pulled back into a half-ponytail, the ends loose and wavy along her shoulders. The red disk in her tooth looked like a flattened raspberry, and the yellow blob in her stomach was twice the size it had been. “You’re okay?” she whispered. Her big eyes filled with tears.

“Yeah.” My own eyes filled. “I’m okay.”

Lucy moved toward the bed in a sudden rush. Her pretty face was squished up, the soft skin along her neck mottled with pink blotches. “Oh, Marin, I was so scared. I haven’t heard back from you in like two days, and then my
mom told me last night that she heard that you’d gotten hit by a car right outside the Jacksons’ place, and …” Her eyes widened. “Your phone must’ve blown up from all the texts I kept sending you, but I never heard back, and I …” She paused, gulping for air. “God, I didn’t know what to think.”

“I did get hit by a car.” I motioned my head toward the cast. “But I only broke my arm. And with everything that happened, I have no idea where my phone went. It could still be in the middle of the street, for all I know.” I patted the side of the bed, and Lucy sat down on the edge of it. “You didn’t have to come,” I said. “I really am okay.”

“Didn’t have to
come
?” Lucy’s eyes widened. “What, are you kidding me? I ran to the
hospital
last night, but they said it was too late for visitors, so I waited as long as I could this morning—my mom kept saying don’t go over too early, don’t crowd her, blah, blah, blah—but I seriously couldn’t wait another second. I just left and walked over. I had to come, Marin. You’re my friend.” Her voice wobbled. “I mean, that’s what friends do.”

I shook my head, my nose prickling with tears. “Oh, Luce, I’m sorry. I haven’t been a good friend to you at all.”

Lucy sniffled. “You’ve had … a lot going on.”

“No.” I hesitated. “Well, yeah. I have. But I haven’t been honest with you, either. There’s something about me that I’ve never told you. Something big.”

Lucy bit her lip. “You’re sick?”

“No.” I let the truth come out slowly, haltingly, the way
it had with Dominic. I watched as the expression on Lucy’s face slid from disbelief into confusion and then wonderment. A long moment passed after I finished, and I twisted a section of the bedsheet, waiting for her response.

“Wow,”
Lucy breathed finally.

“Yeah.” I coiled the sheet into a rope, pulled it tight around my finger. “Wow.”

“I mean like, oh my God.”

I shrugged.

“Can you see anything inside
me
?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like what?”

“Well”—I pointed to Lucy’s mouth—“there’s a red shape inside your tooth.”

“My tooth?” Lucy brought her hand up to the edge of her face, tongued the inside of her mouth.

“It’s probably just a cavity. I see them all the time in people.” I grinned a little. “But you probably should brush your teeth a little bit more. Especially considering all the candy you eat. Oh, and you have a little yellow glob in your stomach too. I just started noticing that one a few weeks ago. It kind of looks like a Jell-O square.” Lucy was still staring at me. I dropped my head, traced an invisible line across the top of my sheets. “I know it sounds crazy. It
is
crazy. Do you think I’m a freak?”