“Ari,” I said, and she yelped, then laughed that hysterical, high pitched kid noise as she insisted that I’d scared her. “Get up,” I ordered. “Put on a coat. I’m taking you somewhere.”
She was excited to see the playground and mad when I told her that wasn’t the destination, but she cooled off when I followed that up with a promise to stop and play on the way home if she still wanted to. We walked through the rose garden and I let her take her time and look at all the dormant, grey plants that would bloom again when Spring returned. Finally, we walked down to the dusty path that led to my little bridge.
“Where are we going?” Ari asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“I want to show you the place I go to when I want to be alone,” I responded. I’d thought about it all day, thought about the best way to frame the whole “Dad is mentally ill and can’t be around us” thing. There wasn’t a handbook as far as I knew, although once, while browsing Amazon Prime, I’d found a book about a bunny whose dad goes to jail, so who knew really. Maybe there was. But it certainly felt like the kind of thing I would have to play by ear.
The leaves crunched beneath our feet as we walked and I cursed myself for not wearing a scarf as I braced myself against the savage Huntington wind.
“Do you remember what you said the other day about not remembering Dad?” I asked, and I reached over to grip her little hand in mine, my wide fingers wedged between her smaller ones.
She nodded and I turned my head to the sky, taking in the gray, still air that had suddenly ceased all wind, all movement, all life. With a breath so deep it hurt my chest, I readied myself. Ari couldn’t be left with no legacy of her father, and I wasn’t going to give her only the heavy one. I couldn’t give her the whole picture, but something was better than nothing.
“Dad walks with a kind of bounce in his step,” I started. “And I don’t mean he’s just peppy, like the expression. I mean there’s a weird sort of bounce that happens on the ball of his foot every time he takes a step.”
She giggled and I figured she was picturing the man from our photo album hopping along as he made his way down the street.
“He loves hats. It drove Mom crazy, but every time we went to the mall, he’d go to that cap store to see if they had anything he liked, and then every single time, he would come out and complain about how they only sold baseball caps. One day Mom told me he’d been doing the same thing since the first time they’d ever gone to the mall together.”
The space around us felt thick and I could feel the heat prickling my eyes. It was too much for me, sitting on that bridge sifting through my memories of dad trying to paint a picture for Ari when every single memory I recalled made me wonder if it still applied. If we went to the mall, would he still bounce his way into the hat store? Did he still go to the mall? The gaps were too much. It was like trying to put together a puzzle with all the edges missing.
“Hannah?” she asked uncertainly, turning her small face up at me. “What’s wrong?”
With a laugh, I shook my head. She was so damned sensitive. I’d never met a kid so young who was so tuned in to how other people felt.
“Dad is sick, Ari,” I blurted out. “He has schizophrenia. He didn’t leave because he didn’t love us or even because he didn’t love Mom. He got sick and he was scared of what would happen if he stayed, so he left.”
She was silent a long time. I poised myself to pull a tissue from my sleeve and wipe away tears or to rock her in my arms like an even smaller girl, but no tears came. There was a blankness to her face that scared me more than tears ever could because for the first time since I’d known my live-wire little sister, she was sitting stark still, frozen like Dad had on that night in my memory. Her hands gripped the bridge and I wished I’d made her bring gloves as I noticed how red and chapped her long, piano player fingers looked.
“My songs are about them, you know,” she said. “Mom and Dad.”
She could have said anything else in that moment and I wouldn’t have been as shocked as I was by this revelation. She could have told me she was a purple, two-headed-sloth and she left her bed every night to kill kittens and I wouldn’t have been as shocked. Her sad little tunes and songs about walking away, about love that’s perpetually doomed. She hadn’t needed to experience those things because they were her story from the time she was a baby. Her songs had been her way of making sense of that story.
“Oh, Ari,” I breathed, the steam rising like a vape cloud from my lips.
There was nothing else for either of us to say. I scooted closer and slung my arm around her shoulders and she leaned into my chest. Time passed in a way that was divorced from reality. We could have been sitting there for two minutes or twenty, but when snot started to solidify in the rims of my nostrils and the cold got so bad that there was pain when I bent my fingers, I stood up and pulled Ari up after. Together, we walked wordlessly down to the playground. When we got down there, I asked her if she still felt up to playing and she shook her head at me before running towards the swings, her hair blowing like a curtain behind her.
I sat on a bench and watched her play, watched her legs dangle from the monkey bars and her quick little kicks as she made her way across the space. After a few moments of watching, my phone chimed. I pulled it out and saw that it was a text from Dad. For a minute, I considered not reading it. There wasn’t much more we could say; he didn’t know us and we didn’t know him. Then Ari smiled at me from the bars and I thought to myself, if Ari can bounce back, if she can carry this weight, maybe I can, too. With a glance back at the screen, I read his message:
I don’t know what to say about what I’ve done, but I do love you and I do love Ari. Please don’t give up on me.
Sometimes in life people say things to me and the words all make sense as far as definitions go, but I don’t actually know what the person is trying to say. Me, not give up on him? The idea was baffling. He was the one who’d lived a life away from me while I wrote him letters I didn’t send. I had shown up for him. I could keep trying and keep giving him the chance to fix everything, but at what point was he going to decide not to give up on me? When was he going to dig in his heels and stick with us? After all, if he’d decided not to give up in the first place, we wouldn’t even need to have that discussion. There wouldn’t be any tense conversations that left me sweaty with heartburn. Things would be normal.
I’d thought making the dating profile would be the hardest part but logging on to check for messages was way worse. It gave me butterflies, but not the good kind. More like the kind you get when you are watching a scary movie and you can feel a jump scare so you are on edge, but it just won’t happen.
I had barely started to browse profiles when a little green dot indicated that I did have a message. When I clicked into my mailbox, I saw the message was from someone calling herself Window. The message was straightforward: You look so thoughtful and lovely in this photo. I would love to know what (or who?) you were thinking of while you stared off into space.
In my mind, I had pictured her first message being different. It wasn’t like I’d had a sample message typed up in my own head or anything, but I had this expectation that the person who wrote me would write something long and expressive that made me feel this automatic chemistry and I would just know that she was my match. Like most of my expectations, I knew it was pretty unrealistic the minute the thought pooped into my head, but it was still what I wanted. If I couldn’t have instant bonding, though, this was a pretty good second place: straight to the point and not cheesy. Sweet without being overly flattering.