Even though it was almost physically painful, I pulled my head back and looked into Lennox’s eyes. With a gentle hand to keep her face level with mine, I asked her the question that hung in the air, the question I wanted to ignore, but knew I couldn’t.
“What’s going to keep you from bailing on me if this gets hard?” I asked her. “If some dumbass calls us dykes because he sees us holding hands, am I going to have to worry that I’m going to lose you again?”
She kissed me gently on my lips, her face lingering close to mine. Her breath was quivering and a small part of me wanted to reassure her that it would all be okay, but I didn’t have it in me to be someone’s cheerleader. Between negotiating my feelings towards mom, trying to be patient with Dad, being a support for Ari, it was time for someone to be there to reassure me. To be my support system. I had to know her answer. With the heat of lips still tingling my lips, I struggled to be practical, but there was no choice. I didn’t have room in my life for another person who was going to let me down the first time I really needed them not to. I had to know if she was going to be by my side when I needed reassurance, too.
She started slowly, her voice smaller than I’d heard it before. “I drove here,” she answered, and it took me a beat before the meaning of her words sank in. She had driven, even though it was terrifying for her. She continued, “If I stood here and told you that I’m not scared, I’d be lying. I don’t want conflict. I don’t want attention. I don’t want to wonder how people will react when I hold your hand,” she said. Then, she pulled me in closer, her arm tightly wrapped around my waist. “But that fear isn’t going to stop me from holding your hand. Got it?”
Tears welled up in my eyes and I was sure the rims were getting all pink again. I was really turning into am crybaby lately. Taking a step back, I wiped my eyes and nodded.
“Got it,” I replied.
Dad sat across from me again, but this time he’d come to my territory. I thought maybe that would be easier for me, but it’s wasn’t. Instead, seeing him sitting stiff and uncomfortable on the same couch that was once his own made me weepy, and I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my chin against them, cradling my legs as I waited for him to say what he’d come to say.
As the silence built, my instinct was to call for Mom, but she’d taken Ari to the park. She was hesitant to let Dad in the house at all, but the idea of letting him see Ari when it had been so long . . . well, Mom just wasn’t ready for that and even though my voice didn’t really matter, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, either.
When Dad lived with us, he worked in an office and wore a suit to work every day. Even when he was home, he was polished in khakis and polos instead of jeans and t-shirts. I never saw him in lounge pants after breakfast was over. Now, sitting on our couch, he was wearing a frayed button up flannel, the middle seam wrinkled. He obviously didn’t fold down the crease, iron out imperfections. His face was shaggy and his five o’clock shadow was rough and prickly. It felt shallow to care about what he looked like and I didn’t, really, except that all these minor things were a reminder that while I’d been growing up, Dad had been becoming a different person, too. Without looking up, I asked him why he’d come.
“You asked me to come here,” he answered, eyebrows furrowed across his lined forehead.
With sudden force, I slammed my feet against the floor. I was so frustrated. Yes, I had asked him to come to my house, but he had been the one who wanted to give our chat another try, he was the one who sent the message asking me not to give up. I didn’t know how to navigate all of this and I shouldn’t have to.
“Dad, I can’t be the one to lead every time,” I asked, fingers pressed against my temples. “Yes, I asked you to come here because you said you wanted to talk.” With slow, deep breaths, I attempted to steady my thoughts and voice as I went on. “What is it you want to say to me?”
His moves were slow and jerky, and he looked almost robotic as he shifted his weight onto his elbow so that he was leaning his body towards mine. Worry knotted his facial muscles and his jaw twitched as he took his time gathering his words. Seconds quickly turned into minutes, and just when I thought I was going to have to encourage him to speak, he started to talk.
“When you were about four months old, you fell off the bed once in the middle of the night,” he started, each word a gut punch that pasted a grimace across his face. “Your mom absolutely lost it. She got online and checked your head for bumps, shone a flashlight in your eyes, and refused to let you go back to sleep.”
Anger flashed though my brain, an almost electrical sensation that caused my fists to ball. A fierce loyalty expanded through my chest and I knew that if he tried to pin even one part of his absence on Mom, I was likely to punch him. The feeling was foreign; always the easy going, go with the flow girl, I could count on one hand the times I’d felt anything nearing the rage I’d been carrying for the past week or so. It was heavy and caused physical pain in my joints. This, I reflected, must be what aged people.
I guess he saw something in my eyes or in a movement of my face, because he put a hand up to stop me from speaking.
“Let me finish,” he said, his voice steady. For a second, I aw my dad in the confidence of his voice and my eyes fixed on him as he told his story. “Your mom was terrified. Even after we’d watched you for an hour and made sure that you were acting normal and staying awake, she was just so sure that she’d damaged you by letting you sleep in bed with us. She was sure it was her fault.”
Then there were tears and for the first time in what felt like a decade, I wasn’t the one doing the crying. Dad was full on breaking down, big, fat teardrops rolling across his cheeks. “That’s how I felt about Ari even when nothing happened. I felt like she was constantly in danger as long as I was there and if I didn’t leave, I would ruin her.”
There was no doubt in me that he was being honest; the emotions were etched in deep cursive line across his face. A nagging feeling tugged at the pit of my stomach and I had a small urge to go over to him and wrap my arms around him. It was big enough to move me, though, because he was still a stranger in so many ways. Yes, I was starting to get a better picture in my head of what had happened and yes, I could empathize with him, but that didn’t erase all the feelings of neglect and resentment.
“Dad,” I began, steeling my voice as much as I could. I was not going to cry. “I want you to know I forgive you for disappearing like you did.” I walked over and sat beside him. There was still a slight pull to hug him, but I decided to compromise with the split that was warring inside me and instead of embracing him, I wrapped my fingers around his clammy hand. His fingers were long and thin like Ari’s and I had a new urge.
“Hey, Dad, let me tell you about Ari,” I said. “Because I want you to know that she’d not damaged. She’s a really funny kid.”
For the next hour, we sat on the couch trading stories. I started off with tales of Ari from toddlerhood to childhood and he laughed when I described how much she’d loved to find any bottles of liquid and pour them all over the house. I described Mom’s mounting desperation as she’d bought a water table, increased bathing time, and done basically anything she could think of to fulfill Ari’s splash needs. After those stories stopped flowing into my head, I filled him in on me and all the things that had never seemed natural to say in twenty-minute-long, annual phone conversations. I told him I was gay, which didn’t faze him. It was funny; just like with Mom, as soon as I formed the words, I knew it wouldn’t be a big deal for him. I told him about Lennox and how everything that had happened since Christmas had made it harder for me to open myself up to her. He told me about living with Gram, but skipped basically everything about what his sickness had been like over the years. I guess maybe that would take time, too. Life isn’t a movie, so I’m not going to tell you some cliché, like that we had all the time in the world and there was no rush for us to catch up, but I am going to say this: the pressure cooled off a bit. There didn’t seem to be the same urgency to repair things right there in that moment and I had a lot more faith that it was all going to work itself out.