Chapter Twenty-Four
#24. SHRINK-WRAPPED DEMO CD OF A BAND CALLED GIFT HORSE
We were supposed to use the money for groceries.
Our cupboards were pretty empty. My dad had been spending long hours out job hunting, leaving no time to shop, which meant we’d been living off peanut butter and jam sandwiches. That night he’d promised to make me spaghetti with garlic bread.
As we approached the street, my dad stopped to listen to some performers, a trio who had set up a little sign that read GIFT HORSE. No one else was listening, but my dad said they were great, and bought several of their CDs to pass out to people walking by. Then he took me to Navy Pier, where he let me ride the carousel three times in a row.
I was always begging to go on the carousel, but that day it wasn’t like the other times. His eyes were too bright and he was talking too loudly to the attendant, and I knew that there would be no garlic bread that night.
I CRIED FOR WHAT FELT like the one billionth time since receiving my dad’s postcard; then I curled up with my phone, running my fingers across the screen. I got a text from Dax: You alive? If I weren’t so miserable, I would have laughed. I forced myself to reply. Soo busy. Call you tonight?
The hospital insisted that I needed to stay overnight, which felt ridiculous but was definitely preferable to the bunk room with Theo. As soon as I got ahold of my mom, I would make plans to go home. I just needed her to answer. So I tried my mom again, then James, leaving what felt like my hundredth voicemail. Finally, I gave up and tried to sleep.
I tossed and turned on the hard bed, listening to beeps and fending off visitors. Around dinnertime, Ana tried to stop by, but I told the nurses I needed to rest. The nurses told me that my dad had asked if he could come down to my room for a talk, and no way was I up for that. Theo didn’t try to visit again, but I felt no relief over that. I missed him. Horribly. Which made no sense given the fact that he had been in my life for such a short—and painful—amount of time.
Sleeping felt impossible, but when I woke it was much too early. Pale, gray light trickled under the curtains of my tiny window and the mumbling of several voices just outside my room found their way to my bed.…
The muscles in my arms and back were sore from all the churning I’d done the day before, and I smelled like the ocean. Maybe they would let me shower?
“Hello?” I called, and the talking stopped. My voice felt scratchy, and I touched my hand to my throat.
I sat up just as the door cracked open. “Good morning.” It was a new nurse, one I hadn’t seen yet. “We are ready to discharge you from the hospital. But first—”
“Liv?” The interrupting voice made me freeze. Was I hallucinating? Still fuzzy? And then she sailed in, looking tired and windblown and so very, very pregnant. Mom.
I nearly blacked out again, this time from relief. She made it over to me in three giant steps, and then I was all wrapped up in her, her hair in my face, her long arms draping around me. The relief consumed me, swept me off my feet. I was sobbing again, holding on as tightly to her as she was to me.
“Tell. Me. Everything,” she said.
And so I did. I told her about the documentary, and Theo, and the bookstore, and Vasilios’s orichalcum, and how we’d dived even though the conditions were terrible. When I got to the part about me having a panic attack underwater and Theo saving me, she could barely listen long enough for me to finish.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, Liv,” she said over and over. “What if Theo hadn’t been there? What if—”
“He was there,” I said. “And Dad didn’t let me dive very deep, so I’m sure I would have made it up.” I wasn’t so sure at all, but there was no use in terrifying her. Not when it was all over and done with. “Are you breathing?”
She looked stunned. Then angry. Then stunned again. “It isn’t my breathing I’m worried about. I think I need to sit down.…” She looked around for a chair, but then apparently decided it was too far away and just climbed onto the bed with me.
I needed to ask The Question. The one I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to. I gripped a handful of blankets. “Mom, you didn’t know about Dad being sick, did you? Because if you knew and didn’t tell me…”
“I had no idea about the kidney failure,” she said quickly, and my heart slowed. “I would have told you if I’d known. But I did know something was wrong. When you told me about how he was leaving every few days… something didn’t add up. I called Ana and she wouldn’t tell me, but, well…” She rubbed her hand over her tired face. “Call it mother’s intuition, but I felt that I needed to be here just in case I was right. I didn’t tell you I was coming because I didn’t want to worry you. But I know him. He wouldn’t have kept leaving you like that unless something was wrong.”
There was a rushing in my ears, a heaviness that not even my mom could make disappear. “He did last time,” I blurted out.
I immediately felt vulnerable, exposed. Her expression turned grave. “Have you talked to him about that?”
“Well…” My mind scanned the last eight days, my breath catching as I landed on the sunset cruise. He’d tried to, and I’d shut him down. “No. Not… really.”
She rested her hand on mine, meeting my eyes seriously. “Liv, I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to listen, because I think it will change some things for you. And then I need you to go talk to your dad, okay?”
I nodded, but my throat felt so tight that I put my hand up to it, testing that it was still working. My heart was sprinting without me. What could she possibly tell me that would change things?
She tucked my hair back from my face, her blue eyes glistening. “Your dad didn’t leave to look for Atlantis.”
I waited for all of the air to get sucked out of the room. For disbelief to hit me. But it didn’t. Instead I felt… relief? But over what? Recognition, my brain supplied. You know this. But I didn’t. How could my brain know something my memory didn’t?
“What are you talking about?” Now my heart felt like a drum, steadily marching onward.
She inhaled, then exhaled slowly, moving her hand to her belly. “Do you remember when he went to the hospital? You were in first grade.”
I shook my head, but instantly a series of images traveled to the front of my brain: a long bright corridor full of doors, low-pile carpet with interconnected hexagons, my mom’s hand tight in mine. My dad was behind one of those doors. I just didn’t know which one. Or why.
She was watching my face carefully. “He went twice, once for two weeks, once for almost a month. Do you remember?”
I didn’t, but my body recognized it. There was a tender spot, a tangle of emotion that blossomed and grew the moment I looked at it. Why had he been there? “Was he having kidney issues then?”
She reached down and squeezed my hand, and the movement made the bed creak. “No. Remember how Dad was always up or down? There was never an in-between. Some days he was on top of the world; other days he could barely get out of bed. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder during that first hospitalization. He’d had…” She hesitated. “An episode. He lost his job and spent most of our money buying a car that he crashed late one night. He was arrested and then hospitalized. Do you remember?”