“I didn’t think you’d understand. I thought you would judge me.” She leans her head back and rubs her eyes. “And that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“What do you expect me to think, Mom?” I stamp my feet hard onto the floor. Her collection of little perfume bottles tinkles like a wind chime.
“This wasn’t about you, Ruby. I kept you out of it because this had nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me! You drove Dad away! You made me feel sorry for you. All the times you seemed sad and lonely were just lies and ways to manipulate me! But I won’t let you do that anymore.”
“I never tried to manipulate you.”
“You know, Dad’s in town, right now. At the Holiday Inn. He’s been there since my birthday. He sent me a letter and a whole box of pictures and stuff. Stuff so I’d come and see him. But I didn’t go, because I wasn’t going to forgive him for leaving us. Only now I know you’re the one who caused this. You’re the one who’s kept me from having a relationship with him! You’ve ruined everything!” I pivot and turn my back to her. “I hate you!” I don’t even feel the least bit sorry.
She tries to call after me. She wants to explain her side. But now that I’ve told her what I had to, I just want to get as far away from my mom as I can.
The illuminated Holiday Inn sign erases the nearby stars from the sky around it. It’s so bright and magnetic. My legs whirl in a circle like a machine, propelling me closer and closer and closer. I lean into a turn and climb the big hill. I have to pedal standing up to keep my momentum. Beth’s white beret flies off my head and into the middle of the road behind me. I don’t even think about turning around for it.
I coast into the hotel parking lot dripping with sweat and barely able to breathe. I fling my bike into one of the bushes near the main entrance and run into the lobby.
It’s much quieter inside than the last time I was here. Partly because the piped-in classical music is shut off. The lobby is pretty deserted and all the bright lights have been dimmed.
There’s a young guy sitting behind the front desk. He doesn’t look as polished as the older man who worked the day shift. He has a nose ring and a stubbly goatee. The collar of his button-up is open and his tie is knotted loosely around his neck. He’s reading a motorcycle magazine and has a sandwich spread out on the counter. He barely glances in my direction as he reaches for a handful of potato chips, so I just run right past him and head for the stairwell.
The carpet on the fourth floor is the color of wheat. I pass room after room. Each one has a huge window that faces the center of the hotel with thick curtains to block out the light of the hallway. Everybody seems to be asleep. My courage drains like bathwater in a tiny little spiral at the bottom of my shoes. What if I can’t wake him up? Should I just crash in the hallway until morning? Or should I pound on his door until he answers? How badly do I actually want this? And what if he’s already gone?
I stop a few feet ahead of his room. His window curtains are pulled open. I see a desk light on and I think I can hear his television. I stop to peek over the railing at the lobby and the vertigo nearly makes my knees give out.
When I turn back, I see my dad inside his room, packing up his stuff into a large duffel bag on top of his unmade bed. Just like old times.
He looks up and spots me, an overgrown Girl Scout lurking in the hallway. For a moment, I don’t think he even recognizes me. But he tosses the sweater he’s only half folded off to the side and moves to the door to let me in.
“Hi,” I say, my bottom lip quivering.
He smiles in a shy way, like he’s unsure if that’s an appropriate response to our first real meeting, and holds the door open for me. I step inside and take a seat on an overstuffed lounge chair. The room reeks of smoke so bad it makes me cough. The ashtray in front of me is packed with stubbed-out cigar butts and flecks of ash seem to cover every surface. He sits on the corner of the bed.
The quiet makes the air in the room heavy and hard to breathe. My eyes leap all over him, not stopping on one detail too long to be caught staring. I observe him in small pieces — a flannel shirt, a white tube sock, a scratchy beard, a pockmark on the side of his neck, a tuft of hair poking out of his ear. We’re both chewing on our fingers. I wonder what he sees when he looks at me.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I ask, suddenly jumping up out of the chair.
“Sure, sure.” He darts into the bathroom and grabs his toiletries, like his razor and toothbrush, and drops them all into a hotel towel. Then he folds up the corners like a hobo sack. “I don’t think there are any fresh towels left, but I can call down to the lobby if you need one.”
“That’s okay.”
I go in, shut the door, and stare at myself in the mirror. I look like total crap. Eye makeup is smeared all over my face. The corners of my mouth are red from Beth’s party punch. I wash my face and my hands. There aren’t any clean towels, just a pile of dirty ones on the floor. I use a big wad of toilet paper to dry myself off and then a second one to get some of the dirt and dried blood out of my cut. I attempt to straighten my shirt, but it’s all lumpy and weird and wrinkled and there’s really no hope for me to look anything but a big mess. There are a few drops of mouthwash left in the tiny bottle, so I swish some of that around. I try to figure out what it is, exactly, that I want to say to him. Or what I’m hoping to hear. Then over my shoulder I spot a newspaper on the floor near the toilet, open to an advertisement for tools on sale at the local hardware shop. It feels weirdly intimate for me to see something like that. So I walk back into the room entirely unprepared.
He’s returned to packing, but stops as soon as I sit back down in my seat. He lights up another cigar. I think about asking him not to smoke but I chicken out. After all, this is his room. He takes a big drag while I say, “I’m sorry I waited until tonight to come here.” I think about explaining how I never really got his letter in the first place but it all seems like too insane a story to tell at this point.
His lips part and a cloud of smoke leaks out. “That’s okay, Rubes. Better late than never, right?”
I nod my head even though I’m not really sure. But I hope so.
“I’ve thought about calling on you for a while now,” he continues. My mind briefly wanders. Does he mean six years is a while? Or three? Or one? Or a few months? “But it’s the kind of thing where, after so much time has passed, you don’t really know how the phone works anymore. You have no idea what to say.”
“I still don’t know what to say to you,” I admit.
He shakes his head. “I’ve never been good at things like this. Feelings and stuff.”
“Me neither.” I chuckle a little bit. He does too. Our laughs sound the same. Quiet and nervous. Mom always tries to fight through awkwardness and pretend like everything’s fine. It’s exhausting to play her game. But Dad and I both know this is weird, and it’s kind of a relief.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
He smiles in a shy way and reaches for a nearby ashtray that he balances on the inside of his foot. “When I happened to be passing through Ohio, I thought to myself, It’s now or never. So I pulled over, took a look at the phone book in Dodie’s, and found you.” His eyes travel down to the floor. “I’m sorry for ruining your party. I felt really bad about that.”
“It’s okay, Dad.”
“Did you get the box?”
He looks at me all expectantly. The same way he did when he held out those flowers for me on my birthday. “Yes.” I don’t know what else to say to him. It was just a bunch of random junk.
He smiles. “Good. I think you can learn a lot about a person by seeing what they keep in the top drawer of their dresser.”
All I keep in my top drawer is underwear. I don’t know what that says about me. “I thought you and Mom looked young in the pictures.”
“We were. That was part of the problem.”
“That and her cheating,” I say. He looks up at me, surprised
. “I just found out that tonight, Dad. If I had known, I definitely would have come sooner. I thought the whole divorce and everything was your fault. But now I understand why you left.”
I thought maybe that would make him happy, but instead of smiling, he looks at me kind of funny, like I’m not getting it. “I couldn’t forgive her, Ruby. I gave up too much for her to do that to me.” His words sting. I guess I have a confused look on my face or something, because he shifts his weight, clears his throat, and tries to start over. “I wasn’t ready when she told me she was pregnant, I wasn’t ready to buy a house, and ten years after you came along, I still wasn’t ready to be a father.” He smashes out the cigar tip in the ashtray. “It was just the out I needed. We both needed it.”
My whole body tenses up. He’s talking about everything like it was just him and Mom. But there was someone else involved. “I wish I’d had an out. Things were really awful for me. I don’t know if you know that or not. But they were.”
We look at each other for a long time then, like a staring contest that neither of us wants to lose. Eventually, he stands up and then so do I. But instead of coming over to hug me or to do something dadlike, he grabs his bags and we both walk out of the hotel room.
“I’m very happy you’re here,” he says over his shoulder.
I run a few steps to catch up. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” he says, like it should be obvious to me. “I would have felt bad if you never came at all.”
My face tightens up. There’s that deserving, entitled tone again. “Well, what did you do all week? Did you see old friends or something?”
“I don’t know anyone here, Ruby. This isn’t my home.”
“Where’s home then?”
“I’ve been transferred to another park up in Maine. I’m going to be manning a remote ranger station up in Acadia National Park. I’ll be driving all night and day to get there, and I start on Monday.” He glances back at me. “If it weren’t for that, I’d spend tomorrow with you.”
“Oh. Doesn’t it get lonely?”
“I like it. I like being on my own.”
“That’s how you are?” I say, squinting my eyes.
He nods. “How are you?”
“I’m not that way,” I say slowly, even though I’m still very much alone. So alone it makes it hard to swallow.
I follow him silently out to the parking lot and watch him load the blue pickup truck again. That’s when I start to cry.
Dad tries to hug me, but he only uses one arm. I cry harder.
“I’d say we could exchange e-mail addresses, but I don’t have a computer.” He rubs his beard. “I can write you when I get there, though I’ll probably be really very busy for the first few months getting settled and everything.”
A huge bubble of snot bursts out of my nostril, but I don’t even care. This is not how I hoped this would go. Not even close.
“Please stop crying,” he says softly. “Wasn’t this a nice visit?”
I sniffle and look around the parking lot. He randomly shows back up after six years of nothing. And after a fifteen-minute chat, he expects insta-relationship and warm fuzzies? “Not really, Dad. I mean … I don’t know.”
He shakes the change in his pocket. “Remember, I waited here all week for you. It didn’t have to be rushed like this.”
His words hang in the air. He wants it, so long as he doesn’t have to work for it. But I worked very hard to be here, to see him. All he did was take an unexpected exit off the highway. “What do you want? A medal?” My tears dry up and I get angry. I can’t even look at him.
“No, I don’t want a medal. I just thought things would be different, now that you’re older. I thought you’d understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Understand me. That I wasn’t ready to be a father.”
All I’m hearing is that he took advantage of Mom’s mistake to shirk his responsibilities to us. She was wrong to cheat on him, but what he did wasn’t right, either. “And are you ready now?” I’m pretty raw and emotional. “Is that why you came here? You want to be my dad now?”
His face begs for sympathy. “I don’t know. I guess I’m still trying to figure that out.” But it’s like he already knows the answer, because he gets in the driver’s side, closes the door, and lowers the window halfway. “I will write you. I’ll figure out something to say to you and write you.”
This is it. This is all I’m going to get.
“Wait, Dad?” I wipe my face on my sleeve and rummage through my book bag to find my camera. Then I lean against the truck, hold out my arm, try to fit both of us in the shot, and pull the trigger. But my Polaroid doesn’t make a sound.
“Let me have a look,” he says, unrolling the window the rest of the way and reaching for it. I hand it over. “I used to have one like this and it always got stuck.” He pops open the front hatch and fiddles with something inside. “You like taking pictures?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Me too. I’ve been documenting some tree diseases for the service.” He flips the latch closed. “Try again.”
I do. And it works.
“Rubes,” he says. “At least remember that I tried, okay?”
And then he rolls up his window and drives away.
I pedal out of the hotel parking lot without anywhere to go. I don’t have any of the answers or the closure that I wanted. In fact, my whole world is wide open. Wide open and empty. Before I can stop myself, I’m on my way to my old house.
It’s too late for there to be any trick-or-treaters left out. I ride boldly in the middle of the street. Make a left, and a right.
Thudding bass grows in the distance. Teddy’s party. As I get closer to his house, the music gets louder. I can see the shadows of people in the windows, bumping and grinding into each other. There’s a person in the driveway, sitting on the stone wall, throwing rocks into the street. He’s dressed in a huge cardboard square. He’s cut out arm holes and leg holes and painted the whole thing to look like a cookie box. The perfect companion to my Girl Scout costume.
“Ruby! Hey!”
But I ride right by Charlie. I skid to a stop in front of my old house.
It’s so beautiful, so well taken care of. I look up into the orange oak tree. A small wooden tree house is nestled in the branches.
“Ruby!” Charlie’s voice calls out. He’s awkwardly shuffling as fast as he can down the street in his cookie costume.
I toss my bike down and climb up the rope ladder to the tree house. As I disappear inside the branches, my tears flow more and more.
“What are you doing?” he calls out from the ground.
I peer past the pillowcase tacked up to the door frame and hiss “Go away!”
But he doesn’t. He follows me up.
The tree house is dark and shadowy and really cramped. I have to slouch to keep my head from scraping against the wood ceiling. There’s a pile of sticks and leaves in the corner, some Army men lined up across the windowsill, and a rubber-band gun with no ammo.
“What happened?” Charlie asks me, as he climbs in.
“I’m so messed up. For nothing. Over nothing.” I retreat to the corner opposite him, even though I’m still in arm’s reach.
“C’mere,” he says folding me into his arms, crinkling the cardboard of his big cookie box. I try to wriggle out, but it’s no use. He’s holding me too tight. So I just cry and cry and cry.
I wake up inside a square of sunlight that shines through the window of the tree house. As yellow and bright as it is, it provides no warmth. The icy breeze is strong through the trees and squeaks through the million cracks between the wood beams. My Girl Scout costume is damp and so is the plywood floor underneath me. I shiver.
Two thermal-covered arms squeeze me until I am still again. I look up from the lap where I am comfortably lying, despite the general uncomfortableness of where I am. Charlie is asleep, his back up against the side of the tree house. His crumpled and d
ented cookie costume is across from us in a corner. His fingers are twitching in tiny movements, like he’s typing on an invisible typewriter. I guess because he’s freezing too. His sweatshirt is draped over my bare legs.
I nudge him gently. His eyes flutter open. “Hey,” he says with a tired voice. And gives me a squeeze.
“Hey,” I say back.
I notice the key in my hands when I push myself up off the floor. I guess I’ve been squeezing it all night because my palm is marked by red flecks that match the toothy grooves. It’s all tender and sore.
“Do you know what time it is?” I ask.
He checks his watch. “Almost nine-thirty. Are you hungry? We could go get some breakfast or something.”
My stomach is empty but I’m not hungry. “I should probably go home.” I stand up and dust my dirty, wrinkly self off. I can’t even imagine how bad I must look right now.
Charlie gets up too. He moves really slow and quiet as he dusts off his jeans, like he doesn’t want to disturb me or distract me from whatever I might be thinking about.
I move over to the window and stare down at my old house. It’s a really nice house. I’ll probably be sad forever that it’s not where I live anymore.
Charlie creeps up behind me. He puts his hands on my shoulders and leads me away from the window and into a shadow. “We should probably keep out of sight.” He pulls a leaf out of my hair. Instead of throwing it on the ground, he tucks it into his pocket. Which is totally weird and sweet and very Charlie.
My heart races. “I can’t believe you’re going to move,” I say. Tears well up in my eyes.
“It’s not going to be for a while.”
“But that’s what I mean. How can I be with someone I know is going to leave me?” I’m full-on crying now.
He wipes my face with the sleeve of his thermal. It’s really soft and smells like dryer sheets. It’s like the most perfect tissue. “I don’t know.”
“And I can’t just forget it either, Charlie. I’ve tried that before and it doesn’t work.”