Hurricane Season, page 12
“Sure I do,” Mark said, and Fig jumped up next to him on the couch, putting the heavy photo album on his lap and flipping open the cover.
The photographs weren’t labeled, but Fig had made her dad tell her which concert hall was which, how many people were in each audience, what songs he performed, how he felt during each and every performance. As she flipped through the pages, showing them to Mark, they didn’t need any explanation. They were photographs of her dad from a different time, one before her, a version of her dad that she sometimes couldn’t connect with the person she knew. His hair was trimmed short, his face smooth and clean-shaven, with a bright, confident look in his eyes. But Fig sometimes still could see the dad that she knew in those pictures—still could see the way his smile sometimes didn’t quite reach his eyes, and that those eyes sometimes had that sheen of exhaustion. Either way, it didn’t take an expert to see that man had been, and still was, a talented pianist.
It didn’t matter if he was playing in front of a crowd of fifty or two thousand and fifty. Even from those photographs, she could see how he commanded each hall; she could see how handsome he looked while doing so. She wanted Mark to see it, too. Wanted him to know that her dad was someone who had been, and should still be, taken seriously in his craft.
She wished there were some way to make CP&P see her dad as the man in these photographs instead of the man he’d been at that first visit. As she looked at him now, his face smooth and shaven and his eyes bright as he sat at his piano, she thought that maybe that was possible.
Mark was quiet as they flipped through the album, and when they reached the end, he started right back from the beginning again. “You clean up good,” he said to her dad.
Fig’s dad was pink around his ears and stayed in the safety of his piano nook.
“Women must’ve been throwing themselves at you.” Mark had a smirk on his face as he said it, and her dad laughed, the blush spreading from his ears to his cheeks.
“Not likely,” he said.
Fig leaned in. “My mom was a groupie,” she confided.
“She was not! Don’t go spreading lies.”
Mark barked a laugh. “Well, I bet she wasn’t the only one.”
There was something about the way he said it that made Fig ask, “How about you? Did you ever have a . . .” She paused, unsure of how to refer to the relationship between her mother and dad. “Were you ever married?”
“Fig,” her dad warned.
“It’s okay,” Mark told him. “Yeah, I was. She passed away about six years ago.”
Fig frowned. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, me too. But I’ve made peace with it, try not to have any regrets.” He stopped, and his eyes drifted off to the side. “You’d have liked her.”
“Yeah?”
Mark laughed. “She would have loved you, too. You’re just like her. Fiery. Small and sassy. Kate kept me on my toes, never let me take myself too seriously. Made me promise to live my life and be happy.”
Fig looked back down at the photo album spread across her and Mark’s laps, tracing the shape of her dad’s face in one of the photos with her fingers. She let herself, only for a second, think about what life would feel like if she actually lost him. “Are you?” she asked Mark. “Happy, I mean.”
Mark took a deep breath, smiled at her, and then looked across the room at her dad. “Yeah. Or at least, I’m something really close to it.”
“All right, Little Miss Nosy,” her dad said, standing up from the piano bench. “Time for you to get to bed.”
Fig drifted off to sleep that night to a lullaby of the soft murmurs and laughter from Mark and her dad, accompanied by his piano. The last image in her mind was of her dad in his best suit up on a stage, performing as if he were the best musician in the world—and she spent the night dreaming of orchestras and happiness.
It wasn’t long after (nights like that had started to become so commonplace and comfortable, Fig forgot to cross days off the calendar) that Fig thought she was still dreaming of her dad’s music until she blinked open her eyes and realized she was awake. The music was real and new and drifting through their house and her bedroom—at six in the morning on a Saturday, though she couldn’t bring herself to care. She held her breath, listening to her dad’s piano along with the tick of the clock in her bedroom, anxious to see how long this piece would last, how long until it spun out of control or abruptly ended or turned into something else, some other half bit of music he couldn’t hold on to.
But it kept going. It grew stronger. It flowed, and it all came together, and Fig loved it. It was like being at the MoMA, looking at The Starry Night. It was like being there in the audience in those photographs of her dad’s performances. It was the exact feeling she wanted to put on paper in Miss Williams’s class. It was the very thing she knew would convince CP&P to leave them alone.
It was her dad, at his best, and when the music came to a stop it wasn’t because he ran out of steam, or forgot the notes, or because his fingers didn’t want to work anymore. It was because the song was finished. She hadn’t heard him finish anything in years.
Could she get him to play it when someone from CP&P next came? Could she get whoever it was to understand how wonderful he could be?
Fig waited until she heard the shower running and climbed out of her bed, slowly opening the bedroom door to pad across to the nook where her dad’s piano lived. She wanted to see it. She wanted to see his handwritten notes of sheet music, wanted to touch those sheets and feel that the music was real, wanted to familiarize herself with it, wanted to know it and be a part of it. She wanted to know that his life before her and after her could be the same.
The sheet music sat on top of the piano, and even before she got up close to it, she could see it was different. She could see how clean the sheets looked; there were no wrinkles, hardly any cross-outs or rewrites or big black smudges covering half the lines. It wasn’t perfect—he had clearly been working on it for quite some time to get it just right—but it looked . . . professional. It looked like the kind of work she knew he was capable of, and this was it. This was what they needed. This was what he had to show and play for the next CP&P visit to prove the science wasn’t exact, but it was working and his mind was fine.
She reached out so she could feel the piece in her hands and look at it, as if she understood music and could read it like a library book. But she froze, her hand in midair, the moment she saw its title, in her dad’s scrawl, top and center: MARK.
Suddenly her dad’s piano nook seemed a little too small for comfort. She stared, bewildered, at that piece of sheet music, Mark’s name clearly legible in capital letters at the top. The last time her dad wrote anything in someone’s name was the piece called “Finola” that he kept safe in his desk drawer. He hadn’t finished anything since, hadn’t been able to, and what, exactly, did this mean? Mark was his friend, and yes, he had helped them, had pulled her dad from a storm, but this seemed different, this seemed . . .
The shower turned off. Fig was stunned by the silence, a stark contrast to the music that had filled the house when she awoke. She quickly made her way back to her bedroom and closed the door. The notes of that song floated around in her head along with her confusion, and she made the decision to pretend she hadn’t seen the new music if her dad said anything about it at all.
Danny was avoiding Fig. He switched his seat back with Jeremy in art class, and back with Jaden in math, and he sat with the rest of the boys in the cafeteria at lunch. Fig sat by Ava, Madison, and Haley, who swapped snacks and stories around her. She was once again fading into the background. Ava wasn’t even looking at her these days.
But when Jeremy got sick in the middle of lunch (and all over the boys’ table), his mom came and picked him up, leaving an empty seat between Danny and Fig in art class. Fig kept glancing over at him as he dipped his paintbrush in yellow, dragging thick swirls of paint along his paper.
She bit her lip, and took a chance. “So, my dad actually finished a piece of music.”
Danny paused but kept his eyes on his artwork. “Really?”
“You won’t believe what he called it.”
Danny didn’t respond, still didn’t look up from his painting.
Fig kept trying. “I don’t really know what it means, though. Maybe you can help figure it out?”
He cringed a little, and she almost thought he might apologize for all the time he wasted ignoring her. But he still wouldn’t look at her, and he shifted his painting a little farther from her, so that he had to turn away from her to paint it. “I need to focus. Okay?” he said.
She nodded, even though it wasn’t okay at all. They spent the rest of art class working in silence.
Fig rode the bus home silently, too. She told her dad she was going to go to the library after school, but now . . . now she didn’t much feel like it. She didn’t want to see Hannah. She didn’t want to make excuses again for overdue book fees, and her feelings for Hannah were messing up her friendship with Danny. She just wanted to go home and see her dad, and ask him what to do, and sit with him on the couch and forget about everything else.
But he wasn’t alone when she walked through the front door (which wasn’t the weird part, not these days). What made her freeze at the threshold—her eyes wide, the fingers of one hand wrapping so tight around her backpack strap that the buckle dug into her skin, the fingers of the other hand reaching for her earlobe—was how she found him, found them.
Her dad and Mark: sitting close on the very middle of the couch. Mark’s arm was around her dad’s shoulders, and her dad’s hand was resting on Mark’s cheek, and they were looking at each other as if no one else were in the world, as if Fig weren’t anywhere in their orbit, as if she weren’t standing right there. They leaned closer and closer to each other, until Mark finally caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, finally registered that she existed, that she was there. He pulled away from her dad, inhaling sharply. “Fig . . .”
Her dad’s head whipped around, and he stumbled off the couch, nearly losing his balance as he turned to face her, his eyes frantic. He almost looked like he did on the days when his mind was useless and lost to him, and she almost wished it were true and he wasn’t himself right now because that at least would explain this, would explain why she wasn’t expecting this. She wanted to blame this on some manic episode, but she remembered that sheet music. She remembered his newly finished song, Mark’s name centered at the top of it. And she knew he was clear, knew this wasn’t a trick of his mind or hers.
“Fig, love. We can talk about this, okay?”
It wasn’t okay. She didn’t know how to explain that to him. Was this happening in the background of all those nights they spent with Mark, those dinners the three of them shared, the laughter over TV shows and sports games and music? Was this there during the conversations and secrets she confided in her dad, the ones in which she explained Hannah, without knowing he understood better than she knew, he understood and could relate to a part of her and didn’t tell her, didn’t try to be there for her the way she had been trying to be there for him with art?
She closed her eyes and tried to find the words to ask questions, to find out exactly what she saw, to get them to tell her the truth, but she couldn’t say anything.
“Fig, please . . .”
And then she didn’t want to say anything, and didn’t want to hear any more, either. She didn’t want to know.
She ran down the hallway and into her bedroom, and she knew her dad and Mark were both following her, her dad’s hands on the door before she could slam it in his face. “Fig, wait, please. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you. But I promise you, nothing has to change.”
The words finally came, bursting out from her chest and up her throat. “Everything has changed!” Didn’t he see that? Didn’t he see the way she took an art class to be closer to him, even though she really loved science? That taking that art class for him was what put CP&P at their door? That it was because of her and Miss Williams that he was drug tested and checked in on? Didn’t he understand that she spent Friday nights with him instead of with girls like Madison and Ava and Haley because they wouldn’t invite her anymore, that her smartphone was useless because no one ever texted her anyway? That she read book after book after book about hurricanes, about Vincent van Gogh, about bipolar disorder, about mental health, and paintings and art and music?
Didn’t he see how she tried so hard to be what he needed and see things like he did, and all this time he was seeing and experiencing those things not with her but with Mark?
“Mark is a good man. I care about him, and he cares about me, and we didn’t want you to find out this way but—”
“No,” she practically growled. “You can’t do this!”
Maybe it was the way she was yelling at him, refusing to listen when he was trying to explain, but he squared his shoulders. “I’m sorry, darling, but you don’t get to dictate my life.”
Which only made Fig fight harder.
“You dictate mine!” she shouted at him. “It’s because of you I don’t have friends and can’t go to parties, because I’m your Theo! I’ve always taken care of you—I’m the only one who knows how to take care of you, and it sucks, Dad!”
Mark stepped forward. “Fig, I’m just trying to—”
“You stay out of this!”
“Finola.”
She paused, taken aback by the way her dad barked her real name. She took a deep breath through her nose, but still her voice cracked as she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her dad looked small. “I didn’t know how.”
That wasn’t good enough. Not for her, not right then. “You’re going to scare him off and make him leave us just like you made my mom leave us and you make everyone leave us!”
And that was a direct hit. Which was exactly what she wanted, wasn’t it? Her dad was hard to live with, and it took a special person to live with him, but her mom couldn’t do it, and Fig didn’t know anymore if she could do it, and what would happen when Mark realized he couldn’t do it, either?
Her dad’s hands hung at his sides, shoulders slumped, his face crumpling as he looked at her.
“I’d never, Fig,” Mark said, but Fig didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to see her dad’s face look so sad and broken over something she said, didn’t want to deal with this anymore.
“Get out of my room,” she said, her voice going small and unthreatening. She didn’t have anything left in her to yell. “Just get out of my room.”
Mark turned to leave first, without hesitation, simply because she told him to. Her dad wasn’t as quick to go. “I love you, Fig.”
She didn’t ask him to double it. He turned and left, closing the door, giving her the space she so desperately needed to breathe again.
13
Three Sunflowers in a Vase
Fig didn’t leave her room for the rest of the night, and come morning, her stomach was growling loudly enough she was positive that was what woke her up. It also could have been the fact that the entire house smelled like butter, or the clang and clatter she heard coming from the kitchen.
Fig wanted to eat but didn’t know what to say to her dad. She took her time in her bedroom, putting on a skirt, a shirt, a cardigan, and socks, taking the time to tie and double-knot both her shoes and also run a brush through her hair. She quietly made her way into the bathroom she and her dad shared, where his toothbrush was haphazardly placed beside the sink. She moved it to sit in the holder, ignoring the medication case that Mark bought for her dad so he wouldn’t lose track of the days of the week and the meds to take each day. She took her own toothbrush and brushed her teeth, washed her face. All these tasks didn’t normally take her this long, but today she decided to take her time with them.
When Fig finally set foot in the kitchen, her dad was standing there in his apron, holding a plate filled with pancakes, as if now that they were made he didn’t know what to do with them. “I made pancakes,” he said, stating the obvious. “No chocolate chips, I’m afraid.”
“Syrup?” she asked.
He cringed. “None of that, either. Jam?”
“Ew.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, taking a seat at the table. He took that as his cue to put the plate stacked with way too many pancakes in front of her and sat in the other chair. For a moment, they just sat there, him looking at his hands and her at her pancakes.
He asked, “Can we talk?” at the same time she said, “Will you braid my hair?”
He sighed, deep and heavy, as some of the tension left his shoulders. “Of course, love. Of course.”
Fig gave him the hairband that was wrapped around her wrist, and he gathered her long dark hair into his fingers, scratching lightly at her scalp. His fingers danced around her hair, not quite as gifted as when they moved over the piano keys, but soothing enough to lull her eyes closed. She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t, just kept to his task. When he finished, he tied the end with the band and rested his fingers gently on the back of her neck.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. “I should go get my bus.”
“Can I . . .” he said, suddenly and quickly, as she stood to gather her things. “Can I drive you to school?”
There was a part of her, and maybe there always would be, that wanted to jump into his arms and say, Yes, yes please drive me to school, and come to the Fall Festival, and make me breakfast and dinner and tell me what you’re feeling and about your illness and medications and please don’t leave me, ever. But right now, there was a larger part of her, one she didn’t even fully understand, that wouldn’t let her. “It’s okay. I don’t mind the bus.”
He nodded and offered her a smile she didn’t believe. “I’ll see you later, then.”
The photographs weren’t labeled, but Fig had made her dad tell her which concert hall was which, how many people were in each audience, what songs he performed, how he felt during each and every performance. As she flipped through the pages, showing them to Mark, they didn’t need any explanation. They were photographs of her dad from a different time, one before her, a version of her dad that she sometimes couldn’t connect with the person she knew. His hair was trimmed short, his face smooth and clean-shaven, with a bright, confident look in his eyes. But Fig sometimes still could see the dad that she knew in those pictures—still could see the way his smile sometimes didn’t quite reach his eyes, and that those eyes sometimes had that sheen of exhaustion. Either way, it didn’t take an expert to see that man had been, and still was, a talented pianist.
It didn’t matter if he was playing in front of a crowd of fifty or two thousand and fifty. Even from those photographs, she could see how he commanded each hall; she could see how handsome he looked while doing so. She wanted Mark to see it, too. Wanted him to know that her dad was someone who had been, and should still be, taken seriously in his craft.
She wished there were some way to make CP&P see her dad as the man in these photographs instead of the man he’d been at that first visit. As she looked at him now, his face smooth and shaven and his eyes bright as he sat at his piano, she thought that maybe that was possible.
Mark was quiet as they flipped through the album, and when they reached the end, he started right back from the beginning again. “You clean up good,” he said to her dad.
Fig’s dad was pink around his ears and stayed in the safety of his piano nook.
“Women must’ve been throwing themselves at you.” Mark had a smirk on his face as he said it, and her dad laughed, the blush spreading from his ears to his cheeks.
“Not likely,” he said.
Fig leaned in. “My mom was a groupie,” she confided.
“She was not! Don’t go spreading lies.”
Mark barked a laugh. “Well, I bet she wasn’t the only one.”
There was something about the way he said it that made Fig ask, “How about you? Did you ever have a . . .” She paused, unsure of how to refer to the relationship between her mother and dad. “Were you ever married?”
“Fig,” her dad warned.
“It’s okay,” Mark told him. “Yeah, I was. She passed away about six years ago.”
Fig frowned. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, me too. But I’ve made peace with it, try not to have any regrets.” He stopped, and his eyes drifted off to the side. “You’d have liked her.”
“Yeah?”
Mark laughed. “She would have loved you, too. You’re just like her. Fiery. Small and sassy. Kate kept me on my toes, never let me take myself too seriously. Made me promise to live my life and be happy.”
Fig looked back down at the photo album spread across her and Mark’s laps, tracing the shape of her dad’s face in one of the photos with her fingers. She let herself, only for a second, think about what life would feel like if she actually lost him. “Are you?” she asked Mark. “Happy, I mean.”
Mark took a deep breath, smiled at her, and then looked across the room at her dad. “Yeah. Or at least, I’m something really close to it.”
“All right, Little Miss Nosy,” her dad said, standing up from the piano bench. “Time for you to get to bed.”
Fig drifted off to sleep that night to a lullaby of the soft murmurs and laughter from Mark and her dad, accompanied by his piano. The last image in her mind was of her dad in his best suit up on a stage, performing as if he were the best musician in the world—and she spent the night dreaming of orchestras and happiness.
It wasn’t long after (nights like that had started to become so commonplace and comfortable, Fig forgot to cross days off the calendar) that Fig thought she was still dreaming of her dad’s music until she blinked open her eyes and realized she was awake. The music was real and new and drifting through their house and her bedroom—at six in the morning on a Saturday, though she couldn’t bring herself to care. She held her breath, listening to her dad’s piano along with the tick of the clock in her bedroom, anxious to see how long this piece would last, how long until it spun out of control or abruptly ended or turned into something else, some other half bit of music he couldn’t hold on to.
But it kept going. It grew stronger. It flowed, and it all came together, and Fig loved it. It was like being at the MoMA, looking at The Starry Night. It was like being there in the audience in those photographs of her dad’s performances. It was the exact feeling she wanted to put on paper in Miss Williams’s class. It was the very thing she knew would convince CP&P to leave them alone.
It was her dad, at his best, and when the music came to a stop it wasn’t because he ran out of steam, or forgot the notes, or because his fingers didn’t want to work anymore. It was because the song was finished. She hadn’t heard him finish anything in years.
Could she get him to play it when someone from CP&P next came? Could she get whoever it was to understand how wonderful he could be?
Fig waited until she heard the shower running and climbed out of her bed, slowly opening the bedroom door to pad across to the nook where her dad’s piano lived. She wanted to see it. She wanted to see his handwritten notes of sheet music, wanted to touch those sheets and feel that the music was real, wanted to familiarize herself with it, wanted to know it and be a part of it. She wanted to know that his life before her and after her could be the same.
The sheet music sat on top of the piano, and even before she got up close to it, she could see it was different. She could see how clean the sheets looked; there were no wrinkles, hardly any cross-outs or rewrites or big black smudges covering half the lines. It wasn’t perfect—he had clearly been working on it for quite some time to get it just right—but it looked . . . professional. It looked like the kind of work she knew he was capable of, and this was it. This was what they needed. This was what he had to show and play for the next CP&P visit to prove the science wasn’t exact, but it was working and his mind was fine.
She reached out so she could feel the piece in her hands and look at it, as if she understood music and could read it like a library book. But she froze, her hand in midair, the moment she saw its title, in her dad’s scrawl, top and center: MARK.
Suddenly her dad’s piano nook seemed a little too small for comfort. She stared, bewildered, at that piece of sheet music, Mark’s name clearly legible in capital letters at the top. The last time her dad wrote anything in someone’s name was the piece called “Finola” that he kept safe in his desk drawer. He hadn’t finished anything since, hadn’t been able to, and what, exactly, did this mean? Mark was his friend, and yes, he had helped them, had pulled her dad from a storm, but this seemed different, this seemed . . .
The shower turned off. Fig was stunned by the silence, a stark contrast to the music that had filled the house when she awoke. She quickly made her way back to her bedroom and closed the door. The notes of that song floated around in her head along with her confusion, and she made the decision to pretend she hadn’t seen the new music if her dad said anything about it at all.
Danny was avoiding Fig. He switched his seat back with Jeremy in art class, and back with Jaden in math, and he sat with the rest of the boys in the cafeteria at lunch. Fig sat by Ava, Madison, and Haley, who swapped snacks and stories around her. She was once again fading into the background. Ava wasn’t even looking at her these days.
But when Jeremy got sick in the middle of lunch (and all over the boys’ table), his mom came and picked him up, leaving an empty seat between Danny and Fig in art class. Fig kept glancing over at him as he dipped his paintbrush in yellow, dragging thick swirls of paint along his paper.
She bit her lip, and took a chance. “So, my dad actually finished a piece of music.”
Danny paused but kept his eyes on his artwork. “Really?”
“You won’t believe what he called it.”
Danny didn’t respond, still didn’t look up from his painting.
Fig kept trying. “I don’t really know what it means, though. Maybe you can help figure it out?”
He cringed a little, and she almost thought he might apologize for all the time he wasted ignoring her. But he still wouldn’t look at her, and he shifted his painting a little farther from her, so that he had to turn away from her to paint it. “I need to focus. Okay?” he said.
She nodded, even though it wasn’t okay at all. They spent the rest of art class working in silence.
Fig rode the bus home silently, too. She told her dad she was going to go to the library after school, but now . . . now she didn’t much feel like it. She didn’t want to see Hannah. She didn’t want to make excuses again for overdue book fees, and her feelings for Hannah were messing up her friendship with Danny. She just wanted to go home and see her dad, and ask him what to do, and sit with him on the couch and forget about everything else.
But he wasn’t alone when she walked through the front door (which wasn’t the weird part, not these days). What made her freeze at the threshold—her eyes wide, the fingers of one hand wrapping so tight around her backpack strap that the buckle dug into her skin, the fingers of the other hand reaching for her earlobe—was how she found him, found them.
Her dad and Mark: sitting close on the very middle of the couch. Mark’s arm was around her dad’s shoulders, and her dad’s hand was resting on Mark’s cheek, and they were looking at each other as if no one else were in the world, as if Fig weren’t anywhere in their orbit, as if she weren’t standing right there. They leaned closer and closer to each other, until Mark finally caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, finally registered that she existed, that she was there. He pulled away from her dad, inhaling sharply. “Fig . . .”
Her dad’s head whipped around, and he stumbled off the couch, nearly losing his balance as he turned to face her, his eyes frantic. He almost looked like he did on the days when his mind was useless and lost to him, and she almost wished it were true and he wasn’t himself right now because that at least would explain this, would explain why she wasn’t expecting this. She wanted to blame this on some manic episode, but she remembered that sheet music. She remembered his newly finished song, Mark’s name centered at the top of it. And she knew he was clear, knew this wasn’t a trick of his mind or hers.
“Fig, love. We can talk about this, okay?”
It wasn’t okay. She didn’t know how to explain that to him. Was this happening in the background of all those nights they spent with Mark, those dinners the three of them shared, the laughter over TV shows and sports games and music? Was this there during the conversations and secrets she confided in her dad, the ones in which she explained Hannah, without knowing he understood better than she knew, he understood and could relate to a part of her and didn’t tell her, didn’t try to be there for her the way she had been trying to be there for him with art?
She closed her eyes and tried to find the words to ask questions, to find out exactly what she saw, to get them to tell her the truth, but she couldn’t say anything.
“Fig, please . . .”
And then she didn’t want to say anything, and didn’t want to hear any more, either. She didn’t want to know.
She ran down the hallway and into her bedroom, and she knew her dad and Mark were both following her, her dad’s hands on the door before she could slam it in his face. “Fig, wait, please. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you. But I promise you, nothing has to change.”
The words finally came, bursting out from her chest and up her throat. “Everything has changed!” Didn’t he see that? Didn’t he see the way she took an art class to be closer to him, even though she really loved science? That taking that art class for him was what put CP&P at their door? That it was because of her and Miss Williams that he was drug tested and checked in on? Didn’t he understand that she spent Friday nights with him instead of with girls like Madison and Ava and Haley because they wouldn’t invite her anymore, that her smartphone was useless because no one ever texted her anyway? That she read book after book after book about hurricanes, about Vincent van Gogh, about bipolar disorder, about mental health, and paintings and art and music?
Didn’t he see how she tried so hard to be what he needed and see things like he did, and all this time he was seeing and experiencing those things not with her but with Mark?
“Mark is a good man. I care about him, and he cares about me, and we didn’t want you to find out this way but—”
“No,” she practically growled. “You can’t do this!”
Maybe it was the way she was yelling at him, refusing to listen when he was trying to explain, but he squared his shoulders. “I’m sorry, darling, but you don’t get to dictate my life.”
Which only made Fig fight harder.
“You dictate mine!” she shouted at him. “It’s because of you I don’t have friends and can’t go to parties, because I’m your Theo! I’ve always taken care of you—I’m the only one who knows how to take care of you, and it sucks, Dad!”
Mark stepped forward. “Fig, I’m just trying to—”
“You stay out of this!”
“Finola.”
She paused, taken aback by the way her dad barked her real name. She took a deep breath through her nose, but still her voice cracked as she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her dad looked small. “I didn’t know how.”
That wasn’t good enough. Not for her, not right then. “You’re going to scare him off and make him leave us just like you made my mom leave us and you make everyone leave us!”
And that was a direct hit. Which was exactly what she wanted, wasn’t it? Her dad was hard to live with, and it took a special person to live with him, but her mom couldn’t do it, and Fig didn’t know anymore if she could do it, and what would happen when Mark realized he couldn’t do it, either?
Her dad’s hands hung at his sides, shoulders slumped, his face crumpling as he looked at her.
“I’d never, Fig,” Mark said, but Fig didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to see her dad’s face look so sad and broken over something she said, didn’t want to deal with this anymore.
“Get out of my room,” she said, her voice going small and unthreatening. She didn’t have anything left in her to yell. “Just get out of my room.”
Mark turned to leave first, without hesitation, simply because she told him to. Her dad wasn’t as quick to go. “I love you, Fig.”
She didn’t ask him to double it. He turned and left, closing the door, giving her the space she so desperately needed to breathe again.
13
Three Sunflowers in a Vase
Fig didn’t leave her room for the rest of the night, and come morning, her stomach was growling loudly enough she was positive that was what woke her up. It also could have been the fact that the entire house smelled like butter, or the clang and clatter she heard coming from the kitchen.
Fig wanted to eat but didn’t know what to say to her dad. She took her time in her bedroom, putting on a skirt, a shirt, a cardigan, and socks, taking the time to tie and double-knot both her shoes and also run a brush through her hair. She quietly made her way into the bathroom she and her dad shared, where his toothbrush was haphazardly placed beside the sink. She moved it to sit in the holder, ignoring the medication case that Mark bought for her dad so he wouldn’t lose track of the days of the week and the meds to take each day. She took her own toothbrush and brushed her teeth, washed her face. All these tasks didn’t normally take her this long, but today she decided to take her time with them.
When Fig finally set foot in the kitchen, her dad was standing there in his apron, holding a plate filled with pancakes, as if now that they were made he didn’t know what to do with them. “I made pancakes,” he said, stating the obvious. “No chocolate chips, I’m afraid.”
“Syrup?” she asked.
He cringed. “None of that, either. Jam?”
“Ew.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, taking a seat at the table. He took that as his cue to put the plate stacked with way too many pancakes in front of her and sat in the other chair. For a moment, they just sat there, him looking at his hands and her at her pancakes.
He asked, “Can we talk?” at the same time she said, “Will you braid my hair?”
He sighed, deep and heavy, as some of the tension left his shoulders. “Of course, love. Of course.”
Fig gave him the hairband that was wrapped around her wrist, and he gathered her long dark hair into his fingers, scratching lightly at her scalp. His fingers danced around her hair, not quite as gifted as when they moved over the piano keys, but soothing enough to lull her eyes closed. She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t, just kept to his task. When he finished, he tied the end with the band and rested his fingers gently on the back of her neck.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. “I should go get my bus.”
“Can I . . .” he said, suddenly and quickly, as she stood to gather her things. “Can I drive you to school?”
There was a part of her, and maybe there always would be, that wanted to jump into his arms and say, Yes, yes please drive me to school, and come to the Fall Festival, and make me breakfast and dinner and tell me what you’re feeling and about your illness and medications and please don’t leave me, ever. But right now, there was a larger part of her, one she didn’t even fully understand, that wouldn’t let her. “It’s okay. I don’t mind the bus.”
He nodded and offered her a smile she didn’t believe. “I’ll see you later, then.”
