Hurricane Season, page 14
“Oh, God,” Fig said, backing away from the counter. “No, no, it’s fine. I should go. I have to go.”
“Your book, let me—”
Fig grabbed the Van Gogh book off the counter, not even waiting to see if Hannah was finished checking it out. She left behind the articles Hannah had printed for her, hurrying out the library doors.
She felt hot and stupid the entire walk home, and she was near tears when she made it to her street and saw an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway. Her stomach dropped, and she started running.
Fig threw open the front door, dropping her backpack on the floor. “Dad?” she called out, rushing into the living room, where she found her dad with Mark and a third man Fig had never seen before. She was breathing heavily, her sweater hanging off one shoulder as she looked at each of them in turn.
Her dad offered her a smile, but Fig didn’t want it.
“How was school?” he said. “David here is from CP and P. Just another check-in. All is good. Why don’t you go get your homework started?”
Fig looked over at Mark, whose fingers were fidgeting against his thighs the same way her dad’s often did, and then she looked over at David. He had folders in his hands (was one their file?) and a plastic bag containing the drug test. “Did you tell him about the doctors?” Fig’s words were quick and desperate, and she focused back on David. “He’s bipolar, they think, he’s taking medicine now.”
“It’s all okay, darling. Just go get your homework started.”
Both Mark and David were so much taller than her dad, especially as he slouched between them, and Fig felt even smaller standing there. She reached forward, grabbed her dad’s hand, and pulled at him, wanting to get him away from the other men, wanting to get him over to his piano nook. “Play something for him, Dad, show him,” she said.
“Fig, stop,” he said. He reached for her shoulder to stop her from tugging at him, but she bent away and kept pulling. “Stop.”
“You need to play, Dad. You need to show him. He needs to know.”
She let go of him and ran over to the piano nook. Mark’s piece was still sitting on the music stand, front and center. She yanked it off, the paper rustling in her hands. “Sit down and play, Dad!”
Mark moved to put a hand on her dad’s shoulder, and David took a step forward, too. “I know these visits can be stressful,” David said.
“You don’t know anything!” Fig shouted.
“That’s enough,” her dad said, but it wasn’t a reprimand. His voice was too small.
Fig threw the sheet music, the pages of Mark’s song scattering as they slowly fell to the ground, and she reached out to grab her dad’s shirt to try to pull him again. “Please, Dad, show him how you can play. Just play, Dad, please. Show him you’re okay! Show him! They don’t understand, Dad, you have to play!”
He pulled Fig close and cupped her face with his hands. His eyes were wet, his face scrunched up as he held her. “Darling, please. I’m sorry, please go to your room.”
“Why don’t we all sit down,” David was saying.
But Fig didn’t want to sit down with him and with Mark and her dad. She pushed her dad off her, grabbed her backpack, and ran into her room. She slammed the door behind her and threw her backpack across the floor, where it skidded and landed under her bed. She could hear the voices from the living room, though she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She wondered if she had made things worse.
She tried to take deep breaths but couldn’t, and she got down on her knees to reach for her backpack. It was next to the hurricane book from the library that her dad had ruined and she had hidden under her bed. The book that Hannah had been teasing her about, the book that was overdue and broken. She picked it up and ripped out the pages that were stuck together, ink smudged and wet. The binding was falling off, and she ripped off the cover as well and threw it across the room.
Because that wasn’t satisfying enough, she grabbed the Van Gogh book from her backpack and ripped its pages out, too. Ripped right through the center of his self-portrait, and The Starry Night, and The Yellow House, and all the rest of it that was supposed to bring her closer to her father but couldn’t. Maybe nothing ever would.
Fig flung her body onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow, wishing, begging even, to disappear.
Fig’s dad knocked on her bedroom door an hour later. She was still facedown on her bed, and sent a muffled “Leave me alone” his way.
He ignored her and walked in anyway. “Can we talk?”
Fig didn’t know what to say. She wondered if this was how her dad sometimes felt, if she finally could relate to him. Everything was slowly slipping out of her grasp, and try as she might to hold on to normalcy, she couldn’t get a strong-enough grip.
Her dad sat on the edge of her bed, and she curled into herself, facing the wall and away from him. “He’s gone, love. He left.”
“Mark?” she asked.
Her dad released a shaky exhale. “The man from CP and P.”
“Mark’s still here, then?”
Her dad reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “Tell me what happened out there. What’s going on in this beautiful head of yours?”
Fig didn’t respond.
“We need to talk about this.” His fingers were still running through her hair, moving the strands out of her face and behind her shoulder. “Me playing a bit of music isn’t going to fix things.”
Fig rolled over to look at him. “What will, then?”
“I’m taking care of it. You just need to worry about you.”
She turned back to face the wall. “I want to be alone, Dad.”
He didn’t leave right away, just continued playing with her hair as she closed her eyes tightly and tried to forget.
She couldn’t sleep that night, even after her dad surrendered and let her be. She couldn’t get her mind to stop moving. She tugged on her earlobe so hard, it was sore by the morning. She stayed there, in her bed, not ready to leave it, using the fact that it was Saturday as her excuse to stay under the familiar comfort of her duvet. She rolled over to look at the clock. It was nine thirty, and Mark was coming over for breakfast.
The house didn’t smell like bacon, though, which worried Fig because her dad should have been up and cooking. He rarely slept in. When he did . . .
When he did . . .
She kicked off her blankets and jumped out of bed, and she wished she was surprised that her dad wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t in the living room or his piano nook or the bathroom. She found him still in bed, a blanket pulled up nearly over his head, facing the wall, curled into himself and still asleep.
It had been a while since he had had a bad day. He was supposed to be getting better. He was supposed to be better.
“Dad,” she said. “Dad, get up.”
He moaned and mumbled things that didn’t make sense into his pillow. Fig doubted they were even real words.
“Get up. Now, Dad!” Her voice was nasty, but she didn’t care.
There was a knock at the front door. Fig chose to ignore it. They didn’t need Mark. They didn’t.
She reached for her dad’s shirt—got fistfuls of what she realized was Mark’s sweatshirt—and pulled. “Get up! Get up, get up, get up!”
Another round of knocking.
“Stop, please, just stop.” At least her dad was saying real words now, even if he was covering his head and turning his shoulder to keep her away from him.
She heard the door swing open, heard Mark calling, “Anyone here?”
He appeared in the threshold of her dad’s bedroom with a shiny silver key in his hand, looking at Fig and her dad with nothing but concern in his eyes.
Fig was furious. “He gave you a key?”
“For emergencies,” Mark said. He took a step to move for the bed, for her dad, but Fig held her ground and put her arm out, forcing him to keep his distance.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said. “He’s fine. I’ve done this before.”
“Let me help, Fig. I want to be here for him. For both of you.”
“Fat lot of help you were yesterday!” Fig yelled. “I don’t want you here. He’s my dad. I’m the one who’s done this before. I know how to take care of him, and I’m good at it, and I’ve always been good at it, and you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Her dad groaned, pulled the pillow out from under his head to hold tightly in his hands instead.
“Fig, please,” Mark said. “Please.”
“No.”
“Shut up!” Her dad’s voice rang out, making her and Mark both jump. “Just shut up and get away from me!”
The pillow in his hands was launched at Fig’s head, and it barely missed her as she ducked out of the way. Something snapped, then, all the anger that was building. She felt it move from her stomach to her fists as she climbed onto her dad’s bed and started hitting him. “I’m trying to help!” she shouted at him. “I’ve always just wanted to help!”
“Fig, Fig, stop.” Mark’s hands wrapped around her waist, pulling her off her dad, even as she continued to swing her arms.
She felt her elbow connect with Mark’s cheek, but he didn’t loosen his grip, and she didn’t relent. “Get up, Dad! I’ll call CP and P and make them come back! I’ll let them take you away, I’ll tell them to find my mom. I swear it, Dad! Get up!”
Somehow Mark managed to pull her out of her dad’s bedroom and into the living room, where he collapsed onto the couch with Fig still in his arms, falling on top of him. The TV was still on from the night before, the storm map on the Weather Channel lighting up the room until Mark reached for the remote and shut it off.
Fig continued to fight against him in the sudden stillness of the room, even as he held her tighter. “Let go of me. Just let me go.”
“Not going to do that, Fig.”
His arms were strong but gentle, and the fight left her as quickly as it came. She wrapped her small arms around his larger ones, and she cried. She cried because her dad was sick. She cried because she thought she knew what she was doing, but she didn’t know what she was doing, and he never got better, and she never understood why. “I thought he was getting better,” she cried into Mark’s embrace. “He was doing good.”
“He still is,” Mark said. “The doctors say this stuff takes time to get right. Sometimes medications need to be changed. Sometimes he’ll still have bad days anyway.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Fig said. “He doesn’t talk to me about that.”
Mark sighed, deep and heavy, into her hair. “He doesn’t want to burden you, Fig. He wants you to get to be the kid.”
“I want to be his Theo,” she said. “I am his Theo.”
“I know you are.”
She pulled back to look at him. “You don’t! You don’t know, you don’t understand. Theo was—”
“Theo took care of Vincent. He sent him money. He listened to him. He believed in him,” Mark said, and Fig was momentarily stunned to silence. “Vincent needed Theo and Theo needed Vincent. I get it, Fig. I do.”
Her eyes searched Mark’s. “How?”
“You’re not the only one who can read.” He shrugged. “You were so hung up on it all, and then we went to MoMA, and I just . . . I wanted to see why.”
She was caught between wanting to yell at him to mind his own business, and wanting to cry because there was someone who noticed her enough to piece together her mind the way she was trying to do with her dad’s.
“It’s because of him.” Mark didn’t ask because he knew, and Fig felt understood for the first time in such a long while. “I see that. I get that.”
“I didn’t mean it,” she said. “I don’t want them to take him away, and I don’t want to leave him. What if next time they come on a day when he’s like this?”
“Then we explain to them that he’s doing his best.”
“What if that’s not enough?” Fig asked. She reached over Mark for the remote control to turn the TV back on. She squinted at the sudden brightness from the Weather Channel, at the radar map that showed possible storms swirling and growing and waiting to happen. “What if there’s another storm? What if he gets hurt?”
“I won’t let him.”
“You can’t stop him. I can never stop him.” Fig covered her face in her hands. “I want him better so that he can be my dad. I just want my dad. Why won’t he tell me anything anymore? Why can’t I understand?”
Mark moved her hands out of the way and wiped the tears off her cheeks in that gentle way her dad always did. His own eyes were bright and wet. “What do you want to know?” he said. “Ask me here, right now. We’ll talk about this. I’ll explain what I can to you.”
Fig searched his face. “Really?”
“Really.”
Fig’s chest started to feel lighter as they began to talk. And it wasn’t the first time she fell asleep with her head on Mark’s lap, with his arm wrapped around her keeping her close and safe, but it was the first time that she did it without being scared, without her dad waking up alarmed and yelling. Instead, when her dad finally managed to stagger out of his bedroom, he collapsed on the couch with them.
The movement of the couch as he sat down stirred Fig from sleep, but she didn’t mind, especially not when he lifted her legs to rest them on his lap and ran a hand through her hair. When Fig looked up at him, his eyes were closed again as he rested his cheek against Mark’s shoulder.
Part Three
November
And I tell you, the more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
—Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, September 1888
15
Twilight, before the Storm
Fig woke up and flipped the calendar page over. New month, clean slate. Thirty days until the scheduled follow-up meeting with CP&P. They were getting so close.
The new month, however, didn’t bring many changes at school. Danny still wasn’t really speaking to Fig. Try as she might, he wasn’t budging, and Fig started not really speaking to Danny. She felt guilty that, after everything, Hannah turned her down (thinking about Hannah still made her stomach hurt, so she was avoiding the library). But even if Hannah hadn’t existed, Fig didn’t think she’d want to be more than best friends with Danny. She couldn’t help that, couldn’t control how she felt.
Danny understood that her dad couldn’t help how his mind worked. Why couldn’t he understand this?
Still, Fig missed him.
Especially when, in English class, Mrs. Lovotti paired them off to peer edit their sentences. Danny no longer sat close, and since Mrs. Lovotti had already paired Haley with Madison, she decided to pair Ava with Fig. Ava hadn’t so much as looked at Fig since her Halloween party.
They switched papers without making eye contact and started to make edits on each other’s work without comment. Fig corrected all of Ava’s its to it’s (and vice versa) while Ava rested her cheek in her hand, drawing doodles on Fig’s page, even though Fig was pretty sure she had mixed up all her lies and lays.
“When you’re done correcting your partner’s papers, exchange back and explain what you did,” Mrs. Lovotti said.
Which meant that Ava and Fig were going to have to talk to each other.
Fig tried to go first. “I think the first one needs to be it’s with an apostrophe because you mean to say it is.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Ava said, and Fig’s eyes snapped up to hers. Ava, finally, was looking right back at her.
“What?” Fig asked.
“I’m not mad. About the party. I thought maybe you thought I was.”
“Oh,” Fig replied, not knowing what else to say.
“Well, I mean, I guess I was? Because your dad kind of made it weird, you know? But then my mom talked to me about it.” Ava shrugged, going back to her doodles. “She said that you and your dad have a lot going on right now.”
Fig found herself nodding, hope and butterflies swirling in her stomach at the thought that someone was finally starting to understand.
“So, anyway. She told me to invite you over more. Like, for dinner, if you want, whenever. I’m just not allowed at your house.”
Fig looked back down at their grammar sheets, at the corrections they both made. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To be included. For Ava to realize her dad was sick and ask Fig to hang out anyway.
But it didn’t feel right. Fig wasn’t sure why she felt like crying.
“Okay, settle down now,” Mrs. Lovotti interrupted from the front of the classroom. “Move your seats back, and let’s go over the things you fixed.”
Ava moved back to her seat, then leaned over to whisper to Haley, and Fig thought she would feel better. She thought that the idea of being invited over to Ava’s house would start to make things feel normal again.
Haley laughed a little too loud, and Mrs. Lovotti yelled at her to hush. Ava didn’t turn back around to look at Fig even once the rest of class.
Molly was sitting on the front steps when Fig got home. She had her phone on her lap and was looking up at the clouds. When she saw Fig approaching, she smiled. “Hi, Fig.”
It made Fig nervous to see Molly outside and not inside with her dad. “Is my dad not answering the door? Did he cancel on you?”
“No! No,” Molly was quick to say. “I had a half day today, so our lesson was early. I’m just waiting for my mom. She’s running late.”
“You can wait inside if you want.”
Molly scrunched up her freckled nose, biting her lip with a smile. “I didn’t want to be in the way. Your dad’s boyfriend is over.”
