The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

77

After you and I met, I stopped going to my father for the things I needed the most. Comfort, advice. He became less useful to me. This must have become apparent to him in the way I glossed over the details of my life when he called, changing the conversation back to him. I didn’t let him in anymore. I’m ashamed of this – I knew I was the only thing he had.

On the day he dropped me off at my college dorm, he kissed me good-bye on the head and walked away quietly. When I looked out the window hours later, he was still there, leaning against a tree, looking up at my building. I closed the curtain before he saw me looking out. I think often about that – the way he stood there.

The month of graduation, it occurred to me one morning that he hadn’t called at all since I’d been home for the holidays. I planned to phone him that weekend and then never did, although I told you I had, and that he was eager to see me. Instead I showed up at his house unannounced the evening after my exams. I told him I had to drop some things off from my dorm room. We exchanged a few cordial words and then he went to bed early. I decided to stay one more night. The following evening, I cooked us a chicken the way I knew he liked it. I waited for him to come home from work, but the hours rolled on. When he came in just after ten o’clock, he smelled like booze and sat at the kitchen table, looking at the cold plate of food while I leaned on the counter. I think we both thought of my mother then. I poured us each a drink of whiskey and sat down. I hadn’t planned on asking him, but I did:

‘Why did she leave me?’

He was gone before I woke up in the morning. My head pounded from the bottle we’d finished together. I drove back to campus and packed the last of my things. You and I were moving in together the next day. It became hard for me to think about my father after that night. I was desperate to leave my past behind. He was too much a part of my mother and me, although he had never been the problem.

When the police called to tell me that he’d been found dead in his home, that they suspected he’d died in his sleep from a heart attack, I handed you the receiver and lay on our warm parquet flooring in a beam of morning sun. We’d been living in our apartment for four months by then.

‘I’m glad you went to visit him,’ you said, crouching down to touch my hair.

I turned away from you on the floor. I could only think of the last thing my father said that night, staring at the bottom of his glass. We’d been talking and drinking for hours.

I would look at you and say to Cecilia, ‘Aren’t we lucky.’ But she couldn’t see –

He’d caught himself midsentence and left the table without saying anything else. He’d been telling me about the days after I was born. I’d hung on his every word.

Now I realized my mother and I had broken his heart.

I went home to organize the funeral and approached the house cautiously. Mrs Ellington had a spare key and had cleaned up before I got there. I knew right away because the house smelled of lemons and she always cleaned with lemon oil. His bedding was different. I recognized the clean sheets from the spare bed in the Ellingtons’ house.

Mrs Ellington came by in the afternoon to keep me company. Daniel and Thomas helped me clear out the house the day before the funeral and I gave it all away – I wanted it empty. I wanted everything gone.

I listed the house I grew up in the following season for a price below market value. I felt nothing to see it go. Mrs Ellington came over the day I signed the papers.

‘He was very proud of you. You made him very happy.’

I touched her hand. She was kind to lie to me.

78

Three days after the pleasant visit with Violet, Gemma called. I could tell by the pitch of her voice that she was upset.

She’d found Jet in the laundry room that morning playing with a sharp blade. He’d been just about to cut through the jeans he was wearing when she walked in.

‘Is it yours?’

‘What do you mean?’ I had been walking home from the pool. I’d gone to see Sam’s tiles. I hadn’t yet processed what she’d said – I was still surprised to have seen her name on my phone.

‘Did the blade come from your house?’

I thought of the one I’d taken from Fox’s tin four years ago, tucked at the back of my dresser drawer, wrapped in a scarf. I hadn’t touched it since. Violet. I wondered if that’s why she had gone into my room. If she’d somehow known it was there.

‘I can’t think of where else it would have come from. Fox doesn’t keep them here. Violet said you still have his old modeling tools in the basement, lying around in the open. Near where her laundry was.’

‘That’s absurd,’ I said, starting to feel warm. I imagined her giving the blade to Jet while Gemma was downstairs and then walking away to wait for his scream. My face grew hotter.

‘You should know better, Blythe. One of them could have been hurt.’

She huffed and hung up. She’d become mean. She used to just pity me. Now, she didn’t like me.

I swore under my breath and hustled home. I pulled off my boots