Come fall, the Hellers were suddenly much closer, because Charles accepted a tenure-track position at the top state university – two hundred fifty miles inland. While their new place wasn’t the twenty minutes we’d been accustomed to when we all lived in Virginia, it wasn’t an impossible distance for a weekend trip. Except to Dad, who refused to make a four-hour drive to see his best friends in the world. His excuse was work, same as always.
I figured then that people never change. Dad might have quit his high-powered banking job, but he brought his workaholic personality with him when he left Washington.
Even though the teaching position was a step up for Heller’s career, Cindy had to look for a new job, and Cole and Carlie had to make new school and neighbourhood friends. I knew they’d done it with us in mind, but Dad closed his eyes to the sacrifice they’d all made. For him. For me.
His silence seemed to blame them for what had happened, though maybe just being around them reminded him. Maybe my presence – which he couldn’t ditch as easily – reminded him, too.
I didn’t need a reminder. I knew who to blame for us losing Mom. Myself, and no one else.
Dad dropped out of Thanksgiving at the Hellers’ place – big surprise. Since I was fifteen and carless, he drove me to the bus station pre-asscrack of dawn. I could have refused to go by bus, alone, just to be an ass**le, but that would have been a pointless rebellion. I wanted to go, even if I had to board a bus with a collection of broke degenerates who took one look at me and concluded that I was the most menacing guy on board. Silver lining: no one sat next to me.
The bus stopped in four piece-of-shit towns to pick up more transportation-challenged losers before arriving in San Antonio, where I transferred to an identical crap bus with a matching set of losers. The total trip would have been less than four hours by car – straight shot, no stops. Instead, after six hours, I arrived at a station that smelled like the combination of a poorly run rest home and areas of Washington, DC, that my friends and I had been forbidden to venture into on our own. Charles was waiting to pick me up.
‘Happy Turkey Day, son,’ Charles said, wrapping me in an easy hug that pinched my heart with a single, abrupt awareness – my father hadn’t touched me since the funeral. Even then, I remember clinging to him, unleashing my grief into his solid chest, but I don’t recall him reaching for me on purpose.
He’d never uttered a word of blame, but there were no words of pardon either.
Remaining within Charles’s embrace a beat longer than comfortable to clear the moisture from my eyes, I shoved at the never-ending guilt in my mind and wished it would fall silent, just for today. For an hour, even. For a few minutes.
‘You’re gonna be Ray’s height, I think,’ Charles said then, drawing back to take my shoulders in his hands and inspect me. I’d grown since I’d seen him last; we stood eye to eye. ‘You favour him quite a bit, too – but you got Rose’s dark hair.’ He crooked an eyebrow. ‘And lots of it.’
Charles had been a military guy before he went to college. I’d never seen a hair on his head longer than an inch. If it even got close to that, he joked that he looked like a damned hippie and went to get a haircut. It amused the shit out of him to harass Cole and me about our hair length whenever he got the chance.
‘You’re just jealous that we have hair,’ Cole smarted off the last time his dad had grumbled that he couldn’t tell him apart from Carlie. I’d spat milk through my nose.
My parents met the Hellers at Duke. Dad and Charles were PhD track in economics – worlds apart from Cindy and my mother, who were undergrads and best friends. None of them would’ve ever met their future spouses if not for my mother’s decision to stroll through a doctoral student get-together held by her father – a distinguished economics professor and a member of Charles’s and Dad’s dissertation committees.
I was eight or nine the first time I heard the story, but the telling I remember was when I had my first real crush – Yesenia, in eighth grade. Love and destiny had suddenly become essential things to comprehend.
‘I saw your dad from my bedroom window and thought he was so cute.’ Mom laughed at my eye roll. I couldn’t imagine my father ever having been cute.
‘I was sick of the pretentious artist boys I usually dated, and I thought someone like my father might suit me better. He always listened to my opinions and spoke to me like I had a brain of my own, and he spoiled me rotten, too. But his students were all so nerdy and awkward – until your dad. I thought if I could get his attention, I could get him to talk to me. Of course then he’d fall in love with me and ask me out.’ Her eyes crinkled at the corners, remembering.
‘I must have tried on a dozen outfits before settling on one. Then I waltzed down the stairs and nonchalantly cut through the living room on my way to the kitchen. My clever little plan worked, of course, because I was pretty cute myself back then.’
This time, I was the one who laughed, because my mother was beautiful. There were times I caught my father staring at her like he couldn’t believe she was standing in his kitchen or living in his house. Like she shouldn’t be real, but was, and somehow belonged to him.
‘He followed me into the kitchen to refill his iced-tea glass.’ She nodded at my confused expression. You couldn’t pay Dad to drink iced tea. ‘I didn’t find out until later that he hated iced tea. He leaned against the counter, watching me make a sandwich. “So are you Dr Lucas’s daughter?” he asked, and with a perfectly straight face, I said, “No. I just wandered in off the street to make a sandwich.” I turned and looked him in the eye to give him a smirk, and I almost stopped breathing, because he had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.’
I had my father’s eyes – clear and grey as rain, so this compliment was for me. I hadn’t known yet that I’d also inherit his height, his analytical abilities and the watertight way he could disappear into himself.
‘Then, Charles strolled into the kitchen. Your dad glared at him, but he grinned and said, “You must be Dr Lucas’s daughter! I’m Charles Heller – one of his many acolytes.” One of them asked me what I did, and I said I was an undergrad at Duke. “What major?” your dad asked, and I told him, “Art.” And then, Landon, he almost kept you from ever being born.’
I waited, stunned. I hadn’t heard that part of the story before.