If I Fix You

by Abigail Johnson

They weren’t holding back now. Not Dad, and certainly not Mom.

  It had always been me and Dad. From the very beginning. But the last few months of fighting would have made me choose Dad even if the lifetime before hadn’t.

  Mom was petty. Calculating. Cruel to the point that shredded any love I held for her.

  But not Dad. Oh, he got mad. He yelled. But he never sought to inflict the same kind of personal damage that she did. No matter what she said to him, no matter how vile her insults, he never spoke to her the way she deserved, the way I would have. The way I wanted to so badly in that moment that I was striding down the hall before I could stop myself.

  “Kate,” Dad said, and I hated his calling her that. She didn’t deserve it anymore. “Don’t do this. Please.” And then I jumped and froze outside his door when I heard him slam something—his hand probably—against the wall. “You selfish— Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You haven’t been sorry for anything your entire life.” More silence followed by a harsh laugh. “Right, except that.”

  There was a lot of yelling after that. It was all things I’d heard before, except reenergized somehow. It was as if all the fights they would have had if she’d stayed were all converging and breaking through at once.

  “Please, Kate. Just wait a second. Think. You haven’t been here, you haven’t seen her.”

  My stomach soured the way it always did when they started talking about me. Dad’s voice lowered after that. He was speaking so softly that I missed most of the next few things he said until:

  “Don’t you ever say that to me again.”

  I shrank into myself at the unspoken threat in his voice. I wasn’t used to being scared of him. I’d made him mad plenty of times, but even at his angriest, I’d never been afraid of him.

  I was afraid now, and I wasn’t even the one he was threatening.

  “Kate—Kate—Kate!” He threw the phone so hard, I heard it break.

  My hands fisted at my sides. Things had just started to get better. Dad and I were figuring out life again—just the two of us. I was beginning to remember what being happy felt like.

  With one phone call, she took it all away.

  Dad would come out of his room any second. If I didn’t want to have a conversation, I needed to hurry back outside and pretend that I was only just getting home.

  Avoiding had kind of been the default all summer when Dad and I came even remotely close to talking about Mom. And maybe it would have worked. Maybe we could have kept dodging the subject, pretending that we weren’t a family with an amputated member, ignore the phantom pains that we both still felt.

  Maybe Dad and I could have.

  But Mom wasn’t going to let us.

  Instead of backing away, instead of hiding, I stood directly outside his door so there’d be no way for him to wonder if I’d overheard him. I wanted him to know.

  I met his eyes dead-on when he opened the door. “What did Mom want?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Dad’s face was flushed red, the anger his conversation with Mom had stirred up still visible under his skin. But the moment he saw me, the moment I asked that one question, all the blood drained from his face.

  I shouldn’t do this to him. I shouldn’t make things harder. Dad looked ill, and he hadn’t even said her name to me yet. I didn’t want him to have to relive the conversation. And yet, I asked him again. “Dad.” I’m sorry. “What did Mom want?”

  His eyes were wide as he stared at me—frightened, I would almost say, except nothing frightened Dad. And that seemed to be all he could do. Just stare.

  But I couldn’t let it go.

  “She wants to know you’re okay—”

  I had never in my life sworn in front of Dad, but I did then. He didn’t even look that shocked.

  “She doesn’t get to pretend she cares. Not anymore. She left us—”

  “No!”

  I shrank back at Dad’s sudden outburst.

  “Me. Not you.” He rested his hand on my head. “She didn’t leave you.”

  The weight of Dad’s hand was familiar and comforting in a way that always made me feel safe and loved. But his words simmered under my skin so I shook him off. “Then where is she? Where has she been all these months? Why isn’t she here yelling at you? Why did she try to—” I bit my tongue.

  In a vertigo-inducing rush, I was back in my living room watching silhouettes moving along the wall in patterns that made no sense to me. And hearing her laughter, her murmuring.

  The morning after she left, I’d carried my Post-it note into the hallway. My legs had moved without any direction from my brain. I had stopped when I saw Dad hunched over in one of the beautiful but uncomfortable dining room chairs that Mom had picked out.

  He’d had his own note, a scrap of paper even smaller than mine. I had watched him stand, crush it into a tiny ball, and hurl it against the wall. It had bounced off and rolled under the china cabinet. Then his bones had seemed to dissolve before he fell to his knees, hung his head in his hands and wept.

  I hadn’t cried. I hadn’t done much of anything besides back up and slip quietly into the bathroom. I’d flattened her note on the counter, but the sticky part was covered with lint from my pillow and refused to stick. I’d held it down and stared at her words until they lost all meaning. Then I’d torn it into tinier and tinier pieces, until all I had left was a palm full of yellow confetti fluttering into the toilet and swirling away.

  The words themselves had been harder to flush. I could still close my eyes and see even the one she’d misspelled.

  I can’t do this anymore and I’m tired of trying. This isn’t the life I was meant to have and it’s suffacating me. I’m sorry if this hurts you, but I can’t stay without hurting myself more. I hope we can find a way to forgive each other.

  And she’d signed it Katheryn. Not Mom.

  * * *

  I wiped tears with my palms, hating that she could make either of us cry after all these months, and felt my voice strengthen. “She left us.” Dad didn’t try to correct me that time. “I don’t understand how you can defend her.”

  Dad raised his hand again, but I stepped back, tears pooling in my eyes. He lowered it with a resignation that infuriated me almost as much as what he said next.

  “I wasn’t a perfect husband. I know it’s easy to look at what she’s done and think it was all her, but it wasn’t.”

  “You,” I said, “didn’t leave. You would never do what she did.” I shook, struggling not to scream. “Never.”

  Why did he look as if I was the one making things harder? As if I was the one who didn’t get it?

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It’s exactly that simple.” I pointed toward the front door. “She’s the one who quit. She’s the one who didn’t want us.”

  “You can’t think that way.” Dad’s eyes were glassy and I knew I would die if he started crying. “I didn’t love her the way I should have. That’s on me. But your mom—”

  “She didn’t love you at all! If you only knew—” I clenched my jaw so tight I thought I heard the bone crack. “Stop making excuses for her!”

  “I’m not justifying what she did.” And then he gave me a look that would haunt me. It was like he was trying to tell me something and not tell me something at the same time. “Not then and not now.” And just as quickly the moment was gone. He swallowed. “I’m talking about your mom, here, not my wife. I don’t want you to write her off because she doesn’t want to be married to me anymore.”

  Love for one parent and hate for the other fought a vicious battle inside me. How could she not love him when even now he was trying to salvage any affection I still had for her? The outcome cloaked my voice in bitterness. “Wife. Mother. It’s the same person. I can’t separate the two. I can’t.”r />
  “Okay, okay.” Dad saw fresh tears fill my eyes. “I’m not telling you that you have to. Not right now. But I am saying that it’s okay for you to still love your mom. I’m okay with you loving her.”

  I wasn’t. Through her words and actions, she’d shown that she despised the most important person in my life. There was no fixing that. Had I ever thought there was?

  I was getting what I wanted. A conversation. Something. Anything. Only, looking at Dad made me want to stitch my mouth shut. “She’s not going away, is she?”

  Dad wouldn’t look at me, but eventually he shook his head.

  My hands were empty, otherwise I would have thrown something just to hear it break. Hate was such an ugly, infectious thing. It burrowed deep inside and consumed. My hate hadn’t begun that way, not even after Sean. It had started out as an ice cube lodged in my throat, an obstruction I couldn’t move no matter how many times I swallowed. Then it melted, and the cold had trickled through my insides, numbing me.

  I wasn’t numb anymore. Everything inside me burned and scalded, and I felt like I was choking on the ashes.

  “Then we’ll give her what she wants. Whatever it is. I don’t care anymore. Does she need a kidney or something?” That last line came out before I could even process the implication. Was she sick? Was that it? Several thoughts collided at once and I couldn’t begin to sort them out. I didn’t want to try.

  Dad should have hugged me then. I expected him to. It’s what he would have done before, but he just stood in his doorway with his arms hanging at his sides.

  When I moved forward to wrap my arms around him, he stepped past me.

  No physical pain had ever hurt worse.

  “What is it? What does she want?”

  Dad’s back was to me, his voice still hollow somehow. “She wants everything.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I blinked and my alarm was screaming at me to wake up. The idea of running made me want to kill something, so I texted Claire to count me out before passing out again.

  The next time I woke up, I could hear Dad banging around in the kitchen. I pulled the sheet up to my nose and waited. For some reason, I didn’t want him to know I was still home, although the Mazda was going to give me away pretty quickly. Maybe he’d think Claire had given me a ride. She did that sometimes. Either way I couldn’t smile and slip into our usual talk about carburetors or whether it was time to upgrade our engine analyzer. Not after Mom calling.

  When I heard the garage door and knew he was gone, I walked into a hot shower. The water scalded my skin a bright pink, but it couldn’t wash my thoughts away.

  I used to love her name. Katheryn. I thought it was the loveliest word, like those three little syllables conveyed all that was beautiful and graceful in the world. I called her Katheryn once when I was little. We were at church and I asked her to pass the hymnal, adding her name to the end of my request as if I always referred to my mom by her first name. It felt wrong the moment I said it, and all I could do was mumble an apology when she told me it was rude.

  I could call her Katheryn now if I wanted—Mom was the word that felt wrong—but I no longer thought her name was beautiful. She still was, but not in a way I envied anymore.

  The mirror in my bathroom was steamed over from my shower. I smeared my hand across the glass and searched my face, my frame, for any trace of her. Each little piece I found—the slope of my shoulder, the curve of my chin, the arch of my eyebrow, all things I would have relished once—hit me like a physical slap. Did Dad see this much of her when he looked at me? Did he also hate those little glimpses of her that seemed to shout out of my skin?

  I left my hair long and loose down my back, blow-drying it stick-straight without a single wave like hers. I wasn’t thinking about it getting in my way at the garage; I wanted to look as little like her as possible.

  I was zipping up my coveralls over my shirt when I walked into my room.

  “What is it with girls and pillows?”

  I whirled, grabbing the first thing my hands encountered—a glass candleholder—and caught myself a second before hurling it. Sean was stretched out on my bed, a mint-green throw pillow clasped to his chest. I’d walked right past him without even noticing. Maybe I did have too many pillows.

  “Get out of my room! Ugh. And get off my bed. You’re all sweaty.”

  “Well, you don’t look sick.” He sat up and squinted at me.

  I grabbed the pillow from him and smelled it. Sweat. “That’s my favorite one, Sean.” I tossed it back and dropped my voice. “And I never said I was sick. I needed a break. And since when do you break into my house?”

  Sean climbed out from under the pillows and sat next to me at the foot of my bed while I tied my boots. “Call me next time you need a break. You know I need a buffer with Claire.”

  “Finally.” Claire came into my room with a steaming mug in her hand. “We’ve been waiting for twenty minutes. I finally used the garage code when you didn’t answer my texts.” She held out the mug and started relaying the run I’d missed.

  “Sorry.” I took the mug, and a sense of wrongness crept up my skin like a spider. I raised the drink to my lips, pulling the rich scent deep into my lungs.

  And I stopped.

  When I was ten, I’d gotten caught shoplifting. Not by the store, but by Dad when he found me eating my stolen candy bars in my room. I came to regret my brief foray into crime many times over that summer. First, when Dad took me back to the grocery store to confess, and later, when he insisted I work off the cost of those candy bars a hundred times over. To that day I still got nauseous when I saw a Milky Way commercial on TV.

  The coffee was the same.

  Dad and I were strictly Dutch Bros. drinkers. There was one right next to the shop that we hit religiously.

  Mom had preferred to brew her own. It was one of those little details I hadn’t noticed at first. Mornings had always smelled like coffee when she was here. But not for the past several months.

  I set the mug down on the far edge of my dresser like it was poisonous.

  Claire put her hands on her hips. “What? I used the bag next to the coffeemaker. I even added real milk and sugar—”

  Sean made an interested noise and grabbed the mug.

  “—even though almond milk and Stevia taste just as good and won’t immediately turn into fat.”

  I shook my head. “It’s my mom’s coffee.”

  Claire made an oh expression and pulled the mug away from Sean midsip.

  “Hey!”

  She frowned at him before carrying it out of my room.

  Sean frowned back until he saw my face. Before he could say anything, we heard the sink in the kitchen and then Claire was back, her head peeking around the door.

  “Your mom didn’t make lemon muffins, did she?”

  “She didn’t really bake.”

  “Good.” Claire produced a plate full of them. “I’ve been messing around with a recipe.” She searched my face as I took a bite and chewed. The muffins were surprisingly tasty considering how healthy I assumed they were. I wasn’t used to equating the two yet, despite Claire’s constant efforts.

  “Mmm.” I offered her one, but she put it back on the plate untouched.

  “Can you tell I used agave nectar instead of sugar?”

  Through a mouthful of muffin Sean mumbled, “What the hell is agave nectar?”

  I laughed.

  Claire relaxed next to me on the bed. “Sorry about the coffee.”

  “Don’t be. I’m just a little sensitive today.”

  I’d tried talking to Claire about my parents when the fighting started getting bad. Sean too, a little. And they’d tried to understand, I knew they had, but it was hard to relate when the biggest fight Claire’s parents ever got in was over w
ho got to pick the movie on date night.

  Sean said his parents fought sometimes, but when I’d pressed him to give me an example, he’d mumbled something about how they mostly fought with his older sister. I’d heard my parents fight until they went hoarse.

  I’d stopped talking about it with them after that. But I needed to tell somebody this time.

  I took a deep breath. “She called last night.”

  Claire’s eyes practically popped out of her head. “Be quiet!” Claire had a self-imposed thing about language. She couldn’t even bring herself to say shut up without breaking into a sweat. “What did she say? Does she want to come back?”

  At the same time Sean said, “Are you okay?”

  They both sat on the edge of my bed while I stood against my dresser. “She only talked to my dad.” Sean moved to my side and leaned his shoulder against mine. Warm and solid. I moved away as casually as possible. No way could I talk about her while any part of his body touched mine.

  Claire’s muffin felt like a rock in my stomach. The thing about Mom leaving, the thing that I couldn’t explain to my friends no matter how much I wished I could, was that I needed it to be exactly the way it was. She left. She never called or tried to contact me. She was the one who broke off all ties. She had to be gone completely, or I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  Claire had the same look on her face that she got when we studied chemistry together, the one subject she had to work at. “What did she say to him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. My dad was really uncomfortable when I asked him about it.”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Shut up, Claire.”

  Claire spun to Sean. “Excuse me?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “But...” Claire turned back to me. “Do you think she wants to...come back?”

  And what? Grovel at my feet and beg Dad and me to take her back? I’d laugh if I didn’t think I might start crying.

  I shrugged and decided I hadn’t tied the lace right on my boot. I bent down and started retying it. Claire and Sean were arguing, but I wasn’t listening.