Jilly and I are nodding now. We’re hoping this ends soon. I don’t even remember him yelling much, really. Not at me and Jilly anyway.
“I’m so sorry for everything I’ve caused. I mean everything I did and stuff. You didn’t deserve that and you deserved a good dad and I couldn’t always be that good dad and I just want to say I’m sorry.”
I know it’s hard to keep up. I know he seems like a bad guy but he’s not.
Dad is a planet spiraling out of orbit, pretending to be perfectly in orbit.
“But how is it really, Dad? Like—how are you now?” I ask. I am gravity. Planets can’t just wander off and think everything is fine with the rest of the galaxy.
“Well, I don’t know. I miss you guys. I miss coming home to you. I missed going camping with you in April. And I miss tucking you in at night. I don’t know.”
Jilly and I sit and stare at him.
“Who wants Oreos?” he says, and gets up from the couch and goes into the kitchen. “Anyone up for an episode of Star Trek?”
“It’s four o’clock,” Jilly says. “We haven’t eaten dinner yet.”
“So?”
“So we should eat dinner and then eat Oreos,” she says.
“Sounds like your mom talking,” he says.
Jilly looks hurt.
I say, “I think we should wait until after dinner. For the cookies and the Star Trek.”
“Suit yourselves,” he says, and then proceeds to eat three Oreos right in front of us.
Dad isn’t getting any better at this. Also, since when does he eat Oreos?
We eat dinner at the diner in town and I get a grilled cheese sandwich because no matter where I go, that’s what I eat. Dad tries to get me to try other things, but I ignore him until the waitress comes and I tell her I want a grilled cheese sandwich. He makes a disapproving grunt and concentrates on Jilly.
The more I watch the two of them giggling and being goofy, the more I wonder about which one of us is more like Dad. Sometimes I am—stars, knots, and fishing—and sometimes Jilly is with her temper, goofy side, and how she’s always crying over stuff. This leads me to thinking that maybe one day Jilly could get depression.
I know the kinds of things Dad said to Mom before he finally left. I don’t know if I could handle if Jilly thought those things about herself. I love her too much. I love her so much I want her to stop holding Dad’s hand on the diner’s table. I want her to stop making him feel happy while we’re here because deep down he’s not happy and this is fake and I don’t understand why he can’t just admit that he’s not happy. It’s as obvious as my grilled cheese sandwich.
Before we go to sleep, Jilly says from the bottom bunk, “He seems to be doing okay.”
“Yeah.”
“He still smells weird, though,” she says.
I still have to take the dog-sized pills for strep throat and Dad decides to put whipped cream on Saturday morning to make it go down easier. This is the Dad I miss. Not awake enough to have even thought about this—just saw the whipped cream and the pill I’d left on the counter and he did it because it’s funny. And now he’s disco dancing to some funky music on the radio while he squeezes fresh orange juice and sings off-tune. I watch him from the living room. This is Dad. The Dad I miss. The Dad I want back. I almost forgot about him.
“You feeling better?” he asks.
“My throat doesn’t hurt anymore, so that’s good.”
“You didn’t bring me any star maps,” he says. “Maybe we can go out tonight and do one?”
“I’ll see how I’m feeling,” I say. “Doctor told me to take it easy.”
“Okay,” he says. Then he yells so Jilly can hear him. “What do you guys want for breakfast?”
“Bacon!” Jilly yells from upstairs.
He looks at me and bends down an eyebrow. “Since when does she like bacon?”
I shrug.
“I don’t have bacon!” he yells to Jilly. “But I can make you a ham, egg, and cheese sandwich!”
“Yay!” Jilly says.
“Dad, I worry about you,” I say. “I just want you to be okay.” He stops digging in the fridge and looks at me. Opens his arms for a hug. I fall into them.
He really hugs me, too. No pats on the back or quick release. He still smells like the perfume counter at the mall.
“You shouldn’t worry.”
I wait for him to say more but he doesn’t. We break the hug and he holds me by my shoulders and smiles. It’s not a picture smile or a happy smile. It’s the kind of smile he gave me when a fish in our old tank used to die and I’d cry because he was going to flush it down the toilet instead of giving it a proper memorial.
I shouldn’t worry. But that makes me worry more. About him. About me.
“You got a new bed!” Jilly says when she comes into the kitchen.
Dad nods.
“Why’d you get a new bed?” she asks.
“Got tired of the old one. Hurt my back.”
“But it’s so big!”
I watch Dad and I know he’s lying. I’m not sure why he’s lying, but he does this thing when he lies. He keeps things short and changes the subject.
“Liberty, do you feel good enough for a short hike maybe?”
Like that.
“Let’s go to Hawk Mountain!” Jilly says.
“I could probably do Hawk Mountain,” I answer.
Dad starts making egg, ham, and cheese sandwiches for the three of us and I go up the steps to see his new bed. Jilly was right. It’s huge. I don’t understand why he’d need such a huge bed.
I’m not dumb. I’m twelve. I know what happens in grown-ups’ beds other than sleeping. I mean, I kinda know. I don’t get the details but I know enough.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I walk right over to the side of the bed where Dad sleeps—you can tell by which side the clock is on and two books—and I open the drawer of his nightstand. I know this makes me a snooper.
The minute I see what’s in the drawer, I close the drawer. I feel strep throat heat all over my body and I go into Jilly’s and my room and sit on her bottom bunk.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I make a list in my head of the things I’m glad I didn’t find in the drawer. A dragon, a hunk of old cheese, an alligator. Nope. I can’t make the list.
I wish I’d never become a snooper. Snoopers can’t unsee what they see. And I can’t unknow that Dad isn’t the only person sleeping in his big, new bed.
My brain wants to know if it was her lipstick on the glass I saw the first time I was here. My brain wants to know if this is why Dad left. My brain wants to know if this is why Dad keeps canceling our weekends together.
My brain wants to storm downstairs and ask him everything.
And as it so happens, my brain controls my nerves, which send messages to my muscles, and the next thing I know, I’m in the kitchen and Dad is just putting a plate out for me.
“Breakfast is served!” he says.
I say, “Who is she?”
Dad looks a mix of shocked and angry.
“You got a big bed. You have new clothes,” I say.
Jilly says, “And you smell weird.”
“Eat your breakfast,” Dad says. He glances at Jilly, then back to me.
“Jilly’s old enough to know,” I say.
“Know what?” she asks. Which means she’s not old enough to know.
“Eat your breakfast,” he says again. “You’ll need your strength to get up to the North Lookout. We might even see an eagle.”
More lies. Because now we’re talking about eagles.
“I don’t feel good,” I say. “Not sure if I can make it.”
Jilly pouts. “You felt fine a minute ago.”
“I’m hot and I feel like I probably shouldn’t do too much,” I say.
We eat our breakfast quiet as a walk in the forest.
Jilly goes upstairs to the bathroom after breakfast.
“Look,” Dad
says to me. “We’ve had this conversation before. No snooping in my stuff.”
“I didn’t snoop. I just saw the huge bed and noticed you smell different and you have new clothes.”
“It’s for my job.”
“You have to smell nice for your job?” Dad works at the same place he’s worked since I can remember. Smelling nice was never important before.
“You’re a kid. This isn’t even a conversation we should be having.”
“But if you’re having this conversation,” I say, “then you’re admitting that this conversation exists and that we’re having it and that means there’s something to talk about.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” he says.
“You’re my dad. It’s my job to ask you to tell me the truth.”
“I have.”
“You haven’t told me anything. You’re just arguing about whether or not we should be having this conversation.”
Jilly comes downstairs.
Dad says, “It’s grown-up stuff.”
I feel dizzy. Parents being insulting makes me dizzy. Or maybe strep throat. You choose.
“Can you take my temperature?” I ask.
Jilly races to the bathroom cabinet and grabs the ear thermometer. She loves doing this, so I just sit and wait for her to tell me.
“A hundred and one,” she says, then puts the thermometer in my other ear. “And a hundred and one point five.”
“I’ll get you some medicine,” Dad says.
“I won’t be mad at all about Hawk Mountain,” Jilly says.
“Thanks,” I say. I lie on the couch and Jilly finds our favorite cartoons—new episodes because Dad has cable TV. She gets me a glass of orange juice and gets my pillow from my bed. She sits on the floor by my head and asks me every commercial break if I need anything or if I’m okay.
The whole time, Dad sits in the kitchen texting on his phone.
I wish he was disco dancing again. Or singing off-tune. Or anything that made me feel like we were still as close as we were this morning.
By the time Sunday afternoon comes and Jilly and I are packed and ready to go back to Mom’s, Dad seems like he can’t wait to drop us at home. We had a good night last night. A movie and popcorn and strep-throat charades.
I watch him hurry around the house making sure we haven’t forgotten anything. My fever is gone again and I feel okay. But while I watch him, I feel hot all over, like my anger is some sort of bacteria that’s always there, like an infection.
Dad drops us off outside of the house and doesn’t turn the car off or anything.
He asks if we have all our stuff, he asks it a second time, and then says, “See you in two weeks!” before we close our car doors.
He turns the car around in front of the garage and drives down the lane too fast. If Lou was here he’d say, Take it easy! because Lou hates when anyone drives too fast down the lane. He almost got into a fistfight with the UPS delivery driver once over it. Or that’s what he says. I don’t think Lou would fistfight anyone.
Mom opens the door and gives us hugs. “How was that?”
“Good,” I say. “Still kinda sick so I just did homework and watched cartoons.”
“Oh,” Mom says. “I thought you were going for a hike. Hawk Mountain and then ice cream, that’s what Dad told me.”
“He didn’t text to tell you my fever came back?” I ask.
“No.”
“Her fever was a hundred and one point five so we stayed home and watched TV,” Jilly says from behind a book. “I didn’t feel like a hike anyway.”
Mom puts the back of her hand on my forehead. “How do you feel?”
“Tired, but okay.”
“Did you take your medicine today?”
I didn’t. Crap. “Uh, no. And I don’t know where it is.”
Mom and I look through my backpack and Jilly’s backpack and we can’t find the packet of pills. I feel bad because I don’t want her to have to text Dad. Not now that I know he has a big bed and new clothes and Mom doesn’t know anything.
She texts him. He texts back. She texts back. He texts back.
“He’s going to drop them down in ten minutes,” she says. “Let’s get you feeling better in the meantime.” She takes my temperature. She gives me more fever medicine. She makes me a bed on the couch and I lie there feeling every shade of every color. I don’t like secrets.
When I hear Dad driving down the lane again, I kneel by the window and look out. He’s laughing at something. I’m kinda jealous that he’s laughing now and didn’t laugh much while we stayed there over the weekend.
He turns the car around and then parks. Then he hops out and walks to the back door and leaves the box on the bench that’s outside. Jilly joins me at the window. We watch as he gets back in the car and takes off.
Jilly says, “Who’s he talking to?”
“Probably singing to something,” I say.
“Seems happy,” she says.
We’re lined up by the window that looks down the lane toward Lou’s house. And right before Dad takes the turn to go around the corner in the lane, a head pops up in the passenger’s seat.
I hope Jilly didn’t see that.
“Did you see that?” she says.
“See what?”
“He had someone with him.”
“Nah. It’s just the trees playing a trick. Sometimes if the light goes …”
“I saw it with my own eyes.” She looks at me sternly.
“Okay.”
“You saw it too, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
Jilly goes quiet. Extra quiet. I do, too. She looks at me and frowns. It’s a grown-up frown, like she’s thinking really deep about things. This isn’t Old Jilly. This isn’t New Jilly.
We both sit on the couches in the living room and read books until dinner. And when Mom says, “What do you two want to do tonight?” Jilly and I say we want to keep reading and then go to bed.
An hour later, while Jilly takes her Sunday-night bath, Mom calls me to the kitchen window. “Lib, you have to see the moon tonight. It’s huge!”
I stay under a blanket on the couch. “Seen one full moon, seen them all,” I say.
Mom sighs. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
She nods. “Jilly told me Dad was grumpy today.”
“Grumpy. Whatever. He’s just Dad,” I say. “Was he ever nice?”
“Oh, come on. You know Dad is nice,” she says. “But he was always kinda … messy, I guess.”
She doesn’t know the half of how messy. Bringing a woman to our house and hiding her in the car like that.
“Is that really why you broke up?” I ask. “Just him being messy?”
“You know, one day I’ll be able to tell you all that stuff but you’re too young right now, Lib. I know how mature you are but it’s still not right to tell you all our ugly stuff.”
“True,” I say.
I know there’s more to it. There’s got to be a big reason parents get divorced and Dad being unwell wasn’t reason enough.
“How about we watch a movie?” she says. “I know one you’d love. About space. It’s got a bit of a love scene in it but we can fast-forward.”
Yes, please. Fast-forward through all love scenes forever.
Nothing happens until July.
I mean, stuff happened but nothing special. Mom still sees Rosemary every Wednesday. I still see Jan once a month. School ended and I’ll go to middle school in the fall. By the time June came, most of the sixth grade class was talking to me again after Leah and Mike got recess-divorced. Finn Nolan bummed my homework off me a few more times, and he was nice about it.
I never went back to the R section in the library.
I never got the ring.
I never told Mom about any of it.
Now it’s camp season. The idea is: Sleep outside as often as possible until it’s too cold to do it anymore. Or, at least, Mom, Jilly, and I were going to aim
to get as close to that as we could. Dad still hadn’t taken us camping since he moved out, but he didn’t cancel any more weekends, so that was cool.
The only thing about camping that makes me homesick, and I’ve never been homesick while I was camping before, is the rock. Can’t just lug around 130 pounds for no real reason. So I leave the meteorite at home and in a way it’s a relief because it’s the only thing that knows about Leah’s ring.
“Why don’t you go out on dates?” Jilly asks Mom.
Mom stands by the fire pit at the campground, hatchet in hand, and looks at the sky. “I don’t know, Jill. Can’t say I want to go on any dates, really.”
“Why not?” Jilly asks.
“I guess I’m not ready. Or something,” Mom says. “I can’t even imagine what going on dates is like. Your dad and I met naturally, you know? Like the way those two trees happened to grow next to each other.” She points at the woods around our campsite.
“Probably someone planted the trees, Mom. Like going on dates.”
“Maybe.”
“Stop asking Mom about her business,” I say. “Help me put the tent up.”
Mom splits two big logs into eight perfectly uniform fire starter logs. Looks up at us and says, “The world isn’t all about dating and boys or whatever, you know. I have other things to do.” She looks like she wants to say more, but she cleaves another part of the log in two.
“Can I try?” I ask.
She hands me the hatchet and I stand a log on its edge. With all my strength, I bring the blade down on the wood and I barely put a nick in it. I pull the hatchet out and try again. Jilly starts laughing at me and I hand the hatchet back to Mom.
She gets the hatchet two inches into the log and says, “It’s not you. It’s the log. There’s a knot.” She leaves the hatchet in the log and grabs another log. “Hold that steady for me, okay?”
I hold the handle of the hatchet while she beats the hatchet into the wood with the new log. One … two … three, and the log splits in half.
“I think we’re about ready to get the fire started,” she says.
She says it like she didn’t just do something most people we know couldn’t do. As if humans were just natural-born log splitters.
The Year We Fell From Space Page 7
