Victor lay in the tub trying to drain the now lukewarm bathwater by pressing the lever beneath the faucet with his big toe. He didn’t know how long he’d been submerged, only that his digits had started to wizen, the once steamy water had assumed his own body temperature, and he needed out.
Then again, maybe he didn’t.
He knew this day would come. He’d known that from the start. His goal had never been to keep Lila from her mother forever. More to keep her mother from Lila until the child was old enough to be safe.
That much he’d accomplished.
The move was always going to lead to this. Someday he would be found out. But he’d imagined himself reacting differently. Self-righteous. Angry. Telling his daughter he had no choice. That she wasn’t safe with her mother. That he did it for her.
Only, he didn’t do it for Lila. He did it for himself.
What he hadn’t anticipated was the look on Lila’s face when she asked—how could he? How could he tell her Elisabeth didn’t want her?
Nor did he have an answer. All he had was shame. Remorse. Exhaustion.
And Elisabeth. He didn’t need to see her to know he’d broken her. Time after time he’d imagined himself in the position of left-behind parent. It had been the theme of many nightmares. Even in his own nocturnal productions, Victor didn’t suffer the loss as valiantly as Elisabeth. The very fact that she had survived proved it. She was the bigger man.
It was easy now that Lila had grown up so strong and beautiful, so safe, to assume Victor didn’t have to do what he did. That he could have handled things in a more traditional, if not more lawful, manner. But that was all hindsight, and hindsight wasn’t just twenty-twenty. Hindsight wrapped everything in sunshine. It got in your eyes and made a positive outcome appear inevitable all along. Made any impulsive move appear outlandish.
Victor knew, to his waterlogged toes, things might have turned out different. As sorry as he was for the pain he’d caused Elisabeth, Lila, he wouldn’t erase his actions.
Except for one. It was their first night in California. They were still down in Anaheim, wandering around the never-ending Disneyland parking lot looking for the rental car and Delilah—it would be another few days before she would become Lila Mack—trailed behind him, still working on an enormous lollipop made of spiraled, multicolored rope candy. She’d asked if they could call her mother when they got back to the motel room. Because Elisabeth worries, she pointed out.
“She does, does she?” Victor had tried to keep the irritation out of his voice. His ex-wife didn’t like
not
having Delilah around. Yet she was perfectly fine with Victor not having her.
“Can we call her when we get to the motel, Dad?”
“It’s too late back east. After one in the morning.”
“But I want to tell her about Pirates of the Caribbean. All the fireflies.”
“Your mother’s fast asleep by now.”
“She won’t mind if we wake her up for fireflies. And she’s going to worry I’ll miss school on Monday. We should tell her I won’t.”
He marched to the end of the row of vehicles and found himself completely disoriented, staring out at the sea of cars, SUVs, and minivans, most of which had out-of-state license plates. They’d gone too far. They were in the Kanga section. Eeyore was what they needed. Taking Delilah’s hand, he started back the way they came. “I was thinking we could stay on in California for a while.”
“I don’t want to. I hate it here.” She trotted behind him, pulling her lollipop out of her tangled hair. Her eyes were so enormous, her face so young. “There’re no fireflies.”
He stopped, irritated. “You just said you wanted to call about the fireflies.”
“Those were fake. I mean no real ones.”
“I’m sure the real fireflies have better things to do on a Saturday evening than hang around an amusement park. I’m sure there are plenty of real ones if you know where to look.”
“Like where? Where are the real ones?”
The night was hot and his button-down shirt was glued to his back and the burger he’d wolfed down earlier was
howling in his belly. Worse, much worse, was the stress of what he’d done, the guilt, the fear all day that the police would be waiting at the next cotton candy cart. The way every woman inside the park with coppery-red hair had morphed into Elisabeth, and he kept smelling her perfume. Kept hearing the thin wail of sirens in the distance. Who would think Anaheim would have so many sirens? It made him snap. “I have no idea off the top of my head. Maybe in people’s backyards or in the mountains by the lakes. It’s not exactly a thing I’ve spent much time researching!”
A battered pickup truck full of rowdy teens careened down the aisle and he pulled Delilah close to his legs as it passed.
“I didn’t see any fireflies at the motel,” she whispered.
“It was afternoon when we checked in,” he said, spinning around and searching for Eeyore’s hangdog face. “Who sees fireflies in the afternoon?”
“I would.” Delilah wrapped her lips around her sucker and sobbed. “I would see them if I was home. If I really tried.”
How could he have done it? How could he have lost his patience at the very moment she needed his support?
“That’s it,” he’d roared. “Not another word about fireflies. We’ve just had a wonderful day at Disneyland. Do you know how lucky you are? Do you know other kids would kill to come here? Everyone loves California, the beach, the hills, the weather. They had three hundred forty-five days without rain last year. Do you think that happens at home?”
There. The Eeyore sign. Victor picked up his daughter and walked toward it. “Your mother needs a break. She’s starting art school and needs some time to herself. I said I’d
help out by taking you off her hands. Pardon me if I thought you’d appreciate it.”
Her hair, tears, blew straight back in the warm wind. “She doesn’t want me?”
Victor stopped, stood still for a moment and despised himself for taking his stress out on Delilah. “Now that’s not what I said. A break is what I said.”
“How long?”
“We’ll see.”
Slower now, he walked toward the rental car, the red metallic paint of which twinkled beneath the lamppost. He opened the back door and buckled her in, squeezed her knee awkwardly. “I know it’s not what you expected, but we’re going to have a great time together here. I’ve landed a new job—one where I stand to make a lot of money. I’m going to make things good for us here. Trust me.”
Delilah had set her head back against the seat and yawned. He would never forget the look of utter faith in her eyes when she whispered, “I trust you, Daddy.”
Now, suspended in the cloudy bathwater, he couldn’t think of one good reason such a father should live. Inch by inch, he allowed himself to sink beneath the surface, holding his breath and staring up at the world that throbbed and drifted above his face. He could see a wash of pink wall tiles, a rippling mass of gray that was the cheap plastic shower curtain he’d been meaning to replace. But what mostly drew his eye was the undulating square window of blue sky that dazzled and danced before him. Fate looking in at him, cheering him on. Perhaps even nudging Death as if to say, “This fool is yours now. Enjoy.”
He could hear nothing but the muffled squeak of his own wornout body parts shifting against the enamel. About half
a minute passed and the need for air took over. He fought it, feeling the pressure in his chest and head build.
There was no reason to keep going. He was of no use to anyone. If anything, his presence butchered Lila’s life even further.
Pressure turned to pain. His fingertips tingled. His field of vision began to narrow. This was it. It was right and just. The turbid end to a turbid existence. Lila would not have to wonder how to move forward with such a father. What kind of life to remake with this monster of a man.
He’d never told her she was right about the fireflies. Once they were settled in the cabin and he started working at RoyalCrest, he’d asked around. Not one person had seen a single firefly in California. Eventually Lila had stopped looking. It was as if she had forgotten she’d ever seen one at all.
Searing pain in his lungs as a few bubbles escaped his nose.
Lila.
She would come home to find him lifeless and swollen in the tub. She would scream, pull him out, soaking her boots with his bathwater and postmortem release of bodily fluids. Shaking, she would dial 911. Probably lean over and throw up in the toilet—her stomach was never up to much in the face of trauma.
With a mighty gasp, he burst up to sitting, water streaming from his nose and face. He coughed and gagged. Blindly, he reached for a towel and came up with nothing but a washcloth. He used it to wipe his face, then sat very still.
The room grew marginally dimmer as thin clouds
passed over the sun. He could just imagine Fate rolling its eyes, shaking its head. Things had looked so good there for a moment.
After several painful near misses, Victor’s wet toe finally took purchase on the shiny lever and nudged it downward. A belch, a glug, and a gurgle, and the murky water began to lower.
From outside the bathroom door, silence thundered. There was the rattle and hum of the dryer, the sound of a car idling somewhere up the street, and the tick of the wall clock in the kitchen.
He would never, from this moment forward, do anything else to pain his baby girl. His every breath, every moment of lucidity, would be toward restitution.
South Pomona was a steep, winding road, snarled and matted overhead by weeping gum trees. And even though number 3414 was close to the bottom where the bungalows were more modest, the road was still vertical enough that when Lila parked, she turned the steering wheel sharply away from the curb to direct the backs of the tires into the sidewalk. She tugged on the parking brake for good measure, but as she reached for the door, the vehicle began to creep backward. The car had popped out of gear and rolled toward the curb. Again, she shifted into first, only to have the gear pop and the car thump against the curb.
Clearly, the nosedive into the porn shop parking lot had rumpled the car’s innards. Victor would go ballistic if he found out.
She couldn’t trust an eight-inch curb to hold the car on such an incline. The only solution was to park perpendicular to the road, so she backed the car across the street and
pulled into Adam’s gravel driveway and, ducking under the vines that hung down from the trees like cobwebs, headed to the front door with hopes of finding him alive.
The house was one of those quaint 1920s Hollywood bungalows—the kind with arched doorways and window frames painted navy blue or apple green, and Spanish tile on the porch. The trees and bushes and roses barely survived one another, intertwined and choked as they were from decades of fighting for attention. No sounds came from inside the house, other than maybe a parakeet chirping from a back room. She rang the doorbell and waited, reaching down to pat a brown cat—this one complete with fur—that appeared from the nearest garden and wound itself around her calves.
Finally a shuffling came from behind the wooden door, locks swished and clicked, and the door swung open to reveal Adam in a holey T-shirt, little boy pajama bottoms with dirt-stained knees, and a striped bathrobe that appeared to be a favorite scratching surface of the cat, who shot past Adam’s feet and disappeared down a hallway. Adam’s nose was puffy and purple, phthalo violet, to be exact. He blinked as if it hurt. God, he
had
been beaten up.
“Hey,” he said with a grunt.
“Hi!” She forced an unnatural brightness into her voice. “Missed you at class today.”
He pulled an oily paint rag out of his pocket and wiped his forehead with it. His glasses were knocked sideways in the process and he pushed them up with his index finger, then chugged from his NyQuil.
“So look at you. You clearly got yourself home okay.”
“Got home. Not sure about the okay part.”
“Seriously? You look good. Really good.”
“Hangover.”
She closed her eyes in relief. She hadn’t nearly killed him after all. “The NyQuil’s got to help with that.”
He made a face as if she were insane to expect such miracles. “It’s one little bottle.”
“Yeah, but what a bottle, right?”
He turned around and disappeared, leaving the door open. Unsure what to do, she stepped inside and followed him through a navy dining room, then a kitchen as small as a cookie, to a sunken, glassed-in room at the back. It resembled a summer porch with white beadboard ceilings, a heavy overhead fan, and French doors he kept open to the yard. Maybe so the cat could wander in and out as it pleased.
The sunlight was dazzling back here, it bounced off the white windowsills and gritty plank floor. Painted canvases lined the walls, the floors, in some places three canvases thick. Two easels held half-finished works in acrylic, and an enormous oil painting leaned against the inner wall, completely blocking the doorway to another room. This one was of a nude female—a woman with long, lanky limbs and pixie-short blond hair—leaning against a glassed doorway and smiling at something. Someone. At dawn or dusk, from the look of the furry blue shadows and grainy, barely there light. Actually…Lila looked from the French doors back to the painting. It appeared to have been done in this very room.
She was Lila’s polar opposite. Tanned to Lila’s pale. Dainty to Lila’s awkward. This woman’s assuredness was absolute, where Lila’s was nonexistent. Not only that, but she probably had an identity that wasn’t purchased from the trunk of someone’s car.
“She’s stunning,” Lila said.
He glanced up at it, then away. “Yeah.”
“A model from school?”
“Nah. Just my ex. Excuse me a minute? I’ll put on some clothes.” He padded down the hall.
His ex? She looked like she could grace the cover of a magazine. Hard to imagine a girl like that with Adam Harding. She looked like someone you’d see on a yacht in Nice, all athletic and carefree with her arms flung over the shoulders of George Clooney.
Coming into Adam’s workspace had been a mistake, she could see that now. Not only did she not come close to measuring up to the girl in the painting, but his studio made envy bubbled up her esophagus like bile. There was no dirt floor, no washing machine that only ran a permanent-press cycle, no dryer that screeched when tumbling a full load, no buzzing fluorescent bulb, no sound of footsteps thumping from above. And though she couldn’t know for certain, probably no subterranean silverfish that snaked across his feet while he worked.
“This is my latest,” he said. She spun around to see he’d returned, still barefoot but wearing faded Levi’s and a white T-shirt, his hair and face damp and smelling like Ivory soap. Standing on a paint-spattered drop sheet, he pointed toward a sky blue canvas taller than he was; a piece depicting empty window frames that floated in the air without context, each one farther in the distance until the one at the center, the tiniest one, had blackness where the glass panes would have been. “I’m not quite done,” he motioned to the upper-right corner. “But almost.”
Lila didn’t love it right away. Though somewhere deep inside, she suspected her judgment was born of envy. “Nice.”
“There’s this designer who needs some art for her lobby. Nothing too out there, you know? More like nudes that are not too overt. Some sort of ironic statement for her denim line. She’s a friend of my sister’s. Ever heard of Norma Reeves?”
Lila felt her eyes widen. “You’re going to sell to her?”
“If she’s crazy enough to like my work. Hey, you should come with me to the meeting. Slip a piece of your own into my shipping crate and see if she wants it.”
“Is this another ploy to get me to paint you naked?”
He sucked from his medicine bottle again. “Or if you want to pose for me, that’d be cool too. Doesn’t seem right to ask my sister to strip down.”
“You should sell the designer your ex-girlfriend over there.”
“No. That’s being picked up this aft. You want to help me wrap it?” When Lila didn’t object, he gathered a huge spool of brown paper and a roll of shipping tape and motioned for Lila to help him lay the painting out on the floor. “Her brother’s coming for it in his pickup. This was my surprise engagement gift to her, believe it or not. I painted it from a photograph I took early one morning.”
She stared at the girl’s face as she held up the top of the painting so Adam could roll out the spool beneath the frame. “What’s her name?”
“Nikki.” He pulled paper across her face and secured it with tape, then motioned for Lila to scoot down to the other end of the canvas while they repeated the procedure on her feet. “Nikki Ireland. She’s a business major over at Connelly.”
Her father must be proud, Lila didn’t say. All that remained
of Nikki was her torso: full breasts, soft belly, and a whisper of blond pubic hair where modesty had her legs crossed tight. “So what happened?”
He sat back on his knees. “You really want to hear this? I know you’re not big on sharing.”
She rolled the paper across what remained of Nikki’s lower half, leaving nothing but pale nipples exposed. It seemed rude to stare, and Lila worked hard to tape down the paper without looking. “I do.” There was no way Adam walked away from a girl this beautiful.
“We’d been engaged a month, living together in her apartment for nearly a year. It was last May and I was supposed to be at school. She’d been out a lot in recent weeks, but that didn’t strike me as too weird. There was this guy at Connelly—fancy kind of guy. The type that wears these pastel dress shirts, even to school. You know, tangerine-striped button-downs that he always tucked into ironed jeans.”
She nodded. Sounded like something Victor would have worn if he were twenty years younger.
“Anyway, I wasn’t feeling great—some kind of stomach bug—and I left school early. Only I couldn’t get into the apartment. Door was locked from the inside. Then I saw the tasseled loafers beside her sandals on the mat in the hallway. She was tidy like that; didn’t want ‘the streets of Los Angeles’ on her kitchen floor. I knocked and knocked, but she couldn’t hear me.” He paused to lay a sheet of paper over Nikki’s nipples, then looked up. “The AC unit is in the bedroom. You can’t hear the front door from there.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. I moved out that night and he moved in three weeks later.”
Together, they taped down the last sheet of paper and he asked if she would help haul the painting to the front door. As they shuffled along the dim hallway, straining under the weight, Lila asked, “Do you love her still?”
He kicked the front door open with his foot and they set the enormous parcel down on the porch, leaned it against the house. “I’d cut off my hands to have her back.” Dropping onto the porch rail, he folded his arms across his chest and stared at Lila. “I told you mine—you tell me yours.”
Behind him, at the edge of the yard, was a rock garden. Cheery black-eyed Susans and pulpy sedum sprung up in clusters around large stones. The garden had just been watered; a hose lay limp on the dried-out lawn and the flower heads were still heavy with shining droplets. At the flowers’ feet, beside the hose, lay a hefty pile of freshly pulled weeds. There was an old sign on the fence behind the garden, partially obscured by a shrub that had grown through the pickets from the neighbor’s side. She leaned to the right and saw it read
DEEDEE’S GARDEN
.
Lila thought back to Adam’s mud-stained pajama bottoms.
Even in his state, he’d been tending his mother’s garden.
Because a child without a mother hangs on to whatever remains. The spiky armor of the weeds might puncture your flesh, the hair dye might sting your scalp, but that wasn’t real pain. It was proof your mother used to exist, and amounted to nothing compared to her absence. A paper cut versus a severed limb.
She reached for his hand and turned it over. His palm was scratched and dotted with tiny red sores. Barely making
contact with his skin, she traced around his wounds with her finger, then took a tissue from her pocket and pressed it over the cuts.
“Did you wash these out?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the prickles get in beneath the surface. You have to scrub them good.”
He nodded.
Still holding his hand, she pulled him down to the welcome mat where she arranged herself in front of him, cross-legged, her knees nearly touching his. With her eyes cast down at her scribbled boots, she told him. About the move. About the barbershop. About growing up believing her mother didn’t want her. Learning she did. Her father’s refusal to explain the abduction.
As Lila spoke, she felt herself lighten. The sensation was dramatic. As if she were being bled of the murky, leaden fluid, the liquid wretchedness, that had weighed her down far too long, and now her body could take flight. Levitate into the air, as if wearing her fairy wings again, and get tangled in the overhead branches. She found herself grasping Adam’s bare foot, lest the weightlessness take her away from his soft presence for even a second.
Finally, she stopped speaking and looked up. His eyes were still bloodshot, but the brightness of the sky and the whiteness of his shirt made the pattern of his irises as clear and intricate as kaleidoscopes. It was impossible to look away.
She wasn’t sure what to expect from him—maybe a lame joke to cut the tension or maybe the requisite platitudes. Something like, “It’ll all work itself out. You’ll see.” Perhaps a bit of wondering out loud about what kind of person her
father might be or insistence that he was sorry for what she was going through.
But Adam did none of these things. To her relief, he placed his hands on either side of her face, pressed his forehead to hers, and said nothing at all.