Chapter 20: The First Light

I came down the next morning because you have to. You can’t stay up in a room forever in a house where people come looking, and the sickness doesn’t care what happened the night before — it had me at the sink by seven, running the tap so the sound of me went down the drain with the rest of it.

He was already at the table.

I don’t know what I’d braced for. A stranger, I think. Or the chair empty and the truck gone and a note that said less than nothing. What I got was my father in his work shirt with his coffee going cold in front of him, not drinking it, and when I came up off the sink and wiped my mouth he looked at me. Just looked. And it was him — not Robin’s husband, not the man from the dark, my actual father, checking me over like he was making sure I was still in one piece. His eyes went down me once and came back up, and something that had been held all wrong in his face since the sink the day before let go by about a degree.

He didn’t say kid. He’d said it my whole life and he didn’t say it now, and we both heard the space where it used to go. He said, “There’s crackers by the toaster.” That was all.

“Thanks,” I said, and it came out level, my normal voice, which has always been the same one I hide behind, and I ate three crackers standing up at the counter with my back to both of them, because I couldn’t do it sitting across from him.

Claire was at the far end with the paper she wasn’t reading. She watched me eat the crackers. She didn’t say a word about any of it — not the sink, not the crackers, not the fact that her husband and her stepdaughter couldn’t get their eyes to meet over a table — and her not-saying was a different kind than his. His was grief with no door in it. Hers I couldn’t read at all. She just watched, cataloguing, the way she’s always watched, and when I caught her at it she didn’t look away like a normal person would. She held it a second, and there was something old and tired in her face, and then she went back to the paper.

The week went like that.

We were careful with each other in a way we’d never had to be. All year the daylight had been the easy part — the tomatoes, the tax joke, kid over the top of everything — and now the daylight was the hard part and there was nothing under it to stand on. The dark was gone. It wasn’t coming back; I’d heard it end with my own name in his mouth. But nobody had built anything to put where it used to be, so we moved around the hole. He’d hand me a plate and our hands would get close and both of us would adjust. He stopped touching my hair. That was the one that got me — a hundred times a year his hand had come up to push it off my face without either of us thinking, and now it didn’t, and the not-doing was louder than the doing had ever been.

I started to think it was over. Not the thing that had happened — that was in me, weeks of it and climbing — but whatever had been between us that wasn’t the dark. I started to think maybe there’d been nothing there in the first place, that I’d built a man out of a ghost’s appetite, and now the ghost was gone there was just my father who couldn’t look at me and a baby neither of us could say out loud.

Because nobody said it. He knew — he’d had his hand flat on the middle of me in the dark and said my name, he knew better than anyone but me — and still, a week of breakfasts went by and not one word. It sat in the middle of the table like a place setting nobody would admit to laying, and all three of us ate around it. There’s no sentence that fits, I know that. But the quiet started to feel like the old quiet, the kind that had gotten us here in the first place, and the thought that we’d come through the dark just to build the same fog in the daylight was worse than anything the dark had done.

It was my father who moved first, on the Friday, at dinner.

He’d been quiet the whole meal, pushing his food from one side of the plate to the other, and I’d stopped waiting on him to say anything, so when he did I nearly missed it.

“There’s a guy down past the state line,” he said, to his plate. “Grows things. Under glass.” His fork went around in the potatoes. “Got one of those—” and he said a word, and it came out mangled, two plant names shoved into one thing that doesn’t grow anywhere. “One of those you’re always after.”

I looked up. Across the table Claire went still over her own plate for a second, and then went back to eating.

“It’s a haul,” he said. “Four hours, give or take. Can’t ship it, he says — won’t take the shipping. So.” He shrugged at the food. “Figured you’d want to see the setup anyway. Might have to stay over. If you wanted to go get it.”

He still hadn’t looked at me.

I almost said no. I was so far down into thinking the two of us were finished that a plant trip sounded like a thing we used to be, not a thing we still were, and it hurt, being handed the old life back across the mashed potatoes like it was nothing.

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever it is.”

I found the pad two days later, hunting a pen in the kitchen junk drawer.

It was his. His handwriting, which I’d know anywhere — the same block print that labels the breaker box and the paint cans, a carpenter’s hand, all right angles. He’d written the plant name at the top. He’d written it three times. The first two were wrong, crossed out, and the third was right, spelled out slow and careful in a way that told me he’d copied it off a screen letter by letter because he had no idea how the word was supposed to run. Under it, a column of names and numbers. Growers. Four of them. Three crossed off — won’t ship / gone / no answer x2 — and the fourth circled twice, a name and a town four hours out and a note beside it: holding till Sat. And down at the bottom, small, a line he’d written to himself and not crossed out. Ask what it needs so it don’t die on her.