Chapter 3: Confession in the Shadows

Raymond Alexander’s Laptop Journal

When it started, it began with the old creak in the stairs. The one I never fixed because it was the only thing that let me know I wasn’t the last man alive in this house. Each step had its own pitch. High, low, and two in tandem. I’d mapped them all by heart years ago, back when I could still convince myself it mattered.

I waited, listening, heart ticking along with the floorboards. I sat in my usual spot. The chair that groaned when I sat down, but remained mercifully silent if I didn’t shift my weight. A reading lamp burned weakly above, a cone of light pooling on my lap and between my feet. The rest of the room lay covered in a murky darkness. The kind of obscurity not restricted to the absence of light but a whole other presence, full of things without names.

Or perhaps thoughts, emotions, and drawings, which are best left unexplored by fathers and daughters. For in those unnatural matters one might lose oneself.

The clock said 8:43. Late enough for relection, but not so late that you didn’t understand tomorrow waited for you.

I heard her stop in the hallway, shoes shuffling the way they did when she stalled for time. In my mind, I pictured her there. With one hand pressed to the wall, chin tucked, eyes narrowed in the way she did when she was about to say something she thought might make me angry.

Or something she supposed would sadden me. For a second, I wondered if she’d already gone. Doubled back to her room to text a friend about how weird and ancient her father had become.

But the doorway caught a shadow, and she appeared.

Shorts and a T-shirt, neither meant for company. The T-shirt she’d won two years back from a science fair. The letters faded, collar chewed thin from nervous teeth. Her knees were red from the cold. She hovered on the threshold. Arms wrapped around her ribs, seemingly smaller than she once was.

Making believe, I didn’t see her at first. Keeping my eyes on the open book in my lap. Even though I failed to turn a page in half an hour. With my thumb pressed into the spine until it ached. Her stare burned into the side of my face.

Finally, she cleared her throat. A thin, fragile sound, a starter pistol that didn’t want to be fired.

“Hey,” she said.

I looked up. Raised an eyebrow in what I hoped meant nothing more than a mere casual recognition.

“Hey yourself.”

Hesitating, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. With her hair loose, a river of light brown tangled over her left shoulder. One strand hung over her eye, and she tucked it behind her ear. Glancing at the chair across from me, the one always piled with laundry I never folded.

“Can I—”

She didn’t finish, but I got the message. Gesturing to the ottoman in front of my chair. The only flat surface in the room that wasn’t covered in old mail or magazines.

She crossed the room, a straight line but for the little stutter in her stride when she passed Mom’s old knitting basket. Sitting perched on the very edge of the ottoman, knees almost touching mine, she pursed her lips. Something electrified between us. Not unlike the air right before a storm.