Chapter 11: The Trip

My mother announced Napa at dinner like it was something she was doing for the rest of us.

“Four days,” she said, to my father, not to me, buttering nothing. “Sasha’s got the house on the hill, the whole thing, a driver, the works. We leave Thursday, back Sunday night. It’s already booked, so.” She said so the way she said everything that wasn’t a question. “You can manage the child for four days.”

The child was me. I was fourteen. I hadn’t been managed in years.

“We’ll be fine,” my father said.

“There’s food. Sara does everything anyway, you’ll barely know I’m gone.” She looked at me then, finally, a flick, the way you check that you’ve turned off the stove. “Try not to make it difficult for your father while I’m away. He works hard. God knows he doesn’t ask for much.”

She had no idea what she’d said. That was the thing about my mother — she could put a sentence like that down on the table, don’t make it difficult for your father, he doesn’t ask for much, right there next to the potatoes, and pick up her wine and mean nothing by it. Mean only that I was a nuisance and he was a martyr and Napa was owed to her, and never once feel the floor she was standing on.

Sara refilled her glass. My father looked at me across the table over the rim of his, unhurried, and I watched him do the math I was doing — Thursday to Sunday, four nights, the house cleared of the one person in it who was too checked-out to notice anything but who was, still, technically, a body in a bed upstairs. And something moved behind his face, some slow pleasure settling in, and he said, “Have a good time, Van. You’ve earned it,” and passed her the salt.

Four nights of the house being his.

I lay awake on it. Because it wasn’t only going to be his. My mother was leaving me in it.

She was getting in a car with Sasha Reyes on Thursday and driving north and leaving me alone in a house with him and the thing he’d made of me, and she’d stood in the front hall a hundred times and never seen the second lock go on the office door, never smelled what came up the stairs, never done the one comparison I’d watched her almost do at the sink and then decide, on purpose, not to finish.

She wasn’t going to save me. She’d never been going to save me. So I was going to have to be the one who found out how deep it went.

Two days before my mother left, a box came — long and flat and heavier than it looked, a picture on the side of a new charging cradle, bigger than the one he had.

He caught me in the kitchen in what I’d slept in, because it was ten in the morning in August and that was what I wore now: a thin cotton sleep tank, nothing under it, and the little jersey shorts that stopped at the top of my thighs. I hadn’t dressed for anyone. Mom was at the club. It was supposed to be a house with nobody in it who counted.

“Come down and give me your hands a minute.”

He’d never once asked me down there. All summer the basement had been his — locked, mine to circle and never get into — and here he was standing at the top of the stairs holding the door open. I didn’t say no. Getting down those stairs was the one thing I’d been trying to do since June.

The new cradle needed its own power. He’d been at it all morning — a line run off the basement panel, back through the low crawl under the stairs to the corner where he wanted her to stand and charge, and the crawl was the trouble. A foot and a half high, black, running back further than the work light reached, with a bend in it partway where the cable fouled and wouldn’t feed.

He couldn’t get in it. He’d have stuck at the shoulders, the belly, all of him, and he knew it. He wanted the two of us — one to crawl to the bend and work the cable around by hand, one to go past it to the far corner and pull — him at the mouth of it feeding, too big for anything but the mouth of it.

He’d had the doll down there with him the whole morning, and somewhere in the middle of the wiring he’d stopped and used it. You could see it on him. He came up the stairs to fetch me heavy-lidded and slow, the way he came up after the updates, and he hadn’t bothered with a shirt — just the gray sweatpants, the soft worn ones that rode low under the hang of the belly with nothing under them I’d ever been able to not notice, the bare front of him shining, the chest hair still matted wet. I made myself not look at the front of the sweatpants to see whether it showed.