The Good Father

3 Robin

Beaufort, North Carolina

JAMES AND I STOOD UP WHEN DALE WALKED into the waiting room. Dale always seemed to have a gravitational field around him and sure enough, the seven other people sitting in the room turned to look at him as he walked toward us. They would sail right through the air toward him if they hadn’t clutched the arms of their chairs. That was the sort of pull he had on people. He’d had it on me from the first moment I met him.

Now, he smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then shook his father’s hand as if he hadn’t seen him at home only a few short hours ago. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly, looking from me to his father and back again.

“Eight centimeters,” I said. “Your mom’s with her. Alissa’s miserable, but the nurse said she’s doing really well.”

“Poor kid,” Dale said. He took my hand and the three of us sat down again in the row of chairs. Across from us, an older woman and man whispered to one another and pointed in our direction, and I knew they’d recognized us. I had only a second to wonder if they’d approach us before the woman got to her feet, ran her hand over her flawlessly styled silver hair and headed toward us.

Her eyes were on James. “Mayor Hendricks.” She smiled, and James immediately stood up and took her hand in his.

“Yes,” he said, “and you are …?”

“Mary Wiley, just one of your constituents. We—” she looked over her shoulder at the man, most likely her husband “—we have such mixed feelings about your retirement,” she said. “The only good thing about it is that your son will take over.”

Dale was already on his feet, already smiling that smile that made you feel special. I once thought that smile was only for me but soon came to realize it was for every single person he met. “Well, I hope that’s the case,” he said modestly. “Sounds like I can count on your vote.”

“And the vote of everyone I know,” she said. “Really, it’s a given, isn’t it? I mean, Dina Pingry? She’s completely wrong.” She gave a little eye roll at the thought of Dale’s opposition, a woman who was a powerhouse Realtor in Beaufort. Of course, the people we hung out with were all Hendricks supporters, so it was sometimes easy to forget that Dina Pingry had her own fans and they were fanatical in their support. But James had been mayor of this small waterfront town for twenty years, and passing the torch to his thirty-three-year-old attorney son seemed like a done deal. To us, anyway.

“It’s never a given, Mrs. Wiley,” Dale said. He was so good at remembering names! “I need every vote, so promise me you’ll get out there on election day.”

“Oh, we work the polls,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “We never miss an election.” Her eyes finally fell on me, still in my seat between the two men. “You, dear, are going to have the wedding of the decade, aren’t you?”

I didn’t stand, but I shook the hand she offered and gave her my own smile—the one I had quickly learned to put and keep on my face in public. It came pretty naturally to me. That was the thing Dale said first attracted him to me: I was always smiling. For me, it had been his gray eyes. When I saw those eyes, I suddenly understood the phrase Love at first sight. “I’m very lucky,” I said now, and Dale rested his hand on my shoulder.

“I’m the lucky one,” he said.

“Well, we’re waiting for our daughter to have her third.” The woman gestured toward the double doors that led to the labor rooms. “And I guess you’re waiting for Alissa …?” She didn’t finish her sentence, but raised her eyebrows to see if she was right. Of course she was. Alissa was the Hendricks’ barely seventeen-year-old daughter, my future sister-in-law and the poster child for Taking Responsibility for your Actions. The Hendricks had turned what might have been a scandalous event into an asset by publicly supporting their unwed pregnant daughter. This was a family that didn’t hide much, I’d discovered. Rather, they capitalized on the negative. To the outside world, their actions might have looked like complete support, but I was privy to their inside world, where all was not so rosy.

“Mrs. Hendricks is with her,” James said to the woman. “Latest report is she’s doing very well.” He always called Mollie, his wife, Mrs. Hendricks in public. I’d asked Dale not to do the same to me after we were married. I’d actually wished I could keep my maiden name, Saville, but that wasn’t done in the world of the Hendricks family.

“Well, now,” the woman said, “I’ll leave you three in peace. It’s the last peace you’ll have for a while with a baby around, I can tell you that.”

“We’re looking forward to the chaos,” Dale said. “So nice meeting you, Mrs. Wiley.” He gave a little bow of his head and he and his father sat down again as the woman returned to her seat.

I was tired and wished I could rest my head against Dale’s shoulder, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate it here in public. In public were words I heard all the time from one Hendricks or another. I was being trained to become one of them. I think they’d started grooming me from the moment I met them all two years earlier, when I’d applied for the job to assist with running their Taylor’s Creek Bed and Breakfast at the end of Front Street. It was a job I’d handled so well that I was now the manager. I’d met with all three of them in the living room of Hendricks House, their big, white, two-story home, which was right next door to the B and B and almost identical in its Queen Anne–style architecture. They told me later that they knew I was right for the job the moment I walked in, despite the fact that I was barely twenty and had zero experience at anything other than surviving. “You were much younger than we’d expected,” Mollie told me later, “but you were a people person, oozing self-confidence and full of enthusiasm. After the interview, you left the room and we all looked at each other and knew. I picked up the phone and canceled the other applicants we’d scheduled for interviews.”

I’d wondered later if they knew then I would become one of them. If they’d wanted that. I thought so. It had been funny getting that glowing feedback. I was only beginning to know the real me. I was only starting to live. I was one year out from my heart transplant and still learning that I could trust my body, that I could climb a flight of stairs and walk a block and think about a future. If I wore a perpetual smile, that was why. I was alive and grateful for every second I’d been given. Now I was living that future. There were days, though, when it felt as though my life was no more in my control than it had been when I was sick. “Everyone feels that way,” my best friend, Joy, told me. “Totally normal.” I’d had so little experience with “normal” that I could only hope she was right.

Mollie walked through the double doors into the waiting room. She wasn’t smiling and I suddenly felt afraid for Alissa. This time, I was the one to get to my feet. “Is everything okay?” I asked. I loved Alissa. She was so real. So down to earth. She was five years younger than me, but I felt as though we were kindred spirits—in ways only I truly understood.

“She’s very close,” Mollie said, “but she wants you with her.” She looked at me. “You want to go in?”

“Me?” From the start, the plan had been for Mollie to be in the delivery room with her daughter. “She wants you, honey.” Mollie sounded tired.

Dale stood up and put his hand on the small of my back. “You okay with that?” he asked quietly. He was always protective of me. Sometimes I appreciated it. Other times it reminded me of my father, cutting me off from the world.

“Sure,” I said. I was no stranger to hospitals, though a delivery room was unfamiliar territory. I hoped someday to have a career in medicine, though Dale said I’d never have to work if I didn’t want to. My only hesitation in being with Alissa was stepping into a role that had so clearly belonged to Mollie.

“I’ll show you where,” Mollie said, and she led me through the waiting room and the double doors and into a hallway. She pointed toward a doorway. “Just hold her hand. Be there for her. She’s tired of me.” She gave me a smile that let me know she was a little bit hurt that Alissa wanted me with her rather than her mother.

I heard Alissa the second I opened the door. She was halfway sitting up, panting hard, a look of intense concentration on her face, and I guessed she was in the middle of a contraction. “Robin!” she managed to say when she could catch her breath. Her face was red and sweaty, her forehead lined with pain.

“I’m here, Ali,” I said. One of the nurses motioned toward a stool at the side of the bed and I sat down and took Alissa’s hand in both of mine. I wasn’t sure what to say. How are you feeling? seemed like a ridiculous question to ask. It was pretty clear how she was feeling, so I just repeated myself. “I’m here,” I said again. Someone handed me a damp, cool washcloth and I pressed it to her forehead. Tendrils of her auburn hair were plastered to her face and her brown eyes were bloodshot.

“I couldn’t take one more minute of my mother.” She spoke through clenched teeth, then let out a long, loud groan. I watched the monitors on the other side of the bed. The baby’s heartbeat was so fast. Was it supposed to be that fast?

“I think she’s okay with it,” I lied.

“I hate her right now. I hate them. All of my stupid family. Except you.”

“Shh,” I said, pulling the stool closer to her. I wondered if delivery room nurses had to keep things they heard confidential. I bet they heard all kinds of gossip in here. The last thing Dale needed was for the world to know all was not well with Beaufort’s first family.

“Will should be with me,” Alissa whispered. “That’s how it’s supposed to be. Not like this.”

I was surprised. Will Stevenson was completely out of the picture and I’d thought she was finally okay with that. He’d created a mess the Hendricks family had needed to clean up, but now wasn’t the time to get into a big discussion with her about it. I’d never even met Will. Alissa had kept that relationship even from me, and I had to admit I was hurt when I found out about it. I’d thought we were closer than that. But she’d done me a favor. I didn’t want to feel as though I was keeping secrets from Dale—at least, no more than the secrets I was already keeping.

She had another contraction and nearly broke my fingers as she squeezed them. The baby’s heartbeat slowed way down on the monitor and I glanced nervously at the nurses, trying to gauge if something was wrong, but no one except me seemed concerned.

“This baby’s going to wreck my life!” Alissa nearly shouted when the contraction had ended.

“Shh,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her say that and it worried me. If Alissa had had her way, she’d be putting this baby up for adoption, but that would never have been acceptable to her parents. “You’re going to love her,” I said, as if I knew about these things. “Everything’s going to work out fine. You’ll see.”

An hour later, baby Hannah was born and I watched my future sister-in-law change from a screaming, fighting, panting warrior to a docile and beaten-down seventeen-year-old. The doctor rested the tiny infant on her belly, but Alissa didn’t touch her or look at her. Instead, she turned her head away, and I saw two of the nurses exchange a glance. I wanted to touch that baby myself. How could Alissa not want to?

One of the nurses took Hannah to the side of the room to clean her up and I leaned my lips close to Alissa’s ear. “She’s beautiful, Ali,” I said. “Wait till you get a good look at her.” But Alissa wouldn’t even look at me, and as I wiped her face with the washcloth, I wasn’t sure if it was perspiration or tears I was cleaning away.

The nurse brought the baby back to the side of the bed. “Are you ready to hold her?” she asked Alissa, who gave the slightest shake of her head. I bit my lip.

“How about you, auntie?” the nurse asked me. “Would you like to hold her?”

I looked up at the nurse. “Yes,” I said, draping the washcloth on the metal bar of the bed. I reached out my arms, and the nurse settled Hannah, light as feathers, into them. I looked down at the tiny perfect face and felt the strangest emotion come over me. It slipped into my body and locked my throat up tight. I’d rarely related Alissa’s pregnancy to my own. That denial had been easy, since I’d blocked so much of my own experience from my mind. The baby I’d had didn’t exist for me. But suddenly, holding this beautiful little angel in my arms, I thought, This is the part I missed. This was the part I’d never realized I was missing and that no one must ever know that I missed. And as I pressed my lips to the baby’s warm temple, I cried the first tears ever for the empty place in my heart.

4 Erin

Raleigh

MICHAEL SET ONE OF THE BOXES ON THE granite counter of my new, small kitchen. Through the window over the sink, I could see the sun disappear behind dust-colored clouds. The sky would be opening up soon with a late-summer storm. I was glad we’d gotten all the boxes in before the rain started.

“This is the last one,” Michael said, brushing his hands together as if the box had been dirty. He walked into the attached dining area and looked out the window with a sigh. “You’re way out in the boonies here,” he said.

I knew what he was seeing through that window: the sprawling Brier Creek Shopping Center. Acres and acres of every big box store and chain restaurant you could imagine. Hardly the boonies.

“It’s not that far,” I said, although it was a good fifteen miles from our house in Raleigh’s Five Points neighborhood.

“You don’t know anyone out here,” he said. “I don’t get it.”

“I know you don’t,” I said. “That’s okay. It’s what I want, Michael. What I need right now. Thanks for just … for tolerating it.”

He looked out the window again. The gray light played on his ashy brown hair, the same color mine would be if I didn’t lighten it. The color my roots were. I was really late for a touch-up, but I didn’t care.

“Let me be the one to live here,” he said suddenly.

“You?” I frowned. “Why?”

“I just …” He turned his head toward me. “I don’t like to think of you in a place like this. You’ve worked so hard on the house. You belong there.”

“It’s perfectly nice,” I said. “It’s new, for heaven’s sake.” I was deeply touched; he still loved me so much that he’d be willing to live in this bland little furnished apartment so I didn’t have to. But he didn’t understand. I couldn’t be in our house any longer. I felt Carolyn’s absence everywhere in that house. Her room, which I hadn’t walked into once in the four months since she died, taunted me from behind the closed door. Michael had actually suggested we turn her room into an exercise room! It was like he wanted to erase Carolyn from our lives. He found this apartment depressing. I found it safe, away from my old life. My Carolyn life. The friends and their children I could no longer bear to be around. The acquaintances I didn’t want to bump into. The husband I no longer felt I knew. I didn’t think my friends wanted to be with me any more than I wanted to be with them. They’d been wonderful in the beginning, but now they didn’t know what to say to me. I was a horror to them, a reminder of how quickly their lives could change.

“What do I tell people?” Michael asked. “Are we separated? Getting a divorce? How do I explain to people that you’ve moved out of the house?”

“Tell them whatever makes you comfortable.” I didn’t care what people thought. I used to, but everything was different now. Michael still cared, though, and that was the difference between us. He was still living in our old lives, where what people thought mattered and where he wanted to find a way back to normal. I’d given up on normal. I didn’t care about normal. My therapist Judith’s reaction when I told her that? “That’s normal,” she said, and the old me would have laughed, but I didn’t laugh anymore.

Michael gestured to one of the boxes on the stool by the breakfast bar. “This one says bedroom. I’ll carry it in for you.”

“Great. Thanks.” I watched him lift it into his arms. I used to love his arms, probably more than any other part of his body. He worked out every day and his arms were undeniably ripped. Michael was that rare combination of brains and brawn. “A geek with a great body,” one of my friends had once told me, when we were watching our husbands playing with our kids in someone’s backyard pool. Watching him now, though, I felt nothing.

I walked the few short steps to the living room windows and looked at the reassuringly unfamiliar landscape. Absolutely nothing to remind me of my bubbly and beautiful daughter. You want to run away, Judith had said when I told her my plan to rent this apartment. There was no accusation in the way she said it, although I knew she didn’t think it was a good idea. But she didn’t do the lecture bit like Michael did. “You might be able to run away from home,” he’d said, “but you can’t run away from what’s inside your head.” I’d wanted to slug him for saying that. I was sick of his advice and his finding fault in my own personal style of grieving. Never mind that I found plenty of fault in his. I had deep questions he simply couldn’t relate to. Mystical questions. Would I ever see Carolyn again? Was her soul someplace? I felt her around me. I heard her voice sometimes. When I asked him if he did, he said, “Sure” in a way that told me that he didn’t.

Michael came into the living room and stood next to me at the window. He put his arm around my shoulders and I felt the tentative nature of the touch. He no longer knew what I would welcome and what I would shrug off. Judith tried to get me to have some sympathy for him, but I was too busy having sympathy for myself. I had no energy to pay attention to what Michael needed these days. He’d turned into someone I’d once loved but could no longer understand. I knew he could say the same about me.

“I’m worried about you,” he said now. His arm felt too heavy across my shoulders.

“Don’t be.”

“I think it’s wrong for me to let you do this.”

“‘Let me’?” I walked away from his arm and sat down on the sofa. It was uncomfortably firm, nothing like the big, cushy sofa we had at home. “What are you? My father?”

“When are you going back to work?”

“If you ask me that question one more time …” I shook my head in frustration. I’d tried going back to work. I’d lasted half a day. I made a mistake with a medication that could have cost a person his life and I took off my white coat, turned the order over to the other pharmacist, and walked out of the building without looking back.

“You’re going to sit here in this—” he waved an arm through the air to take in the combined living room/dining room/kitchen “—this place and ruminate. And that scares me, Erin.” He looked at me head-on then and I saw the worry in his eyes. I had to look away. I stared down at my hands where they rested flat on my thighs.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“You need to stop going over every detail of it the way you do,” he said, as though he was telling me something he hadn’t already said twenty times. “You have to stop asking yourself all the what-ifs. It happened. You need to start accepting it.”

I stood up. “Time for you to go,” I said, walking to the door. I’d moved into this apartment, in part, to get away from exactly this. “Thank you so much for helping. I know it was hard for you.”

He gave me one last frustrated look before walking to the door. I followed him, opening the door for him, and he leaned over to hug me.

“Do you hate me?” he whispered into my hair.

“Of course not,” I whispered back, even though there were moments when I did. I could honestly say he was the only man I’d ever loved and if anyone had told me we would one day fall apart the way we had, I would have said they just didn’t know us very well. But here we were, as fallen apart as we could be.

I opened the door and he walked into the hallway.

“Bye,” I said. I started to close the door behind him, but felt a sudden rush of panic and pulled it open again. “Don’t touch her room!” I called after him.

He didn’t turn around. Just waved a hand through the air to let me know he’d heard me. I knew he was in pain—maybe tremendous pain. But I also knew how he would deal with it. He’d invent some new video game or work on a repair project. He’d lose himself in activity. He certainly wouldn’t ruminate. He didn’t even know how. I had it down to an art. It wasn’t deliberate. It just happened. My mind would start one place—making a grocery list, for example—and before I knew it, I’d be going over every detail of what happened as if I were describing it to someone. Who was I telling it to inside my head? I needed to relive the details of that night the way an obsessive-compulsive person had to wash her hands over and over again. Sometimes I felt crazy and I’d make myself think of something else, but the minute I let my guard down, I’d be at it again. This was why I loved the Harley’s Dad and Friends group I’d found on the internet. It had been started by the father of eight-year-old Harley, a little girl who was killed in a bicycling accident. The group was full of bereaved parents I’d never met face-to-face but felt as though I knew better than I knew anyone. Better than I knew Michael. They understood my need to go over and over what had happened. They understood me. I spent hours with them every day, reading about their struggles and sharing my own. I actually felt love for some of those people I’d never met. I didn’t even know what most of them looked like, but I was coming to think of them as my best friends.

So, now I was safe. I was creating my own world, in a new neighborhood, with new friends in the Harley’s Dad group and a new apartment. I turned around to take in the living room, thinking my escape. But instead of the bland furniture and the small room, I saw a sky the color of black velvet and the long, illuminated ribbon of the Stardust Pier, and I knew that no matter how far from home I ran, that horrible night would always, always be with me.

5 Travis

BELLA RAN AHEAD OF ME ON THE BEACH AND I watched the sandy soles of her feet flashing in the sunshine. Labor Day had passed and we nearly had the beach to ourselves. Bella’s brown hair flew behind her like a flag and her pink purse slapped against her side as she ran. She looked so free. I wished she could always feel the way she felt right this second. Free and happy. That’s why I brought her out on the beach today, so she could run and just act like a kid. My wrecked house was only a couple of blocks from the beach, and I usually brought her out here nearly every day, but we hadn’t been once in the week since the fire and she’d become this totally serious and confused little girl. Sort of like her totally serious and confused dad. Our lives had turned to shit overnight. I didn’t want her to know that. I didn’t want her to feel scared, ever. But she was no dummy. She knew everything had changed.

We were staying with one of my mom’s church friends, Franny, but it wasn’t good. She had a slew of grandkids running in and out of the house and a bunch of cats I thought Bella might be allergic to, and you could tell she was letting us stay there because it was the Christian thing to do but that we were in the way. Bella and I shared the sagging mattress of a pull-out sofa and I thought we were getting flea bites in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t like I could say anything about it. We didn’t have a lot of other offers and about three times a day, Franny asked me if I’d found a place we could move into yet. I had—a shithole of a trailer that sat in a row of other trailers along the main road. It was nothing but a one-room tin can, and a good nor’easter would probably send it flying down the street, but it was going to have to do. There was a double bed I’d let Bella sleep in and a futon that would work for me. I thought it was okay for little kids to sleep with their parents, but the books I’d read said it wasn’t cool once they were three or so. Bella was really good at sleeping in her own room at home. At Franny’s, though, we didn’t have much choice and anyway, Bella needed me close. I needed her close to me just as much.