Chapter Ten
“I thought I told you not to bother.”
I open the door to Edward, glaring at him, wishing I could just smile and look pretty and invite him inside. But I’m not pretty, and I can’t smile. He comes inside anyway.
Every time I see him, I think he gets a little hotter. I don’t know how that’s possible because every time I see him, he also looks a little sicker. The circles under his eyes are darker, and his skin is paler, and his hands are shakier, which is probably why they’re always in his pockets. He needs more fresh air. He needs a new liver or lung or heart. He needs a blood transfusion and a protein shake.
He needs a haircut.
“Your old man have any liquor?” He’s looking around, inspecting, and the house is a wreck, and I’m a wreck, and I wish I had changed into something nicer than these sweats and this tank top. I wish I had brushed my hair this morning. Wish I had picked up, spruced up, or at least bothered to wear underwear.
“Yeah, in here.” I turn and hightail it to the living room, falling to my knees in front of the entertainment center and pulling out stacks of dvds to reach the bottle of whiskey I hid back there before the great alcohol purge of last month. It happens a couple of times a year or so: Dad deciding that he’s done drinking. He pours everything down the drain, and it lasts about thirty days before he’s bringing home six packs and bottles again. We don’t acknowledge it. Just wash, rinse, and repeat the same ritual three or four times a year like we didn’t just do it a few months before.
I hand Edward the bottle, and he falls onto the saggy old couch that used to be the color of a sunset but now looked like a rotten old peach. I stay where I am, watching him take a big long drink. Too big. Too long. Like he doesn’t even need to breathe and doesn’t give a shit about his liver either.
“Drinking is bad for you.”
“A lot of things are bad for you.” He stares at me like he’s about to tell me what exactly is so bad for me, twitching his fingers to loosen his tie and clearing his throat like maybe it’s him that’s bad. Maybe he’s bad enough already and the liquor won’t do much worse, but it sure won’t help anything either. His lips are pale today, paler than yesterday, and his eyes are darker, if that’s even possible. His hair looks the same. His suit looks the same, sullen and slack. I’m not entirely sure how someone can change so much but not change at all.
“Are you sick?” I ask.
“Why?” His eyes narrow, but he drops them from me to inspect the bottle in his hand instead, swallowing hard around nothing but air.
“You look sick.” I shrug. “You look tired and… sick,” I finish lamely, because I realize halfway through how rude I sound. When someone tells you that you look tired, they are really only trying to tell you that you look like shit, but they don’t know how to say it any nicer than that.
“I’m not sick,” he says, but I don’t believe him. I can’t.
He’s not healthy, that’s for certain.
Edward is looking around again instead of at me, eyes on the guns piled in the corner, the beheaded deer mounted to the wall, the discarded camo and neon orange clothing in a pile near the back door. For a cop, my father has just about the worst gun etiquette of anyone I know. No locked case. No safeties. No lessons in “people don’t kill people, guns kill people” that most kids get. He just expected me to adapt and by adapt, he expected me not to pay them any mind or touch them.
So I didn’t.
“Where’d he go? Your dad?” he asks.
“You’re avoiding me,” I accuse.
“Yes.” Edward nods. He doesn’t even try to deny it.
What a load of nerve this guy has.
“Seattle,” I say, feeling glum and lonely and weirdly uncomfortable.
“Got family there?”
“No. He’s… investigating,” I resist the urge to roll my eyes. This is easily dad’s fifth trip this year to some random location, chasing a lead that would most likely turn into a dead end.
“Investigating what?”
I narrow my eyes. It’s instinct. Grind my teeth. Also instinct. Dig my fingernails into my palms and ball my fists against my thighs because instinct was all I had in moments like this. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I felt like an animal that didn’t know how to deal with the realities of life without teeth or claws or blind biting rage. Moments like this, I bared my canines and retreated back into my hole because explaining this to a new person never got any easier.
I’d honestly rather go chew through my foot.
“You know,” I huff. “Don’t fucking make me say it.”
He just stares at me. A part of me, a small part, starts to hate him.
“Know what?”
I flop back onto the carpet, an old shag that isn’t soft anymore, and stare up at the ceiling with my heart in my ears and my stomach in my throat. I hate retelling it. Hate reliving it. Hate that I have to go there again for this guy who should just march his sick, sorry ass down to the library and skim through the backdated newspapers. He should go to the cop shop and ask one of those bastards to fill him in, because it’s easy to recount a tragedy when it belongs to someone else. All the gruesome details become bothersome and boring when it’s not your situation, not your life, not your nightmare.
“She’s dead,” I say, and I hear him clear his throat, but I don’t look anywhere except the ceiling and press on. “I mean, maybe not dead, but she’s been gone for three years, and I’m pretty sure she’s dead. My dad is still looking.”
“For her?” Edward actually perks up for this. He leans forward, sets the bottle down, puts his elbows to his knees and threads his fingers together. While he’s doing this, he hasn’t taken his eyes off of me. It’s hot and cold and feels good but also hurts somehow.
“Of course not. He gave up on her a long time ago.”
“People come back, you know? Children come home.”
I shake my head slowly against the carpet, wishing with every molecule in my body that such a thing could be her truth, my truth, our truth. The fact that it can’t be, won’t be, sucks more than just about anything else in the world. Her last school photo, third grade, pigtails, that ridiculous calico dress she’d started a love affair with a few weeks before and refused to take off, the one with the enormous lace collar and the puffed sleeves and the tiny pearl buttons at her wrist, it all stares down at me from the mantle. I fucking hated that dress.
“Not Alice.” I shake my head. “She won’t come home.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am.”
Yeah, kids come home, but then they lead police to their abductor. If you asked me, if I took a kid, the last thing I’d do is let that kid escape alive.”
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