“Did he, like... do anything here?” Conner asked, traipsing behind me through the tall grass.
“No.” The windows were fogged up, maybe from the humidity, and I pressed my face to the glass to see inside. Surprisingly, there was still stuff in there—an old couch that leaned to one side, a pile of what might have been clothes or wet cardboard or insulation from the ceiling, it was impossible to tell with the effect of time. This was what my dad’s house might’ve looked like, if left alone.
As if reading my mind, Conner said from behind me, “You know Dad wasn’t a serial killer, right?”
“Technically, we don’tknowthat,” I said. “But yes, I’m aware that it is highly unlikely, and that if hewas, my interest in the subject would take on a macabre sort of irony.”
“Okay,” Conner said. “It just feels like youdon’tknow that. He was just a dude. I think because you didn’t have much of a relationship with him, the last ten or so years, that you built him up to be this malicious, horrible person. As far as dads go, he wasn’t great. He got angry a lot for no reason, he took absolutelyzero interest in stuff that you liked but he thought was dumb, like me with video games or you with...” Conner gestured toward the house, as though to saythis weird shit you’re into. “He made you think you were crazy or oversensitive or misremembering the way something happened, he could be really caustic and negative about the state of the world.”
That last one hit a little too close to home for me. One of my biggest fears was turning out like my dad in some way, and his sarcastic humor was definitely one thing I’d inherited, for better or for worse.
“But he was just a dude,” Conner said again. “A really sad dude, when you think about it. He had so many opportunities to have really close, meaningful relationships with his kids, and he never took any of them. When I told him I was moving out, do you know what he said? He said,Don’t take the computer, I paid for it.When he’d bought some parts for my birthday and then never bought the rest that he’d said he would. Good riddance, you know? I’m not going to let that shit get me down.”
I thought back to my first night in the house, those pieces of the computer strewn about the floor. That sounded exactly like my dad. He could be incredibly generous—he’d signed on to all of Conner’s student loans, for example—but then he could take it back the next instant, or say he’d never meant you to have it in the first place. It had been such a disconcerting way to live, and it was no wonder that Conner and I still had whiplash from it.
“I don’t think he told me he loved me once,” I said. “Most of the time, I questioned whether he was even capable of that emotion.”
“The opposite of love is fear,” Conner said. “I think Dad was the most afraid person I’ve ever known.”
“Shit.” I stopped in my tracks, suddenly less interested in poking around this rather ordinary, depressing little house, and more interested in what my brother was saying. “You’re really getting your money’s worth out of that therapy.”
“Oh, that was a line from a song Shani likes,” Conner said. “It’s true, though.”
“I think I might be like him,” I said. “Closed off. Afraid. Unable to love.”
“You’re not.”
I shrugged uncomfortably. If he only knew how that last conversation with Sam had gone, he’d know what a monster I was. I couldn’t even think of it without spiraling back into shame about the things I’d said, the way I’d hurt him. But I didn’t know if anything I’d said waswrong. If anything, the fact that I could be cold enough to say it in the first place proved my point, that I wasn’t cut out for that kind of connection.
“Pheebs,” Conner said. “You’renot. You’re not like thatCold Bloodguy, either. For one thing, you love me.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re a pain in my ass.”
“But a lovable pain in the ass.”
I acknowledged his point with a grunt. We’d made our way to the back of the house by now, where there was a porch with no screen in it anymore and some charred wood at the bottom of one corner of the roof, as if there had been a grill fire at some point. Even the Sunrise Slayer had cooked bacon, or grilled out on the Fourth of July. He’d just also been killing women while he’d doneit. What would that do to you, as a child, to find that out about your parent? And yet what did I want, for his daughter to never be able to move on from it, to have a life that was always tainted by this darkness she’d been a victim of, too, in her own way?
“I can’t even say the words,” I said. “They stick in my throat. I can’t eventextthe words. I don’t know why. Alison will drop it all the time, no big deal, and I just text back a smiley face like an asshole.”
“So ease into it,” Conner said. “Try ILY first. You can manage a few letters.”
“I guess.”
“Pull out your phone and do it,” Conner said, gesturing toward my pocket. “Assuming you get reception in this godforsaken place.”
“The last text she sent me was about a home organization show she’d started watching,” I said. “I’m not just going to drop an ILY after that.”
“Oh, I think Shani’s watching that one,” Conner said. “It’s so boring it’s like a lullaby. I could fall asleep to it every night. Look, you’re leaving tomorrow. Just text something about that, then put the message at the end. Add an emoji if you want to soften it a little. What’s the point of being a doctor if you don’t know shit like this?”
I took my phone out. To my surprise, I did have reception. To my greater surprise, I actually pulled up the conversation between me and Alison, my thumbs hesitating over the phone while I considered whether to listen to Conner’s advice. What was I so scared of, anyway? Rejection? She’d already said it a million times to me, so rationally I had no reason to believe she’d reject me if Isaid it back. If anything,I’dbeen the rejecter in this scenario, refusing to let her words pierce through my armor no matter how close we got otherwise.
Alison’s last message hung there, an innocuous thing about how the couple in the first episode exemplified every terrible millennial stereotype. I’d already responded with a simpleha. I took a deep breath, and started typing.
Hey, as you know, I’m heading out tomorrow! I know you’ll be at work, so just wanted to say thanks again for all your help w/ the cat and the blazer and all of it. ily!
I tried it without the exclamation point, but then that actually made it seemmoreserious, so I put it back in. Then the letters just didn’t feel like me, so I deleted and typedlove you!, no personal “I,” with a heart-eyes cat emoji. I hit “send” before I could second-guess myself.
“Nice,” Conner said, reading over my shoulder. “Now can we please get out of here? I’m starving and I know exactly what I want to eat.”