“Dad.”
My father rolls his eyes, shoving his sleeves up his arms. “If you tell me not to curse, I’m only gonna do it more.”
“Mom doesn’t like it.”
He crosses the entryway and places his hands on top of my shoulders. “Your mother isn’t here. She divorced me and moved to Germany. With a woman. I won’t be living my life according to her demands any longer.”
Poor Dad. At some point, he’s going to meet someone who makes him happy; he won’t feel like this forever. Clearly, he’s having a hard time remembering this, though. Things have been tough for him since the divorce. “She didn’t move to Germany. She was posted there,” I remind him.
Mom and Dad met here, in Mountain Lakes, when they were teenagers. Dad married someone else in college, though. Fate brought them back together when they both enlisted at the same time. Served together as Marines in the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion in California. They were separated into different units when they declared their relationship, but always managed to secure dual postings, so they were luckily never parted by their careers. The cracks in their marriage started showing a couple of years back. Things began to change. Dad didn’t want to re-enlist when his contract ended. Mom did. Dad wanted to move back to New Hampshire to open a restaurant. Mom absolutely did not. Dad was still attracted to Mom and wanted to stay married. Mom realized she was attracted to women, and Dad’s penis was really beginning to cramp her style.
So.
The Great Unraveling.
The very fabric of life as I knew it came apart at the seams; I heard all about the bitter war they waged against each other via email, from my room at the academy.
Mom seems really happy in Germany now. She and her girlfriend Claire have settled in nicely, from what she’s mentioned in her most recent emails. Dad was a complete train wreck at first. Ever since he decided to pull the trigger on his restaurant idea and move back home, he’s seemed lighter, though. As if there might actually be hope for the future. Occasionally, he dips back into the realms of self-pity, though. If flouting Mom’s hard and fast no cursing rule makes him feel better, then who am I to stop him?
“Relax, kiddo.” He squeezes my shoulders. “No need to look so conflicted. We have a lot of boxes to unpack, and I’m probably gonna swear my way through every second of it, so…”
“I still don’t see why you couldn’t stay in San Diego and open up a restaurant there,” I grumble.
It is nice to see Dad taking a more positive approach to his newly found bachelorhood, but his decisions don’t just affect him. They have real-world ramifications for me, too. It doesn’t make sense that I travel overseas, to a military base no less, for the holidays. It makes sense that I stay with Dad. Staying with him in California would have meant escape. Familiarity. Security. Old friends from middle school. Rock climbing, and, cliff jumping, and swimming in the warm Pacific. Now, going to spend time away from the academy with Dad means a ten-minute trip across Mountain Lakes. I’ll be stuck here forever, while everyone else gets to leave.
My friends from the academy are all keeping themselves busy, trying to forget the insanity that just exploded on our doorstep, trying to move on and heal from the loss of our friend. Meanwhile, Dad dragged me here, back to Grandpa’s house, and has been watching me like a hawk since he picked me up first thing this morning. He’s even made some veiled suggestion that I might benefit from intensive, daily therapy sessions. He hasn’t left me alone for one second. Mara Bancroft was one of my best friends. She was a selfish asshole at times. More preoccupied with herself than anything or anyone else. But I’d known her since I enrolled at Wolf Hall. She was sweet and kind when she wanted to be. After she disappeared, both Carrie and I were angry with her. We thought she’d just skipped out on the academy, and on us, without even so much as a goodbye, and that had hurt like hell. Now, it turns out that she never left at all, and all of the anger and hurt we felt was misplaced.
“You okay, sweetheart?” Dad gives me a sympathetic frown. I don’t need his sympathy. I want to lug these boxes out of the back of his brand-new catering van and get on with this. I want to get all of my yoga gear set up in my room. I want to lean out of my bedroom window and smoke a joint so I can be relaxed during dinner. “You’re gonna pull a muscle, carrying around all of that guilt,” I tell him. “Everything’s fine.”
Ever the worrier, Dad proceeds to worry even more. “How can you be fine, sweetheart? You just lost a friend. And your mother’s upped and relocated to the other side of the world—”
“I didn’t just lose Mara, Dad. She died months ago. That’s when she disappeared. That’s when I lost her. I always had this feeling that she hadn’t just…”—I throw up my hands—“moved away. Something felt really wrong about the whole situation. I think…in my heart, I knew she was gone. Properly gone. I just couldn’t say that to Carrie. But I’ve…I’ve had time. And please don’t take offence, but both you and Mom have been on base, on the other side of the country, for the past three and a half years. I barely saw you anyway. Mom getting posted to Germany isn’t going to make that much of a difference. Honestly. And I’m probably going to see way more of you now, so…”
Jesus. I really want that joint now.
Dad looks down at his hands, picking at a fleck of white paint on his thumb. There’s that guilt again. I hate making him feel bad—I know he always used to suffer with his conscience over sending me away to a private boarding school in a different state. I can reassure him that I’m fine and enjoying life at Wolf Hall a million times a day, but it never makes much of a difference. Whenever I mention the academy, he always looks like he’s about to throw up.
“Y’know. Now that I’m so close, it doesn’t really make sense for you to stay up th—”
“Don’t even think about it,” I say. “I’m so close to graduation. I have friends at the academy. I like living there. And…and I can come down the mountain and have dinner with you any time. You know that. I don’t need to live here.”
“You wouldn’t have curfew,” he offers, like the curfew Principal Harcourt imposes actually ever gets policed.
“Dad.”
He purses his lips. “All right, then. Fine. But the offer stands. You can take me up on it anytime. Hell, you can even register at the public school instead if you like.”
This was an argument once upon a time. I’d so desperately wanted to stay in San Diego with my old friends and go to a regular, public school. Dad had considered it for a second, but not Mom. No, she nixed that idea in the blink of an eye, and when she made that kind of decision, there was no moving her on it. That was a long time ago, though.
“I’m settled where I am, Dad. I want to stay at the academy.” Am I being stupid, fighting him on this? If I did leave Wolf Hall and enroll at Edmondson, the local public school, then I wouldn’t have to worry about Pax making life difficult for me. But I also wouldn’t see him. Ever…
Dad’s brows bank together into a tight knot. “But if you change your mind…”
“I mean it, Dad.”
“All right, all right. Fine. I’ll shut up about it.”