But there were things I didn’t notice about him, either. Without Mom here to counterbalance him, I spot the sweat glistening at his temples, the nick where he cut himself shaving. He’s life-sized now, and one of the things he’s no longer hiding from me is his connection to the Glare.
As we wait for the baggage carousel, Dad excuses himself, takes three paces from me, and pulls out his phone. He doesn’t use it long, but as we step outside into the crisp, springlike air, it buzzes again.
“I’m sorry, Hedda.” He ducks inside the concrete taxi shelter. “This won’t take a second.”
“I don’t mind.” I have plenty of distractions, starting with the cars zooming everywhere. Already my feet ache from walking longer on pavement in a single day than I usually do in a year.
Dad’s car is sleek, bone-white. When we’re buckled up, he touches something, and the interior comes to weird, quiet life, a Glare-screen flickering on the dashboard.
My eyes dart away, and I feel a strange tingling at the back of my thighs, part queasiness and part yearning. I half expect to see that skull again, but there’s only a map.
Queasy or not, I need to practice looking. According to Mom’s books, screen addiction comes from interaction, and I’m not doing that, am I?
I wonder how Dad feels about being addicted as he accelerates onto an enormous freeway that groans with traffic. My eyes dart from the screen to his face. How long until I can start asking him about school? The rush of the wind gives me confidence; it’s not a question of wanting or wishing, but of willing, because now that I’m free, no one can put me back in the cage. Does he feel free in this life, too? I think he does.
We rocket toward a clump of skyscrapers on the horizon, the engine whirring in ghostly quiet, our speed like an optical illusion. “This is a Tesla,” Dad explains. “Fully electric.”
As the highway snakes through the city, I almost stop breathing. Western light gilds towers of glass and steel—are there really enough people to fill them? From a distance, all I see are cars.
I could live here. After college, I can live anywhere I want.
As Dad points out Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Park, I wonder what he remembers about me, what he expects. For every birthday, he gives me a couple of fat books that serve as a conversation starter for next year. We hardly ever talk about my life on the ranch, Dad’s new family, or his job in the Glare.
The arches of the Golden Gate Bridge, the color of dried blood, etch themselves in the sky. The air over the bay shimmers like a diaphanous veil.
So beautiful. So unreal.
On the other side of the bridge, in Marin, we exit the highway in a city where date palms frame adobe facades as clean and smooth as cake frosting. There’s an old-time movie marquee and a gleaming Mission-style church. Everything looks like set dressing for a dream, barring the occasional grimy basement window or mean-eyed seagull.
“Is this San Rafael?”
“You don’t recognize it?” He sounds disappointed.
I thought I remembered my life here, but it looks different now. I’ve always known that Dad has money. But as the near-silent car floats up a street lined with graceful, glittering cottonwoods, I see what money can buy. Before the goats and the chickens and the rusty, airbag-less trucks, this was how we lived. This light-filled place is what I lost.
We slow before a house that seems to tower in the tree branches, shielded from the street by a steep flight of stairs. The brown-shingled house. My first home.
The watery forms of memory coalesce into solid things. The central gable. The three sets of cream-colored pillars that frame the door like piping on a uniform. The picture windows on either side.
I climbed up on that roof once—so high! My room was in that front gable.
“It’s the same.” My voice quavers, and abruptly tears bulldoze my composure, coming so fast and hot I can’t blink. For a few seconds, crying feels like vomiting, like drowning.
I’m home.
“You do remember,” Dad says. He reaches out and clasps my hand in his.
By the time we’re inside, I’ve managed to sniffle back some of the tears and wipe my face. Which is lucky, because she comes to meet us—thick black hair in a messy ponytail, black-framed glasses, curvy upper lip. Dad’s new wife, Erika Kim.
We hug but pull out of it quickly. Feeling Erika’s eyes follow me as I move around the living room, I can tell she does notice things.
She looks so young and earnest in her jeans and T-shirt, more like one of the geology students who spent a month digging up our old creek bed than a vain stepmother in a book. But there’s also something wary about her that puts me on guard.
“You look so much like your mom,” she says. “I was going to make tea—would you like some?”
“That would be great.” Control yourself. Smile. Be normal.
On the way to the kitchen, something goes tick, tick, tick, and I stop short.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Erika pats the grandfather clock’s oak cabinet. “An heirloom from your great-grandfather, and who knows how much further back it goes.”
“I remember.” The clock pauses solemnly after each metallic tick, as if holding its breath. And now I also remember that when I was little I always thought it was saying, Tsk, tsk, disapproving of me.
As we reach the kitchen, I’m holding my breath like the clock, though I don’t know why. It’s straight out of a home-improvement magazine: glittering granite and stainless steel with older dark paneling on the walls and door frames.
“You redid most of it—not the floor, though,” I say. The tiles are dingy pink gray, just as I remember. A dark splotch draws my eye like a vortex. Drain cleaner. Blinding. Blood.
Stop being silly. The babysitter didn’t hurt herself in our house. I sink into a chair, my T-shirt suddenly sticky, my heart thumping.
“Floors are next on the list,” Erika says, shoveling leaves into a teapot. There’s still a tension in her spine, a watchfulness, as if my presence has changed this beautiful house for her and she’s not sure why.
When she clicks on the gas burner, something clicks in me, too. Hedda, what were you thinking? This house could have burned to the ground!
It’s Mom’s voice. I close my eyes, shocked by the waves of guilt that fill me along with a rush of memory. The whiff of gas in the air is pure shame. I did it. I turned on the burner and let it hiss. Mom was so angry.
“This house is so old,” I say, fighting my urge to jump up and flick off the burner. “I didn’t remember that.”
“Craftsman, 1909.” As Erika brings us a steaming tray, Dad launches into a lecture about their latest renovations.
My face stiffens into a mask: nod and smile, nod and laugh. I want to be happy for real, but it’s all just too new, and the stakes are too high.
“Are you going to pick up Clint?” Dad asks Erika.
My nine-year-old half brother, a complete stranger to me. My heart thuds at the thought that he might look at me for the first time and see a freak, an intruder.
“Conor’s mom’s giving him a ride,” Erika says.
“Where does Clint go to school?” I clasp my hands to stop the trembling.
That turns out to be the right question to ask; Dad and Erika rhapsodize about the nearby elementary school with its “holistic curriculum.” “They grow their own lettuce and feed chickens,” Erika says.