Page 55 of The Intruder

BEFORE

ELLA

I am strapped into the passenger’s seat of my social worker’s SUV, traveling sixty miles per hour in the direction of New Hampshire.

My social worker is named Amara. She is a big woman with close-cropped curly black hair and lots of comfy padding who likes to envelope me in great big hugs.

When we first met, that was the first thing she did.

She hugged me for, like, five straight minutes.

At first, I didn’t like it, but then by the time she let me go, I wished I could have stayed in the hug longer, and there were tears running down my cheeks.

You poor thing, Amara said to me. You have been through so much.

She wasn’t just talking about losing my mother in the fire. She knew about the hoarding. She knew that I was “dangerously underweight.” She knew about the cigarette burns on my arms. She didn’t know everything, or else I’d probably be wherever Anton is right now, but she knew a lot.

Anton is doing okay. Not great, but good enough.

I haven’t seen him since that awful day, and I’m not sure I ever will again because he’ll be in juvenile detention for a very long time, but he wrote me a letter telling me he was surviving.

I wrote a long letter back to him, and Amara swore she would get it to him.

I told him that even if we couldn’t see each other, we would be pen pals. I really, really miss him.

“We’re almost there,” Amara informs me as we turn off the highway.

My stomach clenches. We have been driving for over an hour now, and I have been dreading this moment the whole time. But unless Amara crashes this car, which I don’t think is very likely, we are going to be at our destination any moment.

The town looks quiet. Quieter than Medford. I see a couple of kids riding their bicycles and a handful of people driving by in cars, but the whole place has a small-town kind of vibe. I decide it wouldn’t be a terrible place to finish growing up.

Although a lot depends on the person I’ll be living with.

Amara finally parks in front of a small apartment building. She kills the engine and turns to look at me, her dimples popping as she smiles. “So, Ella,” she says. “Are you ready to meet your father?”

Am I? I smooth out the pink skirt that Amara helped me pick out for this occasion, and I adjust the headband that is holding back my red-brown hair, which becomes more brown than red every day. I offer her what I’m sure is a super weak smile, but I’m trying.

“You look great,” she assures me. “He’s going to love you.”

My mother told me my father disappeared after getting out of prison, so I assumed going to live with him was not an option.

But when child services told him what happened and that I needed a home, he was apparently extremely eager to take me in.

He told Amara that he came to my mother years ago, after first being released, wanting to have a relationship with me, and she refused to let him.

She told him he was no good and she didn’t want a jailbird to be part of our family.

Really, she was probably just scared he would make her get rid of all her junk.

And now I’m supposed to go live with this man who I have never met before but who is apparently my father. And also, he went to prison for assault, although he has apparently been an upstanding citizen since the time of his release. To say I’m terrified is an understatement.

“He has a nice apartment,” Amara says. “Very clean. It’s only one bedroom, but he said he’ll sleep on the couch and you can have the bedroom. He’s going to be looking for a two-bedroom.”

“Okay,” I agree. I like the clean part best of all.

We climb out of the car and enter my father’s apartment building.

He’s on the third floor, so we take the elevator upstairs.

I’ve got a little suitcase with me full of clothing that Amara helped me buy.

This is everything I own in the world—I don’t have very much since it all burned down in the fire.

I don’t mind losing all my stuff though.

It all smelled like rotten pumpkin anyway.

I am starting to panic by the time we get to the door of the apartment.

My hands won’t stop shaking, and a billion thoughts are running through my head.

After all this time, I’m finally going to meet my father.

He’s really my father—they even did a test where they swabbed the inside of my cheek to make absolutely sure.

But really, he’s a complete stranger. What if I don’t like him?

What if he doesn’t like me? What if we like each other fine, but he snores really loudly and keeps me awake all night?

What if we like each other, he doesn’t snore, but he likes terrible music and wants to play it all the time?

When I get in my head like this, it seems almost impossible that everything will go well.

A second later, the door swings open. A man of about forty stands there, a nervous smile on his lips. My father, I guess. I’ve been so scared about meeting this stranger, but now that I am looking at him, he looks super familiar to me. I don’t know why though.

“Hi, Elizabeth…Ella,” my father says.

“Hello,” I say softly.

We just stand there in silence for a few seconds until Amara bursts out, “You two look so much alike!”

Now it finally hits me. The reason my father looks so familiar is because he looks a lot like I do.

His face is similar to the one I see looking back at me in the mirror—he has the same blue eyes, the same red-tinged brown hair, the same nose with the slight bump on the bridge, the same shape of his chin.

And when Amara says that, he beams like she’s paid him the highest compliment.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Ella,” my father tells me, speaking quickly like he’s excited or nervous, the way I sometimes do.

“I called your mom a dozen times, and she wouldn’t let me talk to you.

I even showed up at the door, but she said she would call the cops if I did it again, and since I was still on parole, I was worried I’d go back to prison.

She even tried to convince me you weren’t mine, but I never believed that for a second.

You’re a dead ringer for my mother, God rest her soul. ”

A fresh wave of resentment toward my mother washes over me. There are days when I feel regret over what I did, but that vanishes in an instant—I should have done it sooner.

“We have a lot of catching up to do.” His smile widens. “Please, won’t you come in?”

Amara and I enter his apartment. The first thing I am struck by is how neat it is. The sofa is spotless, the carpet looks like it has been recently vacuumed, and there isn’t a speck of dirty laundry in sight. It’s the diametric opposite of the house where I used to live, and I love it. So much.

Amara leans in to whisper in my ear, “What do you think?”

I can only nod happily.

Before we drove out here, Amara swore to me that if I did not feel up to it, I would not have to stay this first night—that she would take me with her on her way out. When she is ready to leave, my father looks at me. “What do you think, Ella? Do you want to stay here with me?”

The answer is obvious. I couldn’t imagine going back to the group home when I have a chance to stay here. “Yes.”

“Good.” His eyes crinkle when he smiles in a way that I have already come to love. “Because I want you to stay here with me. There’s nothing more important than family.”

I agree. And I finally feel like I am with family who cares about me, here with my father.

“Do you know what an infinity promise is?” he asks me.

I shake my head.

“It’s the strongest kind of promise,” he says. “Sometimes people promise things and don’t mean it, but when you make an infinity promise, you have to keep it forever.” He looks me in the eyes. “And I want you to know that I infinity promise I will always be around to take care of you.”

“What happens if you break an infinity promise?”

“Well,” he says, “you get dysentery.”

Everything is different after that. My father isn’t perfect—he’s an ex-con and recovering alcoholic—but he tries his best to give me a good home.

There’s always food in the refrigerator, and we do end up moving to a two-bedroom apartment where I get my own space, and he never once tries to lock me in a closet.

He knows what Amara told him about what my life was like back in Medford.

He sometimes tells me how sorry he is—he only walked away because he thought my mother was taking good care of me and he didn’t want to mess up my life.

If only he had known, he would have fought to get custody of me.

I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to help you, Ella.

He also apologizes to me for the terrible thing he did that got him sent to prison in the first place.

Eventually, I open up to him about all the terrible things that happened in my mother’s house. At first, I just tell him a few details. The rotten food in the refrigerator. All the millions of papers in every corner of the house. Being locked in the closet for hours on end.

But over the years, as I grow to trust him more, I reveal more details about my life. And one night, when I am seventeen years old, I tell him about my last night living in that house. And how I burned it all down with my mother inside.

The second the words leave my mouth, I’m sorry I said it. My father and I have become very close, but it was too much to admit something like that. He won’t understand. He’ll think that I am sick, that I should be locked away. It’s a thought that even I myself have sometimes.

But when the truth comes out, he takes my hand in his and gives it a squeeze.

Good girl, Casey, he tells me. She deserved it.

I almost forgot that this was a man who beat another man badly enough to land him in the hospital. That’s why he went to prison in the first place. He admits to me that the man he assaulted was not just a random man in the bar. He had discovered this man was sleeping with his girlfriend—my mother.

When someone deserves bad things, he says, it’s sometimes up to you to dispense justice.

My father taught me a lot of things over the years. But this is one piece of wisdom I will never forget.