Page 22

21.

We headed out for Seattle the following morning.

So many aspects of the situation should have been alarming to me. The dress and the plasticky heels and the purloined lipstick. The suit that I’d watched my father pack, gray flannel with thrift-store tags on it. The new Smith it’s just the outskirts. What, did you think we were going to stay at a five-star hotel?”

“Not, it’s just—” My disappointment was palpable, and potentially incriminating. I tried to temper my tone. “I wanted to see downtown. And the Space Needle. I read about that in the atlas. I’ve never seen a city before.”

I don’t know why this observation came as a surprise to my father. Something softened in him then and put a nostalgic gleam in his eye. “If all goes well tomorrow, we can go there after. Seattle’s not so bad as cities go. There’s a pretty good arboretum, if it’s not raining. And we’ll go to the fish market and eat some oysters. They taste like the ocean. You’ll like them.”

So, I’d have to wait until tomorrow and slip away when he was distracted. Maybe at the fish market. I told myself that it wouldn’t be so bad to wait until after we’d already completed my father’s project, anyway. I was, after all, still curious about what he had been doing all those times that he’d left me behind. This was my one-and-only chance to find out. Besides, what would it hurt to do this one last thing for him before I headed out on my own? It was the least I could do; it would take the sting out of my departure. And all he was asking me to do was put on a dress and smile. How problematic could thatbe?

Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness. Faith in the people you adore doesn’t disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear. I was nearing that tipping point, but I hadn’t quite arrived there yet.

—

The motel was a dump: The twin beds had comforters that smelled like wet dog; the cottage-cheese ceiling was flaking off in chunks; the television only worked if you put a quarter in a slot. But for someone who had only slept in one room her entire life, it might as well have been the Four Seasons. I opened every drawer and peered in every corner, fascinated by the miniature soaps wrapped in paper and the cups heat-sealed in plastic and the gilt-edged Bible in the nightstand.

My father bought us a dinner of vending machine food, Twinkies and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Mountain Dew and Slim Jims, and I remember how excited I was by this. (And a hair resentful, too: Was this how he ate when he traveled? And why had he never brought any treats home for me?) The sugar high from all the unfamiliar junk food left me so manic that when my father went to take a shower, I turned on the tinny AM/FM clock radio and jumped on the bed to “Sweet Caroline” until I was breathless and sweaty . It felt like all the pieces of my life were suddenly falling into place; all truths about to be unveiled.

And so the last minutes of my childhood ticked away, unnoticed, as I na?vely careened around that shabby room, feeling so very pleased with myself. I didn’t know to try to catch those fleeting moments and hold them close, so I let them vanish, just one of so many things I was about to lose.

—

I slept poorly. The strange sensations—the rough sheets and the chemicals pulsing through my bloodstream and the sounds of the highway just fifty feet away—kept me tossing for most of the night. My father snored, apparently unbothered, in the other bed. I drifted off just before sunrise and when I woke up again a few hours later my father was standing over me with a paper cup of coffee and a sack of donuts. He was already dressed in the thrift-store suit, his hair carefully slicked back, a plain black baseball cap perched on top.

“Better put the dress on,” he said, handing me the coffee. “It’s time to go.”

He waited outside in the truck while I tugged the dress over my head and wiggled the zipper closed. The dress was so tight that I had to take tiny, birdlike sips of air so that I wouldn’t pop the seam. I studied myself in the rust-speckled mirror over the sink. The Jane I knew was still there, with the lank blond hair yanked back in a ponytail, the farmer’s tan burned in from a childhood spent without sunscreen, muscled shoulders from years of chopping wood. But that Jane had taken a back seat to this new coquette with her candy-floss lips and her cleavage hefted so high that it threatened to hit her chin. I wanted to slap the girl in the mirror. I wanted to kiss her, too. It was all very confusing.

What was to come hadn’t even begun, but I was already starting to split in two, dizzied by my own bifurcation.

Outside, a half-hearted drizzle was still falling, the low clouds a gunmetal gray. My father hadn’t thought of getting a nice jacket to go with the dress, so I teetered to the truck in my parka and high heels, the fabric clinging to my goosebumps. He watched me approach through the windshield. The expression on his face looked like he’d just bitten into an unripe plum and was trying to decide whether to swallow it or spit it out.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” he said, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that I could see the outline of every tendon. “I’m thinking we should just go home. You don’t need to be here.”

And even though my impulse was to flee, too—back to the predictable safety of our cabin—I found myself thinking of the story he’d told me, about the bear that he’d rescued me from, the one I’d tried to feed. I looked deep down inside myself and tried to locate that child, the fearless little girl my father so admired.

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I said. I reached up and buckled my seatbelt across the dress, smoothing the fabric over my legs. My father gazed at me for a long minute, doing some invisible calculations, and then sighed and started the truck.

We pulled back onto the freeway.

The roads were quiet, but the parking lots of the churches that we passed were overflowing with station wagons and minivans. As we drove, I let myself imagine that we were a totally different father and daughter, normal ones, headed to Sunday service with everyone else. We’d stand around afterward and eat coffee cake and make small talk—about the weather, or football scores, or our upcoming vacations—like normal families did on television.

Not that a church would let me through the door in the outfit I was wearing.

My father put me in charge of the map, and I mirrored our route with my finger as we drove out of the woods and over a hill and then down through the industrial suburbs. In the distance, the skyscrapers of Seattle finally came into view, silver-faced stalagmites rising up from the horizon. We were headed to an X that my father had marked on the map in black ink, across the water from downtown Seattle.

When we finally arrived at our destination, it turned out to be a collection of low-slung, brick-clad office buildings, spread along a tangle of tree-lined streets. Block after block after block: It seemed to go on forever. I turned to read a sign as we passed, and a little jolt of electricity passed through me as I recognized the logo in four-foot-high letters: MICROSOFT. I’d seen it on the screen of our laptop, every time we booted itup.

Even though it was a Sunday, the campus wasn’t completely deserted; a handful of cars were scattered throughout the parking lots. Fancier cars than I had ever seen before, ones I had no names for but now would identify as Ferraris and BMWs and Mercedes. The sidewalks were totally devoid of pedestrians. No one was out and about who might notice the mud-spattered Chevy S-10 pickup carrying a girl and a man dressed for a night on the town and a business meeting, respectively.

My father pulled over along the road, just past the edge of the campus. “We’ll walk in from here,” he said. He looked in the rearview mirror and adjusted his tie and baseball cap, then pulled a pair of cheap aviator sunglasses from his pocket and perched them on his nose. When he looked at me, I could see my own image reflected back at me, and I couldn’t decide what was more alarming: the cloaking of his eyes or the dolled-up stranger who was reflected in the mirrored lenses.

The drizzle had turned into a fine mist. I didn’t particularly want to get out of the warm truck. Neither of us budged from our seats.

Finally, he reached over me and unlatched the glove box, retrieving the Smith emitting a throaty little cough as he gave me a sideways look. “Jane. You’re a beautiful blonde in a tight dress. It should be easy.”

If there’s one thing a teenage girl should never have to hear, it’s her father describing her sex appeal. I flushed and stared down at my legs. The bare flesh exposed by the dress reminded me of a chicken plucked of its feathers. “You didn’t exactly cover this in home school.”

His gaze fluttered down from my eyes to rest on the sticky fuchsia gloss that was gluing my lips together, and then flung itself upward again, as if the sight upset him. “I figured some things just come naturally to women.”

We both fell silent, thinking. Finally, I spoke: “Do you have any money?”

My father hesitated, taken aback, before slowly extracting a wad of cash from his pocket. It was a fat stack of fresh-from-the-bank twenties, folded in half and held together by an old rubber band. He handed it over, and I waited for him to ask what I planned to do with it, but he said nothing. I shoved the cash in the pocket of the parka, along with the gun. The weight of them was incongruous against my polyester-clad thigh.

“OK,” I said. “I’m ready.” I didn’t move.

“Wait—” My father reached around me with one arm and for one moment I thought he was going to embrace me. But instead he reached behind my head and forked out my ponytail holder, letting my hair spill loose around my shoulders. Haircuts being rare in our house, it had grown almost to my waist.

He fluffed it a little with his fingers, sat back and squinted at me. “Yes. Good. You’re going to do just fine.” There was an odd hitch in his voice, one I hadn’t heard before, throaty and—could it be?—mournful. He cupped my cheek with his palm. “Look. I know I’ve given you a strange life, and I’ve been hard on you sometimes. Too hard, maybe. I had the best intentions, you have to believe me; but I’ve still sometimes wondered whether I did the right thing. And lately, I’ve been watching you grow up, practically a woman, and I’ve worried that you’re starting to want more than I can give you. I can’t fault you for being curious. But the thing is, Jane, deep inside you’re just like me. You can see things, understand them , the way I do. And that’s a gift I’m glad we can share as equals. Because you’re my girl.”

My girl. I’d never heard him use this phrase before. Maybe it was just that the dress was too tight, but I suddenly felt dizzy, almost euphoric. His belief in me—so clearly articulated, after all these years—was what finally propelled me forward, my hand reaching for the handle of the door, my legs swinging out toward the pavement. And off I marched, wobbly-ankled and pimple-fleshed, like a lamb to the slaughter.