Written by Marissa Boucher of Richard Montgomery High School
The first time you see her, you don’t quite believe your eyes. But there she is, sitting in her favorite armchair, feet not quite touching the ground. When you step closer, she disappears. You set your glass beside the sink and go to bed. You tell yourself the next morning that it was late, and you’d been drinking—of course some fantastic sightings were in order. You were just as likely to have hallucinated a unicorn, or seven very angry kittens. Nothing more to it.
The next time she comes, you are stone-cold sober.
***
You shut the door behind you and toss your bag to the side. Then you hear her voice. Bad day at work?
“It wasn’t great,” you respond instinctively. She is older now—perhaps around that age when she asked if she was ugly, and you pulled out old photographs of her mother to explain that, biologically, no one born of that woman could be anything other than beautiful.
Aw, she says. What happened? You notice that she has hung your bag on its customary hook.
What did happen? What happened today but success—tales of new locations and rising stocks and mentions in Forbes?
“Ah, nothing,” you say, retreating to the kitchen for a glass of water. When you come back, she is gone. Your bag sits by the door, untouched.
***
When she appears for the third time, you barely notice her. You are busy entertaining the very sweet lady you’ve been seeing, and all you hear as she exits is her muttered I’ll give you two some privacy.
To her credit, the woman you’re with is very nice about the whole thing. “I don’t know if I can do this tonight,” you say, and she smiles and redoes the buttons on her shirt. When you tell her you’d prefer she go home, her manner changes to understandably annoyed.
“You’re forcing me out after you asked me to come?”
“I’m sorry,” you attempt. “It’s just not a good time.”
“When will it be?” she demands. “I’ve been trying to get through to you since our second date, and you can’t even spare me the time of day.”
She pulls her coat on and starts to leave. “Let me drive you home,” you say. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Believe me,” she tells you, “you’ve already done the least you can do.” And she’s gone.
She’s right, you know, says a voice from the corner. Its owner stands and shrugs. Not that it’s any of my business. She leaves the bedroom door ajar as she, too, leaves. This time, you follow.
There’s no one else in the house. You lock the front door and decide that perhaps it is time for bed.
***
You dream of your wedding day. It is soft, quiet. There are no sharp edges.
Then you see faceless demons and surgeries gone wrong and giant scythes with which to cut open a body like yours. Because dreams are stupid, you remind yourself, and only a fool would attempt to pull meaning from them.
You text the lady an apology the next morning. Just in case.
***
Any response?
“From who?” you fake. She sees right through you, as always. You can’t quite tell how old she is at this point; all you see is that she is closer to that day than you’d like her to be.
Why’d you break it off, anyway? she asks. I thought you liked her.
You sigh and start making coffee. “I can’t be with her. That doesn’t mean I don’t like her.”
Instead of letting that be enough, she follows up with a Why can’t you be with her?
Her questions always tripped you up, especially when she got a bit older. “Because I don’t have time,” you say. “I have the job, and—and you know how much energy that takes. It’s just not in the cards.”
Hmm, she replies. I don’t think that’s quite true. She smiles as she begins to fade away. But we’ll see.
You are out of milk; your coffee is fittingly bitter.
***
Every day is the same. You have lived this night before, without a doubt. The memory is so close you can almost taste it; obligingly, she takes her place on the armchair and watches rain warp the view from the window. Dad? she says, looking up from the raindrop race taking place on the glass. Is rain just the stars crying?
The clock informs you that it is nearly midnight. This is how she is—one moment it’s “ten more minutes until bedtime, okay?” and the next, you’ve been up for three hours explaining the basics of DNA. Because she would ask. She could ask you a million questions about ribonucleic acid and trick you into thinking like a scientist instead of a father.
You always had all the answers. Perhaps you miss that—the feeling of being right, the knowledge that you were trusted by someone incredible. Even when everything else slipped away, that remained, for better or for worse.
“No,” you tell her, “rain doesn’t come from the stars. It comes from the clouds and the ocean.” You look over to make sure she understands, but she’s gone. Another figment of an imploding mind.
***
“Why are you here?” you ask her one night, while the washing machine makes concerning noises from the laundry room.
Your guess is as good as mine. She smiles—you cannot deny that you love to see her smile, but some clarity would be nice once in a while.
Before you can push for more, she disappears again, leaving you tense and stranded. You hear the laundry stop and decide that you should call it a night.
It takes you hours to fall asleep.
***
You wake up to a text. “I want to make this work,” it reads. “But you have to be open with me.” You suppose you owe her a response—perhaps even a small piece of you is excited at the prospect of making things work with someone.
But then she appears, slipping into the room like a cat, and you are reminded that you really don’t have time for that sort of thing.
***
That night and all through the next day, she is nowhere to be found. Instead, she lives in your memories, which you nurse like the last of a bottle of whiskey.
Her penchant for questions is not a recent phenomenon. You’re reminded of this as you ride the train to work, as you answer your fortieth phone call, as you catch a glimpse of the moon on your way home. You took her to work one day, when she was very young. That day was much slower than the others—you got to the office half an hour late because she refused to walk past flowers without smelling them, or to pass a musician without tossing coins into his case, or to see another child her age without waving and talking to them.
On your way home, you try to adopt the same attitude, but the flowers are dead, the musicians silent, the children all grown up.
***
This time, it is you who asks the question. “Where have you been?”
Where was I supposed to be?
Déjà vu hits you like a train. You know this moment like the back of your hand; perhaps better, because who scans the back of their hand nightly for flaws and fixes, for answers to aching questions?
“Well,” you say, feeling quite a bit like you’re invading Russia in winter, “you didn’t come home, and I got worried.”
Worried about me? The scorn in her voice is unfamiliar. Crippling.
“I’m allowed,” you say, suddenly powerless. Or not so suddenly. You don’t know.
I’m here because I’m worried about you.
You bristle. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine.”
Of course, she recognizes the lie. It makes sense—didn’t you always call her out when she said the same thing? You’re a stranger to empathy, no question, but didn’t you have a keen eye for your daughter’s feelings?
As though she can hear your thoughts, she says, You did. You did a great job.
“You were too good,” she told you, an eternity ago. “You were only ever perfect, and I idolized you because of it. There’s a problem there, right? I’m not just making this up?”
“If I did such a great job,” you ask her, “why did you leave?”
Why did Mom leave? Why did the lady from last week leave? She stands up, and for a moment the kitchen lights cast her shadow on you. Maybe they didn’t leave. Maybe you did.
You turn defensive, guided only by instinct. “Your mother loves to say that I pushed her away. It’s not true.”
Maybe it’s not. Maybe she’s a liar. Maybe she’s sad and lonely and needs someone to blame it on. Her words are acid; they bite. But she’s not the one that sits at home and talks to memories like they can help.
You don’t say anything, but she is not finished. And maybe I left because I didn’t know how to help you. I was watching you die. You couldn’t tell me how to help because you were like a brick wall. You always have been.
“Take care of yourself,” she had said that day. Before she had closed the front door one last time. Before you had left it unlocked, hoping for her return and seeing nothing but emptiness the next morning. Before she had left for good.
Even now, you can hear the stars crying.
***
She does not come back. You only see her in your dreams. “Why are you doing this to me?” you ask.
She is watching the window intently, as though taking a photograph with her eyes. I thought you might need it, she tells you, her gaze fixated on the outdoors.
“Need what?” You don’t tell her that you’ve been grateful for every moment. “Need my daughter to pop in and out of my life so she can tell me everything I’ve done wrong?”
She turns toward you. I think you know I’m not your daughter.
And then she disappears again, but her words linger, bittersweet on your tongue.
When you wake up, something has changed.
***
Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe you’re just making this up out of anguish, out of loneliness and despair. Maybe this feeling of walking down new hallways and making beginnings from endings is fleeting. Maybe you’ll be back to your old self by sundown. You see someone who looks like her on the train; you pass another doppelgänger in the office. She is in every step you take. But you keep walking, and she doesn’t, and maybe you’re still invading Russia, but you’re doing it in the spring. And maybe she’ll return someday, and maybe when you see her, you’ll say hello and goodbye all in one breath, and maybe you won’t let her slow you down anymore, and maybe you will. And maybe it’s not the perfect way to live, but maybe it’s good enough.
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