Diane Chamberlain - The Good Father

“What do I tell people?” Michael asked. “Are we separated? Getting a divorce? How do I explain to people that you’ve moved out of the house?”

“Tell them whatever makes you comfortable.” I didn’t care what people thought. I used to, but everything was different now. Michael still cared, though, and that was the difference between us. He was still living in our old lives, where what people thought mattered and where he wanted to find a way back to normal. I’d given up on normal. I didn’t care about normal. My therapist Judith’s reaction when I told her that? “That’s normal,” she said, and the old me would have laughed, but I didn’t laugh anymore.

Michael gestured to one of the boxes on the stool by the breakfast bar. “This one says bedroom . I’ll carry it in for you.”

“Great. Thanks.” I watched him lift it into his arms. I used to love his arms, probably more than any other part of his body. He worked out every day and his arms were undeniably ripped. Michael was that rare combination of brains and brawn. “A geek with a great body,” one of my friends had once told me, when we were watching our husbands playing with our kids in someone’s backyard pool. Watching him now, though, I felt nothing.

I walked the few short steps to the living room windows and looked at the reassuringly unfamiliar landscape. Absolutely nothing to remind me of my bubbly and beautiful daughter. You want to run away , Judith had said when I told her my plan to rent this apartment. There was no accusation in the way she said it, although I knew she didn’t think it was a good idea. But she didn’t do the lecture bit like Michael did. “You might be able to run away from home,” he’d said, “but you can’t run away from what’s inside your head.” I’d wanted to slug him for saying that. I was sick of his advice and his finding fault in my own personal style of grieving. Never mind that I found plenty of fault in his. I had deep questions he simply couldn’t relate to. Mystical questions. Would I ever see Carolyn again? Was her soul someplace? I felt her around me. I heard her voice sometimes. When I asked him if he did, he said, “Sure” in a way that told me that he didn’t.

Michael came into the living room and stood next to me at the window. He put his arm around my shoulders and I felt the tentative nature of the touch. He no longer knew what I would welcome and what I would shrug off. Judith tried to get me to have some sympathy for him, but I was too busy having sympathy for myself. I had no energy to pay attention to what Michael needed these days. He’d turned into someone I’d once loved but could no longer understand. I knew he could say the same about me.

“I’m worried about you,” he said now. His arm felt too heavy across my shoulders.

“Don’t be.”

“I think it’s wrong for me to let you do this.”

“‘Let me’?” I walked away from his arm and sat down on the sofa. It was uncomfortably firm, nothing like the big, cushy sofa we had at home. “What are you? My father?”

“When are you going back to work?”

“If you ask me that question one more time …” I shook my head in frustration. I’d tried going back to work. I’d lasted half a day. I made a mistake with a medication that could have cost a person his life and I took off my white coat, turned the order over to the other pharmacist, and walked out of the building without looking back.

“You’re going to sit here in this—” he waved an arm through the air to take in the combined living room/dining room/kitchen “—this place and ruminate. And that scares me, Erin.” He looked at me head-on then and I saw the worry in his eyes. I had to look away. I stared down at my hands where they rested flat on my thighs.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“You need to stop going over every detail of it the way you do,” he said, as though he was telling me something he hadn’t already said twenty times. “You have to stop asking yourself all the what-ifs. It happened . You need to start accepting it.”

I stood up. “Time for you to go,” I said, walking to the door. I’d moved into this apartment, in part, to get away from exactly this. “Thank you so much for helping. I know it was hard for you.”

He gave me one last frustrated look before walking to the door. I followed him, opening the door for him, and he leaned over to hug me.

“Do you hate me?” he whispered into my hair.

“Of course not,” I whispered back, even though there were moments when I did. I could honestly say he was the only man I’d ever loved and if anyone had told me we would one day fall apart the way we had, I would have said they just didn’t know us very well. But here we were, as fallen apart as we could be.

I opened the door and he walked into the hallway.

“Bye,” I said. I started to close the door behind him, but felt a sudden rush of panic and pulled it open again. “Don’t touch her room!” I called after him.

He didn’t turn around. Just waved a hand through the air to let me know he’d heard me. I knew he was in pain—maybe tremendous pain. But I also knew how he would deal with it. He’d invent some new video game or work on a repair project. He’d lose himself in activity. He certainly wouldn’t ruminate . He didn’t even know how. I had it down to an art. It wasn’t deliberate. It just happened. My mind would start one place—making a grocery list, for example—and before I knew it, I’d be going over every detail of what happened as if I were describing it to someone. Who was I telling it to inside my head? I needed to relive the details of that night the way an obsessive-compulsive person had to wash her hands over and over again. Sometimes I felt crazy and I’d make myself think of something else, but the minute I let my guard down, I’d be at it again. This was why I loved the Harley’s Dad and Friends group I’d found on the internet. It had been started by the father of eight-year-old Harley, a little girl who was killed in a bicycling accident. The group was full of bereaved parents I’d never met face-to-face but felt as though I knew better than I knew anyone. Better than I knew Michael. They understood my need to go over and over what had happened. They understood me . I spent hours with them every day, reading about their struggles and sharing my own. I actually felt love for some of those people I’d never met. I didn’t even know what most of them looked like, but I was coming to think of them as my best friends.

So, now I was safe. I was creating my own world, in a new neighborhood, with new friends in the Harley’s Dad group and a new apartment. I turned around to take in the living room, thinking my escape . But instead of the bland furniture and the small room, I saw a sky the color of black velvet and the long, illuminated ribbon of the Stardust Pier, and I knew that no matter how far from home I ran, that horrible night would always, always be with me.

BELLA RAN AHEAD OF ME ON THE BEACH AND I watched the sandy soles of her feet flashing in the sunshine. Labor Day had passed and we nearly had the beach to ourselves. Bella’s brown hair flew behind her like a flag and her pink purse slapped against her side as she ran. She looked so free. I wished she could always feel the way she felt right this second. Free and happy. That’s why I brought her out on the beach today, so she could run and just act like a kid. My wrecked house was only a couple of blocks from the beach, and I usually brought her out here nearly every day, but we hadn’t been once in the week since the fire and she’d become this totally serious and confused little girl. Sort of like her totally serious and confused dad. Our lives had turned to shit overnight. I didn’t want her to know that. I didn’t want her to feel scared, ever. But she was no dummy. She knew everything had changed.