Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Her great fear was always how her ongoing failure to restabilize their lives might be delaying Sara’s recovery from all the trauma of the fall; but Sara, even if she didn’t care to give her mother the satisfaction of admitting it, felt she was coping with uncertainty just fine. School, which under normal circumstances was pretty much your whole life at that age, now felt strangely and sort of exhilaratingly meaningless to her. She would be there for only one semester anyway, before everyone dispersed for the summer and then to high school. And it wasn’t like Rensselaer Valley, where there was pretty much only one high school to go to, so that all the cliques basically just relocated to a new building. You overheard some kids talking about the SHS test, or about private school, and a few delusional girls who thought they were talented enough to get into LaGuardia or Sinatra. But the vast majority would scatter in June and head off in September to one of three sort-of-nearby high schools, each of them, from what Sara overheard, even more vast and unsightly and perfunctory and treacherous than whatever middle school you had just graduated from. Wherever Sara wound up next year, she’d be starting over, socially and academically, yet again. She’d moved to New York too late to take the SHS exam anyway, not that she would have passed it, even though everyone seemed to think Asians passed it automatically. She hadn’t met anyone who’d passed it.

Unexpectedly, all of these aspects of her new life that should have depressed her — no friends, no sense of her own near-term future, everything and everyone brand new and a total cipher — made her feel pretty bullish instead. It was like getting a cosmic do-over in terms of who you even were. It wasn’t just that no one seemed to know or care who her father was. That was the kind of story that would have bored an eighth grader to death anyway: it was more of an old-people scandal, the type of scandal that would have been on somebody’s parents’ radar, maybe, if she’d ever been invited to meet anybody else’s parents, which she had not. But it was fantastic, in a way, not knowing anyone or, rather, being unknown to everyone. She wasn’t really engaged in reinventing herself, not yet, but she had a strong and pleasing sense of being dormant, like a one-girl sleeper cell, until she got the lay of the land and figured out where and how she wanted the next few years to go.

She was unused to so much time alone, not least at home, where her mom, even without her former commute, was so tired at night that there was zero supervision in terms of homework. But the homework was easily handled anyway. It was such a relief after eighth grade in Rensselaer Valley, where everyone stressed out constantly and bragged about how little sleep they got. She couldn’t believe how little everyone here seemed to care about standing out in that way. It was really liberating. The school didn’t have any sort of team sports program — even the nominal playground was now filled with trailers brought in to provide extra classroom space. Her mom did get it sufficiently together to sign her up for an after-school basketball league on the West Side. Tuesday and Friday she rode the bus back and forth to Broadway with her uniform on under her clothes. And that too was just unbelievably low-key compared to what she was used to: no tryouts, no screaming coaches, no practices even, just games. Just playing.

They ordered out for dinner almost every night — it was so easy in the city, and so much better than home cooking, that not ordering out seemed borderline perverse — and after the first several weeks that duty too became Sara’s. They’d eat in front of the TV, and sometime between eight and nine she would peripherally watch her mother’s chin sink down toward her chest, snap up suddenly, and then sink again for good. It was awkward and sad, but, at the same time, Sara had little desire for things to revert too far in the direction of how they used to be, because she liked being in charge of herself, of what she ate, when she went to bed, where she spent her time. One day she went to the movies right after school let out, by herself, and still got back home before her mom did; when asked how she’d spent the afternoon, Sara replied that she’d gone to a friend’s apartment to study for a test. It was a totally pointless lie — her mother probably would have been pleased, if anything, to know she’d been to see a movie — but in another way it demonstrated perfectly the point that her time was now her own. So many things that used to define her just didn’t signify that much anymore: New York City was full of only children, New York City was full of Asians, New York City was full of adoptees who wore their status on their faces, in their features’ unlikeness to those of their mothers and fathers. There was a Facebook group for her school, and one for her grade as well, but she stayed off of them. She was pretty sure no one was talking about her on there anyway. She was neither hot enough nor weird enough, basically, to spark much social interest from either boys or girls, and on that score too she felt oddly but definitely relieved.

Even to her dad she seemed both there and not there at the same time. He emailed a lot but, for some reason, hadn’t called or even texted for weeks. Maybe he still felt guilty about what he’d done, which, as she understood it, involved him trying to get over on some much younger woman who worked for him, getting his ass kicked by that woman’s boyfriend, and then driving around drunk and bleeding afterward like some kind of maniac. It was pretty embarrassing and disgusting, to be sure, whatever this chick’s age, which Sara didn’t quite see the point of being shocked by — they were both adults. But to her the disappointing thing was that her father seemed to have done this not because he’d fallen in love or for any other logical reason but simply because he had freaked out — his life had seemed intolerable to him — and parents just were not supposed to do that. Apart from the sexual element of it, she felt she understood his state of mind easily enough — this cannot be my life; this cannot be my family; my real life and family must have been left behind somewhere else — because everybody felt that way sometimes, but you were not supposed to give in to that feeling at his age, at least not if you had agreed earlier on to become some girl’s father.

For a while she got an email from her dad at the same time every day. All he did was ask her questions, as if to make up for the period in which he’d had to feign interest in her, and no detail was too small to escape his anxious attention: if she mentioned playing a basketball game, he wanted to know what the score was, and if she told him it was 24–22, he wanted to know who’d scored the winning basket. Even when the names meant nothing to him. Sometimes she’d text him, but he would never reply. She still hadn’t mentioned any of it to her mom; she had a sense of the panic and fury that would lead to, and as weak as her connection to her father was now, she didn’t want to lose it again. Besides, if her parents could just decide on their own one day that their lives were now separate, who was anyone to tell her that her relationships with them couldn’t be kept separate as well? One night when her mom was out unusually late, Sara called him but just got his voice mail: she left a message, but his email the next day read very much as if he hadn’t heard it. “Did u lose yr phone?” she emailed him. No reply. Finally she sent him an email saying that she understood if he didn’t want to talk about himself because he felt guilty or whatever, but that it was starting to seem weird to her that he wouldn’t even tell her where he was, where he was living, where he was working, etc. Was she ever going to see him again? The next day, same hour as every day, she opened an email from him, this time with the subject line “confession time”: