Sarah Dessen - This Lullaby

Of course he knew the song, he said, and then hummed the opening chords, pulling the words out of thin air. They’d even sung it a couple of times at weddings, he said: some brides picked it for the dance with their father. Which seemed so stupid to me, considering the words. I will let you down, it says, right there in the first verse, plain as day. What kind of father says such a thing? But that, of course, was a question I’d long ago quit asking myself.

He was still strumming the chords, finding them in the dark.

“Dexter.”

“Why do you hate it that much?”

“I don’t hate it. I just… I’m sick of it, that’s all.” But this wasn’t true either. I did hate it sometimes, for the lie that it was. As if my father had been able, with just a few words scribbled in a Motel 6, to excuse the fact that he never bothered to know me. Seven years he’d spent with my mother, most of them good until one last blowout, resulting in him leaving for California, with her pregnant, although she didn’t find that out until later. Two years after I was born, he died of a heart attack, never having made it back across the country to see me. It was the ultimate out, this song, admitting to the world that he’d only disappoint me, and didn’t that just make him so noble, really? As if he was beating me to the punch, his words living forever, while I was left speechless, no rebuttal, no words left to say.

Dexter strummed the guitar idly, not picking out any real melody, just messing around. He said, “Funny how I’ve heard that song all my life and never knew it was for you.”

“It’s just a song,” I said, running my fingers over the windowsill, easing them around those snow globes. “I never even knew him.”

“It’s too bad. I bet he was a cool guy.”

“Maybe,” I said. It was weird to be talking about my father out loud, something I hadn’t done since sixth grade, when my mother found therapy the way some people find God and dragged us all in for group, individual, and art until her money ran out.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, and I was unnerved by how solemn he sounded, how serious. As if he’d found that map after all and was dangerously close, circling.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

He was quiet for a second, and I had a flash of his face earlier that night, caught unaware by Don’s pronouncements, and the vulnerability I’d seen there. It had unsettled me, because I was used to the Dexter I liked, the funny guy with the skinny waist and the fingers that pressed against my neck just so. In just seconds I’d seen another shade of him, and if it had been light where we were now, he’d have seen the same of me. So I was grateful, as I had been so often in my life, for the dark.

I rolled over and pressed myself into the pillow, listening to the sound of my own breathing. I heard him move, a soft noise as the guitar was put down, and next his arms were around me, circling my back, his face against my shoulder. He was so close to me in that moment, too close, but I had never pushed a guy away for that. If anything I pulled them nearer, taking them in, as I did now, sure in my belief that knowing me that well would easily be enough to scare them away.

“I mean, God,” Lissa said, stopping in front of a huge display of bedsheets, “who knows the difference between a duvet and a comforter?”

We were in Linens Etc., armed with Lissa’s mom’s gold card, the list of items that the university suggested for all incoming freshmen, and a letter from Lissa’s future roommate, a girl named Delia from Boca Raton, Florida. She’d already been in contact so that she and Lissa could color-coordinate their bed linens, discuss who should bring what in the way of televisions, microwaves, and wall hangings, and just to “break the ice” so that by August, when classes started, they’d already “be like sisters.” If Lissa wasn’t already glum about starting college post-Adam, this letter-written on pink stationery in silver ink, and spewing forth glitter when she pulled it from the envelope-had pretty much done her in.

“A duvet,” I told her, stopping to eye a stack of thick purple towels, “is a cover for a comforter, usually a down comforter. And a comforter is just a glorified quilt.”

She crossed her eyes at me, sighed, and pushed some hair out of her face. Lately she’d just seemed cranky all the time, defeated, as if at the age of eighteen life already sucked beyond any hope of improvement.

“I’m supposed to get a comforter in a purple/pink hue,” she said, reading off Delia’s letter. “And sheets to match. And a bed ruffle, whatever the hell that is.”

“It goes around the base of the bed,” I explained. “To cover the legs and provide a sort of color continuity, all the way to the floor.”

She looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Color continuity?” she asked.

“My mother bought a new bedroom suite a few years back,” I said, taking the list out of her hand. “I got an entire education in thread count sheets and Egyptian cotton.”

Lissa stopped the cart next to a display of plastic wastebas kets, picking up a lime green one with blue trim. “I should get this,” she told me, turning it in her hands, “just because it will so clash with her predetermined scheme. In fact, I should pick the most butt-ugly furnishings as a complete protest against her assumption that I would just go along with whatever she said.”

I glanced around: butt ugly was entirely possible at Linens Etc., which carried not only lime green trash cans but also leopard-patterned tissue holders, framed prints of kittens frolicking with puppies, and bath mats shaped like feet. “Lissa,” I said gently, “maybe we shouldn’t do this today.”

“We have to,” she grumbled, grabbing a pack of sheets-the wrong size, and bright red-off a nearby shelf and tossing them into the cart. “I’m seeing Delia at orientation next week and I’m sure she’ll want a freaking update.”

I picked up the red sheets and put them back on the shelf while she pouted around the toothbrush holders, completely un-enthused. “Lissa, is this really how you want to start college? With a totally shit attitude?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah, well that’s easy for you to say, Miss Going-across-the-Country-Free-and Clear-No-Problems. You’ll be out in sunny California, windsurfing and eating sushi while I’m stuck here in the same place I’ve always been, watching Adam date his way through the entire freshman class.”

“Windsurfing and sushi?” I said. “At the same time?”

“You know what I mean!” she snapped, and a woman pricing a stack of washcloths glanced over at us. Lissa lowered her voice and added, “I might not even go to school anyway. I might defer and join the Peace Corps and go to Africa and shave my head and dig latrines.”

“Shave your head?” I said, because, really, this was the most ludicrous part of the whole thing. “You? Do you have any idea how ugly most people’s bare heads are? They’ve got all kinds of bumps, Lissa. And you won’t know until it’s too late and you’re flat-out bald.”

“You’re not even listening to me!” she said. “It’s always been so easy for you, Remy. So gorgeous and confident and smart. No guy ever dumped you and left you shattered.”

“That’s not true,” I said in a level voice. “And you know it.”

She paused at this, as our shared history caught up with her. Okay, so maybe I was known for having the upper hand in my relationships, but there was a reason for that. She didn’t know what happened that night at Albert’s, within shouting distance of her own bedroom window. But since then, I’d been stomped on my fair share. Even Jonathan had caught me unaware.