Chapter Eleven
SAWYER
Wednesday morning was more of the same with my father running off, seemingly to avoid any conversation with me. I caught him leaving but said nothing, just watched while he took his newspaper and his mug of coffee to the back porch as though he’d ever done that ritual in his life before. For a moment I stood in the kitchen with one hand on the chair, considering running after him and confronting him about it. I knew he’d tell me some bullshit about liking to eat outside or always taking his breakfast in the morning outside, and how could I have forgotten?
He was full of shit. But he was my father, nonetheless. I sat down at the table and watched Mom, seemingly ignorant to the entire affair, sat down across from me. She acted as though she hadn’t a clue what had gone on.
“Do you think he’s ever going to get over this?” I asked her. That hadn’t been quite the right phrasing. I’d meant to make myself out to be more at fault. To some extent, though, I couldn’t do that anymore; I’d done nothing but blame myself and make penance for years. It was his turn now to offer some sort of forgiveness. At least, that’s what I felt.
“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Sawyer,” Mom said. There was a careful tilt to her kind tone and I set my jaw, struggling not to grow frustrated with the wrong person.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “He’d avoided me since I got home. He’s… I don’t know whether it would be worse if he didn’t, but he’s avoiding me. Treats me like I’m not even here. Or, worse, like I’m here and he hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“Then why does he leave?” I knew it wasn’t fair, in a way, to ask that when I had left myself years ago. But I’d left for much different reasons, many of which had to do with getting my father back on my good side, nonetheless.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Mom said. “I really don’t, Sawyer, and you know I don’t like to talk to you about what we discuss, but I can tell you it hasn’t given me any leave to answer that question.”
I sighed and stared at the back of his head through the glass. I’d begun to get the feeling that I would never understand him, or maybe that he would never understand me.
“What I can tell you,” Mom said, carefully ladling herself a spoon of eggs, “is that he loves you. Whether or not you can tell it, he does.”
“That’s a lovely thought, Mom,” I returned, despite my better judgment. I should have known better than to snap like that, and she visibly stiffened, but there was no taking it back. And in truth, I meant it. She had no reason to defend the way he was treating me, at least, not unless she agreed with it in some part.
I had another appointment with Quinn that day. I’d thought of skipping it, but now I looked for the excuse to get out of the house. The appointment was only for an hour, but maybe she would take me up on my invitation for dinner. Well, my return to her invitation for dinner. I couldn’t help but be sorely disappointed that events had turned out the way they had.
Today, when I arrived in her office, the door was open. I didn’t sit down in the waiting room but rather proceeded directly to the door, and knocked against the side of it.
“Come in!”
So I did. It was hard not to marvel at her where she sat. She’d been lovely in jeans and a shirt at the party, but in slacks and these soft, ruffled blouses, she was nearly irresistible. For work, I noticed she wore glasses, perched on her nose and magnifying the deep blue in her eyes. They sat, round and all-knowing, above the peaks of her cheekbones and pointed slope of her nose. When she saw me, her mouth curled into a small smile.
“Sawyer, you’re just a little early,” she said.
I stood by the couch. “Do you need a few more minutes?”
“No, no. I just appreciate punctuality, and I’m glad that you do, too,” she said, and my own smile appeared despite any attempt to keep myself somber.
I hated that she’d turned out to be my therapist. In any other situation, I would ask her to dinner and at least attempt to date her. I didn’t know that I could stand sitting on this couch and not doing anything about this.
“I was rushing out of the house, really,” I said, as a sort of humble statement. I was punctual, but my punctuality today had been more circumstantial than behavioral.
“Oh? What had you in a hurry?”
“My dad.”
“Is he cross with you?”
I considered shutting the conversation down. I didn’t want to tell her all about my personal life and make her look at me as some broken person who needed help. But at this point, there was no point in trying not to talk to her. I had appointments with her, she didn’t want to go on dates with me, and the only thing I was achieving with shutting conversation down was making myself look ornery to her.
“Sort of,” I said. “He’s… he tends to ignore me.”
“Since you got back?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I’ll walk into a room; he’ll leave. He avoided the party we had when I got back, and he’d avoided me since.”
“He didn’t come to meet you at the airport?” Quinn tilted her head slightly, and I couldn’t help but notice she had some sort of semblance of pity on her features. I adjusted myself slightly and tried to dissuade that.
“No, he didn’t, but it wasn’t a big deal,” I said. He wasn’t fighting with me, shouting at me, hitting me, any of that. Even despite all that we’d been through, he was at least being moderately civil. Part of me wanted to explain that, that everything could be much worse than it was.
“It’s just kind of hard, though, knowing that we used to get along,” I said. I looked down at the floor. “When I was a kid, you know, we would go everywhere together. “I remember being a little kid and going to get donuts with him on Saturday mornings. I was in Boy Scouts, too, and he used to go on all the campouts with me. We used to have a really good time.”
“What happened to change that?” Quinn asked.
So much had happened to change that, really. Almost everything that had happened was my fault, too, and not some change of heart by my father. I wanted to perpetuate the narrative that my father was a villain. It might help me in Quinn’s eyes and make me look like some sort of unfairly treated kid. At least it would be better than the truth. I decided to evade from the truth as best I could.
“It’s just been different since I got back,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. Since I got back, he was more blatantly hateful towards me. The full truth would be that something happened before I left that made the situation change, and he’d been hateful before, too, just to a different extent.
Quinn looked like she suspected I was lying. It was in the arch of her eyebrow and slight twist of her mouth. I wondered what kind of date I might take her on, in a world where she would allow me to take her on a date. Probably dinner, somewhere nice but not too upscale. She didn’t seem like someone easily impressed by lavish meals or fancy decorations. She was well-educated—maybe she would want to go to an art museum, or see something interesting. She deserved better than a stereotypical movie date, that was for sure.
“When you were overseas, did you talk to him about something that had an effect on him?” She asked.
I shook my head. I hadn’t actually had any contact with him overseas. There had been one phone call from boot camp, one extremely terse phone call that hadn’t gone well. Neither of us had shouted, but he’d made it very clear that joining the military wasn’t going to solve my problems. Maybe turning to that phone call would help me understand why he still hated me.
“So he just randomly decided not to talk to you anymore? Do you think he feels guilty about your service, or doesn’t know how to talk to you about it?” Quinn asked.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes when people come home from wartime, their families get a little distant because they don’t know how to talk to the veteran about their time overseas. They know that they must have seen horrible things and don’t know what to say about it. So they don’t say anything. Sometimes people get resentful of the attention veterans receive.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Resentful of the attention?”
“I know, it’s a really shitty way to be,” Quinn agreed. “If someone serves any amount of time doing some of the stuff the SEALs do, they probably deserve a nod and a ‘thank you for your service’ every now and again. It’s probably the least they could do.”
I shrugged. “I don’t like to think I’m looking for thanks.”
“Well, the point is that it’s displacement,” Quinn said. “Someone feels inadequate in one part of their life, and they see someone else getting attention or merit, and they don’t connect the reason in their brain. They just get resentful of the other person because they don’t realize that they’re actually resentful of themselves.”
That made sense. I knew a lot of people got irritated with how much attention veterans got, and I knew that the US tended to give veterans more attention than other countries did. Some people called it ‘deification,’ and I didn’t know if that was true. I certainly didn’t consider myself a god. I considered myself a person who’d done a job he needed to do to get his life in order. I wasn’t really a hero.
But that was the label people put on me. While it wasn’t the reason why my father hated me—the reason was clear, Quinn just couldn’t know about it—I wondered if maybe that had something to do with it. Now that I was home, people were acting like I’d saved the world, and he knew full well who I really was. Who I couldn’t escape the legacy of.
“That might have something to do with it,” I said. “I mean, it would explain some of it, anyway.” That was really all I could disclose.
When the session ended, I’d managed to keep all of my secrets hidden. I still wanted Quinn to look at me as a person and not as a basket case, even if I was willing to open up a little about some of my personal stuff. I started to leave the office, and Quinn called after me.
“Sawyer, the same time Friday, right?”
I paused and turned around. I didn’t want to come back as a patient. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bit the inside of my cheek and summoned a bit of courage. “Actually, I was thinking maybe eight o’clock on Friday. I could pick you up, if you wanted.” It came out a little more forward than I intended, and I nearly berated myself. She could probably file for harassment in the workplace, or refuse to stop seeing me, or whatever the measures were in situations like this.
She laughed, instead of wincing. “You flatter me, Sawyer. You really do. But I’m keeping it professional.”
I resisted the urge to curse. “I understand. I won’t bother you about it again, I promise.” I didn’t want to harass her into a date. That was the last thing I wanted to do, make her uncomfortable.
“I would appreciate that,” Quinn said. “Have a good afternoon.”
I closed the door behind me and stared at the door for a second, eyebrows furrowed. Before, it had been a matter of trying to see if she’d say yes. Now, her refusal felt like a challenge. And that was a challenge that I was more than willing to accept.