Chapter Seven
When I first came to live with Daddy he worked in a prison-release program at Goodwill. He would pick things out of the donation piles to bring home. A Barbie with her hair cut jagged. A half-empty box of tinker toys. It was when he brought home the Rubik’s Cube that we hit the jackpot.
Some of the stickers had been torn or smudged away, but the colors were still visible. Only one sticker was gone completely, but a quick count of the sides told me it was yellow.
I sat down in front of the armchair, still worn and lumpy then. My legs crisscrossed, my heart pumping. And in twenty minutes solved the cube for the first time.
Daddy watched with a strange look in his eyes.
When I was done he turned the columns this way and that, trying his best to make sure no two colors were side by side. This time I already had practice. It took fifteen minutes.
So many evenings we sat like that, him messing up the cube, me putting it right.
That was before he lost the job at Goodwill, before he turned heavy to gambling. Before I met Damon Scott and began to hide what I could do.
Though I guess we’re still in old patterns. Daddy messing things up.
Me putting it right.
I can tell Daddy’s home before I put my key in the lock. Something about the air feels heavy with despair, with guilt—though maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I want him to be sorry for what he’s done. But the only thing I feel when I feed my addiction, when I breathe in the sharp tang of numbers is relief.
He sits in his lumpy armchair, the secondhand metal cane leaning against the side.
My feet seem to slow down as I approach him. As much as I need to have this confrontation, as many questions and accusations are swirling inside me, I wish I were anywhere but here.
I don’t bother to sit on the lumpy couch or the wooden coffee table with a crack down the side. Instead I sit down at his feet, crossing my legs. In the same place I sat so many times. The same way I did when I was a little girl.
That’s how I feel right now. Small and helpless.
In Daddy’s eyes I find terrible confirmation.
“I’m sorry,” he says gruffly.
“I don’t understand. Why would you borrow from Damon Scott?” When his lips press together, my heart stops. “Oh God. You owe someone else.”
He shakes his head, as if struggling to understand it himself. “I thought if I could pay off the debt with Damon Scott I’d have more time. So I borrowed from someone else. Pretty soon I owed almost everyone in the city money.”
“Almost?” I say, my voice tight.
Where I felt a surge of emotion with Damon Scott, there’s only emptiness. A blissful numbness that spreads from my heart to my fingers. It’s a relief, however temporary.
His eyes sharpen. “I didn’t borrow from Jonathan Scott.”
“You wanted to.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway, whether I borrowed from him or not. There’s no way I can survive this. Not with the amount of money on the line.”
“Damon Scott talked to me.”
Daddy surges up in a surprising show of strength, before making a cry of pain and falling back into the chair. “That bastard. Did he touch you?”
That small amount of protectiveness makes my heart squeeze. This is what I wanted. Someone to care about me, someone for me to care about. Without having to worry about kneecaps breaking.
How is it that some people get huge trees of family, aunts and uncles and cousins? A flick of a DNA strand, a twist of fate. And here I am, almost alone. Except for one person.
I can’t quite meet that person’s eyes. “Damon might be willing to help.”
“He’s no better than his father,” Daddy snarls. “Leaning on family like that. He’s not supposed to do that. He’s never done it before. And with you still a child.”
A child? Not really. There are enough men in the diner who stare at me to know they see me as a woman. And Jessica’s barely older than me, her body just as slender despite having given birth only eight months ago. We grow up early in the west side.
The Rubik’s Cube is long gone, lost to the vagaries of childhood. Maybe left behind in the trailer outside of town. But my fingers clench together all the same, longing for something to solve.
A puzzle that’s guaranteed to have an answer.
“What will we do?” I ask softly.
“I have a plan,” he says, gruff, almost glad.
“But how—”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s this big game.”
Dread slithers down my spine, thick and cold. “No way.”
“The pot is huge, Penny. It could pay off all the debts and still have more.”
“You have to win.”
“With your help I would. If you were there—”
“You don’t think anyone would notice?” Counting cards isn’t allowed, which has never made sense to me. As if I could stop counting them. But any sort of signals I made would definitely be caught.
“The game isn’t for six months,” he says. “We have plenty of time to practice them.”
“And what would I be doing at a high-stakes game?” Even in the twisted sex world of Tanglewood, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a player would not be allowed into the private room. There are rules, which is why I couldn’t help him in the big games.
He’s silent in that way that’s filled with words. With guilty admissions. “You’d be in the room if you were my buy-in.”
My gasp sounds loud and ridiculously innocent in the broken little apartment. Who knew I still had naivete to shatter? “You want to bet me?”
“It costs fifty thousand dollars just to enter.”
Oh my God. I thought we had hit the bottom with the debts, but this is worse. There are rocks down there, sharp and slick. And no one to pull me from the water.
Suddenly I remember Damon Scott, his eyes black, fierce.
What made him able to hold his breath underwater so long?
My throat tightens. The memory of a tall man in black sweeps over me, his grey eyes like mist in a dream. “Who’s running the game, Daddy?”
“Jonathan Scott.”
“Don’t do this,” I whisper, knowing I’m too late.
“We’ll win, Penny.” He’s pleading now, asking forgiveness for something already decided. We’re not so far away from medieval times. A man can sell his daughter. A man can gamble her.
I don’t have to ask what happens if he loses, my body forfeit.
Horror is a black hole, threatening to drag me under. Only denial keeps me floating in endless space, denial that my own daddy would do this. “There has to be another way.”
He stares at his hands, knotted together. I know he has arthritis, that his joints swell up in the warm muggy nights, that he struggles to hold the cards.
Oh God, I hate that I care about him.
“The debts are coming due,” he says, and in his voice I hear the grains of sand falling, the amount of time I’m the owner of my body slipping away. The water level rising.