NOVEMBER 25, 2017
I KEPT TO MY WORD and didn’t go to the hospital, but not for the same reasons.
Not because I didn’t care, but because I cared more than I could handle.
Krista called a couple of days later, as promised, and told me where the service would be. They wanted to wait until Thanksgiving passed. It would be their first holiday without him.
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know anyone who would be there. I’d be a sore thumb sticking out. A bastard child trying to claim someone who wasn’t mine. It didn’t feel right.
I’d refused to go, until Basil got a hold of me through Silas. Hearing his voice had been a salve to the wounds ripped open. He told me it would be my last chance to make peace. Gave me a strength I didn’t know I’d been searching for.
When it came time for the service, Hudson booked us plane tickets before I could say otherwise. I hated flying, but time was running out. If I wanted a chance at peace, then I had to go.
“Are you okay?” Hudson asked as we sat in a rental car at the bottom of a hill in the graveyard where my father was about to be laid to rest.
It was such a simple question, but the answer was complicated.
“I don’t think I can do this.” My chest felt heavy and hot. I was gripping the door handle, flesh stretched white against my knuckles. He didn’t understand the mud in my veins. The tarry hate and confusion I’ve felt ever since I was twelve.
I was dressed the part. Mom picked up a flowy black dress for me. She knew I’d need my clothes to be loose since my emotions would be too tight today. I’d kept a brave face the entire ride there. Smiled when I was supposed to. Frowned on cue. I was a robot, moving to the echoes of Basil’s advice inside my head.
But when I watched the woman and young boy holding each other up as they stood near my father’s casket, I realized I wasn’t as brave as I thought I was. I was a coward. Jealous. Confused. Bitter. Angry. Longing.
And overall just… sad.
Hudson reached for my hand. “You can,” he said, the surety in his eyes like a breath of fresh air. “I’m right by your side.”
I nodded, letting him lead for once. I was too tired to do otherwise.
And then we got out of the car.
THE FUNERAL WAS A BLUR of listening to complete strangers mourn over the man I barely knew.
“George was a great man,” Krista said as she stood near his casket holding a handkerchief. “He loved his family. He did everything he could to provide for us. He had this way of making everyone around him laugh. You always… always looked for him when he was in the room.”
I didn’t know the man she spoke so highly of. He was a different man, because the George I knew didn’t love his family. He left them. He didn’t provide for them.
But… I did always look for him… even after he was gone.
I stayed rooted to my seat near the back the entire time until it was over. Tried to keep my feet planted even though every inch of me protested at their words. I wanted so badly to say my piece. To let them know what kind of a man George was, at least to me.
But I was better than my bitter side. I had to be.
“You’ll come back to the house, right?” Krista asked as everyone began clearing out. She was prettier than her pictures, her features soft and kind. Sadness had formed a permanent mist in her eyes.
I ran my gaze over my little brother, Trevor. He was the same age as I was when my father left me. We had that much in common.
“We’d love to,” Hudson said, being the rock that he was.
“Thank you,” Krista said. She started giving him the directions to her house. Her voice began to fade as I left them and inched toward the man in the casket. They were getting ready to wrap everything up. Put him into the ground.
He was eerily still. Pale. Weathered.
I reached for his hand. It was cold and stiff, and it made my heart twist in an awful way.
“You weren’t all those things they said,” I leaned in and whispered. “Not for me.” I took in an encouraging breath and let the flames rise. “I wanted you to be. I don’t know how many days I waited on the doorstep, searching for your car down the street. Hoping you’d change your mind. Hoping you’d miss me and come back.
“But you didn’t. You weren’t a great man. You were a selfish man. You were a coward.” My breath caught in my throat. “And I don’t… I don’t want to be like you. I don’t want to run anymore. I don’t want to be a coward. But I don’t know if I can ever forgive you.” I dropped the single white rose I’d been clutching the entire time onto his chest, and then said, “Goodbye.”
A half an hour later, we were heading up the steps to his house. It was a child’s fairy-tale house. Two stories. Perfectly groomed yard. Sprawling acreage. There were so many faces inside I’d never seen before. I didn’t know of any living relatives on his side of the family, so I assumed most were either friends or Krista’s family. The rooms were filled with bodies and voices, swapping memories of a stranger I never knew.
I felt like I was trapped inside the box of all my secrets, banging against the walls, begging to be set free. I didn’t belong here. I was standing inside someone else’s life. Crashing someone else’s funeral.
When Krista saw me, she hugged me tight, more tears spilling from her eyes. “You look just like him,” she said as she pulled back, her hands cupping my face. “I know you were estranged, but he loved you, Hartley. You have to know that.”
“I don’t know that,” I said firmly, eyebrows pressing together as I pulled away from her. I couldn’t get the image of her on my father’s desk out of my mind. Of him begging me not to say anything to my mother.
Krista frowned. Maybe she could see the old hurt in my gaze. I remembered her apology as she came out of his office, her guilty eyes wild and filled with fear. “I’m so sorry, Hartley,” she’d said, and I wondered how she knew my name. I’d never seen her before. She was a stranger, a villain, a monster sneaking into our home.
Peering into her eyes now, I was sure it made her feel as muddy as I did.
“Come with me,” she said a moment later, hesitating as she waited for my answer.
Hudson stood tall, asking with his eyes if I needed him to rescue me, but I shook my head.
I wasn’t sure why… Maybe it was Basil’s advice. Maybe it was because Hudson was near and with me, but wherever she was taking me, I needed to go alone. I had to close this chapter.
“He spent most of his time in here,” she said, opening the doors to a small den. It was his office, but it wasn’t anything like the one he had when I was growing up. There were fish on plaques displayed proudly on burgundy walls. Regal molding. A large desk in the middle of the room, surrounded by bookshelves.
I was on the other side of his desk, eying his things. Things he touched only days ago. A set of keys. A tin of mints. Credit cards.
“I’ll leave you alone. Let you look around,” Krista said before disappearing.
I nodded, and then sat in his chair, watching as she left.
There was a picture of Krista and Trevor on the corner of his desk. They were standing on a dock, a lake sparkling behind them. Papers were scattered across the wooden surface. Some bills. Other documents from work. I opened the drawer in the middle. There was a handful of soft caramels. Pens. A watch that had stopped working. More keys and notebooks. I tried the drawer on the side, but it was locked.
After grabbing the key, I turned it in the lock, and the drawer slid open. It was mostly files he’d brought home from work. I rummaged through them, not knowing what I was searching for.
Until I found a file with my name on it.
The tears were already present as I pulled it out, and then shut the drawer. I sat it on the desk, staring at the thick, dingy folder as if there was a bomb held within it. Maybe there was. An information bomb I wasn’t sure I wanted to process.
Forgiveness was the only power I had over him. I was chained to my bitterness, and the chains, up until this point, had suited me fine.
I stood. Wiped the few tears that had slipped out, and then moved to a bookshelf. He had a large array of books, from business reads to science fiction. I wondered if he actually read them. I picked up one that rested on the chair next to the shelves, and opened it to the page that was folded in on the corner. It was Simple Reminders by Bryant McGill.
There was a quote highlighted in the middle of the page.
There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.
Those words hit me hard in the gut. Almost as if he had highlighted them for me. I did love him. Once. A long time ago, when I was a little princess, locked in an ivory tower, waiting for him to come rescue me.
But he never did.
And he’d never get the chance again.
I dropped into the seat behind his desk, bracing myself as I opened the folder with my name on it. My sixth-grade picture was pinned to the backside. There was a large stack of newspaper clippings, all about the different films I’d been a part of. He’d kept the interviews I did. The playbills my name was mentioned in. There were a few DVDs with written labels. It was clips of various indie pieces I’d worked on in college. How he got a hold of them was beyond me.
I may not have known it, but he’d walked beside me my whole life.
He just never had the courage to say so.
“He wanted to reach out to you.” Krista was standing in the doorway, a strange calm settled in her shoulders.
“Why didn’t he?” I asked as the desk blurred in front of me.
“I think he was scared. After that last phone call, he knew he’d hurt you, and he figured you were happier with him gone.”
“That’s a shitty reason to make me feel like I didn’t exist.” The sadness was so thick I felt like I was suffocating. “This hurts so much,” I admitted as the tears became more constant. As my heart crumbled inside my chest. I didn’t pull away when she wrapped her arms around me. There was something safe in taking comfort from a stranger. “All this time, I felt like I wasn’t good enough for him. And all this time… he… he thought…”
I couldn’t finish the words.
He thought he wasn’t good enough for me.
Wasn’t that the tragedy of life, though? There were those who never let anything slip between the cracks. Every opportunity to speak their truth, they took it. And then there were those like me… like my dad…. who stubbornly hid in the shadows because we were too scared of what we might uncover in ourselves.
I didn’t want to live like that anymore.
“I forgive him,” I said into her shoulder as we held onto each other. “And I forgive myself.”
For so long, I’d hated the man who had secretly longed to fix things with me. I’d left the hole wide open in my heart, refusing to let anyone fill it. And then came Hudson. Now that he was mine, I’d never let him go. I’d never let another moment slip through my fingers because of fear.
Even though my father would never know that I showed up. That I came to say goodbye.
I hoped that somewhere, wherever souls went when they passed from this life, he’d know that I finally learned how to forgive.