“What do you mean you’re at your mother’s? I thought we discussed this?” My father wasn’t a happy camper.

That was three hours and four coffees ago, and I hadn’t heard anything from him since his final words to me.

“I’ll be there shortly.”

Now, instead of napping like I wanted to, I was busy watching the window in Mom’s living room. I wanted to cut him off before she saw him, before he broke her heart again. After a week of being with Mom, I knew she still loved Dad, she just didn’t understand why he thought she was crazy or why he’d taken me away. She was proud of how I’d turned out despite her not being around, but she was still hurt.

I could understand. I was hurt I’d lost that bond with her. Dad did what he thought was best for all of us, I could understand that too, but I was a grown woman now. Not a child that needed permission to see her own mother. Why he thought he needed to come here was beyond me. I’d worked up a rather righteous anger by the time I heard a car coming up the hill. I went out and sat on the front porch swing I’d first seen Mom sitting in when I came.

Dad pulled into the driveway and I could only watch from the porch. My pulse raced and I chewed at my lip. What was he going to say? I thought he might be angry with me. After all, I’d left without calling him. I was just as angry that he’d followed me up here. Dad and I had been in arguments before but this was different, mainly because it involved Mom. There was also the fact that I’d ignored him when he told me not to come up here.

Dad stepped out of the car, his face set in a grim expression. This wasn’t going to be a happy greeting then.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, staying on the porch and not greeting him with my usual hug. That probably tipped him off that I was angry, because he didn’t come up on the porch to give me one either.

“Arista, why are you here? You shouldn’t be around your mother. She’s not healthy.” He rubbed at his face, a face that I knew as well as my own.

“She might not be totally sane, I get that, I mean, what are those dragons about?” I trailed off but soon picked up the thread again. “She isn’t dangerous though.”

“No, I don’t think she’s dangerous now. When you were young and impressionable, she might have been a negative impact on your mental health, but not now. Now I’m just worried you’re going to get hurt. It’s one thing having people tell you one of your parents is crazy, it’s another thing to witness it.” His eyes pleaded with me for understanding, and I turned away.

His words hit too close to the truth. “Dad, I’m twenty-three, I’m a big girl now, I can deal with her mental illness. I can’t deal with not having answers. The doctors couldn’t give me the answers, you couldn’t give me answers, so now I’ve turned to Mom. She’s my last hope.”

“Baby girl, you won’t find answers here. I believe you need a psychiatrist. If your doctors couldn’t find an answer then maybe you’re mentally ill too. There’s no shame in that.”

“No shame? Weren’t you ashamed of her when you took me away? No, I suppose there wasn’t any shame for her, you were too busy carrying all of that around for her. She doesn’t see anything wrong with thinking dragons are real. You do, though. You divorced her, had her declared unfit, because you were ashamed your wife believed in dragons.” My voice had started to rise and over a decade of anger suddenly poured out of me, leaving me feeling weak.

I slumped back down to the swing and stared at him. “You left her, you took me away, and yet you tell me there’s no shame in mental illness?”

“That’s not what I meant. It wasn’t about being ashamed either. I meant…” He paused, swiping at his face again. “I just meant you can’t help being mentally ill, you can only get through it.”

“That’s not helping, Dad.” I squinted my eyes at him. “So now we’ve gone from I might be mentally ill to I am mentally ill? That’s just great.”

His eyes went wide and I could see the panic on his face. I felt bad for giving him a hard time but he’d made his bed a long time ago. He’d taken me away and I hadn’t realized just how angry I was about that until I saw him pull into the driveway.

“You messed up, Dad. Coming here now only brings that home to me. You messed up because you didn’t like the fact that your wife believed in fairy tales. Now you want to break up what I’ve only just begun to rebuild? You want to take away the last chance I have of finding an answer?”

“Honey, you aren’t going to find answers here, not from your mother.” His voice was pleading again, asking me to see reason.

I couldn’t though, not with these lines around my eyes and exhaustion as a constant companion.

“Then don’t I deserve a little bit of time with the mother you denied me? Don’t I deserve that much? I don’t know how much longer I have before I can’t get out of bed at all. I think I deserve just a little more time with my mother. You had me to yourself for over fourteen years, Dad. Let me have this time now.”

For once, he was speechless. The man who had an answer to everything finally had nothing to say.

“Alright, Arista. But if you get worse…”

“I’m already worse, Dad. Look at me.” I held my hands out, holding the blanket I’d covered myself with open.

My pajamas sagged on my frame, though they were meant to be snug. He’d got them for me for Christmas, so he knew they were far too big now. It was like he was only just seeing how ill I was. His eyes scanned my face, saw the lines, the way my hair was thinning, and how pale I looked. He really saw it now, and I knew he did because he was stunned.

“Arista, I need to take you to a hospital. You need to eat. Are you not eating? Is that it?”

I sighed and closed my eyes, trying to calm myself. “I’m eating, Dad. I’m eating enough for three people some days. I can’t always keep it down, and the other days I can’t eat at all. Some days it’s because I don’t have the strength, other days it’s because I’m too nauseous. But yeah, maybe you’re right, maybe it is all in my head and I just need to take a pill to make it all better.” I paused to let him truly take me in before I finished. “I think you should go, Dad. Go back home.”

I started to turn around and walk back in the house, but Mom chose that moment to come outside. I’d talked her into taking a nap, but I guess our arguing woke her up. “Mom…”

“Who’s here, baby?” She wiped at her eyes sleepily, a smile on her face until she looked around me and saw Dad.

“Ted?” She looked at my father, his blond hair now more gray than blond, and it was like the years melted away.

Her face somehow went smooth when she smiled, and I saw the woman he must have fallen in love with all those years ago. Wow, she was really beautiful.

“Eve. Um, sorry to intrude. I wanted to see Arista.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her and it was amazing to watch. He’d really loved her, I could see that now.

I’d always known he was hurt when he left Mom, that it wasn’t something he’d done lightly, but in that glimpse of adoration before he schooled his features into a placid mask of composure, I saw how he really felt.

“Why don’t you come in?” Her voice was sweeter, softer than it was when she talked to me or anybody else in the family. It was a sound from my past, but only a vague one.

“I’ve got to get back into town, find somewhere to sleep tonight. I’ll call you later, Arista.”

He all but ran from us both then, his eyes glued to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him move so fast.

“Ted…” Mom called after him, but he was in his car and gone before she could finish. I watched sadness move across her face like a storm cloud and wanted to throw a rock at my dad. He’d just broken her heart. Again!

“Come in the house, Mom,” I said, wrapping my arm around her shoulder as though she were the invalid and not me. “We’ll get some dinner going, shall we?”

She let me lead her back into the house and we spent the evening quietly together, watching old movies on television. She liked the black and white romance films and I didn’t have it in me to tell her I hated romance films. If I learned anything from them both, it was that true love didn’t last, no matter how much you want it to.

She made me her grandmother’s chicken and dumplings recipe, the kind with big fluffy dumplings rather than the flat noodle-like ones I was used to. That seemed to make my tummy happy and I even had some energy later that evening. Later, I decided to walk around her little version of the top of the world, to see what it looked like in moonlight.

I found myself humming an old song from one of the movies we’d watched earlier and smiled. A slight breeze blew, bringing a scent of pine with it. The breeze was warm, rather than cold, and I found it odd, but I hadn’t been in the mountains for a long time. Maybe that was normal up here.

I looked up at the moon and thought about my parents and how they’d reacted to each other today. I’d seen the love there, before hurt hid Mom’s and anger hid Dad’s. They’d loved each other dearly for so long, why had Dad suddenly decided that he couldn’t take the dragon thing?

Maybe that was my purpose here, to bring them back together. Maybe that’s what had really driven me home, not just a need for answers, but an attempt to right a wrong. How could I do that? I wondered as I walked along. A scent hit me, distracting me from my thoughts.

It was a smell that pulled at a hunger deep within me. I tried to follow it, my strength coming back amazingly fast the longer I followed. I felt a longing unlike anything I’d ever felt before when I smelled that scent, but it was one I’d never smelled before. I followed it along the edge of the mountaintop, down to a stand of maple trees.

A loud swishing noise made me shriek and jerk back to the safety of the moonlit mountaintop. I saw something large in the sky, but it flew to a cloud before I could make out the exact shape of the creature. It must have been a very large bird. That was all.

I walked back towards the house, feeling some of my renewed strength ebbing away. What had that thing been? And what was the smell it produced? It was something like pine, but that might have just been the trees. There was some smell beneath that, something that made me think of only one word… desire.

I’m not a pure as the driven snow kind of girl, but I wasn’t one to normally think in terms of desire. Lust maybe, arousal, yes… but desire? Just not in my mental vocabulary. Yet, it was all I could think of now.

I went back to my room, and for the first time in a long time, took out the laptop I’d built my games on. I had some energy and wanted to use it while I could. As I built a world of steam-powered, clockwork gadgets, I tried to get the whole thing out of my head.

I was working on a scene in an abandoned room when a previous thought intruded again. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe I was crazy.