When Vivi calls, I can barely make out the words. It’s sobbing and it’s a chant, half my name, half pleases. Jonah, Jonah, can you come get me? Please, Jonah. I can’t—I just. Please come get me.
“Vivi.” My voice sounds the way it does after a long run. “Viv, are you okay?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Jonah, please just come get me.”
“Okay, I’m coming. Where are you?”
“Cloverdale?” Sniffling. “I think.”
That’s over an hour away. “Did you call your mom?”
“NO. Not my mom, Jonah, please, just you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Go somewhere safe, okay? I need you to find an intersection you’re close to and text it to me. I’m leaving now.”
Fortunately, Naomi’s home from work early, and I drive, and drive, southbound, and I don’t know what to expect. The sun starts to drop and so does my stomach. Once I get close to where I think Vivi is, I scan every street for pale hair and skin, for a shock of red lips. I call, but the phone goes to voice mail.
I finally spot the Vespa and the little ball of person next to it. She’s sitting on the sidewalk in front of a dumpy apartment complex. Her legs are tucked up and hidden by her skirt, which is ripped at the bottom. Her black-streaked face is pressed against her knees. I bail out of the car like in an action movie, barely sliding it into park before my feet hit the ground. I don’t bother to shut the door behind me.
“Viv! Vivi, hey,” I call to her. “Hey.”
She scrambles to her bare feet and runs to me. Her white shirt is untucked and dirty. Before I can process that, she’s in my arms, face buried against my shoulder. Her tears soak through my shirt, warm and wet on my skin.
“Why didn’t you go somewhere safe like I told you?” I ask. She cries and cries. Wrong question. “Where’s your helmet?”
“I think it’s . . . on . . . his . . . lawn. I got pulled . . . over . . . for not wearing it.”
Wait, what? “Viv, what are you doing down here?”
“I hate him,” she wails. “I hate him.”
“Who?”
“My . . . dad.”
I feel her breathing, the way her heaving chest pushes against my own chest and against my arms. Oh my God. She found her dad? Here in Berkeley?
“It’s okay,” I tell her, and she sobs into my shoulder. It’s clearly not true. I just want it to be.
“I wish I’d never met him, I wish I’d never met him,” she mumbles into my neck. “I wish I’d never met him. I wish he was dead.”
Holy shit—she did find him. I hold her there, on the sidewalk, while she cries. Finally, I put her in the car. An older man stops to ask if he can help. He’s carrying a gallon of milk home from the convenience store around the corner, and he sets it on the sidewalk before I can reply. We heave the Vespa into the back of the van. Vivi’s reclined on her side in the front seat, hugging her arms to her chest. She’s motionless enough to be asleep, but her eyes are open. Staring into nothing.
“Is she okay?” the man asks after we’ve shut the trunk. “Do you guys want to come in and regroup for a few minutes? My wife and I live down the street if you need a cup of coffee.”
“That’s okay.” God, do I appreciate the offer. It’s nice to have someone older than me try to help. “Thanks, though. She’s just had a really long, really bad day.”
He chuckles, clapping me on the shoulder like we’re old frat bros. “Hang in there. Any time we have car trouble, my wife has an emotional breakdown about it. She’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“I hope so,” I tell him. Inside, Vivi’s rocking herself a little. Her hand is curled near her mouth like she wants to suck her thumb. “Thanks again.”
I start the car without knowing what to say. Are you okay? She clearly is not. Do you want to talk about it? She clearly does not.
I wonder how many people felt this way toward my family—unsure of what to say. Sometimes I think everyone should be handed a manual for this stuff when they turn fourteen. That seems like a good age. Starting high school. Staring at the business end of your childhood, when you have to start growing up. So maybe the school should distribute a book called The Field Guide for Broken People. Between Vivi and me alone, we could write a bunch of chapters. Dead Dad. No Dad. Despondent Mom. Flaky Mom. But each broken person is different, and there is no right way for everyone. Just a lot of wrong ways.
Viv shifts beside me. I can’t believe this is the same girl who went streaking down the beach. Who sneaked into my house in the middle of the night. Who made my little sister talk and dance and laugh again. I want to pull over to the side of the road and pull her into my arms. I want to find her in this sadness the way she did for me. For us. Another glance at her, and I have the overpowering urge to make comfort food for her. This is a legacy my dad left me. The hardwired impulse to feed people. I wish I could make the food myself, but there’s no time for that.
“Viv, have you eaten today?”
I take my eyes off the road to look for an answer on her face. She shakes her head once. Her expression doesn’t change. She looks thinner than she did the day we met. I don’t know why I didn’t notice before today.
I stop at a drugstore off the highway and buy her a pair of two-dollar flip-flops. I don’t ask where her shoes went. I also buy these things that Naomi has in our bathroom closet—makeup remover wipes. When I get back in the car, I slide the flip-flops on her dirty feet. She doesn’t move. I clean her face off. She stares ahead like I’m not there. Like I’m not touching her.
At a twenty-four-hour diner across the street, she looks out the window and I order for both of us. It’s dark enough outside that our reflections stare back in the windows. But she’s looking beyond herself. Into the recent past, into the future, I don’t know. When her pancakes come, she eats one bite. She cringes as if she’s been made to swallow soggy cardboard.
“Hey,” I say, reaching for her hand. “I know you’re not hungry, but it will make me feel better if I bring you home fed. Okay? Please?”
With a wrinkle of her nose, she slurps some of the whipped cream off her hot chocolate. I ordered it in place of coffee because I want her to sleep on the way home.
“It’s good,” she says quietly. But her hand doesn’t move to her utensils.
I use my fork to split a sausage link in half, and I run it through a puddle of maple syrup. “Don’t make me do it, Viv. I’ll do it.”
She furrows her eyebrows at me, grumpy.
“Vvvvveeewwwww.” I make my best airplane noise. Loudly. I steer the fork toward her mouth. A truck driver in a nearby booth turns to look at us. I try to make my voice sound like a pilot’s, whatever that means. “Sausage supplier asking permission to land. Over.”
She presses down a smile. “Are you kidding right now?”
“Nope! SausageFork to tower, this is an emergency. We request emergency landing.” I try to make the crackling noises of a radio transmission. Then malfunction noises. “Neeeeeeer, neeeer, ahhh, ahhh.”
Viv laughs, opening her mouth for just long enough for me to wedge the food in. The piece of sausage pushes her cheek out. “God, okay. I’ll eat it.”
She eats all her sausage and drains her hot chocolate all the way down to its powdery dregs. Then, out of nowhere, she starts laughing. It’s giggly and a little crazed and, because it’s Vivi, musical.
She gets out a few words in bursts. “I threw my shoes at his front door. I can’t believe I did that.”
“You threw your shoes?”
“Yeah. I did. Everything else is a huge blur; I barely remember it, it’s like I blacked out. But I’m sure about that part because . . . hello, my shoes are gone.” She dabs at her mouth with a paper napkin. She squints like she’s trying very hard to remember something from years ago instead of only a few hours. “I was storming away from his house, and he had closed the door behind me so he could tell lies to his wife in private or whatever. My shoes were slowing me down, and I was still so mad. So I pulled them off and ran back to the house and threw one square at his front door—SMACK!—and then the other right behind it, and I think the heel dented it. God, it felt so good. I remember that. It felt so, so good. Then I rode off on my Vespa in a blaze of glory. For a second, anyway. Then I felt so sad that it felt like my rib cage was collapsing in on itself.”
I know this feeling. I also know that emotions come from the brain. So why do people feel real aches in their chests? Why does it feel like we carry every feeling in our cores?
I pay for our meal, and we head back to the open road. There are very few cars on the highway, and Vivi plays the radio low. She talks nonstop, working through her feelings in a gush. I try not to add anything. If she’s talking, I’m not getting in the way of it.
She understands that her mom was trying to protect her. But she’s mad. She doesn’t know how she feels about her dad paying child support all this time. Or how he hid it from his wife. Is she glad that he cares enough to do that? Or does he only pay so her mom won’t tell his wife? She just doesn’t know. What she does know is that she’s not sorry if she ruined his marriage. Vivi understands secrets. But not ones like this. Not when you fail to tell your wife that you have an extramarital daughter.
“God, he’s such a rat; I can’t believe it, Jonah. I really can’t believe it.” She’s shaking her head. She’s still upset, but it’s a relief to see her animated. “You know, some people act like every kid is entitled to two responsible, loving parents. I don’t feel like that’s a given. We’re born alone, and we die alone. If you get an adult who’s genuinely there for you, that’s pretty lucky. So I’m not bitter about having grown up with a single mom—I’m really not. She’s enough and I’m proud of everything she does for us, even when I’m so mad at her that I want to set her canvases on fire. So it’s not that. It’s that I’ve lived my whole seventeen years so far thinking I had this rocker dad who wasn’t cut out for fatherhood, and it took me a while, but I understood that he didn’t try to create me and couldn’t handle responsibility or whatever. Instead, my father is this guy who is, like, a responsible and stable citizen, who has a family, who has lived on the same coast as me my entire life. How hard would it have been for him to know me? He’s already a dad, so why not be a dad for me, you know? God, now I have to come to grips with the fact that he sucks as a person, and that’s half of where I came from.”
There’s a pause, a spot for a reply. A thought pops into my mind so quickly that it doesn’t feel like it’s my own. After all these weeks with Vivi, I sometimes feel as though Vivi has changed the chemistry of my brain. Like she rearranged neurons.
“I’m not convinced that he’s your real dad.” In my peripheral vision, I see her face turn to mine. Her interest piqued. “Modern science would disagree, but they don’t know you. I think maybe your mom is your mom but your dad is the Man in the Moon. I’m just saying. I wouldn’t put it past you to be half-Lunar.”
There is a quiet that settles between us.
“Jonah Daniels.” She says my full name, as she often does, only this time in a whisper. She’s shaking her head. “I don’t deserve you.”
She’s quiet again, but this time she grabs for my hand, gripping onto me for the miles and miles toward home. I steer one-handed.