How to Love

awnings over the windows and a weird rusty stain creeping up the exterior near the door. A random orange traffic cone sat overturned on the lawn. I’d thought it was some exotic clubhouse, romantically shabby. Now it just looked bleak.

The windows were dark but Sawyer’s Jeep was in the driveway, and I was talking myself into crossing and ringing the bell when the front door opened and there he was: slouching and feline, angry and sad. I hardly even recognized his face. He’d lost a startling amount of weight, I realized. I hadn’t noticed that before. His shoulders jutted oddly beneath his T-shirt, fiberglass or shale.

Actually, I thought as I stood there: They looked sort of oddly like wings.

He didn’t see me. He wasn’t looking. He was holding a backpack, some ridiculous old camping number I happened to know was his father’s, because my father had one, too. They’d bought them together when they were teenagers, back when they used to do things like camp.

Sawyer crossed the lawn, threw the pack in the backseat of his Jeep and slid into the driver’s seat. I stood there and watched him, struck dumb. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know how long he’d be gone. I waited as the engine turned over, loud and cranky—Reena in the background, watching as usual. The taillights glowed like two red coals.

Wait, I almost shouted, but didn’t, and that would be my burden to bear. Instead, I stood on the curb and I watched him disappear, lights fading in the distance like waking up from a dream.

I stood there for a long time, feet rooted to the sidewalk, and in my head the stillness began to make a sick kind of sense. I wasn’t going anywhere, I realized numbly—not college, not Chicago, not off into the sunset to see the great wide world. This was it. Sawyer was gone—gone gone, I knew already, the way you know you’re hungry or that it’s about to rain—and I was going to have to stay in Broward. I was going to have to do this—whatever this was—on my own.

I was crying again, silent and stupid, right there on the curb like the worst kind of fool. All that careful planning, all those maps and magazines, those nights I’d dreamed myself to sleep. The places I was going to explore, the stories I was going to write when I got there—and for what? I looked down at the damp, cracked pavement, felt the boundaries of my life constricting around me. The air was heavy and oppressive, pushing against the surface of my skin.

At long last, I pulled it together, wiped my eyes and scrubbed my palms against my jeans. I took a deep breath and headed for the only destination that made sense at this particular juncture:

I got back in the car and drove toward home.

49

After

My father gets released in the middle of August, twenty pounds lighter and considerably worse for wear. He spends most days in the living room or at physical therapy, groggy or annoyed, but he is alive, and that is good enough for now. We settle into a new routine, all of us Monteros, full of medicines and lists. I start cooking dinner. Silence descends like a shroud. A few times a week, Sawyer’s Jeep rumbles to the curb and he takes Hannah to the park or the zoo for a couple of hours.

“How are you?” he always asks, when I bring her outside.

“Fine,” I always tell him, and watch him disappear down the road.

During the day I am a dutiful daughter. I weed the garden. I salt the soup. At night I read my atlas like a Bible, imagining my escape.

It goes on like this for a while, a steady drone and the hum of the central air, until one afternoon when I come downstairs after putting Hannah down for a nap and find my dad sitting on the couch, flipping the channels. “Do you need anything?” I ask automatically. “You hungry?”

“I’m all right,” he says. Then, clicking the TV off: “Come here for a minute, daughter of mine.”

I feel the nerves stir in my stomach—a warm prickly rush of guilt and anxiety, though I know there was a time when I felt safer with my father than with anyone else on earth. “What’s up?” I ask, trying not to sound afraid. My hands move in front of me like butterflies. My toes curl down against the rug.

“Sit down,” he tells me, and I do, perching on the edge of the sofa beside him, feet still planted on the carpet like at any second I might jump up and bolt.

“I want to talk to you about that night at dinner,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say immediately, trying to avoid the inevitable lecture: If he’s going to lay into me again, I’d rather just take the blame right off the bat and be done with it, preempt the whole affair. My textbooks are piled on the desk in my bedroom. I’ve got finals starting next week. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that.”

“It’s not that,” he says, which is surprising. He shakes his head, sighs a little. “I owe you an apology.”

“It’s just been a really difficult—” I stop. “You do?”

“I do.” There’s something stilted about his speech, like he’s been practicing. I wait. “You were right, Reena,” he begins after a moment, “about what you said at the table. I didn’t protect you after—” He breaks off, tries again. “Once the baby came. I was angry. You know that. I said rotten things to you, and I’m ashamed of myself for that. I’m sorry.” He swallows. “This isn’t the life I imagined for you.”

I shrug, hands still twisting in my lap. I tuck them between my knees to still them. “It’s not the life I imagined for me, either.”

“I know. But as your dad, I think it felt—it felt like a personal failure to me, to see you lose Northwestern. A baby at sixteen—it’s not the way I raised you. I’m sorry if that’s difficult for you to hear, but it’s true.”

My cheeks feel hot. “I know.”

“But that’s not an excuse.” My father sighs again; he looks so old lately, his face gone slightly slack. “I did a terrible job once you told me you were pregnant. I did a miserable, piss-poor job. You probably needed your parents more than you’d ever needed your parents in your entire life, and what did I do? I walked away.”

I start to deny it, an absurd reflex. It’s bizarre to hear him talk this way. Finally I nod. “Yeah,” I tell him, which is about all I can manage. “It’s been hard.”

“But look at you,” he says. “You’ve handled yourself with a lot of grace. You’re responsible. You took up your cross. You do a good job with Hannah. You might think I don’t notice that, but I do.”

I feel my eyes start to well up, that familiar clog in my throat. I feel like I’ve been on the verge of crying for the last two years. “Thanks.”

“I know a lot of people have left you in your life,” he tells me, and that’s when the tears start for real. He gets a little closer, puts a heavy hand on my back. “Your mother, and Allie. Sawyer. And me, too.” His arm slides down around my shoulder, pulls me close; he smells like laundry detergent and limes. “But what I want to tell you, sweetheart, is that that’s not going to happen again, all right? I’m not going anywhere. No matter what happens, what you do or where you go—you’re not going to lose me again.”

Well, that rips it. All of a sudden it’s like he’s given me permission to let go of everything I’ve been holding on to so tightly—the guilt and fear I’ve walked around with since the night of his heart attack, the huge anger that’s burrowed in behind my ribs. I rest my head on his shoulder and let myself a cry a little, leave a wet splotch on his shirt the way I haven’t since I was a little girl. My father pets through my hair. I know this won’t fix everything between us—I know we have many, many miles to walk—but it feels, at the very least, like a start.

“There’s something else,” he tells me, once I’ve pulled it together a little bit, hiccups instead of sobs. His hand is still on my back, familiar after all this time. “It’s about Sawyer.”

“Honestly?” I groan. “There’s nothing going on between me and Sawyer.”

“It’s not that.” My father shakes his head. “Although whatever decision you make about him is just that—it’s your decision.” He clears his throat again, straightens up. “There’s something I never told you about Sawyer, about the time right before he left.”

I feel my eyebrows shoot up; I can only imagine. “What?”

My father reaches for the glass of water on the table, takes a long sip before he goes on. “He came here, to the house. Looking for you.”

“Wait,” I say, blinking. “Before he left for good?”

He nods. “This was when things between us weren’t so friendly, and I didn’t invite him in, but his car was