I glanced up in the darkness to find her eyes, as unsteady as they might be, focused on me.
"A butthead?" I asked, holding her heel as I slipped off her shoe.
"A butthead," Abbi repeated before giggling. "Butthead. Butt. Head. That's a funny word, don't you think?"
After glancing around her room, I found an oversized faded t-shirt draped over the top of her laundry hamper. I grabbed it and offered it to Abbi.
"You'll be more comfortable if you change," I said.
With a whine, Abbi flopped backwards and complained, "Can't you do it? I just want to go to sleep."
I sighed and started with her pants, undoing the button of her jeans.
"You're a butthead, Mr O'Sullivan," she said, floundering like a dying fish in an effort to help me tug down her pants over her hips; it really made the effort more difficult, but I didn't want to say so.
I pulled her up to sitting again.
"Arms up."
Abbi's arm wobbled in the air and I grabbed the hem of her blouse and pulled it over her head before she fell over again.
"Can you undo your bra?" I asked her.
She giggled and said, "You know how to do it, butthead."
I used the t-shirt to cover her as I unhooked her bra and helped her shimmy out of it. I did my best not to look as I guided her arms through and then helped her head to find the opening. Only when it was on her did I realise it was backwards, but that would just have to do. I folded back the covers and manoeuvred Abbi's rag doll body beneath them. I poured a glass of water in her kitchen and came back to sit on the edge of her bed.
After she took a wobbling sip where more water ended up on her backwards t-shirt than in her mouth, Abbi laid her head on the pillow and stared up at me. She was wasted, but her eyes still managed to grab hold of mine and refuse to let go.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, my voice little more than a whisper in the dark stillness of her room.
I asked the question not really expecting her to know what I was talking about—that I had been referring to our daughter. I hadn't even really been expecting a coherent response given how drunk she was. I asked it more because the words swelled so fiercely in my heart that I couldn't have kept them inside of me even if I had wanted to. So it was with more than a little surprise that I heard Abbi whisper back.
"I tried."
I frowned down at her. Her hand was resting on the pillow next to her sprawl of wild, golden hair. Her fingers looked so small, so delicate. I didn't remember seeing her like that in the mountains, as something that might break, as something that I might break.
"You tried?" I repeated.
I still wasn't sure that Abbi knew what I was talking about, but after licking her lips and exhaling slowly, she said, "I called the number you gave me when I was back in the US."
I shook my head.
"You called me?" I said. "No, no, I would have remembered you calling me. You didn't call me."
She was drunk. That had to be it.
"You gave me your office number."
My confidence started to erode; my stone wall was impenetrable, but a tiny crack was forming at the foundation. I searched Abbi's eyes.
"You didn't ask for me?" I questioned her with growing uncertainty.
"I did."
The whole story was there in the sadness of her voice as she said those two simple words. The tiny crack was spreading rapidly, the stone eroding, the whole impenetrable wall threatening to fall at any moment.
I refused to believe it. I wanted to hold onto my last sense of innocence: that I hadn't known about my daughter, that there was no way I could have known, that it wasn't my fault.
That wall, that impenetrable wall, was holding back a dam and the guilt in those waters ran deep. I wasn't sure I could survive them crashing over me all at once.
"I don't understand," I whispered, as if to buy time to suck in one last desperate breath before I drowned in dark, cold, rushing regret.
Abbi's eyes seemed to clear and focus, as if the alcohol wasn't preventing her from seeing with crystal clarity some distant memory.
"I called and I asked for you," she said softly, "and your receptionist said it was me and you said, 'Who?' and I hung up after that."
My hands that had been resting in my lap began to shake. It wasn't the horror of recalling this moment in time nine years ago that I was experiencing; it was the horror of not remembering at all. This incident didn't even register as a blip on my recollection. A woman I dared to love for a few precious days called to tell me I had a child, and I had no memory of it whatsoever.
I had probably been consumed by some report, busy with some email, focused on some court document, all things that I once put so much value in, all things I once swore were the most important things in life.
"I don't remember that," I admitted with cheeks hot from my shame. "Abbi, I'm…I'm so sorry."
Abbi continued to stare up at me.
"Butthead," she whispered, but there was none of the jovial drunkenness from before.
I had hurt her. I needed to face that unavoidable fact head-on. I needed to stare its ugly visage in the eye and not flinch away from it. I needed to look in the mirror and say to the man staring back at me, “You. You did this.”
Abbi's eyelids started
