The Survivor

“We haven’t seen you in nine months,” Janie said. “You don’t get to tell us what to do. Certainly not without telling us why.”

“Okay.” He took a breath. Bit his lip. “I got knocked out and regained consciousness half embedded in a slab of ice.”

She’d been ready with a response, but his words must have caught up to her, because her mouth froze partway open. It closed with a little pop.

Still speechless, she circled a hand for him to continue, then listened intently as he spelled out his ordeal with the Ukrainians, ending with Pavlo’s threat.

The onions sizzled, black wisps rising, until Pete picked up the pan and turned it upside down in the sink. Janie sank onto a barstool. Pete coughed out an angry one-note laugh, wiped his mouth.

“They threatened to kill my baby?” Janie finally managed. It seemed she was saying it aloud to try to get her mind around it.

“Yes. But I’m not gonna let that happen.”

“All due respect, Nate,” Pete said, “but it hardly seems like you’re in control of the situation.” He hurled a dish towel at the backsplash.

Janie looked catatonic. From the garage, muffled screaming: “You can have anything ya want but yer a better mint taker for free!”

“We need to just get in the car and start driving,” Janie said.

“Not yet,” Nate said. “These guys have shown that they have reach, resources. They’ll be watching, and who knows what they’ll do if you try to run. I’ve got a window to take care of this.”

“So we’re supposed to just sit here?” Janie said.

“You want them to catch up to us at a Motel 6 in Nevada?” Pete said.

The question bled through the air, and they breathed until it dissipated.

“Do we tell Cielle?” Nate asked Janie.

“Are you kidding?” Pete said. “It’d scare the living hell out of her. What’s the upside in that?”

“She hates not knowing,” Nate replied. “Not having a say in things. Janie? Are you okay?” Nothing. “Janie, look at me. I will take care of this.”

“Give us a moment here,” Pete said.

“Okay.” Nate pulled his gaze reluctantly off Janie. “I need to check something in Cielle’s room. I’ll just…”

Heavy on his feet, he mounted the stairs. For all his concern about sparing them fallout from his illness, here he’d inflicted on them something much worse. In Cielle’s room he headed for the closet. Parted the curtains of clothes. A mound of clutch purses in the back. He dug under them, and there it was.

A red diary.

Just as Pavlo had promised. His men had shown up so quickly after the bank shoot-out. They’d stood where Nate now stood, arms in his daughter’s wardrobe, prying and digging and reading. Revulsion rose in his gorge, then something sharper. Rage.

Gathering himself, he breathed deeply, tapping the red leather against his thigh. Something in the closet caught his eye, mostly hidden beneath a black sweater. The edge of a wooden frame. Was it? He lifted the sweater tentatively to discover their old family portrait. The three of them laughing and hugging and half falling over. She’d kept it. Buried in her closet, but still. When he inhaled, he felt the slightest catch in his throat.

The door boomed open, and Cielle and Jason spilled in, Cielle mid-rant: “-just saying I can’t believe you called a friend of mine ‘Sewer Crotch’ on your Facebook page.” She halted two steps into the room, her eyes blazing over to Nate, who was bent into her closet, incriminating diary in hand.

Nate held out his hands, a felon at gunpoint, “I’m sorry. I-”

She flew across the room and ripped the diary from his hand. “I can’t believe you. I get that you’re dying and everything, but you can’t just sail in here and start prying around in my stuff and reading my journal.”

“Seriously,” Jason added.

“Can we get this clown out of here?” Nate asked.

“Chillax.” Jason showed him his palms. “I’m leaving.” He kissed Cielle, keeping his eyes on Nate the whole time, a little power move that, on another day when Nate owed his daughter less, might have resulted in a broken nose. And then the kid was gone, thumping down the stairs whistling the chorus from “Paradise City.”

Nate faced his daughter across a floor littered with dirty clothes and torn-out magazine pages.

She glowered at him. “Why are you back here?”

“What?”

“Why’d you come back again? I assume it wasn’t just to read my diary.”

He wanted so badly to be straight with her, to paint the whole picture, taking some of the edges off the gory points, but he wasn’t sure what was best, and Pete and Janie certainly deserved a vote. He cleared his throat to stall, but Cielle was having none of it.

“What were you doing at the bank, Nate?”

Quite a lane change. He heard himself hesitate a beat too long. “Bank stuff. Making a deposit. But I was interrupted by the robbery-” A second late he caught his choice of words.

“Interrupted? From what? Making a deposit?”

“Yes,” he said.

“In the news you said you were in the bathroom.” Her gaze, steady beneath those long eyelashes. Questions and emotions whirring beneath the surface, slot-machine reels that wouldn’t land. Did she know?

He chewed his cheek, not wanting to lie more but not willing to tell his fifteen-year-old daughter that he’d been planning on killing himself.

Finally she said, “At least do me one favor. Let’s not pretend that either of us doesn’t know you’re lying.”

“Okay.”

Relief showed on her face, though she covered quickly, wiping her nose roughly on her sleeve. More silence.

He started for the door.

“You hate him,” she said.

“What?”

“Shithead Jason. You hate him.”

Nate paused, hand on the knob, trying to switch lanes. The dispute loomed ahead like a pileup. “He doesn’t exactly make a glowing first impression.”

“Jay is a musician. He’s an artist.”

“No. Eric Clapton is an artist. Jason is a mouth breather with a guitar.”

“Who’s Eric Clapton?”

Nate thought, I’m gonna kill myself in earnest.

She was already caught up in her objection. “Who do you want me to date? One of those is-this-gonna-be- on-the-test dorks from my AP classes? I like Jay because he’s different. And you know what else? He’s here for me. Unlike some people.”

“I know you still like me a little.” Nate gestured at the uncovered family portrait in the closet. “You keep the ridiculous picture of us in here.”

She curled her broad shoulders, withdrawing into herself, her hands gone again in her sleeves, turning the cuffs to puppet mouths. “Nowhere else to store it.”

He nodded. They were done here. As he passed her on his way out, his arm brushed lightly against hers, and he realized that this touch of fabric was the first physical contact he’d had with his daughter in years. How had it gotten here? The question weighed on him all the way down to the kitchen.

The smell of burned onions laced the air. Pete paced, circling the island, and Janie sat on the barstool. She was grimacing in pain, her head tilted and one arm stretched low with the wrist cocked back.

“I have an acquaintance who’s a cop,” Pete said. “We have to take this to someone who knows what the hell he’s doing.”

“And say what?” Nate asked. “What proof do we have? A pair of handcuffs in a warehouse? Even the ice has probably melted by now.”