He glanced up at me, frustrated. “I need time, Dad.”
“I just—”
He held up a hand. “Dad, please. I heard what you said, and I know you’re looking for an ‘I forgive you’ or something, some sort of immediate resolution, but I can’t give you that. I just need time, okay? You’re trying, and I recognize it. But you fucked things up for us so bad, and I can’t just wave that away. This shit runs deep for me, okay? Real deep.” He gestured at my new tattoo. “That there…that’s a big step for me. Putting that on your body. Take it for what it is—it’s the most I can give you right now.”
I nodded. “Yeah, okay. I get it.”
He wrapped the tattoo, handed me a salve of some kind, and gave me basic care instructions, and then I stood up and headed for the counter.
“Tat is free, Dad,” he said when I dug out my wallet.
I stared at him. “Your time is valuable, Rem—I wasn’t angling for a freebie just because I’m your dad.”
He nodded. “I know. And like I said, I heard you. I can’t give you what you want right now, but I can give you that much,” he said, gesturing at my arm. “And coming from me, that’s a lot.”
“I’ll take it. Thank you, Rem.” I swallowed hard. “I love you. Ain’t been great at sayin that or showing it, but I do.”
“I know.”
Nothing back.
But then, I’d gotten far more than I had ever expected.
I went home, then, and thought about…a lot of things.
12
Liv
I satin the waiting area outside our gate at Charles de Gaulle airport, sipping an espresso, munching onpain au chocolat, reading a New Yorker article. Cassie was beside me, head tilted toward my shoulder, snoring softly, a paperback copy ofAmerican Godsby Neil Gaiman in her hands, her thumb holding her place, the book slowly slipping out of her hands. We had arrived at the airport three hours early, anticipating a heavy line for security and check-in, but there’d been nearly no one here for international departures, so we’d breezed through and arrived at our gate with more than two hours to spare. We’d shopped the duty-free stores, had a leisurely breakfast and then, still with forty-five minutes before boarding even began, we’d gotten coffee and a pastry; Cassie had devoured her pastry and slammed her coffee, then promptly fell asleep.
Which she definitely needed—in the month and a half I’d been in Paris with her, Cassie had only been able to sleep sporadically, a few hours at night and catnaps throughout the day. She claimed this was normal for her, but it made Mama worry.
She had needed plates and screws in her leg, and weeks of physical therapy before she was able to regain full mobility, or anything close to it. Because her dance troupe was based in Paris, her surgery and subsequent PT needed to happen here in Paris, where the union doctors and therapists were located. Now, however, she’d regained enough mobility that she only needed to continue the protocol and have follow-up sessions with a physical therapist in the States. She was officially retiring as a dancer, however, and with no backup plan in place, was moving in with me until she could figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, now that professional dancing had been taken away from her—even Rick, her fiancé, had been taken away from her. First by the coma, and then, once he had come out of it, he hadn’t been the same and had broken up with her shortly after emerging from the coma—to focus on healing and being with his family, he had said. A devastating blow to Cassie, just to add insult to injury.
I was worried about my Cassie. She was depressed, angry, bitter, confused, and prone to emotional outbursts. Being a passionate, high-octane, high-energy, highly emotional person anyway, this wasn’t entirely unusual, but she had always been a relentlessly positive person, able to find the good in just about any situation. Now, though, she seemed to be slipping faster than I knew how to handle.
She was leaving her friends in the troupe—as much a family to her as her sisters and I—leaving her life as a dancer, losing her career and the one thing she’d worked for since she was three years old. She was leaving Europe where, from the age of seven, she had always insisted she would live.
Basically, her life was as shattered as her leg had been. But, rebuilding her life wouldn’t be as simple—not to sayeasy—as a couple of surgeries and a few weeks of PT.
I sipped my coffee and munched on my pastry, worrying about Cassie instead of reading.
I was worrying about my life, now that I would have a daughter with me again. I was just starting to adjust to life as an empty nester. Selfish of me, I know, but it was reality. My life was going to change, at least until Cassie figured out a new life for herself, and was able to find a new normal.
I also worried about Charlie, and Poppy. On top of being with Cassie all day every day, helping her to PT, and helping her move through the basics of day-to-living with the challenge of limited mobility, I had spent a lot of time on the phone and video chatting with each of my daughters. Charlie had officially left her position with the law firm, had sold her condo, and was living in a loft apartment on a month-to-month lease, living off the savings she’d been socking away for a house in the suburbs—or that had been the plan, she said, assuming she and Glen were going to get married and have children.
Now, though, she was living off her savings, doing a lot of yoga, running, and what she called “introspection”, and which I called pouting and feeling sorry for herself. Which, I assumed, meant she was going to find her way to Ketchikan, at some point.
Poppy had decided to finish the semester at Columbia and reassess after that—which, again, I assumed meant finish the semester and then move to Ketchikan until she decided to pursue art full-time like I’d told her she should do months ago.
The only two daughters I wasn’t currently worried about were Lexie and Torie—Lexie was at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, majoring in journalism and women’s literature, and very literally burning bras and marching for women’s equality and social justice campaigns of various kinds. She’d settle down eventually, I figured, but for now, she was a social justice crusader with a burning passion to right all the wrongs in the world, all by herself.
Torie…was the exact opposite. Laconic, easy going to a fault, difficult to rouse to excitement about anything, she was still living back in our erstwhile Connecticut hometown, living an apartment with four other girls, attending community college, working at a cafe as a short order waitress, and probably smoking a lot of pot and watching indie films at the local theater. I wasn’t sure at all where Torie would end up in life, and while I wasn’t worried about her in the sense that she wasn’t currently in crisis, she was the child I worried most about in general, because she seemed to have no passions and no particular talent, nor any kind of drive to find one. She was content to wait tables, take two or three classes a semester at the community college, smoke pot with her friends, and watch movies. Which, being just barely nineteen, was fine for now, especially since she was supporting herself. But I just worried that she would never find her niche, and while I wanted to push her to look, I knew I couldn’t. Torie was like water—you couldn’t force her to do anything, or to go anywhere; the harder you pushed, the more she would slip and shift away from where you wanted her to go.
I sighed, wondering if I was going to end up with all five daughters around me again. While I relished the thought of having them near me again, as I missed them each dearly, and missed our camaraderie as a family, I had been enjoying my independence.
Which I felt guilty about, in a lot of ways. My independence had come at the cost of my husband’s life—not that I’d wanted to trade his life for my independence, but I’d only found it after his death. I missed him dearly, and I’d trade my life now—or rather, how it had been before Cassie’s accident—to have him back. In a heartbeat.
