***
Sometimes you keep things from the people you love.
I went through the motions of being discharged from the hospital the morning of January 4. After a whole extra day of observation, I was concussion-free, my head bandage was replaced by a much smaller one, and a look in the mirror showed me I’d been through the ringer. I asked a nurse for a razor so I could shave off my beard to match my head, because I looked weird. It was a mistake; I looked even less like myself without facial hair. But it all tracked; I didn’t feel like myself, so why should I look like myself?
A taxi took me to the airport, where I was able to book a new flight on JetBlue at noon. I went through all the same motions as I had two days prior, except without the promise of sitting with Harmony for the five-and-a-half-hour flighthome.
My mind was a tornado of spinning thoughts, so on the plane, I took out my notebook and opened it to a clean page. I started writing a letter to her. I wanted to explain everything that happened. I told her what I’d hoped the morning would have been like, and I said how sorry I was that we overslept. It was like that movieThe Butterfly Effect, I wrote, but I wouldn’t have changed anything about our night together. And maybe this was the universe’s way of showing me that my father was really gone. Moved on.
Maybe it was time for me to move on, too.
I tried to imagine how she must have felt when I didn’t show up at the airport for our flight. Would she have been angry? Worried? Both? I wouldn’t want her to ever feel those things on my account.
I knew that when the plane landed, I’d be able to check my phone, and I was sure I’d have at least one message from her. Probably more. She was such a worrier.
I realized that I also never asked her to make things official during our night in the bungalow. I meant to. I was just so swept up in our time together. And I kept thinking I’d have more time. But when we overslept, she was upset and we rushed to get her back to her mom, so the timing was bad then.
We would figure it all out, though. We had to. What we had was so magical, it would be impossible for her not to hear me out, and then I could ask her to be my girlfriend.
Happily-ever-after.
My bigger fear was actually my mom. I didn’t know how I was going to tell her I had seen my father—that he was inAruba, of all places. With a younger woman and a boy.
A whole new family.
It dawned on me then that maybe the child wasn’t his.
Theylookedlike father and son, though. Even if the boy wasn’t his, he certainlybehavedlike they were related.
That hurt the most. He traded us in for something that didn’t look much different. Younger, sure. Newer. But still, a small family of three: a mom, dad, and son.
Why wasn’tourfamily of three good enough for him?
I wasn’t as close with my mother as I had been when I was a kid, but we were still close enough that I didn’t want to hurt her.
So, on the plane ride home, I decided I would leave it alone. If he wanted to live the same life in an alternate universe, let him.
He was dead in my book, anyway.
Chapter 29
Reading Beckett’s story raises so many questions that I become antsy. It’s almost 11:00 p.m. on Thursday night, and I know I have to finish it.
I can’t believe he saw his father at the airport.
With a whole new family.
Whether he told his mom or not, that had to cause him some irrevocable damage.
I remember him mentioning going to therapy at some point. I also remember that the novel he wassupposedto be writing was a whole father-son saga. His dad left the day after Christmas, and there was Beckett, running away like a professional at manifesting abandonment issues.
I didn’t know any of this happened to him.
I know he tried to reach out in the blur that followed Aruba. Evan told me about an e-mail he received through the contact page on my website, but by then it was too late. I was too medicated on anti-depressants and too much of a disaster for any of that to even register. I was hurt, angry, and broken, and there was no way to come back from it. The hole of despair I fell into was too deep.
I know the only way to figure this out is to just finish the book.
“I told you, Pretty Girl,” I hear her say.
