"Gerald please, just tell me where?—"
"Miss Keller."
He says it again and again, the same two words, and his face is doing the same wrong thing Alana's face was doing, the mouth slightly out of time, and I take a step toward him, and his face changes and becomes my father's face.
I stop.
My father looks at me.
He looks at me the way he always looks at me, he looks at me the way you look at something you have noticed in your peripheral vision, something that is not relevant to where you are going. His eyes move across my face without finding anything worth stopping for.
"Dad," I say.
He frowns. The frown isn't at me, it is at something behind me or beyond me, something I am in the way of.
"Dad, please?—"
He looks away the way he did when I was twelve years old standing in the doorway of his study after the funeral. He was at his desk and he didn't turn around and I stood there for so long my feet went numb and he never turned around.
I am crying. I can feel it on my face. I look up because I cannot look at him anymore, I cannot stand looking away.
I look up at the sky and my mother is there.
She is up high, very high, standing in light that doesn't have a source, and she is herself again, completely herself, and she is looking down at me.
"Mom," I say, and I reach up, though she is too far, miles too far, she is unreachable and I know it but I reach anyway. "Mom, please, come back, please, I need you to come back, please?—"
A figure steps in front of me. I lower my arm.
Luca is standing between me and the sky where my mother is and he is looking at me with his face completely closed, every door in it shut, and he says, "Miss Keller. I'm done with you."
"No." I grab his jacket with both hands. "No, Luca, please, I'm scared, I don't want to stay here, please don't leave me here, I'm scared?—"
He starts to walk. I hold on and I am dragged two steps before I lose my grip and he keeps walking. I run after him and the road has no end and he keeps walking and I keep running but I cannot close the distance, it only grows.
I am screaming his name and the sound of it fills the whole road and comes back to me from both directions doubled and tripled until it is just sound, just his name, over and over?—
"Luca—"
I jerk upright from my feverish dream.
"Luca—"
My voice breaks on it and I am crying. I open my eyes and the ceiling is white and the light is white and the smell is antiseptic and wrong and I turn my head.
My father is in a chair with his jacket pressed and his face in the expression he uses in public. The one designed to read as concerned from a distance.
Beside him were Alana and her father and Gerald.
They are all looking at me.
My father turns to Alana. "Get the doctor," he says.
Alana rolls her eyes and stands and goes and I lie there in the white room and I think, no, no, this isn't right, this can't be right, no please, with a desperation that has nowhere to go.
The doctor comes in and takes my pulse and checks my eyes and says, "She's alright. There was a light sedative in her system but nothing lasting. She'll be perfectly fine."
His eyes move to my neck. He looks at the bruising there for a moment. "That will heal within a few days," he says.
