Alana is by the window with her arms folded. Her father stands beside her with his hands clasped behind his back, watching me with the mild curiosity of a man. Gerald stands to my father's right like he always stands, slightly behind, slightly to the side, the human furniture of my entire childhood.
My father looks at me.
I have just come from a hospital bed. There is bruising on my neck and I have been unconscious for hours. Now I am sitting in his study and he is looking at me the way he looks at mail he has decided to discard.
He stands up and walks over to me, and the first slap turns my head to the left. The second comes before I have finished processing the first and turns it back.
I stay where I am. My eyes are stinging and the left side of my face is ringing and I hear Alana make a sound beside the window. I look at her and I see her pressing her lips together very hard and her shoulders are shaking very slightly and she turns her face away.
She is holding in laughter; I look back at my father.
Gerald appears at his elbow with a cloth and my father takes it and cleans his hands and he looks at me and he says, "Do you have any idea the embarrassment your foolishness has cost me?"
I say nothing.
"Do you have any idea," he says, his voice dropping quieter and considerably colder, "how much I had to sacrifice to suppress those videos? You! Sobbing on the floor. My daughter, wailing like a child." He folds the cloth and hands it back to Gerald. "Do you understand what I had to call in to make that disappear?"
The tears come without my permission and I feel them run down my face. I don't wipe them because wiping them would require lifting my hand and I don't seem to have the energy for that.
I look at him sitting and cleaning his hands after touching my face and I think about a hospital room this morning, about turning my head and finding him in the chair, and waiting. I had actually waited, for something, for one thing, one word or gesture that placed me in the category of people he was relieved to see alive.
He had looked at me and walked out. I start to laugh.
It comes up out of me hysterically as I laugh through my tears.
"Uncle," Alana says, from the window, her voice pitched with theatrical concern, "I think she's lost her mind."
My father looks at me.
And I look back at him and I see it. For the time without the fog of wanting it to be different. He has always seen me. That was the thing I had never understood, the thing I had been creating my entire existence around and getting wrong. I had thought he was too busy. I had thought he was distracted, that if I could just be useful enough, visible enough, impressive enough, he would finally look.
He had always been looking. He just didn't like what he saw.
He looked at me at twelve years old standing in the doorway after my mother's funeral and he had decided, and nothing I had done in the eleven years since had revised the decision because the decision had never been about anything I did. It was about what I was. His daughter. The wrong child.
The laughing stops.
"You are banned from the office," my father says, straightening his jacket, the matter already closed in his mind and moving on. "Your apartment has been rented out. You will stay here undersupervision." He glances at Alana. "Your cousin will visit and she will work on your manners and your conduct since it is clear you lack both." He pauses. "Senator Hartley's son is looking for a wife. You will meet him. You will make a good impression and you will marry him."
The room is quiet.
"Do you understand me?" he asks.
I nod slowly with a detached smile. I stand up and I don't look at Alana or her father or Gerald. I walk up the stairs to my room and I open it. I walk to the room that used to be mine, I open that door, I lie down on the bed, and stare at the ceiling.
The room is exactly as I left it. That is the most depressing thing about it. Nothing has marked my absence. Nothing has shifted or worried or rearranged itself around the space I usually occupy. The room was indifferent. I reach into my pocket and my fingers find nothing.
I sit up and check the other pocket and then the folds of the clothes and then I go still because I know before I finish checking that it isn't there. And I remember that I lost my crystal in the hotel room Luca had his men kidnap me from.
I press my fingers against my head and I sit on the edge of the bed and I think about where I got the crystal that calmed me down in my tense moments. The parking garage was two years ago. A man was bleeding in my backseat. My hands were on his chest in the pharmacy light pulling out the bullets. The crystalwas proof to me that I wasn't hallucinating what happened that night.
Alana had called it a story I made up. Gerald had filed it under the long list of things I invented for attention. I had stopped telling it because nobody believed it and it had started to feel like something I had dreamed.
But it was real. He was real.
Would he want me? That man in the parking garage who had needed me, actually needed me, the only person who ever had. I don't know his name. I know nothing about him except the fact that he had taken my bra which I had been furious about for three days before I stopped being furious and started being grateful that I had something to be furious about because it meant he had existed.
I lie back down. Senator Hartley's son.
