The Rom-Commers(93)

This was the thought that woke me in the night. If I hadn’t been selfish—if I’d just given my mom what she wanted instead of being all about me—she’d have been on a striped beach towel with a book at the shore a thousand miles away on the day that rockfall happened. She’d have been nowhere even close. Our lives would’ve continued blithely on. Everything would’ve been different.

She wanted to go to the beach.

My dad squeezed my hand.

“I want to ask for your forgiveness,” I said to my dad then.

He looked at me. “You can’t have it.”

“What?”

“I won’t forgive you,” he said. “You only forgive people who’ve done something wrong.” He tugged my hand a little closer and shook his head at me. “Emma. You never did anything wrong.”

But I argued with him. “Sylvie said I killed her.” Was I trying to get her in trouble?

“When did she say that?”

“As I was racing to the airport.”

My dad studied me. “And you’re going to hold her to it, huh?”

He had a point. Was I going to clutch onto something mean she’d said in a moment of panic forever? What would be the point? It didn’t seem like a choice that would benefit anyone. And yet: She’d said it, and I’d heard it.

I wasn’t sure where to go from there.

I lowered my voice. “She’s not wrong, though.” And then I said the thing we’d all been thinking all along. “I wanted to go rock climbing. I insisted on going. If it hadn’t been for me, we’d have been nowhere near that rockfall. If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have died.”

But maybe it wasn’t the thing we’d all been thinking—because my dad sighed like he couldn’t even follow my reasoning. “That makes no sense, Emma,” he said. “Mom could have gone to the beach instead and drowned in a riptide. Or been run over by a drunk driver on the seawall. Or hit by a stray firecracker. Or bitten by a snake near the dunes.”

I frowned.

“There is absolutely no way to predict the infinite random forces in the world any of our choices will expose us to. How paralyzing would it be to even try?”

And then there was a seismic shift—for both of us—in our thinking about me.

Was that what I’d been doing? Trying desperately to predict the unpredictable and avoid the unavoidable? Was that why I’d been so willing—or, if I’m really honest, relieved—to stay home all this time? Had I decided in some place deep below my consciousness that the best way to avoid disaster was to just never do anything?

“You can’t live like that, Em,” my dad said.

I could have denied it, I guess. But it was late. And quiet. And we were already telling truths.

“I don’t know how not to,” I said.

He studied me. “I think California was a start. In more ways than one.”

At that, I let down the bed railing so I could scoot closer and lean in to rest my head on my dad’s chest. I could hear his heart beating a soothing rhythm, and I listened for a minute before I said, “How do you do it?”

“Do what?” my dad asked, his voice muffled through his ribs.

“How do you find a way to be okay?”

“Well,” my dad said, frowning. “I had to be, didn’t I?”

He squeezed my hand.

Then he said, “Things were very dark for me after Mom died. But I knew you and Sylvie needed me to find the light somehow.”

“I didn’t know things got dark for you. You always seemed … okay.”

“It was my job to seem okay.”

“You didn’t want to talk to me about it?”

“You were a kid.”

“Sylvie was a kid,” I said. “I was—”

“A girl who’d just lost her mom.”

Okay. That wasn’t wrong.

“I decided that if I just held on, things would get better. I wasn’t sure how much better, but better. And when you’ve seen worse, better is good enough.”

“But how? How did you hold on?”

“I just got up every day, and went to bed every night, and tried to be a good person in between.”

“That can’t be all there is to it,” I said.

My dad took a slow breath, and then he said, “Somewhere during that time, I got very lucky and I accidentally figured something out.”

“What?”

“Whatever story you tell yourself about your life, that’s the one that’ll be true.”

I lifted my head to give that idea my full attention.

My dad went on, “So if I say, ‘This terrible thing happened, and it ruined my life’—then that’s true. But if I say, ‘This terrible thing happened, but, as crazy as it sounds, it made me better,’ then that’s what’s true.”

“You believe you’re better? Since the rockfall?”

“I know I am,” my dad said, with so much conviction I had to believe him. “I’m wiser, I’m kinder, I’m funnier, I’m more compassionate. I can play at least ten instruments one-handed.” He held up his good hand for us both to look at. “I’m more aware of how fragile and precious it all is. I’m more thankful, too—for every little blessing. A ladybug on the windowsill. A succulent sprouting a flower. A pear so ripe it just dissolves into juicy sweetness in your mouth.”