He pulled his arm free and ran a shaking hand over his skull, patting down wayward tufts. “And he would never, ever, do something like that.”
“Dad.” My voice verged on a whisper. “Maybe we don’t talk about this now.” Sometimes I thought his grief would strike him down, take his last strength, kill him, and I wouldn’t be able to survive it.
“Let me talk, for Christ’s sake.” He leaned heavily on his walker, which, even with its legs fully extended, wasn’t tall enough for him. “Your brother loved this world too much… Yes, he was sad about what we’re doing to the planet, but he loved it. He—he would never…”
He wobbled, the walker’s rubber tips catching here and there on the pavement as he tendered small steps forward. I caught his arm. “Dad, take a second. Sit.”
I held him gently by his narrow torso, torqued him a bit, and he let gravity sink him onto a bench, which was, according to its inscription, dedicated to a Mr. and Mrs. Gerald K. Waterston.
“Listen, kiddo, if I wasn’t such a decaying old heap of garbage, I’d be on that plane today to pay Dr. Speeks a little visit. Right this second, do you hear me? And goddammit if I wouldn’t get the truth,” he said, searching for his handkerchief in all the wrong pockets.
His paranoia about Wyatt’s role in Andy’s death made no sense to me, but he had always tended toward the suspicious. For years, he’d harangued Mom, convinced she was running around on him while he was on assignment in Antarctica. But she was crazy about him, always had been. So what good would it have done to remind him that, after what was described as a normal March evening at the Tarrarmiut Arctic Science Station, where the temperature hovered at twenty below with fifty-five-below-zero wind gusts, Andy was found outside at dawn, curled up on his side, barefoot, wearing only boxer shorts. Frozen to death. No signs of a struggle.
“It’s hard to accept, Dad, but—”
“But you, Val. You’re young. You’re strong, even though you’re wasting your life pretending you’re not. And you’ve got that break coming up at school. Whatever you call it.”
“Sabbatical—”
“You go, understand? He’s even gonna pay your way. And you know why? Because he knows you’ll be able to figure out what that girl—wherever he found her—is trying to say, because that’s what you do.” His voice caught, but he continued. “That’s what you’ve spent twenty years of your life getting good at.”
Sweating in my too-heavy cotton shirt and skirt, staring at the heat-stroked roses and clipped-too-short browning grass, I realized that the reason I’d even told him about the call was because I wanted him to change my mind, to push back at my obstinate, stuck self. Talk some smack to the person who ate the same damned dinner every night—Caesar salad with grilled chicken, no croutons—because new foods frightened her, who joylessly counted her steps on the StairMaster as she watched the women in Zumba swivel and shake their hips with incomprehensible abandon. The person who clung to her routine of rigid control: up at six, never in bed later than ten after a Columbo rerun, only to stare into the dark wondering, Why am I always so afraid, and what, exactly, am I afraid of?
I could feel my dad watching me, waiting for an answer, while I indulged in my age-old disappointment that his fondest wishes had nothing to do with me. On top of that, he wasn’t concerned about my safety or happiness. I was an implement of justice, only.
“Go, Val,” my father said, gripping, then releasing the handles of his walker, veins bulging. “Or don’t bother coming to see me anymore.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT I lost count of how many times I played the twenty-eight-second clip. Slowing the girl’s voice down, speeding it up, trying to sync it with every known language in the world, or at least the ones in the northern hemisphere. No matches, no overlap, nothing. What is she saying, what does she want, what has happened to her?
As I got drunker and more exhausted, the lines blurred, and she became me as a little girl, hidden behind a brother I adored and resented in equal measure, giving inchoate voice to my own anguish. I got so drunk I finally played Andy’s voice mails. I may as well have stabbed myself with a pair of scissors.
But the next morning I woke sober and clear. Over coffee, I played each voice mail again, erasing them as I went. I would never see or speak with Andy again. But this girl—no matter where Wyatt had found her—was alive. The pleading in her voice unmistakable, her suffering clear. And Wyatt had a temper—a couple of hair-raising stories Andy had shared jumped to mind. How was he with little kids? Jittery, I opened my bottle of pills and dumped them on the counter. Two weeks’ worth. I’d need enough for a month, maybe more. Double doses for the plane. It could be done.