Chapter 5
I began to close the door.
His hand came up, not to stop it, just lifted, the gesture of a man reaching for something he has understood he cannot hold. Then it dropped back to his side.
The door closed with a quiet, solid click.
I stood in the hallway of Ryan's apartment for a moment. The television downstairs had gone quiet. Through the door I could hear my father's breathing, slow and controlled in the way of a person practicing steadiness. Then I heard his footsteps, not rushing, not storming away, just walking back down the stairwell the way a man walks when he has accepted something.
Ryan put his hand briefly on my shoulder and then went back to his laptop without saying anything, because that was what Ryan did. He held the space and then got out of it.
I went to the bookcase and took down my mother's photo album and sat on the couch and opened it. The first page was the beach. My father carrying me on his shoulders, his face tilted up toward the camera, laughing. My mother behind the lens, her shadow visible in the foreground. I looked at it for a long time.
The guardianship was approved the following month. My father did not contest it, which Ryan's attorney said was itself a form of accounting. He filed no opposition, made no motion, submitted a letter through his own counsel that Ryan showed me only after asking if I wanted to read it. It was two pages. The second page had a sentence near the bottom that I have memorized the way you memorize things that cost someone something to write: I understand that a home is not a structure and that I failed to protect his.
Carla did not return to the house. My father told me this in a phone call I accepted in September, the first one I had taken since the night at the door. He said it without asking me to respond to it, which was the right approach. He asked about school. I told him. He asked about Ryan. I told him. Before he hung up, he said he was seeing a therapist, and that the therapist had asked him to describe the moment he understood what he had done, and that he had described the hallway, and the photo album under my arm, and the door closing, and how it had sounded like something final even though he hoped it wasn't.
I told him it wasn't final.
I meant it. Not because everything was repaired, because it was not, because some things require longer than a September phone call to rebuild. But because he had stood in the rain and heard me say you were too late and he had not argued. He had put his hand up and let it fall and walked back down the stairs, and that, more than the letter or the therapy or Carla's absence, was the thing that told me he understood.
The photo album is still on the lowest shelf of Ryan's bookcase. I can reach it without asking anyone.
May you like
When I turn eighteen next spring, the guardianship will dissolve by operation of law, which Ryan's attorney explained to me in the same even way Ryan explained most things. I will be an adult. I will make my own arrangements. I have not decided yet whether those arrangements will include returning to my father's house, because some decisions should not be made before you are ready to make them, and I am not yet ready.
What I am is seventeen, with my mother's sweatshirt on and my brother in the next room and her photograph visible from the couch where I sleep. The cuffs are fraying at the edges. I wear it anyway. It is the right size for a person who is still becoming who they are going to be, and I am patient enough to wait for that to finish.
