Page 77 of The Summer I Destroyed You

“Wall Street,” I say, though if I thought about it more, I could probably come up with something better. My head is just stuck on the stock market. “Do you think if I get into Harvard, I’ll be able to get a job on Wall Street when I’m grown up?”

It seems like a long time before he replies. “I’m sure you could, hon. But you don’t have to go to Harvard. You can get any job you want if you set your mind to it, no matter where you go.”

I shake my head. “Harvard has a really strong alumni network. I read about it.”

“A lot of schools do,” he says, but his mouth is tight.

“What’s an alumni network anyway?” I ask.

“It’s just people who already graduated from that school,” he says, and then he turns up the radio, which is what my mother does when she wants me to shut up, when she’s on the verge of snapping. He’s never done it before, and it hurts my feelings. I don’t understand why I’m messing up with him so much today, why I seem to be ruining this outing.

I tug my knees to my chest to make myself small, hoping that if I’m quiet long enough, he’ll forget I made him mad. It helps, sometimes, with my mom. I stay like that, watching the ocean change from charcoal to blue under the rising sun until we finally arrive in a city I’ve never been to, bigger than Elliott Springs and fancier than Santa Cruz.

“Where are we?” I ask through a yawn. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving, but I really need to pee.

He pulls into a parking lot. “Santa Barbara. Let’s see if their donuts are better than the ones near us.” His smile is forced, and he’s not quite meeting my eyes.

We find a bakery. We usually buy a dozen and he eats half of them on the way home, but today he only buys two. He says he’s not hungry and hands me both.

We walk toward the wharf. “How do you feel about trains?” he asks.

The only train I’ve ever been on is the old-timey steam train he and I sometimes take to the top of Bear Mountain. It doesn’t even have a roof. I shrug. “They’re okay.”

“They have a special train here called the Surfliner,” he says. “How would you like to take it home?”

I swallow the bite of donut in my mouth. “What about our car?”

“I have a few things to do here, so I’m going to stay a while. You take the train and tell me how it was. I’ll make sure you get picked up.”

My steps stutter. Is this because I upset him when I asked about Harvard? I want to apologize, to ask for another chance, but I’m still not even sure what I did. I follow him into the train station, worrying my lip the whole way. He buys me a ticket and stands with me while I wait to climb on the train. I must have done something wrong for him to be sending me home. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought up Disney. It’s the kind of thing I’m careful about with my mom, but I’ve never had to be careful with him.

“I’d rather wait with you,” I plead.

He kneels on the ground and hugs me. “I messed some things up that I have to fix,” he says. It’s weird that he’s hugging me. His affection usually comes in the form of a pat on the head, an arm around my shoulders. He’s rising before I can ask what’s wrong. His hands shake.

“Be good, Emmy,” he says when it’s my turn to climb aboard, his voice breaking. “I love you.” When I glance out the window to watch him go, his shoulders are stooped as if he’s an old man and suddenly it all feels very final.

I still don’t know what I did wrong.

I arrive in San Jose many hours later. A nice man hands me a bag of snacks he says he’s not planning to eat and I wait, hour after hour, for my mother to show. The man sits across the way the entire time, watching me, and when a homeless guy comes over, the man tells him to move along.

It’s dark out when my mother finally arrives at the station, furious with me in her scariest sort of way—beady-eyed, silent, lips a tight line. She says nothing on the way home, but the minute we walk in the door, she slaps me so hard across the face that I fall backward and crack my head on the banister.

She doesn’t care. She’s already walking away, untroubled, pleased with herself. Please hurry home, Dad, I whisper in my head as she goes.

It’s a steady chant in my head until the police arrive…and tell me my father won’t be coming home at all. That he ran away and used me to do it.

It’s as if he never cared any more than my mother did. He was just better at hiding it.

* * *

I wake with this sick heaviness in my chest and jump from the bed, pulling a sweatshirt over my pajamas as I head out to my car.

I don’t even question the fact that I’m knocking on Liam’s door until I hear his steps moving toward me. That’s when it hits me how fucking needy it is that I’m here like this, in my pajamas, for God’s sake. The porch light flips on, and the door opens.

“Hey,” he says. A puzzled furrow forms between his brows. “What’s up?”

It’s the middle of the night. Why the hell did I think this was okay?

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