Page 64 of By the Book

“That’s an excuse,” I said. “She chooses to be this way. She chooses to act like this. Let me guess: the stuff with Phil, the book deal, me taking over Talon Maverick—that was all her idea, wasn’t it? She always has to get what she wants, and it doesn’t matter how anyone else feels. She’s—she’s cruel. And she’s manipulative. And she’s cold.”

My dad’s silence stretched out, and as it grew longer, I wished I could call my own words back—they hung in the air between us, childish and callow and small.

But it was worse when he spoke.

“Her father is dying,” he said. “She’s struggling.”

The way he said that—her father, notyour grandfather—probably tells you everything you need to know. I’d never met my mom’s dad. I hadn’t seen a picture of him until college, when I’d done some half-hearted googling one night. I’d never tried to contact him because, from as early as I could remember, I’d been told he was bad. Cruel. And manipulative. And cold. He’d cut my mother off in college—cut her off completely, no money for tuition or rent or groceries, completely and totally, between one day and the next—because she wanted to have a part-time job editing a student journal. He’d left her at risk of being forced to drop out of school, of being evicted, and of starving. As far as I knew, my mom hadn’t had any contact with him since—almost forty years of total silence.

And because I will forever be Dashiell Dawson Dane, the word that dropped out of my mouth was “Oh.”

“Your mother loves you, Dash.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“She loves you so much,” my dad said softly, “that I think it scares her. You’re very similar in some ways.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“You both have this tremendous emotional range. You feel things so deeply. You care and you love and you hurt so much.”

“I don’t, actually. I desensitized all those parts of myself with meaningless violence and video games.”

My dad quirked a smile. “And you both have your defense mechanisms to avoid dealing with those feelings.”

“Since when is a sense of humor a defense mechanism?” (He said ironically.)

Voices rose in the distance—happy voices, the ghosts in the night of a group of people who were having an easy, uncomplicated night. Laughter. The familiar tones of people who take each other for granted in the best possible way.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“I don’t know. No. I don’t think so.”

I tried to pluck meaning out of those words, out of all the things he hadn’t said. Finally, I spoke again. “She said she collapsed when she was on tour. She said the doctors weren’t any help.”

“She’s exhausted,” my dad said. “She hasn’t been taking care of herself.”

“She didn’t even mean to tell me—it slipped out, and then when I asked, she wouldn’t talk about it.” That childlike hurt surfaced again. “Why can’t she just talk to me? Why does she have to be this way?”

My dad rubbed my back, and once again, I wished I could take the words back. Because what about Bobby? It was hard for him to talk about his feelings, but I didn’t hold that against him. But then, with Bobby, I didn’t have years of my own pain and resentment—years of feeling like I’d been abandoned, that there was always something else more important, and that therefore there was something wrong with me. Because otherwise they’d have chosen me.

Maybe I’d changed more than I realized, because I felt, for the first time, a kind of agency that was new to me. It must have had something to do with living on my own, with taking risks,with finding someone who loved me, and yes, probably with solving all these murders. It didn’t make the past any different. I’d been hurt. I’d been disappointed. My parents hadn’t been who I’d wanted them to be. But slowly, whether I liked it or not, I realized that I was starting to see my parents in a way I never had before. It was easier to understand that they were people too. That, in their own way, they’d probably tried their best. And that they’d fallen short. And that they had their own griefs and disappointments, their own difficult pasts. I’d never thought—never, not until now—about what it must have been like for my mom, everything that had happened with her dad, when she’d been young, when she’d needed his help. And I realized that, in this moment, I had a choice.

Being an adult really was the worst.

It took me longer than I’m proud of to ask, “Where is she?”

When I found her, my first thought was that there was something childlike about how she sat on the pier, her arms resting on a hawser, her legs swinging in the open air. The damp had settled into her hair and glistened slightly when she turned her head at the sound of my steps. Her face was unreadable, and I thought again how I’d called her cold.

I sat, and without meaning to, I found myself copying her pose. The boards were rough under me, the hawser bristly. Water sloshed below us against the piles, lost down in the dark. I swung my legs. The drop couldn’t have been more than twenty feet, but at night, when I couldn’t see, it felt much longer.

“I always think I’m going to lose a shoe when I do this,” I said. “I did lose a shoe once when Bobby and I were on a hike. He had to scramble down this ravine to get it. I mean, he didn’t have to. But he did because he’s Bobby, and that’s the kind of thing he does.”

My mom looked out at the shoreline, which was quickly dissolving in the encroaching fog. When had this gulf openedup between us, I wondered. When I’d been a teenager was the automatic answer. When developmentally, I was already trying to individuate, to separate myself from my parents, to be different from them. It had been a little too easy. All the years of hurt had been there, waiting for me—ready for me to mine for my own adolescent ego-massaging. But I hadn’t always felt this automatic defensiveness. One of my earliest memories was of my mom playing a game with me. If the game had a name, I didn’t know what it was. It was just telling a story, taking turns coming up with the next part. And I remembered, with that clarity of a strong emotion in childhood, how happy she’d been.

“That would be a good final image,” my mom said. The words startled me out of my thoughts. “The shoe falling into the water. Carried away by the tide.”

“Or a good opening one,” I said.

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