Page 9 of This I Know
I hold out my hand, lifting my shoulder into a shrug. “Why do you think I came? Why else would I come? It’s not like I’m here to tell you how much I love you for committing another crime.” I had meant it as a sharp insult, but instead, the words choke me up. I lean back in the chair, my hand gripping the phone with the strength of all my anger. “And I sure as hell didn’t come here for the fun of it.”
He doesn’t say anything. At all. He just looks at me. That bastard.
I lean forward. “So why did you do it?” Maybe not the most appropriate question, but like I said … I don’t feel like waiting for the healing this time around.
He sighs and looks around. Already, I can tell he’s not going to give me the answers I’m looking for.
I slam my hand on the counter, then ball it into a fist when I realize what I’ve done. “I need you to just tell me.” I look at a guard, who shoots me a corrective glance, and lower my voice. I turn back to my father. “Please?”
He shakes his head and breaths out. “I don’t have an answer for you, Ethan. What do you want? Do you want me to tell you I did it because I liked it?”
I slam the phone into its holder. I don’t bother giving him one more ounce of my respect or my time; I stand, and without saying goodbye, I leave. I can feel his eyes burning into my back as I leave him behind.
I rush out of the building – past the guards, almost forgetting to collect my things from the entryway, flying through the doors without care of them slamming behind me, just hoping that none of the guards who are eyeing me grow suspicious enough to stop me. I open the door to my truck just as violently and the second I sit down, I feel like hitting something. I don’t, though. Instead, I bury my head against the steering wheel and squeeze my fingers into the seat of the car.
His non-answer wasn’t what I expected. It doesn’t help me. If anything, it makes things worse.
That last phrase of his plays over and over in my mind:I liked it. I liked it.
I’d always known he was a criminal.
I didn’t know he was so cold.
Although it hurts like hell, I officially never, ever want to speak to him again.
When I’m home, I hesitate, biding my time in the driveway before going inside. I finish the rest of that Poptart while I think about what to do next. The plan had been to head to the library after that little visit, to finish up the half-day by getting some homework done and studying for next week’s exam – my attempt to maintain some sense of normalcy. But after that, there’s no way I’m up for it.
I pick up my phone to text my mom. I didn’t send her a text after I finished up at the prison like I should have. She’s probably wondering how it went.
i’m done. everything went fine
I send the text with a pang of guilt about the lie. But that’s how it’ll have to be for now. I’m not ready to face her knowing that I’m destroyed yet. The truth is, despite what I thought going in, I’m not ready to face any of this yet.
As I collect myself and grab my things to head inside, my phone rings. It’s my mom, texting me back already.
great. come inside. i have something for you.
Inside? She’s home? She said she was working today, and in her field it’s hard to get time off, not to mention last-minute time off.
I press the button of the garage door opener, attached to the visor. The garage opens, and there’s her car. Okay, so she is here. Huh.
And she’s right there when I walk through the door. She’s on the couch near the foyer, trying to look as casual as possible. She’s holding a thick stack of papers in her hand and she gets up and walks toward me.
“I’m not going to ask for details of how it went with that … creep,” she says before I have a chance to speak. “But I want you to know it’s okay to be not okay. And here.” She hands me the papers. “I thought these might help you.”
I take them. “What’s this?”
“Well, I thought about what you said this morning. About the need for closure and all that.” She touches her mouth. “I got in touch with my lawyer, and we filed a request for your dad’s police reports. With his help, we were able to get them expedited.” She looks at the stack in my hands. “So there they are. Everything damn thing you’d hope to know.”
“Damn,” I repeat after her, looking down at them, too. The stack is thick – there has to be a hundred pages here. “You got off work for this?”
She shrugs. “I told them it was an emergency.”
“Wow. Well, thanks, Mom. This means a lot to me.”
She touches my shoulder and walks away.
I’m alone in my room with nothing to bother me but the occasional sound of my TV. The stack of papers is sitting where I left it, on my nightstand. I bounce my knee and then grab for them and plop them on my lap. I flip through the pages one by one. A lot of this means nothing to me – it’s incomprehensible professional terms and data that doesn’t apply to the layman. Some pages contain only a single sentence. Some contain helpful pieces of information about my dad’s cases. Some are individual police reports, describing the moments of his arrest; others are the specific charges that they’re planning to file against him.
