A Seahorse in the Thames (10 page)

When I turn on my phone I see that Dad has called and left a voice mail. I press the button to hear the message.

“Hey, Lex, it’s Dad and it’s Tuesday morning about nine-ish. Just calling to see if there’s any word on Rebecca. You didn’t call back Saturday night. Give me a call.” I click the phone off.

I’ll call Dad later.

After I can talk to Priscilla alone.

Isabel is fast asleep after her long day and Priscilla and I are sitting on the porch, enjoying the sounds of Mission Beach in the pleasant evening. Serafina and Jorge have just left after visiting with us for a little while.

And Patrick has also left after a five-minute chat, deciding no doubt, that he hasn’t a chance with Priscilla.

“So are you going to call Kevin?” Priscilla asks me when we are alone again.

“I think I might drive by the house first and just look at it. I want to see if I can tell by the outside what Kevin has turned out like. I wouldn’t mind seeing our old house either. I haven’t been over there since Mom moved out. Would you like to come with me? I promise I won’t do or say anything to upset Isabel.”

“Thanks for the offer, Lex, but I really have no desire to see our old house. Why don’t you just let Isabel and I sleep in in the morning and go do it then. By the time you get back, we’ll be ready to take you out to lunch. I’ve been in the mood for fish tacos.”

“You really don’t want to come?”

Priscilla smiles and shakes her head. “No, Lex. I really don’t.”

Her tone makes me wonder if my timing might be really bad, but I have to ask her about Dad. He’ll be expecting me to return his call.

“Priscilla? Dad called and I’m supposed to call him back.”

She turns to me and her expression reveals nothing.

“It’ll be very hard for me not to tell him you are here. But if you insist on him not knowing, I won’t say anything.”

She waits for a second before answering me. “I don’t insist on it,” she finally says.

Her answer surprises me. “So I can tell him?” I ask and I am smiling.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to see him?”

She pauses again.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Don’t act like it’s the strangest thing you’ve ever heard.”

“Sorry!” And I am sorry. But I can’t help it. I feel like an ugly chasm that has been open for years is about to close. And surprisingly it is not taking any victims with it.

“I’ll go call him right now.” I spring out of my chair.

“Lex,” Priscilla says.

“Yes?”

“Let him have the opportunity to make the first move.”

I don’t know if it is kindness or stubbornness that motivated her to say that but I don’t stay long enough to find out. I head inside to the kitchen phone to dial my dad’s house.

My half-brother Laird answers the phone. With my dad living an hour away in San Juan Capistrano, I don’t see Laird very much but he’s a decent ten-year-old kid. Quiet. Shy. I feel kind of sad that his father—our father—is sixty-four years old. When Laird is my age Dad will be in his eighties.

“Laird, it’s Alexa. How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Great. Say, is Dad home?”

“Yeah. Just a sec,” I hear him walking through the house calling for Dad.

It’s Alexa
, I hear. Then my dad’s voice.

“Lex! It’s about time. Where’ve you been?”

“Sorry, Dad. I did call Saturday night. But you weren’t home.”

“Well, why didn’t you leave a message?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

“Well, I have been wondering if there’s news about Rebecca.”

I so want to say, “Well, Dad, did you call the Falkman Center and ask?” But I don’t.

“No,” I say instead. “There’s no news about Rebecca. But I do have some other news for you.”

“Really? What?”

“Dad, Priscilla is here.”

There is a momentary pause. “Are you serious?” he asks.

“Yes. It came about rather sudden. I called her to tell her about Rebecca and she decided to come out. She had some vacation time coming to her and she needed to use it.”

“So just like that she came?”

“Yes. And Dad? She has a little girl. I know that’s going to come as quite a shock, but her daughter is three. Her name is Isabel and she’s the most precious little thing.”

“I don’t believe this,” he says, but I know he does. It is just something you say when you are completely astounded.

“She never told anyone about Isabel, so please don’t think Mom or I have kept this a secret from you. Mom and I just found out, too.”

“Why in the world would she do such a thing? Keep a secret like that!”

“She did what she did because she felt it was best. Please, Dad. Don’t dwell on this. Isabel is a beautiful little girl.”

“So, they’re both here?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

I take that to be interest in perhaps seeing Priscilla. And Isabel.

“They leave on Sunday.”

He pauses.

“What am I supposed to do?” he says, but he hardly frames it like a question.

“Dad, what do you
want
to do? Do you want to see them?”

He sighs. “What difference does it make whether or not
I
want to see them?” he replies harshly and I can tell I’ve hit a nerve. I also finally understand. He doesn’t get it. Guess I will have to explain it to him.

“It makes all the difference in the world. She wants you to want to see her.”

He does not answer right away. And I let him take all the time he wants.

“How? Where?” he says.

“Why don’t you invite us for dinner on Thursday? We can eat at your place or go out.”

“Will she come?”

“I think she will if you invite her.”

“All right. I am inviting her. Will you tell her that? Will you tell her I am inviting her?”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Okay,” he says and he sighs again. How can the prospect of seeing his own daughter be so fraught with difficulty? I very nearly ask him this. But I’m not sure I want to understand how it could be that way. “I will have Lynne and Laird go visit her parents in Burbank,” he adds.

I cringe at the notion that the battle lines are still drawn. “Is that really necessary?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Alexa,” he replies, like the idea of Lynne and Laird actually being at the house when we come is as preposterous as the concept of life on Mars. “Will six o’clock work?” he adds.

Fine, I’ll play his way. “Six is fine. We’ll see you then.”

We say our goodbyes and I h
ead out to the porch to tell Priscilla what I promised him I would tell her.

That he invited her.

I
awaken Wednesday morning early, before the sun, and I can’t fall back asleep. I finally get up off the sofa bed and make coffee. I take a mug out to the porch and wait for the paper and the sun to arrive.

Priscilla didn’t have much of a reaction last night to my telling her Dad has invited us for dinner on Thursday. She just nodded her head and looked away from me.

Then, still looking away, she had said:” Will Lynne be there?”

I could strangle the two of them sometimes. She draws a battle line at the same place he does. It drives me crazy.

I’d slid back into my chair, the same one I am sitting in now, and told her no, Lynne wouldn’t. I said it in a way that I hoped communicated how childish I think it is that Priscilla and Lynne can’t get along. Actually, they’ve never tried. No, make that Priscilla has never tried. Lynne made a feeble attempt in the beginning but her attempt was met with disdain that was practically three-dimensional in its depth. Priscilla has hated her from the moment Dad told us, four months after he moved out and the divorce was final, that he was getting married again. To a woman named Lynne.

I was utterly shocked.
Who gets married just four months after a divorce?
I had wailed inside my head. I know now, of course. A man gets married that soon after a divorce when he is already in love with a second woman, and probably has been for some time. I remember crying when he told us. We were at a restaurant, in a booth near the back. Mom wasn’t with us and neither was Rebecca. It had been two years since the accident and two days after Priscilla’s and my fourteenth birthday. Priscilla sat there like stone. She said nothing when Dad told us his news. It was like she knew already. Or like she hadn’t heard a word he said.

Priscilla had already stopped talking to him by then; she actually did that before he moved out. Her communication with Dad consisted of a yes or no here and there and occasional nods and shakes of her head. Visitation with Dad after he moved out was actually laughable. He would take us to a movie every other Saturday and then out to a crowded restaurant before bringing us home. Imagine the level of intimacy you can have in a movie theater and then a noisy restaurant. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized Dad was making Priscilla’s silence seem like a byproduct of the things we did, instead of a result of something he did: in that he’d left our mother. It was like the last straw for Priscilla; our dad leaving Mom. After Rebecca’s accident and while Rebecca was still home, Priscilla slowly withdrew into a place where even I could not penetrate. Plus, I had my own troubles. My parents’ heightened bickering, Rebecca’s never-ending therapies and the advent of our puberty collided on us both. Priscilla retreated into silence and I ran for cover under the umbrella of Rebecca’s recovery needs.

When Rebecca moved to the Falkman Center, everything changed for me. I felt like I suddenly was unsure of my place in the family. My parents were at odds with each other, fighting over the most mundane of things, including the forced absence of phones in our house. They barely noticed they still had two daughters at home. Priscilla had attached herself to a new circle of friends of which I was not invited to be a part of, nor did I really want to be. Her new friends were older—most of them were driving already—and they scared me. And Rebecca was gone, living her semi-independent life on the lovely grounds of the Falkman Center. I don’t ever remember feeling more alone and bereft of love. When I look back on it now, that year—my thirteenth—was the worst. Worse than my twelfth, when Rebecca nearly died, and worse than my fourteenth, when my Dad remarried and moved away.

Dad invited Priscilla and I to his wedding. We didn’t get an invitation in the mail or anything. He just invited us one afternoon, a few months after he told us was remarrying. We were at a pizza place after a movie and while we were eating, he said his and Lynne’s wedding was in two weeks—on his next visitation Saturday—and if we wanted, he would arrange to have us picked up for the ceremony. Priscilla had not even looked at him when he said this. But he wasn’t looking at her anyway. He was looking at me. Even at fourteen, I knew it was foolishness to think Priscilla would even consider going to Dad’s wedding. Did my Dad really think I would come alone?

I had told him we’d get back to him.

He had then said something like, “Sure, I understand.” And then he said it would be several weeks before he could arrange for weekend visits again because he and Lynne were moving to San Juan Capistrano.

“Okay.” I had said.

“Maybe you girls would like to take the train up for visits? You can catch it downtown or at Del Mar. It’s a beautiful ride. You could stay overnight and then take the train back on Sunday. I’m sure your mother wouldn’t mind taking you to the station.”

I know he meant well, but when he said ‘your mother’ even I bristled. Priscilla nearly sprang from her seat in rage. It was as if he had no history with Mom. She was simply “mother” to us and nothing to him.

I had waited a second or two before responding with, “Yeah, maybe,” knowing full well that Priscilla was seething next to me. I didn’t think she was going to say anything, but she did. Oh, she did.

Priscilla had first leveled her eyes at me and then she turned to Dad, looking at him full in the face as she opened her mouth to speak. “I will not come to your house,” she had said. “I will not sleep in your guest room. I will not share meals with that woman you are marrying. And I would like to go now.”

It was the most Priscilla had said to Dad in nearly a year. I know my mouth dropped open. I saw Dad’s fall open, too. But he looked bewildered only for a moment. As his mouth slowly closed, the countenance of his face changed, too. I think it was at that moment he realized he’d had it with Priscilla’s hostility and her refusal to accept that our parents had divorced and that he was in love with someone other than our mother.

What he said next pulled the last frayed thread from the fabric of our unraveling family.

“You may not like the choices I have made, Priscilla, but I am a grown man, not your son or your employee or your slave. You don’t decide what I do. I may not be your mother’s husband anymore, but I am still your father, whether you like it or not. If you choose not to have a relationship with me, then obviously you are making a choice I am going to have to learn to live with. Just like you are going to have to learn to live with my choices. Got it?”

I remember wincing when he said those last two words. I wish he hadn’t said them. It would’ve been slightly easier for Priscilla to swallow his reprimand if he’d left off the cocky “Got it?” at the end. He was angry and hurt. But so was Priscilla. And she was the child, after all, not the adult.

Priscilla had stood up then, calmly. It scared me how calmly she stood and then turned and walked away from our table.

I waited for Dad to stand up and go after her. But he didn’t.

“Dad! Go get her!” I’d whimpered.

He was watching Priscilla walk away and he looked nervous and mad. I could tell he didn’t know what to do.

“She’ll be back. She just needs a few minutes to herself, I think,” he said uneasily.

“Dad!” I whispered.

“Where is she going to go, Alexa? It’s five miles to home!”

I got up then and followed after Priscilla. I found her at the front of the restaurant, using a payphone, punching in numbers.

“Priscilla, come back to the table. Please?” I’d said.

She looked at me but said nothing. Then she turned her head as she spoke to whomever she had called.

“I need you to come and get me,” she said into the receiver. “I’m at Giuseppe’s, but I am going to start walking to the intersection. Right. Thanks.”

She hung up and began to walk out of the restaurant. I had followed.

“Priscilla! Where are you going? What am I supposed to tell Dad?”

“Tell him whatever you want, Lexie.” Her voice was void of emotion. She stepped out into the sunshine and the restaurant parking lot.

“But where are you going? Who did you call?” I said, squinting into the late afternoon sun.

“I called a friend.”

“But Priscilla!”

She had stopped then and turned around to face me. My mirror image.

“You really want to know what to tell Dad? You tell him this. You tell him I will not ‘get it’. I won’t. All right, Lex? You tell him the answer’s no.”

She walked away, out of the parking lot and toward the intersection where a friend would soon pick her up. I stood there, crying, until she was a far-off figure on a busy street corner.

When I got back to the restaurant, Dad was paying the bill.

“Where have you guys been?” he said, annoyed.

I told him my version of what had happened, not Priscilla’s.

He had shoved his wallet back into his pants pocket and stormed outside to the parking lot, cursing under his breath. We got into his car, left the parking lot and headed to the intersection.

But Priscilla was already gone. Dad took me home, dropped me off actually, and I had to go inside and tell Mom that Dad and Priscilla had had an argument and Priscilla was now out with a friend. My sister didn’t come home until nine o’clock that night.

Mom said nothing to Priscilla about any of it. I believe Mom was secretly glad that Priscilla had walked out on my Dad.

That happened fifteen years ago. To my knowledge, Priscilla and Dad have not spoken to each other since.

I did make the train trip up to see Dad and Lynne a few times, but I hated going alone and Priscilla didn’t come with me. When I turned fifteen, I stopped going to see Dad, and he did not put up much of a fuss. It was like he believed his rift with Priscilla extended to me because we were twins; like he assumed that if we shared the same DNA and the same clothes, we surely shared the same opinion about Lynne. He was probably wondering why I came at all that first year of his second marriage.

To be truthful, I don’t particularly care for Lynne, and I am sure the feeling is mutual. From the beginning, it was easy to see Lynne resented having to share my Dad with what surely seemed like baggage from his past. There were a few times when Dad came to visit Rebecca that Lynne came along with him, but it didn’t happen very often. Most of the time when Dad came—usually just a couple of times a year—he came alone. Then when he and Lynne had Laird, his visits trickled down to once a year, if that.

But I still call my father from time to time; I still drive up to see him on Father’s Day. I still send Laird Christmas presents and I spend New Years with Dad and his new family if I have no other plans.

My mother rarely speaks of Dad anymore. It’s like she wants to forget she ever knew my Dad.

And until now, Priscilla was the same way. But her sudden interest in seeing Dad makes me think she came back home for a second reason besides introducing Isabel to her American relatives. I am starting to believe that the old adage that time heals all wounds may actually be more true than false.

The paperboy is now turning onto my street; just as a rosy-gold spray of light begins to tint the sky. He tosses the paper in my direction, surprised and perhaps self-conscious, at my presence on the porch at dawn.

I take the paper and my empty mug back inside. I refill my cup before sitting down at the kitchen table. I try to read the news of the day but my mind keeps wandering. I can’t keep my mind from trying to process all that is swirling about inside it. I am amazed and somewhat intimidated by Priscilla’s boldness in coming home with a daughter in one hand and an olive branch in the other. It’s like she is taking the initiative to finally fix a priceless, broken vase, one that has been in pieces for fifteen years. It is such a forward action. And it suddenly occurs to me that this is exactly what Rebecca has done. She has done something very forward. She made a very conscious act of the will when she packed her bags and left. I don’t know why she did what she did, but I think Rebecca planned her escape. She made it happen.

I think of Stephen, this man who has tumbled into my life and whom I am inexplicably drawn to. I think of Rebecca and how she left me thinking I knew where she was going. I think of that check and how much I want to know why Rebecca had it. None of these events are things I planned, they happened while I was leisurely recovering from minor surgery. But now that I see where things can lead, what will I do about them? What conscious acts of the will shall
I
make? What are my choices? What will I make happen?

It is just a few minutes after seven but I have this sudden urge to hear Stephen’s voice. I feel like I will burst if I do not. How rude is it to call someone you have known for just nine days at seven in the morning? Stephen does not seem the type to be annoyed by someone in need. If I am wrong about him, then I will surely know it when I call and rouse him from sleep. Before I can change my mind, I walk over to my kitchen phone, grab the grocery receipt that lies next to it and press the numbers.

When it begins to ring on the other end, I begin to pace.

What in the world am I doing!

But it only rings twice. He answers.

“Alexa? Is everything okay?”

My first reaction is mute shock. He knows my number. He knew it was me on his Caller ID. He knows something is troubling me or I would not have called so early in the morning. He doesn’t sound sleepy. He sounds wide-awake.

“Alexa? Is that you?”

“Y-yes, Stephen, it’s me. I’m so sorry to call you this early, but—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m up. I usually get up at six every morning, so you don’t need to apologize.”

“Six every morning?” I repeat with a nervous laugh. “You didn’t tell me you were a morning person.”

He laughs too. “I wouldn’t exactly say that. But I just like having the time to read and pray and sort my day before it really starts. I usually have a pretty good day when I do.”

Again the lure of his relationship to God draws me. “I am sorry to interrupt it, then,” I say.

“I’m done. I’m just sitting down with a bowl of Lucky Charms and the latest
Sports Illustrated
. So you’ve interrupted nothing. What’s up? Is it about Rebecca?”