Titans (14 page)

Rags is gracious enough to drop me off out front. It’s a first for him; not making me walk from his house. I thank him for that, and for the flowers. I don’t expect him to say more than what he does, which is a gruff, “Be at my house at eight in the morning. No excuses.”

I roll my eyes and smile as he pulls away, but when I face my house, my smile falters. The light in my room is on. Maybe Dani finally came home to, I don’t know, gather her strength before leaving again to be with Jason. But if I know my sister, she’d be asleep already. It’s eleven o’clock, and though Dani likes herself a good party, if she is at home, she’s hibernating in bed. Always.

Raw nerves bloom in my stomach as I gather my feathered skirt and head toward the front door. I stop outside and peer through the window to the left to ensure my dad isn’t up. He’s nowhere to be seen. Probably off making a microwave function with only the use of a fork and a box of toothpicks.

Even though Dad’s MIA, I’ll still have to deal with Dani seeing my dress. My mom asked me to keep it from my sisters, and now I’m going to start a household riot.

I swish through the door and close it gently, then tiptoe down the hallway. My parents’ bedroom door is shut tight, and so is Zara’s. So I form a plan. I’ll peek around the corner, and if Dani
is
back, I’ll hop in the shower for a few minutes and return wearing a towel. The dress can spend the night in the hamper.

Though I’m not sure why, I find myself holding my breath when I slyly glance around the corner, a criminal in the making. But it’s not Dani I see sitting on her bed.

It’s my father.

His hands are on his knees, and his head is lowered as if in prayer. But I know that’s not right. I pull back lightning-fast, but that breath I’d been holding rushes out. Before I can make a break for it, my dad catches sight of me.

“Dani?” His voice is misleadingly soft. I stop, hoping he’ll say my own name instead of my sister’s using that same exact voice. If he did, I’d go in there. I might even sit next to him and lay my head on his shoulder. Tell him everything about my night and pray he understood my reasons for doing this. Pray I understand
his
reasons for putting us in this situation.

He doesn’t say my name, though, and I know I’m avoiding the inevitable by standing in the hall. Am I really going to hide from my dad? Is he really that big of a monster? Guilt leads me to step into view.

As soon as he sees it’s me, and I mean the
moment
his eyes wash over my face, he rises to his feet. Gone is the softness he fooled me with. Gone is the aging man sitting on his oldest daughter’s bed, wishing she’d return.

Now there is only anger.

“Where have you been?” His voice is dangerously low. It takes five years off my age, and all of a sudden I’m twelve instead of seventeen.

My tongue attempts to answer him truthfully, but my brain won’t have it. Call it survival instincts. “I went to a dance with Magnolia. At the Knights of Columbus hall.”

“And you’re just now getting home?” he says. “Did you think to tell your mother or me where you were going?”

I’m stunned silent, because my dad rarely asks when I will be home or where I’m going. He says he trusts his kids and doesn’t need to hover over them, but in actuality, I don’t think he wants the headache of constantly questioning us.

Before I can form another lie, he leans his head back and his eyes narrow. “That’s a nice dress, Astrid. Where’d you get it?”

Ooh, that one is too easy. “Borrowed it from Magnolia.”

I’m proud of myself for that answer. Look at me, one step ahead of the grizzly man!

My dad crosses the room in an instant and takes hold of my elbow. “I’d like you to look me in the eyes and answer all the same questions I just asked. Let’s start with
Where have you been?
”

My body turns inside out: firing nerves and throbbing brain and pounding heart are now open for public viewing, free admission. I can’t think with my dad this close to me, can’t breathe when he’s gripping my elbow this tight. My father has never laid a hand on me or anyone in my family, but right now, his fingers feel like they’re made of iron. Like they’ll cut right through muscles and tendons, and from here on out, I’ll live with half an arm.

“I … I went to …” I can’t finish the sentence, because I can see it in his flared nostrils. I can see it in the way his head shakes ever so slightly, like I’ve upset him in the worst of ways.

He knows.

“Say it,” he growls.

I swallow a lump in my throat and whisper, “I went to Travesty Ball.”

“Why?”

“To secure a sponsor.”

“Why?”

“So I can race in the Titan season.”

“WHY?!” His voice fills the room. It’s so loud my brain rattles inside my skull. Tears sting behind my eyes and my bottom lip trembles.

“To try and win. So we can keep our house and be a family again.”

“And you thought gambling was the way to do that? Did Grandpa teach you nothing? It was his debts that made us lose the last house. It was his debts that led to us living out of a car. And do you remember how that ended, Astrid?”

“I remember he was a better gambler than you, Dad!” The words leave my mouth before I realize what I’m saying. My grandfather’s addiction was a loud one. He didn’t care who knew so long as someone would lend him a ten spot. My dad, on the other hand, has the decency to be ashamed. I’m not even sure he knew that
we
knew. And now I’ve put it out there that I do.

“Anyway, I’m not gambling,” I whisper, afraid I said too much. I try to pull my elbow away, but his grip is vise-like. “A man who used to work for Hanover Steel is lending me a first-edition Titan, and tonight … tonight I got a sponsor. Someone who’s going to pay for everything so I can race.” I raise my chin in a final attempt to maintain an adult conversation, instead of one between child and father. Even still, my voice quakes. “It’s because I’m good.” And then, a bit louder, “I ran in the sponsor race, and I finished in the top half. You should have seen it. You should have seen how this horse—”

He throws my arm away like a rotten piece of fruit. “You think I have any interest in seeing you make a fool of yourself? The only thing you’re going to do is get yourself hurt.”

I press my lips together to keep them from trembling. “I won’t get hurt. You’ll see if you come watch.”

His nose scrunches like he’s smelled something bad. “No. No, if I go up there then they’ll all know you’re my daughter. And that’s a shame far worse than losing my job. My kid pretending to be one of them? Involving herself in the same gambling circuit that robbed us of every dime I’d saved over the last five years? You do what you want, but just know I want nothing to do with you as long as you’re a part of that.” He shakes his head and motions toward my dress. It burns against my skin, and suddenly I see myself in his eyes. Dressing like them. Pretending to be something I’m not.

Reminding him of every bad decision he ever made.

Like father, like daughter.

“You disappoint me,” he says dejectedly, like he’s given up on a great task. “I can’t even look at you.”

He walks by me, and that’s when I lose it. That’s when I stop pretending his lack of affection doesn’t tear me to pieces. That this last bit of rejection doesn’t burn those pieces to dust. My voice isn’t my own when I speak.

“Daddy, please.”

He stops in the doorway, but doesn’t turn around.

Tears flow down my cheeks and slip salty-sweet onto my lips. “I wanted to help. I
needed
to help after what happened with Grandpa.”

When I left Grandpa at the house when you told me to stay home,
is what I mean. When I told Mom, and Dani, and even Zara that I’d be back soon, and what to do if anything happened to Grandpa while I was out. When my disobedience killed my family member and the trust I had in my family.

Every muscle in my body tenses awaiting my dad’s reaction. He has to turn around. He must. If he doesn’t, my heart will shatter into a million parts.

My mother’s voice comes from the hallway, asking what he’s yelling about, telling him to come to bed after he grumbles a response. My dad listens to her. For the first time in as long as I can remember, my dad listens to someone other than himself.

It’s too bad that when he does so, it involves leaving me alone in my room.

Hours after he’s gone, when I’m lying in bed wishing Dani would come home from Jason’s, I’m still cycling through our conversation and what I should do to repair things. If I quit racing, we’ll go back to normal. He’ll spoon baked beans onto my plate and hand it over without a word. He won’t complain when I bring a book into the room and sit as close as I can to a man I wish I knew—but never
too
close.

He won’t be disappointed in me anymore.

But is that enough? No. I know what I have to do. I have to show my father I won’t quit. I have to show him that mistakes can be forgotten, and he doesn’t need to carry our weight alone, because that’s what family does.

I have to win the Titan Derby. I won’t settle for the way things are.

Not when I know they could be so much better.

The next morning, before the sun has risen, I make my way to Rags’s place. He opens the door in jeans and a white shirt, stained yellow near the belly button region. His white hair sticks up like it’s trying to escape his head, and he rubs the heel of his hand into his eye.

“What is it, kid?”

“Let me take your truck.”

“What?” He drops his hand. “No.”

“I have a driver’s license,” I lie.

“Well. That’s more than I’ve got.” Rags studies my face, zoning in on the circles beneath my bloodshot eyes. “I know you didn’t drink that much champagne.”

I don’t respond.

“All right, out with it. What’s wrong with you?”

Again, I plead the fifth.

He scratches his armpit and squints at something over my shoulder. “Let me get my vest, at least.”

Then he slams the door, leaving me on the porch, in the dark, until he returns ten minutes later. Once we’ve loaded into the truck and stopped by Magnolia’s house, where she tells me through her cracked window that
No, she’s not getting up this early, and why the heck am I waking her up?,
we make our way down a route I’ve memorized over the last two weeks.

The sun slumbers on when Rags pulls up outside Barney’s house. He kills the engine. “What’s this all about? You that eager to start training?”

I lower my head and mumble, “I needed some space. Mind if I hang in the barn for a while?”

Rags wipes invisible dust off his dashboard. “Yeah, all right. I’ll go inside and wake up that good-for-nothing senior citizen. See if I can’t make breakfast. It’ll be a miracle if that man has anything more than stale bread and half a stick of margarine.”

I peel myself off the worn vinyl seat and head toward the barn. Inside, I find the gray mare leaning her head out of the stall. I spot another horse too, a black stallion with one white ear, but he’s not all that interested in what I’m doing there so early, and soon disappears into his feed trough. The mare, however, whinnies for attention, and so I rub her soft nose while keeping my eyes on the back of the barn.

Why hasn’t Padlock poked his head out yet? As a Titan, his hearing is heightened above flesh-and-blood horses. I give the mare one last scratch and then make my way to Padlock’s stall. When I see him huddled in the corner—a black tarp thrown across his back, his head buried in a mound of straw—frustration boils through my limbs. His eyes are unseeing, his body unmoving.

He’s turned off.

I throw open the stall door and search the wall until I find his key. Then I slip it into his ignition and turn, ensuring the autopilot switch isn’t engaged. Almost immediately, heat warms his cold steel body, and in another couple of seconds, the Titan draws up his weary head. It’s a much different reaction than the one he had the day we first woke him. He seems off-kilter now, as if he didn’t expect to have fallen asleep, and is now disoriented.

“Padlock?” I say, kneeling beside him. “Are you okay?”

His steel ears turn in my direction like mini satellites, and he moves his head so that it lies across my lap. I drop down into the straw—the morning light now slipping through the barn slats—and run my hand tentatively across Padlock’s smooth neck.

“I don’t know why they turned you off, but I won’t let it happen again.” I think about Lottie, and how she agreed to pay for any expenses we incur. Well, one of them is going to be enough diesel fuel so that Padlock doesn’t ever have to be disengaged. If he’s to help us win this thing, he deserves to be cognizant at all times. “Guess what, horse. We got a sponsor. She’s going to pay our entrance fee so we can race in the circuit.”

Padlock flicks his tail, which I take as a sign of enthusiasm.

I glance at the stall door and listen to hear if anyone is coming. All is still, so I lift Padlock’s head and lie down in the straw beside him. Maybe he’s not groggy at all. Maybe it’s just this place, this certain time of day. When all is quiet and colors are muted and you can think clearly about what lies ahead. Or what happened in the past.

My thoughts fall instantly to my father.

You disappoint me
.

“Padlock, I want to tell you something.” My voice is barely a whisper, and already my throat is thick with lingering emotion. “I’d never be disappointed in you. No matter what happens this season, I’m proud to call you my Titan.”

And then I lose it. Because right now, I need someone. It can’t be Magnolia, because she has her own problems. And it can’t be Rags, because he’s so much like the man I let down when I went in search of my colored chalks. But this here—this hunk of metal that’s burrowing his nose into my neck and looking at me with large, thoughtful eyes—this is perfect.

I lie next to Padlock and ugly cry for several minutes, and not once does the Titan pull away. He only keeps his head close and nuzzles my side, and my belly, and sniffs at my hair. Only when I’ve exhausted myself does the horse climb to his feet. Leaning down, he nudges me to do the same. I shake my head because I don’t trust myself to stand on my own. But that’s okay, because Padlock is there, offering his strong neck for me to wrap my arms around.

When we’re both upright, I wipe my face and snort real lady-like. Padlock stares at me dead on, almost as if asking whether I’m okay, and I grow ashamed. It’s ridiculous how much I’m letting my father affect me. And it’s ridiculous that I care whether a machine sees me crying. Rubbing away the rest of my tears, I say to Padlock, “This never happened.”

Padlock snorts louder than I did.

“I’m serious, horse. Tell anyone and I’ll spill the secret about your raging crush on Miss Gray down the aisle.”

Padlock glances down the way as if looking for the mare, and then ducks his head.

“Oh, boy. You know, you gotta do more than sniff at her if you want a chance over that white-eared stallion.”

I allow my imagination to run wild and envision Padlock a year from now, long-legged gray colts fumbling after their father—half-flesh, half-steel. How awesome would that be? Pretty sure it’s entirely impossible too. But then again, I wouldn’t have thought architects and engineers could create a horse with human-like emotions, and yet Padlock surprises me more every day.

When the sun has appeared enough so that I can see the stable in all its run-down glory, Rags makes his way outside. He has two paper plates in his hands, and frustration masked across his face. When he sees me, he lifts one in offering. “I was right. Barney’s kitchen is useless. But I got a couple of eggs from the coop, and found a ripe tomato in his garden that somehow survived his neglect.”

I leave Padlock’s stall and stride toward him.

He clears his throat. “You, uh … you get done whatever it is you needed to get done out here?”

I take the plate and dig the fork into the scrambled eggs, kicking my leg back onto the stall behind me. “Yeah. Thanks for this, Rags.”

My manager leans back and shovels food into his mouth.

“I don’t want Padlock being turned off anymore,” I say between bites.

The old man studies me for a moment, and then looks at Padlock’s outstretched head. “He’s programmed to experience fatigue after enough physical exertion, so resting shouldn’t be a problem.”

“So he can stay on?”

Rags finishes off the rest of his eggs. “Yeah, fine.” After tossing our plates into the aluminum trash can, he says, “You ready to train, kid?”

“I’ve been ready all morning.”

“That’s good,” he replies. “Because we’re going to try something new today.”