WAS IT A big cathartic moment when my family realized they’d been wrong all along only to burst into tears of regret and beg me for forgiveness?
Uh, no.
We never even got to see Parker’s reaction because when we looked over, she had taken off—slipped her disgraced and guilty self off into the night before ever having to own up to anything.
And then Lucinda promptly got the vapors and asked my dad to take her home. I wound up stuck outside my own art show holding up the near- to-fainting Lucinda as we waited for my dad to bring the car around.
There were no apologies. There was no Greek chorus of remorse. But did it feel nice to have my name cleared at last?
It did. Too little and way too late—but nice, all the same. Plus, I got my favorite polka-dot wrap dress back.
And in fact, Augusta had barely left to go into the show when Mr. and Mrs. Kim showed up with the most enormous, elegant, fuchsia-colored potted orchid I’d ever seen. Mrs. Kim wanted to hand it to me, but my arms were busy holding up my evil stepmother, so she wound up setting it lovingly at my feet.
“What’s wrong with Martha Stewart?” Mr. Kim asked. “It’s a long story.”
“Shouldn’t you be inside?” Mrs. Kim asked. “That’s an even longer story.”
“You’ve worked hard,” Mrs. Kim said.
“We are very proud of you,” Mr. Kim said.
“You don’t have to go in,” I said to them. “Just coming by is more than enough.”
But Mr. Kim shook his head. “We want you to win.” “I have no hope of winning,” I said.
“We’ll see about that,” Mr. Kim said, and they went in anyway.
My father showed up with the car then, and I thought that would be it: car doors slamming, red taillights in the sudden distance, me left standing on the sidewalk alone. But to my dad’s credit, after he helped Lucinda get settled in the passenger seat, he turned back to me and lingered for a minute
—offering a little moment of closure.
“Is it true? About you blaming me?” I asked. “Or was Parker lying?”
My dad looked down at the sidewalk as he said, “I don’t think she was lying.”
“You don’t think she was?”
“I did say all that stuff once,” he said. “To Lucinda. Late at night. I was horrified to hear the words coming out of my mouth. I think I hoped that saying them might get rid of them. But I guess it just gave them a different life.”
“I guess it did,” I said.
“I remember worrying afterward that you might have overheard us,” my dad said. “So I went to check your room. But you were fast asleep. I didn’t think to check on Parker.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Mom?” “I didn’t want you to blame yourself.” “But you blamed me.”
“That was my problem. I knew it was wrong. I knew it wasn’t fair. That’s why I married Lucinda so fast. I knew I was letting you down. I hated how quiet the house was. I wanted, honestly, as strange as it must sound … to find you another mother. I thought, Let’s hurry up and heal and get back on our feet.”
“You can’t replace mothers like appliances.” “I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”
“And now you’re stuck with Lucinda.” “I actually like Lucinda.”
“I kind of do, too. Occasionally.”
Then I forced myself to ask: “Do you still blame me?”
My dad rested his hands on my shoulders. “Sweetheart … of course not.”
His voice sounded dismayed that I could even ask. But how could I not
ask? “You did once.”
“I did once,” he confirmed, “yes—but I was…”—he searched for words to describe it and finally settled on—“crazed with grief.”
I looked down.
“I couldn’t even see straight,” he said. “I blamed everyone. You, yes. But your mom, too, for being so damned stubborn. And the doctor, for explaining her situation so casually that she could think putting the surgery off was even an option. I even blamed the Norman Rockwell museum. I had fantasies of driving to Massachusetts and burning the place down. I blamed her friends, her travel agent, and most of all—more than all of the rest of you put together—I blamed myself. How had I not insisted? How had I let her just ignore it? Knowing what I knew? Doing what I do for a living? I could have stopped her. She could still be here right now. Our lives could have been so different. Everything could so easily have been okay.”
I nodded. “She wasn’t really one to be bossed around, though.” My dad laughed a little.
I went on. “You make it sound easy when you say you should have stopped her. But how would you have done that?”
He shook his head. “Stolen her keys? Tied her to the newel post?
Kidnapped her for the surgery?”
“She wouldn’t have taken too kindly to any of that,” I said.
“And then we lost her,” he said, his voice going gravelly. “And I didn’t know how to go on.” He took my hand. “This isn’t an excuse,” he said then, “but it’s true. I couldn’t look at you without seeing her, too—getting flashes of the two of you dancing to oldies, or spraying me with the hose while you washed the car, or disco skating. I don’t know how to describe it, but my chest would seize up so bad I thought I might suffocate. It hurt so much, it scared me—and I was afraid to feel that pain. So I turned away.”
“I remember that,” I said. “You averting your eyes whenever you had to talk to me.”
My father nodded. “I was ashamed.”
Then I added, “You still do it. To this day.”
We’d been talking like this was all the distant past. But so much of it was still going on.
“I want to apologize to you,” my dad said then. “For what?”
“For lots of things. But right now—for the way I disappeared after your mom died.”
Ah. That.
“I wasn’t … okay.” “Neither was I.”
“I was drinking a lot. Every night in my room.” “I remember,” I said. “You’d lock the door.” “And you’d sit outside in the hallway.”
I nodded. “And cry.”
My dad squeezed my hands, but he kept his head down. “I can still hear the sound of you crying. In my head. I can hear you calling for me, begging me to come out.”
“But you never did.”
My dad shook his head. “A doctor friend gave me some sleeping pills. I’d take them and pass out. It was the best I could do. It’s not an excuse. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I left you alone when you needed me. If I could go back in time, I would. I’d rip open that door and gather you up in my arms and say everything you needed to hear: You’re not alone. We’ll be okay. I love you.”
Then my dad pulled me into a hug, and I could feel that he was crying. “I’m sorry, Sadie,” he said. “Your mom would hate me so much for
how I failed you.”
My knee-jerk impulse was to say, You didn’t fail me.
But of course he had. Not just then, but after—over and over.
So instead I said, “But you’re here now. And you brought her favorite flowers.”
His voice was almost a whisper. “Of course.”
And then, with his bandaged hand, he broke one of the yellow marigolds out of my bouquet and tucked it behind my ear with the daisy.
Did this one moment magically make everything better? No.
But it didn’t make things worse, either.
I’ll give it that.
And now whenever I see a marigold, I think of my mom, of course, as ever—but I think of my dad, too. Apologizing.
 |
AFTER HE DROVE away with Lucinda, I picked up my orchid from Mrs. Kim and then eyed the gallery entrance.
There were still forty-five minutes left.
A courageous person would return and stay till the end. But I wasn’t sure how courageous I was. It was one thing to not leave my post—it was another thing to be out and then force myself back in.
I might be a few guts short of the guts I needed to do that.
But I’d barely had time to consider that before, in rapid succession, I got that primal feeling of someone watching me, turned to see who it was, and caught a fraction of a glimpse of Parker, edging around the corner, out of sight.
She was still here.
Lingering at the scene of one of her many crimes.
I took a few steps in that direction, thinking she was running away and I might chase after her. But then I saw her shadow on the sidewalk. She hadn’t run away. She was just hiding.
Hiding.
I would’ve expected her to be out here, gloating. Cackling. Savoring the misery she’d wrought.
Hiding made me wonder. Was she ashamed of herself? Could she even feel shame? Did she feel guilty? Remorseful? Even—and I shook my head, even as I thought it—sorry?
I’d overheard a few things about Parker’s life, too, during the years when we all lived in one house together. I once heard Lucinda on the phone telling a friend the whole story about how Parker’s dad walked out very dramatically one night—with his mistress waiting in the car. Parker had tried to hold on to his leg to keep him from going, but he shook her off the way you might shake off a terrier—and he had kicked so hard, Parker slammed her head against the metal doorstop and had to go to the ER.
In my more generous moments, I’d sometimes wonder if her father’s leaving like that haunted her. If she was still reckoning with that moment somehow. If she’d rather do bad things and make herself into a bad person than have to face the idea that she might’ve been unlovable just as she was.
Or maybe she was just a psychopath. Or even a sociopath.
And yes—I’d done enough armchair research on Parker over the years to know the difference between the two. I’d once even printed out a flowchart. I guess I’d known her too long and too well to hold out hope that she might change.
That said, this moment felt like an opportunity. All our normal stories about ourselves and our family had kind of gone through a paper shredder tonight. Right now, with everything in shambles, it felt like I could say something true. And whether or not she would hear me or understand me or use it against me, I decided right then to go ahead and say it.
For my sake, if not for hers.
“Parker,” I said, watching her shadow to see if she’d run off at the sound. “I know you’re there.”
The shadow didn’t move.
I went on, “I don’t know what drives you to go after me like you do. I once read that people who hurt others think there are only two choices in the world—to hurt or to be hurt. And so they hurt others so they can feel safe. Like, if they’re the bully, they can’t be bullied. If they’re the victimizer, they can’t be the victim. As if anything in life could ever be that simple. But maybe that’s what it is for you. Maybe it’s faulty logic. Maybe it’s something that you’ll rethink in the future and regret. Or maybe there’s
—I don’t know—something wrong with your brain, and this is how it’ll always be. Me, always cast as the squirrel, and you always cast as the neighborhood pyromaniac who douses the squirrel with lighter fluid…”
I paused then, in case she might have something to say. She didn’t.
So I went on. “The irony of it is … I always wanted a sister.”
This moment was almost over—I could feel it. And the shadow was still listening.
Then something became very clear to me: As terrible as Parker made my life, she made her own even worse. Nothing she could do to me was as
soul-crushing as what she did to herself. In turning away from kindness, she’d chosen a life of torment.
Maybe I didn’t have to punish her.
Maybe she was already punishing herself.
Spoiler: I would find out the next day that my portrait came in dead last in the contest. I would get a total of zero votes from the judges. But I really would come away with a whole new understanding of what it meant to win. And standing in that dark street alone, talking to Parker’s shadow, I was already getting a glimmer of what that would feel like.
“I just want you to know,” I said then, “that it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be enemies. I believe you can change, and I know I’m not vindictive. If you ever decide that you want to stop acting this way … I will genuinely try to forgive you.”
