Beneath the Surface(55)

Kristin couldn’t help but wonder if she could ever be enough.





Chapter Twenty-Four





Five days had gone by, and Sheryl hadn’t done anything with the piece of paper. She’d stashed it away in a drawer in her desk, but out of sight was not out of mind.

She taught her classes, pretended to do research but nothing really got through, had meetings with her colleagues and office hours with her students. She sat around in The Pink Bean, watching people, and every time the door opened, with a flutter in her chest, she wondered if her father would walk in again. With all her might, she wanted life to continue the way it had before, but she couldn’t shake the sight of him, and the memories it had ignited.

So, she drank. In a cruel reversal of everything she had believed in in her twenties. The only wish she’d had as a child—apart from being able to go back in time and being enough for her mother to not want to leave this world—had finally come true, now that her father had finally gotten sober. The irony didn’t escape Sheryl, but what was she meant to do? Go to AA meetings with him?

Every night, after Kristin went to bed, Sheryl stayed up and easily polished off a bottle of wine, on top of the one she and Kristin had already shared over dinner. After the wine was finished, she turned to the bottle of vodka she kept in her desk—in a different drawer than her father’s phone number.

Only after a few units of that, the liquor burning hard in her throat, its heat spreading through her, could she cope with the darkness of her bedroom. With the warmth of another person next to her. A woman who loved her. Her. How was it even possible? It all felt like such a sham. In between knocking back shots, Sheryl asked herself the same questions over and over again: how had she managed to fool herself and everyone around her for so long? How had she found a woman who loved her? How could she respect a woman who could find it in her heart to do so when Sheryl had been utterly convinced, because the facts were so clear, since the age of twelve, that clearly she wasn’t meant to be loved.

Most of all, though, she wondered how on earth she had managed to keep it together for so long. The will to survive, perhaps? Human nature? The surprising resilience of the mind and its ability to stash away in a dark corner what it doesn’t want to remember?

Sheryl remembered now. She remembered her mother’s arms around her, her voice always so sweet and low, when she said, “I should stop kissing you on this cheek. It will start showing on your skin.” The love and warmth she had taken for granted, even when it became harder for her mother to muster an easy smile, and to get up to go to work in the morning.

Sheryl had been too young to understand any of it and perhaps too absorbed in her selfish early-teenage world, thus she’d had no way of bracing herself, of preparing herself for the worst.

Who did her father think he was, showing up like that? To him, it might have looked like an attempt to make amends; to Sheryl, it was the opposite. She had already made amends with her past. She had done the best she could with the hand that life had dealt her. She had found ways to forget, mechanisms to cope. Moreover, she had love. Stability. A beautiful partner. She had much more than she’d ever dreamed she’d have. And then this man walked into The Pink Bean… destroying it all.

She took another sip, while thinking of Kristin asleep in the other room. How could she explain to her how an old, deep wound, that had taken years to heal, had been brusquely torn open? And did she even have to? She slammed the glass down, noticing how sorry she was feeling for herself and hating the notion of it. This was not how Sheryl had picked herself up. When she was a child, wallowing in self-pity didn’t even occur to her. So what the hell was she doing now? And why? Because nothing had changed. If it weren’t for that persistent little voice in her head—her father’s gruff baritone asking, “Please think about it.”



“Professor Johnson,” Martha said. “May I take a moment of your time?” She smiled disarmingly.

The last student hadn’t closed the door, giving Martha ample opportunity to walk right in.

“Hey.” An arrow of pain, which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside of her, burrowed its way up to Sheryl’s temples. The headaches never stopped. “Sure.” Sheryl gestured at a chair.

Martha closed the door. “You’ve been looking a bit pale of late,” Martha said. “You know I have dibs on the fairer complexion.” Her lips drew into a wide smile.

When Sheryl didn’t reply, Martha’s smile faded. “I’m officially worried now,” she said. “Is it your health?”