Hero(111)

I gazed around, hit by a wave of memories.

The furniture was the same after all these years. Pictures of us as a family still hung on the walls.

“Lexie?”

Our eyes met.

I hadn’t expected to find our home … well, still as our home. I’d built this picture up in my head of the place being stripped back, barren of us, erased by everything that was him. But no. Mom was everywhere here.

This had momentarily distracted me, but reading the wary confusion on his face, I wondered if any emotion he ever showed was actually real.

He gestured to the couch. “Take a seat, Lexie.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“What’s this about? I haven’t seen you since your mother’s funeral and I think this is the most you’ve spoken to me in seven years. What’s going on?”

“I was attacked,” I blurted out.

My father paled. “Attacked?”

I nodded. “I was leaving work and a guy stabbed me. He was wearing a hoodie and I didn’t see his face … We haven’t caught him, but the police are investigating it and think the attack might have been premeditated.”

“Stabbed?” He stumbled toward me, his hands reaching out unsurely.

I flinched back from his touch and he froze.

“When?” he whispered.

“A few weeks ago.”

“A few weeks ago? Shouldn’t you be at home recovering?”

“I had to come see you.”

“What was so urgent—”

“The police asked me if there was anyone in my life that had a grudge against me.”

Realization dawned on my father with the impact of a swift kick to the gut. He slumped down onto his armchair and stared up at me in horror. “You think I had something to do with this?”

I quashed the guilt his reaction stirred in me. “No. But for a brief moment I did. I wondered to myself what my leaving did to Mom and to your relationship. For a moment I thought about the man who was capable of leaving a woman to die and I wondered if blaming his disloyal daughter for his own crapshoot of a life could make him unstable.”

“That’s—”

“Far-fetched, I know.” I sighed and sat down wearily on the sofa. “But I’ve been lying in bed these last few weeks and I can’t get it out of my head that the thought even crossed my mind. I’ve been protected and coddled in a friend’s apartment, scared of what’s outside, but even more scared of how messed up I am over you. So I had to come see you.”

Silence fell between us.

Finally my father cleared his throat. His voice was thick. “I am not this monster you’ve made me up to be in your head.”

“No?” Tears burned in my eyes. “How could you leave a woman who had a little boy to take care of … How could you leave her to die? I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t have lived with myself all these years.”

His own eyes were bright with tears and I was surprised he maintained eye contact with me. When in the wrong, or lying, or being evasive, my father had a habit of looking at the ground, or anywhere but into my eyes. “I was in the kind of denial I didn’t know existed, Lexie. I coped with it because I switched it off. I didn’t allow myself to think of her as the vibrant woman she’d been, a confused, lonely, beautiful woman, who loved her kid more than anything in this world. But like me she was weak and she could be selfish. It was many years until she began to haunt me. I don’t know what happened, I just know that the excuses I made to myself, the rationalizations, they burned up into ash in my mouth. I couldn’t stop seeing her face. That’s when I had my breakdown over it, when I told you and your mother.”

“So you do feel remorse? Just not enough to apologize to the man who lost his mother and father within months of each other?”

My dad looked away, his fingers biting into his armchair. “Apologize? What the hell kind of apology could I give him now? Not one that would matter. I let a woman die because I was afraid and I was weak.” He looked back at me. “You have to come to terms with the man I am, Alexa. I’ve had to. I’m not a perfect man. Far from it. I never will be. I’m a weak man and for a long time I was spoiled.”

Tears dripped off my chin. “Tell me one thing. Did you love my mom? Me?”

His mouth quivered. “I did. I do. I just … I was never cut out to be a husband and a father. I’m not built that way.”

It was the sad, horrible truth, but there it was. There was no magic solution to finding a father who would take care of me whenever I needed him, whose unconditional love would soothe the rejection of others, whose love for me would always exceed his love for himself.