Randi herself had still not been able to fit what she could recall of that night into a story that would explain what truly happened, though in reality she had not tried very hard. On her flight back to California, she’d managed to reduce the entire episode to a bitter joke, telling herself she was lucky to have found a way to skip that bogus trip to Spain, telling herself it was okay if she couldn’t remember everything, since as soon as she put it out of her mind entirely, it would be as if it had never happened at all.
To pass the time while she waited to forget, she started fooling around on the computer her father had handed down to her the previous spring in hopes it would help improve her schoolwork. She began by playing the solitaire game the computer came with, and then she resurrected The Oregon Trail game she’d played as a kid. But after a few weeks she graduated to Doom.
She got the game from a boy she’d secretly liked for years, one on the fringes of the crowd she hung around. Before London she would have been more thrilled by his attention than curious about the video game he offered to share with her. But when they ran into each other at the park where her group liked to congregate on balmy evenings, and he handed her the yellow floppy disk that contained the first episode of Doom, suggesting that if she liked it, maybe they could get together sometime and play through to the end, wariness prickled through her like a thousand electric shocks. She’d made up an excuse to leave the park right away, and for months she didn’t go back again.
Barb was already out by the time Randi got home, so she was spared having to explain herself or spend the evening comforting her mother. Grabbing a Coke, a banana, and a bag of chips, and trading her black velvet skirt and Doc Martens for a tee shirt and sweats, she booted up her computer, pushed the yellow disk into the drive, and watched with a kind of listless impatience while the game loaded and the letters that spelled out DOOM rose up to dominate the screen. Suddenly, she was inside a strange dark building, urgent electronic music was playing, and at the bottom of the screen a masculine hand that seemed to belong to her was pointing a pistol at the roaring red monsters lunging in her direction.
She died in that first instant, and afterwards she died about a million times more. But click by click she figured out how to manipulate the mouse so she could move smoothly down the strange dark corridors of the Phobos hangar, click by click learned how to keep her health up, collect weapons, avoid green slime, and kill more and more of the steady stream of shotgun guys and zombies that wanted to attack her.
She liked that she had to concentrate so entirely on something that seemed like life or death in the moment but that had no meaning beyond the glowing screen. She liked that she could see her skills improving, slowly but measurably. She enjoyed the sizzle of adrenaline she felt when she was attacked, and she took a pleasure almost deeper than she was comfortable with in the groans and roars of the invaders when her shots hit them, in the satisfying red splats they made when they died. It was gratifying to go back through parts of the hangar she had already traversed and see the bloodied corpses of those she’d slain still scattered across the tesselated floors. And even back then, in that stilted, gruesome first-person shooter, she’d been fascinated by the entire world the game suggested, the glimpses it gave her of dark corners and strange mountains and unexplored distant vistas.
When the doorbell rang on Sunday afternoon, she was still wearing the sweats she’d put on the night before. With a couple of breaks for naps and snacks and to pacify her mother, she’d been playing steadily ever since, working as hard as she’d ever worked on anything. After hours of butt-numbing focus and tooth-gnashing frustration, she had finally picked up her first shotgun and was beginning her forays into the nuclear plant, so that at first she had no intention of answering the door. But when the bell sounded for the third time, she assumed that Barb had locked herself out again. Pausing her game reluctantly, and rising a little dizzily, she’d stumbled to the door.
“Dad,” she gasped when she saw him standing there. He was wearing his weekend jeans and sports jacket, and an expression that seemed both penitent and stern. “Hi,” she added lamely while waves of shame and pain the size of the monsters at Mavericks Beach broke over her.
“Didn’t your mother tell you I was coming?” he asked, eying her disheveled clothes, her rumpled hair, and unwashed face.
“She must of forgot.”
“Must have forgotten,” he suggested mildly.
“Whatever.”
“Where is she?” he asked as she stepped back to let him pass through the door, and then watched as he took in the meager squalor of their living room, the threadbare sofa and the nearly new TV.
“At work?” she said with a shrug, hoping it wouldn’t occur to him that the office her mother managed was closed on Sundays.
“So,” he said, infusing his voice with so much false cheer that Randi was almost embarrassed for him. “What’ve you been up to today?”
“Playing a game,” she admitted, wincing at her sudden awareness of how that would only underscore all her previous failures in her father’s eyes.
“A game?” he asked. “By yourself? What kind of game?”
“A computer game,” she answered.
“A computer game?”
She shrugged. “It’s better than watching crappy TV or taking drugs.”
“Are drugs and TV your only alternatives?”
“Maybe,” she answered, her tone a mix of desperation and defiance.
“I’d like to think your world could be a richer place than that. I know it could, if you wanted it to.”
“Whatever.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Okay.” She found an unexpected pleasure in watching him struggle to overcome the annoyance their conversation was causing him.
“School off to a good start?” he asked with more fake heartiness.
“I guess.” Without warning, she found herself back inside that moment in London when the policemen who returned her to the hotel finally left, and she was alone in the room with her father. She’d been dirty and sore and scared and beyond exhausted, but the relief of being back with him flooded her like warm syrup. For a second she felt so overjoyed that she would have started giggling if the sight of his face—as cold and set and stern as stone—hadn’t shocked her out of it.
“What classes are you taking this fall?” he asked now, frowning at the TV screen.
“The usual crap—English,” she began, and then, before he could react, she added, “and math and history and stuff.”
He sighed. “Miranda, I really wish you’d talk with me.”
“I am talking,” she quipped. “I’m talking right now.”
“I want you to know that I feel as bad about what happened on our trip as I’m sure you do.”
Terror surged through her—terror and shame and oceans of regret—while he continued, “I hated to have to send you home. But really, I had no choice. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
But it seemed she understood right then. Suddenly, all her sorry, muddled feelings crystallized into a single emotion—an anger so sharp and clear it seemed capable of cutting granite. She saw what she had never seen before, that her father was the problem, the reason she’d felt so dirty and stupid and forlorn. Suddenly she hated him, and not just for sending her home from London in disgrace, but for being so judgmental, so unwilling to value anything about her but the things he thought he already understood.
He said, “It’s obvious that we both have some work to do to rebuild our relationship. But I think it will be worth it. I know we still have a lot to give each other.”
“What relationship?” she asked coldly, and it was like blasting another zombie with her newly acquired shotgun to watch the concern drain from his face.
“Fuck you, Dad,” she’d said, riding her elation. “Just totally fuck you.”
After he left and she’d rammed the door shut behind him, she returned to the starting alcove of the nuclear plant exhil
arated by both her clarity and her courage, convinced that she could become the person she wanted to be, now that she was free of her father.
But she never felt that free again, and as she trudged on through the weeks of that grim fall, she began to suspect that whatever actually happened in London, she would never be able to leave that night behind. When her nausea increased and her suspicions grew, she lost interest in chainsawing monsters and finding her way to Hell. She returned to her childhood Oregon Trail, taking a kind of mindless comfort in naming the members of her travel party, choosing her supplies at Matt’s general store, and then starting off on what the old-fashioned type font in the dialogue box promised would be a long and difficult journey. When a member of her party died of typhoid or diphtheria, she felt as much relief as failure, glad to be rid of even the imaginary burden of someone else’s life.
Every night when she went to bed, she lay under the rumpled covers grinding through her real-life dreads, trying not to imagine the long and difficult journey that was in store for her no matter what choices she made, managing to sleep only when she had promised herself yet again that she would do something about it in the morning.
Finally, when she still hadn’t had a period by the end of October, she went to a pharmacy on the other side of town where she spent a week’s lunch money on a home pregnancy test. The next morning, she dipped the plastic wand in the vial with her pee, and when the second blue line appeared beside the one the instructions called the control, there was a long moment before she could comprehend what it meant. Standing in the cluttered bathroom, with her mother yelling through the locked door that she couldn’t find her car keys, shoes, and aspirin, she’d felt a gut punch of pure despair.
Dad, her heart cried silently before she could think to stop it. Daddy, I need you.
Burying the wand at the bottom of the full wastebasket, she’d left the bathroom to help her mother find her things and get to work. Then, pleading an imaginary period, she stayed home from school, vacillating between sick panic and a state of numb despondence as she tried to decide what her next step should be.
It seemed certain that whatever she ended up doing, at some point she would need the help—or at least the money—of an adult. At first she thought it would be impossible to reach out to her father. But he was smarter, calmer, less hysterical than her mother. She couldn’t help hoping that if he only knew the truth, he would feel at least some bit of obligation toward her. Besides, Barb had been drinking a lot that fall, and Randi worried that if anything happened to make her drink still more, she might lose her job, and they would end up on the streets or camping down at the levee.
When she calculated that it was late enough for her dad to be home from work but still too early for her mom to walk in on their conversation, she went into the kitchen where the phone was stationed and dialed her father’s number. Clutching the receiver like a life raft, she listened as it rang and rang and rang.
She had just convinced herself that no one was home, when someone finally answered. At the sound of Freya’s smug hello, Randi’s first impulse was to hang up, but in the split second in which she had to make that decision, she reminded herself it might be days before she could find another time to try to reach her father without her mother knowing about it.
“It’s Randi,” she’d said, struggling to crush the quaver in her voice. “Is my dad there?”
“No,” Freya answered. And then waited.
“I want to talk to him. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“Not sure.”
“Well, maybe … do you think you could maybe have him call me?”
“I’ll tell him you called,” Freya answered with icy precision. “But it’s not my place to have him do anything for you. He’ll have to make those decisions for him—”
To keep from sobbing into the receiver, Randi hung up before Freya could finish. Then, stumbling back through the silent apartment, she’d thrown herself on her bed, given herself up to crying while she waited for her father to call her back.
But by the time Barb staggered in at ten, Randi had run out of tears and her father still hadn’t called. He didn’t call the next day, or the next day, or the next. He never called at all until her birthday, and by then it hardly mattered, since three days after she’d tried to reach him, she’d been seized by the wickedest period she’d ever known, with hours of cramps that stabbed like knives and floods of blood and, in the end, a little wad of tissue like a crushed raspberry that Randi guessed was meant to be a baby.
“You still there?” she heard Sally ask inside her ear. Pushing back against those memories, Randi answered, “He got mad when I said I’d never gone to college, and even madder when I wouldn’t help him leave. In the end, I’d say he seemed pretty darn clear about not wanting me there.”
“Oh, no,” Sally answered ardently. “That’s just not true. One of the first things your father ever told me about you was how much he wanted to be back in touch.”
When those words registered inside her head, Randi closed her eyes as if the little darkness she found there might somehow protect her from their power. But alone in the blackness behind her eyelids, she’d felt more vulnerable instead of less. A memory popped into her head, entire and unbidden, how one Easter when she was six or eight, the Easter Bunny had left a bright little envelope in her basket along with the usual jelly beans and chocolate eggs. Instant Life! it claimed on the front of the package, and when she’d emptied the teaspoon of dusty powder it contained into a glass of water, she’d watched, transfixed, as tiny translucent creatures appeared, frolicking in what moments earlier had been only water, drifting and dancing like minute living feathers—revived, her daddy had explained, from microscopic cysts which could remain dormant for many years. Hope was like that, she’d thought angrily—translucent, ephemeral, and resurrected from the most unlikely dust.
When she opened her eyes, the compost bucket was still there, still heaped with sour scraps, and Sally was saying, “I know there’s more than one side to any story, and more than one way to interpret every side. But I also know your father’s missed you. He loves you. And now he’s old. And sick. And you’re his only child.
“He’s not going to get any better,” Sally continued before Randi could find a way to answer, “but he does have better days. I’m sure it was a surprise for him, to see you again after all those years. It probably confused him, maybe stirred up memories or feelings he hasn’t been aware of for a while. Maybe he was tired, or maybe his hip was acting up. It’s not a good idea to get it replaced now, and sometimes he’s in a lot of pain.
“I know it’s not my place to ask it,” she added after a pause, “but I really wish you’d give him another chance.”
And so she’d let herself get duped once more. Though now, standing on the hot sidewalk with her father’s final words still clanging in her head, Randi promises herself it won’t happen again. What’s done is done, she thinks grimly, groping in her bag for a cigarette and her lighter as she follows the sidewalk around the building to the little smoking outpost in the back.
It was also dumb to buy that book for him, she tells herself as she pries a cigarette from her pack and lights it. When she’d seen that copy of The Complete Works in the window of the bookstore next to the coffee shop, she’d thought of her dad immediately, imagined how his face would light up at the sight of it. She’d hoped that having it might help to fill his empty days, and even that his pleasure might somehow help to reconcile the two of them. Reconcile, she thinks drily—like making the contents of the register at work jive with the day’s transactions. After a busy shift, it can sometimes take forever to find those last odd pennies. Occasionally, she cheats, adding a little money of her own to the till. To pay for her stupidity, is how she thinks of it.
With a fresh sweep of chagrin, she recalls her father’s book-filled office at the university, the walls of books he’d always had at home. If owning a copy of Shakespeare’s plays was still important to
him, surely his new wife would have seen that he had one.
Staring at the smoke unfurling from her cigarette, Randi recalls their confusion about her father’s favorite play: It’s won … it’s lost … Love’s Labor’s Won is lost. It was like some kind of comedy of errors, she thinks, like that old Abbott and Costello baseball skit Mink showed her on YouTube—Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.
Once, her father would have enjoyed that joke himself. He’d had a sense of humor, back when she’d thought she’d known him best. It could be subtle, to be sure—sometimes too dry for a little girl to understand, though at other times he could be flat-out silly. She remembers him observing, “Well roared, Lion,” when she farted at the dinner table, how even her mother’s scowl had not prevented him from adding something about her rank offense smelling to heaven. She remembers giggling so hysterically that she’d inadvertently roared again, loudly enough that even her mother had joined their laughter in the end.
She sits for a moment, enervated and inert. But suddenly, the thought of her ArtTech acceptance comes welling up, irrepressible as the corny helium balloon Mink bought to congratulate her with, effervescent as the bubbles in the champagne he’d poured. Yesterday morning when she’d first opened the email, she’d read the message over and over, confused by that word, “Congratulations!,” convinced it must have some alternate meaning that she was too dumb to understand, afraid to believe the simple truth that she had been accepted at ArtTech, that she was in. Now, despite her father’s rejection, despite the heat and the sour-sweet smells wafting from the dumpsters at the far end of the building, she finds herself buoyant with pride and anticipation once again.