We both laughed, and our laughs were uncertain creations with almost no sound.
Rachel dabbed her lips on her sleeve; in the yellow glow offered by the moth-filled porch light, I saw evidence of where she’d done it earlier, a small collection of kisses on her cuff.
I tried to think of what to say. I tried to think of which of them would open the door. It was almost nine. Maybe neither of them would open it. Maybe —
It was Dad who opened the door. Before he had a chance to react to the fact that it was me, my mother shouted from the living room, “Don’t let the kitten out!”
Dad stared at Rachel and then at me, and in the meantime, a brown tabby cat the size of a rabbit crept around the doorjamb and shot into the yard beyond us. I felt ridiculously betrayed by the presence of the cat. Their only daughter had disappeared and they’d gotten a kitten to replace me?
And it was the first thing I said. “You got a cat?”
My father was shocked enough by my presence that he answered honestly. “Your mother was lonely.”
“Cats are very low maintenance.” It was not the warmest of replies, but he hadn’t exactly delivered the warmest of opening lines, either. I had expected, somehow, to find evidence of my absence on his face, but he looked as he always did. My father sold expensive real estate and he looked like he sold expensive real estate. He had well-groomed hair from the ’80s and a smile that encouraged sizable down payments. I didn’t know what I was expecting. Bloodshot eyes or pouches beneath his eyes or ten years added to him or weight gain or weight loss — just some concrete evidence of time passing without me, and it not being easy for him. That was all I wanted. Concrete proof of their anguish. Anything to prove that I was making the wrong decision confronting them tonight. But there was nothing. I sort of wanted to just go then. They’d seen me. They knew I was alive. I’d done my job.
But then my mother came around the corner of the hall. “Who is that?” She froze. “Grace?” And her voice broke on that one syllable, so I knew I was coming in after all.
Before I had time to decide if I was ready for a hug, I was in one, my mother’s arms so tightly around my neck and my face pressed into the fuzz of her sweater. I heard her say, God thank you Grace thank you. She was either laughing or crying, but when I pulled back I couldn’t see either a smile or tears. Her lower lip trembled. I hugged my arms to keep them still.
I hadn’t thought coming back would be so hard.
I ended up sitting at the breakfast table with my parents across from me. There were a lot of memories living at this table, usually me sitting by myself, but fond nonetheless. Nostalgic, anyway. The kitchen smelled weird, though, like too much take-out food, odors from eating it, storing it, throwing it away. Never quite the same as the smell you got from actually using a kitchen to cook. The unfamiliar scent made the experience seem dreamlike, foreign and familiar all at once.
I thought Rachel had abandoned me for the car, but after the first couple moments of silence, she came down the hall from the front door, holding the tabby kitten under her arm. She wordlessly put it down on the couch and came to stand behind me. She looked as if she would rather be anywhere but here. It was rather valiant, and my heart sort of swelled to see it. Everybody ought to have friends like Rachel.
“This is very shocking, Grace,” my father said, across from me. “You’ve put us through a lot.”
My mother began to cry.
I changed my mind, right then. I no longer wanted to see evidence of their anguish anymore. I didn’t want to watch my mother cry. I had spent so long hoping that they had missed me, wishing that they loved me enough that it would hurt that I was gone, but now that I saw my mother’s face, guilt and sympathy were making a solid lump in my throat. I just wanted to have had the conversation already and be back on the way home. This was too hard.
I started, “I wasn’t trying to put you —”
“We thought you were dead,” my father said. “And all this time, you were with him. Just letting us —”
“No,” I said. “I was not with him all this time!”
“We’re just relieved that you’re all right,” Mom said.
But Dad wasn’t there yet. “You could have called, Grace,” he said. “You could have just called so we knew you were alive. That was all we needed.”
I believed him. He didn’t really need me. He needed proof of me. “Last time I tried to talk to you, you told me I couldn’t see Sam until I was eighteen, and completely talked over the top of m —”
“I’m calling the police to tell them you’re here,” Dad said. He was halfway out of his seat.
“Dad,” I snapped. “First of all, they know. Second of all, you’re doing it. You’re not even listening to half of what I say.”
“I am not doing anything,” he said. He looked at Rachel. “Why did you bring Rachel?”
Rachel twitched a bit at the sound of her name. She said, “I’m the referee.”
Dad put his hands up in the air like he gave up, which is what people do when they’re not really giving up, and then he pressed them against the table like we were having a séance and the table was trying to move.
“We don’t need a referee,” Mom said. “There’s not going to be anything unpleasant.”
“Yes, there is,” Dad said. “Our daughter ran away from home. That’s a crime, Amy. An actual crime in the eyes of Minnesota law. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen. I’m not going to pretend that she didn’t run away to live with her boyfriend.”
I wasn’t sure what it was about that statement that made me suddenly see everything with perfect clarity. Dad was going perfectly through the motions of parenting: an autopilot setting that was completely reactionary and probably learned from television shows and weekend movies. I studied them: Mom huddled with her new kitten, which had wandered from the couch to jump on her lap, and Dad staring at me as if he didn’t recognize me. Yes, they were grown-ups, but I was, too. It was like Rachel had said about me being her older sister. My parents had raised me to be an adult as fast as they could and they couldn’t be offended when I turned into one.
I pressed my hands onto the table, too, an echo of Dad’s posture. And then I said what I’d wanted to say for a long time. “And I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t almost die in your car, Dad.”
“Oh, come on, now,” he said.
My stomach hurt with my indignation. “No, I won’t come on, now. It’s just a symptom. You forgot you had a kid in your car. And before that, I was dragged off the swing by wolves while Mom was upstairs painting. And yeah, I had my boyfriend sleeping in my bed here, but it took you weeks to realize it. Did you even notice I was sleeping here? You gave me thirty miles of free leash. Did you think I wouldn’t use it?”
Rachel frantically applied lip gloss again.
“Okay,” Mom said. The cat was crawling around her neck. She pulled it off and handed it to Rachel, which I thought was probably against referee rules. Rachel did look happier with the kitten, though. “Okay. So where does that leave us? I’m not going to fight anymore. God, Lewis. I don’t want to fight with her. I thought she was dead.”
Dad’s lips made a thin line, but he sealed his mouth shut.
I took a deep breath and steeled myself. I had to get this out right. “I’m moving out.”
“You are not,” Dad said immediately.
“That is why I’m moving out,” I replied. “You don’t get to tell me what to do all of a sudden. You can’t just wait until I start to choose my own family and my own life and my own happiness and say, no, Grace, that’s not allowed. Go back to being lonely and miserable and a grade-A student! It’s not fair. It’d be different if you were there like Rachel’s parents or Sam’s parents.”
My father made a face. “The ones who tried to kill him?”
“No, Beck,” I said. I thought about that afternoon, Beck and Sam, head to head, that silent bond so strong that it was visible to bystanders. I thought about Sam’s gestures, putting his hands behind his head, how he had gotten them from Beck. I wondered if there was anything of my parents in me, or if who I was was entirely cobbled from books and television and teachers at school. “Sam would do whatever Beck asked him to do, because Beck’s always been there for him. You know who’s always been there for me? Me. Family of one.”
“If you think you’re going to convince me,” my father said, “you’re not. And the law is on my side, so I don’t need to be convinced. You are seventeen. You don’t get to make decisions.”
Rachel made a noise that I thought was her refereeing but turned out to be just the kitten biting her hand.
I hadn’t really thought I would persuade Dad that easily. It was principle now, I could see, and Dad wouldn’t back down from that. My stomach squeezed again, nerves crawling up into my mouth. I said, my voice lower, “Here’s the deal. I’m going to do summer school to finish high school, and then I’m going to go to college. If you let me move out now, I will actually talk to you guys after I hit age eighteen. Or you can call the cops and force me to stay and I will sleep in that bed and follow all your brand-new rules, and then, when midnight rolls over on my birthday, that room will be empty and I will never come back. Don’t think that I’m joking. Look at my face. You know I’m dead serious. And don’t talk to me about the law, Dad! You hit Sam. Tell me what side of the law that’s on?”
My stomach was a disaster zone. I had to will myself not to say anything else, to shove words into the empty space.
There was complete silence at the table. My father turned his face away and looked out the window at the back deck, though there was nothing to see but blackness. Rachel pet the kitten furiously and it purred as if it would split its ribs, loud enough that it filled the room with the sound. My mother’s fingers rested on the edge of the table, her thumb and forefinger pressed against each other as she moved her hands back and forth, like she were measuring out invisible thread.
“I’m going to suggest a compromise,” she said. Dad glared at her, but she didn’t look back.
Disappointment sat in my chest, heavy. I couldn’t imagine a compromise that would come anywhere near to being acceptable.
“I’m listening,” I said, voice flat.
Dad burst out, “Amy! A compromise? You can’t be serious. We don’t need that.”
“Your way’s not working!” Mom snapped.
Dad leveled a glare at my mother, charged with so much anger and disappointment.
“I can’t believe you’re going to condone this,” he said.
“I’m not condoning. I talked to Sam, Lewis. You were wrong about him. So now it’s my turn to talk.” To me, she said, “This is what I suggest. You stay here until you turn eighteen, but we treat you like an adult. You can see Sam and you won’t have a curfew as long as you” — she paused as she came up with her conditions on the spot — “keep up with your summer school and seem to be keeping up with your academic goals. Sam can’t stay here overnight, but he can stay here all day long for all I care, and we’ll try to get to know him better.”
