Page 95 of Things I'm Seeing Without You

And then what happens?

Like you said: Something imperfect.

And then before he signed off:

I’ll be watching my mailbox.

I put the phone in my pocket and I looked out the cab window as the heat of the afternoon made waves in theair of the city. It was just before rush hour, and the roads were nearly empty. After the driver got off the freeway, we passed a public high school. A long brick building with what looked like hundreds of small windows. It was out for the summer, and an American flag flapped lazily in the light breeze. Is that where I’d end up going? It was unimaginable.

The cab pulled up at my father’s house, and I gave him Grace’s money and got out. Part of me expected to see her Jeep parked in the driveway with her rowing shell on top. But of course, she wouldn’t have put me in a cab just to drive here herself.

I walked through the screen door and let it slap closed behind me. The house was a little cleaner than usual, and in the hallway, I noticed the tacky wallpaper had been stripped down. It sat in sheets along the wall.

“Dad!” I said.

There were buckets of paint by the staircase, and the first few steps were painted a clean white color instead of the dingy brown that used to be there. There was plastic on the railing.

“Dad,” I said. “Are you having a nervous breakdown?”

No answer. I kept walking until I got to the living room where I found my father on the couch with tears in his eyes.

“You are having a nervous breakdown,” I said.

He didn’t look up at me. His eyes were fixated on the television. I followed his gaze and saw myself. I saw myself in a cave in Sicily. He was watching the footage. As far as I knew, we had not received it from Paul yet. But now it was playing in my dad’s living room.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

Again, he didn’t look up. He pointed to an open envelope on the coffee table. I recognized the return address as Grace’s.

He motioned for me to sit down. So, I walked across the room and sat on the ratty couch next to my father, who was covered in splatters of paint and a gummy substance that was probably wallpaper paste. He put his arm around me, and I didn’t care that he was getting paint on me. Then I looked back at the screen. The dust was swirling in the air, glittering in the Mediterranean light. And all of us were standing silent.

“I liked what you said,” he whispered.

I nodded.

“It wasn’t bad,” I said.

Paul was shooting us walking down the trail now. Moving toward the valley below. As the angle of the light changed, we looked like silhouettes against the rock face.

I looked away from the screen. The walls of the livingroom were scraped down, too. Patches of old paint colors were coming through.

“Are you tearing this place down?” I asked.

He smiled.

“I thought I’d make it habitable now that there’re two of us.”

“Two of us?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Does that mean I’m getting a bedroom?”

“If you mean a room with a bed,” he said. “Then yes. You are getting one of those. If you don’t max out any credit cards this week, you might even get a dresser.”

He chuckled at his own joke. And he was already walking out of the room into the kitchen where he had something going for dinner. I thought about following him in. I wanted to ask him more about my room. But instead, I sat there and watched the end of the footage.

We were so far down now that Paul couldn’t get us in focus. If I squinted, I could see us moving. But it was hard to tell. He tried to zoom in, but we were indistinguishable from the water below. I know I was down there. But everything around me was so big and dazzling there was no way to find me.

And maybe, I thought, that was okay.