Page 75 of The Seekers of Deer Creek

As he read, he blinked hard, as if clearing dust specks from his eyes. “After all this time. Your mother didn’t leave you.”

“Shedid,” Vivi corrected ferociously, brushing a lone, irksome tear from her eye. “She might have tried to return, but she still left. Like him.”

For a few beats, Ki`êuregarded her in sympathetic silence. Then he said, so quietly she had to stoop to hear him, “You think your father meant to get in the accident?”

“I don’t know what I think. How did you find out that he’d died?”

“His lawyer wrote us.Tu?nhad left me a bit of money. I haven’ttouched it. Everything that counted, the house and the land, went to you girls.”

Vivi had disregarded the lawyer’s messages. She didn’t want anything from her father. And Calla, in her haste, would have signed whatever documents she was supposed to, then forgotten about the whole thing. Maybe they’d have known about their uncle sooner, had they done things differently.

“I miss him,”Ki`êusaid. He rubbed at the face of his watch, as if trying to jitter time. “And I don’t believe he killed himself. TheTu?nI knew wouldn’t have quit life like that. Especially not with you two to live for.”

Vivi ignored the spasm in her chest. “What do you remember about him?”

“What don’t I remember? He was my knight, my samurai. As he’d say: a real shit-giver. He’d throw off the bigger boys when they came after me. He had a sense of justice, you know; too rigid often, but fearsome nonetheless.” Vivi remembered her father’s wink at Halloween when she’d pushed the bully onto the pavement. Morality and love, both so twisted inTu?n. “He was also an adventurer, anxious to experience everything he could, like there was a ticking clock at his back. How fast he sped on the motorbike—I thought I’d die half a dozen times as his passenger.”

“Every cop in a fifty-mile radius knew his truck by sight. Calla is the same.”

“I can see that.”Ki`êulaughed, a gravelly and comforting sound that Vivi leaned toward. “Once, when he was a teenager, your father stole our neighbor’s brand-new motorbike. This was in the fifties; not many of us had them yet. But we couldn’t get enough of the speed, him especially. He had more confidence than aptitude back then, so you can guess what happened next. That very day, he drove the motorbike straight into a pit by the canal. Such filth. The bike was wrecked, of course, and we had to walk for miles in sodden clothing. The walloping our father gave us! We worked for months to pay the neighbor back, then, as soon as we did,Tu?ntried to convince me to go steal another bike.”

Vivi gave a short, amused huff. “Head like a rock, brain like mud. Our mother said that about him when she was annoyed.”

“Each time I tried to get angry at your father, he’d shine that bright smile on me—so like your sister’s, actually—and I’d have to relent. After all, he made it feel inevitable that we’d be just fine.”

“Were you?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes we weren’t. But who doesn’t need that illusion of safety? Was my brother such a capable charmer in America?”

Vivi thought ofTu?n’s rapid declineafter May left, how he slumped over the bills at the kitchen table, a flush collaring his neck as he added numbers that never seemed to match up. His painful, almost savage squirm at parent-teacher conferences and the way he cursed out other drivers at the slightest traffic infractions. No, he wasn’t a charmer, and he wasn’t very capable either.

Maybe that had been the appeal of the shed. There, he could travel back to the roads of his youth, speeding toward a future that hadn’t yet been etched in granite. Dreaming of alternate realities as Vivi sat in her bedroom, doing the very same thing.

“My father had demons,” she said finally.

“You mean his anger? I saw it. He’d get in terrible fights sometimes. Especially when he drank. Everyone knew to steer clear of him in those moments.”

“We did too.”

“After I got married, my wife forbade alcohol in our home. That seemed to help. You’re right to say thatTu?nhad a darkness in him. He covered it with bravado, but no one could deny it, not even those who most adored him. Some humans come with a price. You accept them in their entirety, because learning to love their flaws is easier than not loving them at all.”

“I wish I’d met the man you knew.”

Ki`êuwas silent for so long that Vivi thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he said, “We’re different people to our children than to others inour lives. The barrier of personal responsibility can stand between fathers and their children. For some, it’s insurmountable. I’m sureKhánhwill one day approach others with questions she might have asked me. She’ll wonder if she ever knew me, too.”

“Wouldn’t you rather give her the answers yourself?”

“What if I’m unable to give her the answers she needs?” He fell into a coughing fit, then held up his hand as Vivi reached to help him. After a moment, he continued. “Maybe there’s another truth I can offer you.”

The sunlight glinted off the steel encasingKi`êu’s wheelchair. His hands rested on his knees, wrinkles crisscrossing like wires of knowledge. How many years did her uncle—any of them—have left?

At that moment, Vivi thought of metempsychosis, the transference of souls. Would it be possible for her parents, those damaged and beaten souls, to start again in another life? And if they did, would they bring the old pain with them, or would they finally be able to lay it down?

“I want to know everything. My father never talked about you. Any of you. We assumed you were dead.”

He sighed. “I wondered. Over the years, I’ve thought of you all often, especially after your father’s death. He didn’t want us to write you.”

“Why would he hide you?”