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“Dad? Open the door. Please? Please, open the door! Daddy? It’s not funny anymore! Open the fucking door, Dad!”
It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.
She’s lost him too. She’s lost her father. She’s lost them all.
Jaehaera’s mouth is a bleeding gash in her face. “DADDY PLEASE!!!”
She starts pounding with both fists, her small body shaking like a leaf.
She isn’t thirteen anymore. She is seven years old again, and her mother’s funeral flowers are rotting on the living room window and her father hasn’t come home in a week and a half.
In a matter of days, Auntie Helaena and Uncle Daeron will finally realise Aegon never took his daughter with him. He remembered the six pack in the fridge, but not his baby girl. She is too frightened to leave the house. The groceries run out. The toilet gets blocked. The electricity bill was never paid. The lights go out. There is no heating.
They find her curled up in the back of her parents’ closet. She’s pissed all over herself and her mother’s favourite dress. Crushed like a tiny bug under a careless boot, she weighs little more than a cat.
It took Aegon years to convince the social workers he was fit to care for his daughter after the incident. They visited religiously. He fucked the pretty ones. Jaehaera would hear them upstairs as she did her maths homework. The lady would come down after, fixing her blonde hair – or red, or brunette, depending on who it was – and have the decency to look embarrassed before she snuck out.
Aegon would follow ten minutes later, unshaven and unclean, grubby wifebeater, and jeans hanging loose around his waist. It took him a while to put on the weight he lost after mum and Jaehaerys died.
“Sup.” he’d greet his remaining child. “What’s that you’re doing?”
“Maths homework.”
“’Ere give us a look. Might be able to help. I was good at maths in school.” He’d take it, scrunch up his nose all funny and glower at the worksheet for minutes on end. Then, he’d shake his head and toss it back. “The shit they teach nowadays. Wasn’t so hard when I was a kid. And look at me now. I pay the bills don’t I, kiddo? What else d’you need maths for?”
Jaehaera would just nod and agree.
It was better to nod and agree with her dad. Even back then, she knew he was weaker than she is. He’s always been weak, the weakest in the family, driven to fits of tantrums and petulant silences when someone tells him no. Momma used to tell him no a whole lot before she died in the fire and took Jaehaerys with her.
Momma would know what to do now, with Aegon locked in the bathroom.
Momma with her bright eyes and brighter smile.
Momma could light up everything around her no matter what she was feeling on the inside. She wasn’t quiet and moody, not like Dad’s family. Dad says he never fit in with them anyway. Momma was the first time he felt like he belonged somewhere.
“Do I look like her?” Jaehaera asked him one day.
She tilted her head the way Momma used to, in hopes it would make his judgement easier.
He didn’t hesitate. “No, baby, you’re all me.”
That was the first time he truly broke her heart.
Momma’s a myth now. Jaehaerys is the imaginary friend that sleeps beneath her bed. He runs his fingers over the razors she keeps taped to the slats like they’re saying something profound in braille. He whispers it to her at night sometimes. Other days, he’s so faded, she can barely hear his voice.
She misses them so bad.
There is no complication in it. No heavy poetry. No melancholic angst.
She wants her Mummy back. She wants her twin back. She wants to eat cereal in the sunshine and not worry if her Daddy is going to die soon. She wants to go to school and not be bullied. She wants to be popular and happy and she wants her mother so bad, she wants her mother, her mother –
Momma, please, come back.
“I hope you fucking die,” she tells the bathroom door. “I wish you died and she stayed.”
There is no answer.
Maybe he used razors like the last time. Or the tie he wore at the funeral that left his neck bruised.
Maybe he’s so drunk, he’ll drown before he bleeds out.
Jaehaera picks up her bag and runs outside as the bus trundles to a stop in front of their flat.
She doesn’t last an hour at school.
Right in the middle of English, she stands up, shaking like a bunny rabbit, and begs the teacher to let her go to the bathroom. The whole class bursts into laughter. Jaehaera tries to ignore them. Her face is red as a button, and her bottom lip is jutting like when she was six. They’d tease her then too, because she couldn’t talk properly, and hated making eye contact.
“Let her go, miss, she’s gonna shit herself!” a boy behind her crows.
Someone launches an eraser at her head. Someone else tries to lift her skirt with a pencil.
The teacher snaps at them to settle down, and her mouth softens when she nods to Jaehaera. All the teachers feel sorry for her. The adults recognise neglect and isolation and abuse better than the kids do.
Two years ago, when she was eleven, they had to call Aegon in for a meeting and asked him to make sure she was changing her underwear and getting her uniform washed. They told him Jaehaera was getting infections down there. When she’d itch in class, the other children would tease, so she tried not to, but that would only drive her to tears of frustration.
He looked stunned, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him that she might need caring for. To him, eleven years old was old enough.
The drive back home was awkward.
“Hey, kiddo. You know, if you need stuff done, you can just ask.”
“Okay.”
“I know I’m a bit of a mess, but I’ll get it done. I’m still your dad.”
“Okay.”
“And if not, then Auntie Hel will. You gotta talk, you know? You’re always so quiet. Promise me, you’ll ask.”
“Okay.”
“’Cause that was embarrassing. I don’t wanna be called in by your school over shit like this. I know what they’re all thinking and I’m not gonna have them looking down on us.”
“Okay.”
“Stop fucking saying okay! Christ!”
He’d hit the pedal in his anger and crossed a red light. Jaehaera clutched her seat belt and sealed her lips shut, hoping her silence wouldn’t anger him as much as her voice did.
He ranted all the way home, but not before he stopped at the gas station for beer and cigarettes. That calmed him down. He told her there was a TV dinner in the fridge and then they didn’t see each other for the entire weekend because she stayed in her bedroom, and he was too drunk to care.
She isn’t thinking of that when she runs out of the school gates.
She’s thinking of his purple face, eyes unseeing, lips parted, skin blue.
I’m coming, Daddy. Please don’t die. I’m sorry for what I said this morning.
Jaehaera can’t see through her tears.
She sprints across a zebra crossing and almost knocks over a mother and baby on their morning walk. A policeman spots her, and shouts something, but she’s too quick.
She might not be the best at maths, but she’s always been good at running. When you get bullied enough, you learn to run like lightning in a bottle.
Uncle Aemond thinks it’s funny how she runs, like a grasshopper on crack. Aegon laughed himself silly at the mental image. The words return with the flash of a summer’s day, some memory when Momma was still alive, and Daddy didn’t need to get drunk to forget he has a daughter.
She bursts through the door of their council flat, and the strength leaves her legs. She crawls up the stairs and turns the corner to see the bathroom door is ajar. There is no mess. Her rubber duckie and pink unicorn sit pride of place on the shelf. The glitter shampoo is next to them, her favourite. There’s no glitter in it. She’s just called it that since she was little because the formula sparkles in the sun.
He forgets a lot of things, but he always replaces the glitter shampoo when it runs out.
The emptiness of the house falls on her like a weight.
Jaehaera starts to wail. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, knees pulled to her chest, rocking back and forth, sweaty and dishevelled.
“Jae?”
She squeaks in frantic shock and crawls onto the landing. Aegon is staring at her from the bottom of the stairs, toothbrush in his mouth, and brow scrunched. Jaehaera flies down the stairs and flings herself at him. Aegon grabs the railing to steady himself and laughs through the foam in his mouth.
“What are you doing home?”
She is too busy crying into his chest to answer. Words fail to come.
Aegon finally gives up and bends down to lift her up on one arm the way he’d do when she was little. She used to be a Daddy’s girl. He’d have to do everything one-handed if Jaehaera was around and asking to be picked up.
At least he can still pick her up. She wraps her arms around his neck and buries her face in his shoulder, soaking his shirt with drool and snot and tears.
“Shit, Jaehaera, can you not?” he mutters, shrugging his shoulder to make her lift her head up.
When she refuses, he decides not to push it.
“Wanna watch cartoons? You’re home now. Might as well. Wait – what time is it? Eleven? For fuck’s sake, Jae, you know they’re gonna badger me about your attendance again. Alright, never mind. Do you want lunch?”
“There’s no lunch, Dad. You never went shopping,” she mumbles.
“’Course. Yeah. Fuck.”
“Why were you in the bathroom with the door locked before?”
“Passed out, and the door must have jammed. Sorry if I made you late for school, baby.”
I thought you were dead.
The adrenaline of relief turns to poison.
She wriggles out of his hold, and goes to sit at the table, wan-faced and sombre. Aegon glances at her a couple times, as if he’s debating whether to ask. But he decides against it. Grandma said grandpa would act the same. He liked his life peaceful, so he’d never ask why his family were quarrelling. He just tried to love them all the same.
Wasn’t much good at that either, her grandma would say, lighting up a cig, red hair piled high on her head.
But Jaehaera’s dad doesn’t want his life to be peaceful, not the way he lives it.
He just doesn’t want her.
And the guilt is killing him.
“Do you wish I’d died with Momma and Jaehaerys?”
She thinks she only asked it in her mind.
But her father’s stunned expression says otherwise.
He stops counting the change in his wallet and stares at her like she’s grown two heads.
There is a misty quality in his eyes that Jaehaerys shared. That is how she knows he lied to her when he said she doesn’t look like Momma. She has her mother’s eyes, large and unforgiving. No wonder he can’t bear to gaze into them too long. He sees his wife staring back, judging him for not protecting the baby she left behind.
“Are you insane?” Aegon rasps.
He slams his feet into his favourite pair of boots and walks out of the front door without another word.
Jaehaera knows he means to go to the supermarket to buy food for the pair of them. But her father’s good intentions always end up with piss and vomit all over them. She marches out after him, just as angry as he is for once.
“I’m going with you,” she tells him.
“I don’t need a fucking babysitter. Get back in there – no, even better – get back to school before they drag me in for another meeting!”
“No.” She starts yanking on the handle of his shitty, beat-up car and it falls off because he never replaces anything, not until it’s hanging on by a thread.
Like he’s one day going to replace her when she gives up and dies and he can start over with a whole new family who won’t die on him like the first one did.
“Look what you fucking did!” Aegon yells. “Go inside!”
She balls her fists and fills her lungs with all the air they can muster. “I’M GOING WITH YOU!”
Something comes over her. She doesn’t know what. She doesn’t care. She throws the handle away and starts kicking the car door. Aegon storms around the back of it and grabs her before she can do worse. He lifts her up, legs kicking and fists punching, and takes her back inside.
He flings her through the doorway and slams the door shut with the finality of a prison guard. Jaehaera lands on her knees and the graze is bad enough to draw blood. She doesn’t feel the pain.
She calls him all kinds of names through the open window as he drives off, tyres screeching angrily on the tarmac.
He comes back an hour later with bags full of food, and his eyes suspiciously red.
Jaehaera is sitting on the kitchen table the way he always tells her not to. She doesn’t know why there’s such a rule in place for her. She’s seen him bring women home who he’s then fucked right here on the edge.
She knew what sex was before a classmate whispered gleefully in her ear how her parents had created her. There was no fascination with it like the other kids had.
To her, sex is what her loser father does when he’s too much of a coward to face up to his own life.
Jaehaera never wants to have sex.
“What do you want? Found some chicken fillets and the fish fingers you like,” he says.
Jaehaera notes that it’s all frozen food. She doesn’t get to eat fresh food unless she goes to her grandmother’s house. The oven in their flat is overused and on its last legs. When it gives up, they’ll be fucked.
“Chicken fillets please.”
“Get off the table.”
She does as he says and ends up in front of the TV, numbing herself on the brightness of cartoons.
Aegon whistles, and when she turns, throws her a tube of love heart sweets.
Jaehaera wonders if this is his apology. She should be saying sorry for breaking his car handle. But she won’t. Maybe it will force him to get a new one.
She counts out the love hearts with their pointless messages.
Hug me.
I love you.
Best friends.
Be mine.
Cutie pie.
You’re hot.
All you need is love.
Hold me.
Sweetheart.
Playtime.
“Dumb,” she mutters, crushing them on the coffee table. “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”
She uses the vase to grind them into powder and does as she’s seen her father do with lines of coke. Neat streaks of multicoloured sugar, sticking to her red fingertips. She leans down and presses one nostril shut and snorts up a line. It clings to the fine hairs in her nose and gets lodged in the back of her throat.
Aegon hears her spluttering and coughing and retching and runs into the room to find her hunched over the mess.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Pretending it’s coke,” she coughs.
“Don’t be daft. Christ, Jaehaera, what goes on in that head of yours?”
A whole lot more than he’ll ever give her credit for.
But she can’t help smiling when he giggles and cleans up the powder, but not before trying to snort a line of his own. The same thing happens, and it’s Jaehaera’s turn to howl with laughter.
Aegon shoves her, and she keels over which only makes him laugh harder. She throws her whole body weight into shoving him but it doesn’t do squat.
He doesn’t try to send her back to school that day.
They spend the afternoon watching cartoons and when the ice cream van goes by, Jaehaera’s eyes widen like when she was little. Aegon widens his eyes too as if to say do you wanna? She nods and giggles.
He immediately gets up and digs under the couch cushions for spare change that somehow, magically, is always there. It would dazzle her as a child. Her father was the world’s greatest magician for producing money out of nowhere.
Jaehaera watches from the window as Aegon runs after the van and laughs when he refuses to let the man drive off until he has her favourite raspberry cornetto.
He’s got a swagger in his step when he walks back, the cone held over his head like a trophy.
Her smile slowly fades.
“Jae! Get down here!”
That biting edge to her father’s voice is all too familiar.
Jaehaera leans over to the bedroom window and peers out. Her head knocks against the glass in defeat. Her tutor’s car is parked beside the weed-strewn pavement. The junkie from two doors over is letting her dog piss all over the tyres as she jogs on the spot, fighting the cold in her oversized bin bag of a coat.
Ms Townsend is too old to be seduced by Aegon. If he could, he would, just to keep her from darkening his doorstep with her pinched red mouth and pin-straight blonde hair tugged into a bun. He is only thirty-one, in the prime of his life. He could get anyone into bed if he isn’t sloppy drunk and he’s remembered to shower and put on clean clothes.
But not Ms Townsend.
She doesn’t care about him. She only cares about Jaehaera. That always irritates him. He cares about his daughter too, but he digs for scraps of validation in everyone he meets, no matter how insignificant they are to his life.
It drives his daughter insane. She hates calling him pathetic in her head, but she does it anyway. Every time it happens, the word father is chipped at, losing its ancient, primal strength. She wonders what will happen when all the letters are gone, whether Aegon will just shimmer and disappear too.
“Is this your wife?” Ms Townsend lifts the photo frame off the mantelpiece. “Goodness, she’s beautiful.”
“Yeah. Real movie star.”
Aegon’s voice is flat, but Jaehaera knows he means it.
Sometimes, when he’s really drunk, and his words are tangled in a fishing net of sobs, he’ll tell Jaehaera he’s never going to find anyone like Momma. He’s never seen anyone prettier before her or since.
Jaehaera always finds the love inside herself when he says things like that and forgives him. Maybe she is as pathetic as he is.
Like father, like daughter.
No, baby, you’re all me.
They both need someone brighter than themselves to gravitate around, like the moon around the sun. Jaehaerys was like Momma in temperament. He was the confident one. All Jaehaera ever had to do was hold his hand and be pulled along. Her hands are always cold, something others have pointed out. She doesn’t remember them ever being cold when Jaehaerys was alive.
“She passed when Jaehaera was quite young, didn’t she?”
“Six years ago. She was twenty-four.”
Ms Townsend’s face slackens.
Jaehaera recognises that look. She’s seen it on others when they look at pictures of her mother and find out how she died and how young she was. She had Jaehaera and Jaehaerys when she was seventeen, practically a baby herself. And then she died after barely growing up.
When someone that beautiful dies, even strangers mourn.
Jaehaera coughs and makes noise coming down the stairs. The air in the living room is stiff and Aegon’s hand is rattling against his thigh. He wants so badly to light up a cigarette, but he cannot, not while her teacher is here.
“What’d you do now?” he snaps at his daughter, brittle as glass.
Ms Townsend glances between them, and then smiles at her. “You’re not in trouble, Jaehaera.”
“I know, miss. Did I forget any homework? Um, and about the day I ran out of English class, I really was sick. I had to come back home.”
“The thing is, dear, we did have a look at the cameras to check you’d left and weren’t still inside the school. You were in a great hurry to leave. It gave us quite a shock. It didn’t seem as if you were sick.”
“But you called, and I told you she was sick and at home, didn’t I?” Aegon snaps.
Jaehaera looks at him pleadingly. Please don’t. He grits his teeth and turns away, trying his hardest to restrain the blackened tar of his instincts.
He fights his way out of everything. In this situation, it’s only going to make it worse. If they take her into the care system, she might not return to him. She’s thirteen. She knows all about what strange men can do in strange homes. If she ends up in a family where the dad is a pervert, she’ll end up like Caylee.
Caylee is dead.
“Yes, and I am glad Jaehaera is better now,” Ms Townsend nods. She fiddles with her fingers, uncertain where to look. Her gaze lands on Momma’s photograph again and her eyes flicker with sadness.
“I’ll be back to school on Monday,” Jaehaera says.
Just get out. Please. Please. Please. I know you care. But when people like you care, life gets so much worse for people like me.
“I wanted to talk to your father about therapy. Mr Targaryen, would it be something you’d be open to discussing?”
Aegon frowns, eyes darting between Jaehaera and her teacher as if they are both in on some trickery he is not a part of. “Therapy for who? Jae? She’s fine. Jae, tell her you’re fine.”
“I’m fine, miss.”
“I would like to believe that. But you’ve been engaging in worrying behaviours.”
“Like what?” Aegon is getting riled up.
Jaehaera wishes she could shrink herself into a dot the size of a pin and be swallowed by a bigger dot. And then a bigger dot would swallow that dot and so on and so forth. Until she has been cocooned in so many dots, she is the Russian doll at the centre who will never be found, never be hugged, never be loved. It doesn’t matter, as long as she’s left alone.
“Her wrists. I’m sorry but – I’ve noticed there are some marks – “
Aegon moves so suddenly, Jaehaera and Ms Townsend both flinch. That sends a trickle of fear down her spine. Will she think he hits me now?
Her father grabs her wrists and pulls them to the light. He pushes the sleeves back as Jaehaera tries to pull away. Her teacher is saying something, pleading with him not to act out of emotion.
Jaehaera’s head spins like cotton, her ears plugged with it.
Her father’s lips move, dark blue eyes filled with sorrow and rage. He is shaking her, wanting to know why she did this to herself, why she’s turning into her mother, why, why, why –
“LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!” she shrieks.
She shoves him back, and his surprise forces him to let her go.
She takes off running as they call after her.
Run, little rabbit, run.
Nothing in the world feels as good as running.
The rattle of her heart, and the burning in her lungs fools her into thinking there is a real destination waiting. Once these English roads end, suspended in mid-air, Jaehaera will keep running, her feet treading air, and at the very end of it, a gold light will beckon.
God wouldn’t have given her running legs if he didn’t want her to run to him.
He’s got her mother.
He’s got her brother.
She’s hated him so long for it, cursed him for thinking he had more rights over them than she does. Maybe if she says sorry hard enough, he’ll take her too.
Each cut on her wrist is an apology.
She is a devotee. That’s what it is. Her grandma told her there were sects in their religion where people would beat themselves with whips in repentance. God fed them the flesh and blood of the son he was meant to love the most. He hurt himself to do it too.
Love and repentance are the same thing. To be loved by her mother again, she must repent until her blood turns to gold when she cuts, and she can no longer smell her father’s menthol cigarettes and stale beer.
She wants to smell her mother’s jasmine and lavender again.
She wants Momma.
Jaehaera runs until her legs give out, and she has to lie down in the middle of a field. She doesn’t know which route got her here. She doesn’t care. Flowers tickle her legs, ladybugs drawing designs on her pale skin, dancing across the hairs. Elina said girls should start shaving at their age, that boys like it. Jaehaera looked up ways to make her leg hair grow even longer.
A rough tongue brushes at her ankle.
She screams and kicks.
The black stray yowls in fear and flinches back.
“Crap. I’m sorry. No, don’t go – don’t go – don’t – “
Jaehaera reaches for the cat, but it is gone.
A wave of misery hits her like a ton of bricks.
She throws back her head and screams as the first drops of rain hit her face.
The black cat returns later.
It follows her all the way home.
When she turns to pet it, it recoils and hides. It creeps back out after some seconds and follows her again after making sure she won’t touch it.
She names it Cannibal.
It sounds like a cool name for a cat. Momma would have liked it. She loved horror films and gothic stuff, things Jaehaera is slowly developing a love for. Dad used to call her Morticia and Jaehaera was their little Wednesday. He hasn’t called her Wednesday in a long, long time.
She starts jogging and the cat speeds up.
“So, you do like me. Just say that then!” Jaehaera tells it and skips faster.
The cat is almost imitating her, hopping around, following the way she jumps over the cracks in the pavement. The sky turns a drenched deep blue, and the air is sticky and humid. This summer doesn’t feel like summer. English summers are hit or miss, but it’s been especially cold this year. At least there’s warmth today. Life can seem oddly simple when the sun refuses to set.
Ms Townsend’s car is gone by the time Jaehaera gets back, her sneakers worn, and an old lollipop she found in her pocket sitting sticky between her teeth.
Aegon is sitting on the stoop. His head is in his hand, and a bottle hangs from the other. Jaehaera maps the downwards curve of his shoulders and tries to work out a mathematical equation that will lift them up again.
Cannibal creeps past her and patters up the path towards the house. He looks back at her with wide green eyes as if to say –
This is nice!
He ignores Aegon’s weak attempt to pet him and goes inside to make himself comfortable.
Her father notices her next and sits up. The expression on his face is cautious and broken. He’s been crying.
When she comes closer, she smells Momma’s favourite perfume. He sprays it on his pillow sometimes and smells of her in the morning. Jaehaera hates that. She could be in a good mood when she wakes up and then she smells it on him and her whole world rocks sideways, like a ship capsizing.
“Where’d you go?” he croaks.
“For a walk,” she shrugs, hands shoved down the front of her dungarees.
“Your teacher wants me to get you into therapy. But it’s not gonna help, is it? It never helps our family.”
Jaehaera sniffs and rubs her nose. “You don’t know that. You just never wanna try.”
“I’ve tried, Jae. Trust me.”
“When?”
“Do you want medical transcripts? Why do you always have to fucking argue?”
Jaehaera shrugs. She kicks the ground with her shoe, and watches a tiny ant drag a crumb. She wants to help it, but she might accidentally kill it. That’s how her dad is, hovering over her, as Jaehaera becomes the tiny ant struggling. Maybe he never helps her because he thinks he’ll ruin her. Turns out she’s doing a good enough job of it on her own.
“You’re fucked on both sides, kid,” Aegon mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “Just didn’t think it’d kick in so fast.”
“Momma was fine.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“Yes, she was.”
“There you go arguing again – “
“You didn’t know her that much longer than I did! You got her pregnant the second you met her! She didn’t have a chance!”
Aegon’s face wrenches with something so violent, it can only be anguish. He presses his palms to his mouth, and squeezes his eyes shut. Jaehaera watches the tears break free, and wishes she had a vial to catch them. The only proof her father is still a human being who gives a shit about something, anything.
“Your mother wasn’t fine.” His voice is guttural and soaked with unusual gravity. He sounds older than his years. “Neither was her mother. She said it ran in the family for the women, like they were all witches. But it was just plain old mental illness, wasn’t it?”
“Like you don’t suffer from the same thing?” Jaehaera scoffs. “Stop trying to blame her just because you don’t know how to take care of me.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
He spits on the ground. “No, fuck YOU.”
“FUCK YOU!”
They yell it back and forth until Jaehaera breaks first and starts giggling. Aegon swears and rubs his face between his hands like he’s going mad. But his shoulders are shaking with mirth. At least they are for a bit. And then he’s crying again.
Watching your dad cry is like watching the sun rise from the west and set in the east.
It’s wrong.
Jaehaera knows it’s why her life won’t right itself. She keeps having to watch her father cry.
She remembers what her mother would do when it happened. Hug him so tight, he almost couldn’t breathe. He’d push his face into her stomach and wrap his arms around her legs so hard as she tried to stay upright. Her fingers would run through his hair, and she’d tell him he was silly for crying, that it would all be fine, that she was here, wasn’t she?
Now what?
She’s not here anymore.
And Jaehaera’s arms aren’t big enough.
She tries to copy her anyway, and awkwardly pats her dad’s hair, pulling him against her. Aegon doesn’t turn his head. He stays hunched over, refusing to accept her embrace.
Jaehaera gives up and slumps down next to him. There are multicoloured stars dancing across her vision like faeries in wintertime. She is so tired, she can’t even see straight.
“I don’t cut too deep,” she says. “You don’t have to send me to therapy yet.”
Aegon coughs, the sound wet and throaty. “What kind of logic is that?”
“I dunno. Therapy is just a waste of time, isn’t it?”
“I think your teacher’s right though.”
He reaches down to take her arm, and his touch is damp with tears and sweat and misery. Jaehaera tries not to recoil. Comfort from her father is an alien thing. His affection is awkward and distant and desperate. He wants to please her so bad, but it’s not because she’s his daughter. He just wants to please everyone, or he’ll hate himself.
That doesn’t count as fatherly love, does it? It shouldn’t.
“See? Shallow,” she points out.
He doesn’t say anything and runs his fingers over the pink welts. A fresh tear falls on them.
Jaehaera presses her cheek to his shoulder and imagines it stitching her flesh up like tears do in fairytales. Aegon lifts her wrist to his mouth and kisses the scars. His face is twisted with grief, and he hiccups once or twice. She thinks he is holding in is a child-like cry of sadness. He sounds the way she does when she does the same thing.
“She tried to kill herself three separate times when we were together. I swore I’d spend my life keeping her anchored here. For me, for both of you kids. And then she went, and it wasn’t even her choice.”
He presses Jaehaera’s scarred wrist to his forehead like it is a holy relic. The angle is awkward, and it is hurting her joint socket. But she doesn’t have the heart to pull away. She shifts on the spot and tries to hold it steady.
“Don’t leave me, Jae. I’m staying here for you. I won’t go if you don’t. Promise me.”
“Dad, I’m only thirteen. Stop making me promise things I’m not ready for.”
The laugh that bursts out of him is startled and tender. It reminds her of the iridescent bubbles that spewed out of her and Jaehaerys’s favourite childhood toy.
“Your grandma said you were precocious, but holy shit.” He flicks her forehead, and she mouths ow and flicks him back.
“I’m not precocious. Just had to grow up too fast.”
His smile fades, and his eyes sink into sadness again. “Yeah. Five more years of slumming it with me. Wonder how old you’ll be by the end.”
“Eighteen. Your maths is shite.”
“Thanks, genius.”
“We’ve got a new cat by the way.”
“That dickhead that just walked in?”
“Yeah. We’re keeping him.”
“My name’s on the lease. I decide.”
“Keep the cat and I’ll go to therapy.”
“Fine. Go inside, get the kettle on. I’ll be there in a second.”
Jaehaera is reluctant to leave him there.
Something cold breaks open in her chest. If she turns away, she’ll look back and the doorstep will be sitting empty. The night will swallow him as if he never existed to begin with. Her feeling is so certain, she is rooted to the spot.
He pats her hand to encourage her, and gives her a smile, his handsome face so young and so old at the same time.
She looks over her shoulder just before she turns to go into the kitchen.
He is still there, a lonely silver-haired silhouette. She marks him with her fingertip and pretends to cut out his edges like a patch of appliqué.
She doesn’t believe him when he says he’ll stay for her.
They are not the kind of father and daughter who get a happy ending.
But the memory of him sitting there, drinking cheap beer and smoking the last of his cigarette will never leave her.
She will love it until the colours fade.
Or until he does.