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They talk, afterwards.
Her father already had his own house by the time the divorce was finalized, right along the Florida coast, high enough into the cliffside that foot traffic was near negligible. Jolyne had made the trek from the bus stop to his front door for enough weekend visits that it felt like she’d garnered something of a compass north to lead her to him. The only difference now is that when she knocks on his door, he’s always there to open it.
The first few times she visited, she was almost disappointed. No pictures on the walls, dry research papers and encyclopedias on the bookshelves, clean tables and countertops and almost no real sign of the forty-five years of life that her father had to show. It wasn’t like she’d really noticed before, when she was twelve and screaming that he was a bastard to leave her mother and storming her way down the sanded dirt desire path to the bus stop to sleep on the bench until she could take the four-thirty coastal line back to her mother’s apartment in the morning, but she sees it now.
Whatever history Jotaro carries, he’s careful to blot it out entirely enough that it never bleeds into the little life he’s made for himself now.
If she were younger, she would have asked. Demanded, even, to know what he was keeping. Wasn’t it her birthright too, whatever story he had? What right did he have to keep so much from her, after everything she had to give up for him?
But in a way, Jolyne understands now. She gets why his coffee machine is spotless, why no sand makes it past the mat by the door. She doesn’t have the words for it either. She doubts he does too.
The wind is soft today. Out on the front porch, it whistles between the gaps in the steps, rustles the grit caught in the walkway. The wood under her legs is damp with age and moisture, makes for a soft seat. It’s a temperate day today, cloudy. The coffee Jotaro made for her sits by her thigh, still steaming.
When Jotaro opens the door, he pauses.
“You smoke?”
Jolyne quirks a brow up at him. “What, are you surprised?”
There’s a bit of tobacco caught in her teeth as she exhales. She tilts her head so the smoke won’t get in his face, but the wind carries it there anyways.
“Mm.”
She has no idea what that’s supposed to mean. But she still scootches over to let him sit down next to her.
It’s not like he’s going anywhere, but he’s still in a pair of slacks and his coat, hair gelled back and all. Jolyne jabbed at him for it once, asked him if she was getting in the way of his dinner plans, and he just said he needed to go into town later anyways. It wasn’t like he could make it that far before sundown, with his cloudy eye and effectively revoked driver’s license, and she’d thought it strange then too. Now, she realizes that maybe he’s just dressing up for her.
She shakes out her Lucky Strikes and offers the pack to him. For a second, Jotaro almost looks bemused. He blinks at her, then sighs.
They don’t talk while he lights his cigarette, the shabby click of his lighter punctuating the ambient drone of the waves. It’s one of those cheap Bic’s from the gas station, not even a souvenir. If there was anything Jotaro might have kept as a memento, Jolyne assumed it would be a lighter. It doesn’t seem like he’s deigned to hold on to even that much though.
She thinks she might still be a little mad at him for that. That he can’t even spare her a lighter from their family history that she’s only been privy to for the past few years of her adulthood. But she thinks she understands, when she watches the smoke from the end of her cigarette haze out the horizon and says, “Wasn’t it boiling?”
Jotaro doesn’t say anything for a while. Sometimes he’ll do that. Let one of her questions lapse back into silence if it’s something he doesn’t have an answer for. The quiet goes on for long enough that Jolyne thinks it might be one of those questions before he finally answers.
“No, not quite. But it was close. The tides were moving too fast. Made too much heat in the water.” He pauses. “I think the ocean’s still cooling down now. It might be a while before all of it fades.”
As simple as that. It’s one of those questions that she always thought would draw out a story until she finally realized that sometimes the answer was just a simple as that. There was steam on the water when he dragged her out of the waves, hot enough to leave her skin a blotchy irritated red, like a brief contact burn. She’d hardly noticed, staring up at the sky that was finally starting to slow down, only a few days in every second instead of a week in a blink. There was something ringing in that finality of time molding itself back into the framework of what it should have been.
Jolyne still doesn’t know how many days passed when Pucci died and the earth slowly wound down again, but she remembers laying there on the beach. And she remembers Jotaro calling her name every time the moon rose, over, and over, and over again, until there was finally just one mellow August afternoon sun in the sky.
“I’m sorry I didn’t answer you back then.”
Jotaro blinks.
“Probably scared you shitless, going silent on you when you kept talking to me,” she says. “I could’ve answered. Don’t know why I didn’t.”
It’s not your fault, is what she’s half-expecting to hear. What she gets instead is, “I know.”
She shoots him a side-eye. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Jotaro doesn’t back down. He takes another drag of his cigarette. “You didn’t need to respond. I knew you were alive.”
Maybe it could be offensive. She’s tempted to take it that way, chews it over, but it doesn’t quite fit right.
“What were you doing then?”
This time, the silence lingers.
“When I was a little younger than you, I killed the man Pucci was inspired by. I didn’t know if he would stay dead until the sun rose.’ He exhales, slow, and steady. “I couldn’t find your great-grandfather, or anyone else I came with. Just his body. So I sat there and waited. Six hours until dawn.” Exhales. “Your grandmother would have been fine once he was dead. But I didn’t know that. And I couldn’t leave to find a phone. So I just sat there and called out for her.”
Jotaro’s trip to Egypt is one of those stories he’s never told in full. Just in little bits and pieces. The aridness of the desert, the warmth of the ocean, brushstrokes around the bigger picture. And this isn’t the full story. Jolyne knows that much. But she can imagine her father, seventeen, alone in a foreign country with the corpse of the man that tried to kill his family next to him, calling out for his mother and never getting an answer.
It slots itself into place with quiet conviction. If she had called out to her father then, alone on the beach at the end of the world, she would have heard an answer.
It’s one of those realizations that makes Jolyne feel a little smaller. It feels like it’s too late to thank him. Even later than that to apologize. She tries to find the words for it, but before she can, he smothers the butt of his cigarette out on the ash tray.
“Are you thirsty?”
“Yeah,” Jolyne says quietly.
“I’ll make you another cup.”
He takes her mug and disappears back inside. A flock of seagulls cry from the cloud cover, circle the surf languid in the heat. It’s one of those stories that can’t ever be told fully.
But the door’s unlocked, and she can hear the faint whir of the coffee machine from the kitchen. Maybe it’s one of those stories that doesn’t need to be told now.
Jolyne crushes her cigarette under her heel and follows Jotaro inside.