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Holly, over the past few years, has developed something of a routine.
It goes something like this: She wakes up, bright and early, in time for school. She searches the house for her father, and checks to make sure he’s breathing. She makes herself breakfast. Jessica’s sister picks her up, and drives her and Jessica to school. Around ten, maybe 11:30 if she’s feeling generous, she sneaks out of school to the payphone around the corner and calls the house to wake her dad up. He rarely answers, but if she leaves a long enough message, it’s usually enough to lure him out of his stupor by the end. Then she goes back to school until Jessica’s sister drives her home. She puts her backpack down, grabs her book, heads around the corner to the invisible house where she’s allowed to just be a kid reading a story in her parents’ bedroom. She reads for an hour, or two, or sometimes all the way until dark, skipping dinner because who’s really going to care, anyway? She goes home. She talks to her dad if he’s there — how long the conversation is depends on how much he’s had to drink so far. The conversation is usually short. She goes to sleep in a bed that isn’t hers, not really. She hopes her father makes it through the night, usually.
Once, on a day when the conversation had been one sentence long and notably one-sided, despite it only being half past six, she had laid down in bed and closed her eyes and an image had risen to the forefront of her mind, completely unbidden: herself, in a foster home, meeting a beautiful young couple in nice clothes with neat hair, professing their desire to adopt such a smart and responsible young girl, and to take care of her and cook for her and drive her to school themselves. Her eyes had snapped open, a flood of guilt-grief-longing surging through her abdomen into her throat, and she’d clambered out of bed and stumbled out to the living room where her dad, her real dad, was passed out, and she’d tucked herself down in between him and the couch cushions and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” through rapidly forming tears because she was so sure that in that vision, he was dead, and she didn’t want that, God, she could never want that, how could she wish for that kind of life if it meant trading his away? And when she woke up the next morning, he had moved, had wrapped his arms around her and tucked her under his chin and pulled a blanket up over them both, and it took her so long to find the will to extricate herself from him that she was almost late to school.
It wasn’t always like this; he really did try, at first. That was almost worse. The slow unraveling, the letdowns, the missed calls, more and more of them until about six months in, when she realized she’d gone an entire week completely in charge of herself, cooking and cleaning and bumming rides and, once, just giving up and driving the car to the grocery store herself. And even after, even now, it’s not always the same. He’s better when he’s got a job, when he has to be certain places at certain times, when he can’t get so messy he becomes nonfunctional. He even cooks for her, sometimes, although he has to let her do the seasoning — with his nose, he can never get the balance quite right. But even that’s comforting, the way he sets the jars down grandly in front of her, stepping back from the pot or the pan with a sweeping gesture like a game show girl presenting the board, applauding her lightly when she declares it’s perfect. He’s warm, her dad, and goofy, and she catches glimpses of him through windows as he passes by, but she can never get him to stay, and sometimes — a lot of the time — she just really, really misses him.
She learns his trade, tags along on his detective work, hides in the trunk of his car for half an hour and nearly gets herself killed, all to try and catch a glimpse of him while he’s still here, in his body, recognizable. She smiles when he pulls it all together, impresses Healy, finds the projector, because it’s proof that he’s not completely gone. She likes Healy, because she brings her dad out of his stasis, makes him try — and yet there’s a little part of her that wonders why it took Healy to do that. Why she wasn’t enough.
John Boy’s guy takes her hostage, and they’re on the roof, and Holly’s so full of sick-slick disappointment and rage that she misses it the first time her dad says “duck,” and everything happens too fast for her to process until she’s on the awning telling Healy she’ll never talk to him again and he’s staring at her, bewildered, a man’s life in his hands, and she’s used to this; she has begged and begged and begged for men to be better, to care enough about her to live up to their promises. She is not expecting results; she hasn’t gotten them yet.
Healy does something new, though. He listens. And then he’s clocking John Boy in the face, and then her dad’s holding up the film and then his pinky because he promised her he’d get it, and then Healy’s putting a fatherly hand on her head and saying, “Let’s go down and see your dad,” and she feels this ugly, desperate hope rising up inside her so quickly it almost makes her mad. What is she, a stupid kid? She’s hoped before. Look where it got her.
A few weeks later, after the politics and the lawyers and the bureaucracy of it all have slowed, and her dad is home, and slowly business goes back to usual, Holly waits for the routine to come back. At first, that hope in her chest — that shriveled little creature in her ribcage that she’s been trying to exterminate, just to preempt the inevitable, make it more of a choice — it refuses to leave. Sunday night, Dad orders them a pizza, and they sit on the couch in companionable silence, gorging themselves. She wakes up for school on Wednesday and he’s in his bed, in a tank top and flannel pajamas, instead of in a suit in the bathtub. On Thursday, he answers her 10:45 a.m. call on the second ring and tells her fondly to go back to class, you little truant.
On Friday, she gets home from school and the smell of the alcohol when she enters the living room is so strong that her brain initially categorizes it closer to hand sanitizer than liquor.
She stops in her tracks, takes in the form of her dad sprawled out on the couch, snoring lightly, surrounded by bottles. Infuriatingly, she feels the sting of tears at the backs of her eyes. She whirls around and runs for her room, throws her bag down on her bed and grabs the book and the flashlight and makes a break for it. She gets to the old house with pure muscle memory, not watching where she’s going, and she counts her steps and collapses on the ground on the ghost of her parents’ bed, her knees just giving out, and she curls into a ball on the grass that has grown over the place where she last had her innocence, and she cries.
And then she stops, and she sits up, and she wipes her face with her arm, and she gets the hell over it. She picks her book up and stares at the words without taking in a single one of them, just blinded with helpless rage.
It’s just after sunset, the smog still lit up a brilliant, fiery orange, when she hears the chain link fence rattle. Hears footsteps, soft in the grass. The low huff of air inside a barrel chest. She stares determinedly down at her book, even as boots appear before her in the grass at the top of her peripheral vision, coming to rest on the soft, mustard-yellow rug in her parents’ bedroom where she used to lay on her stomach and gently pass the palm of her hand over the plush, thick fibers, back and forth until her palm was tingling and Dad asked her if she’d worked herself into a trance. Reached down to jokingly snap his fingers in front of her face, pretended to be immensely relieved when she “snapped out of it” and laughed up at him. “I missed you!” he’d exclaimed, and she’d said, “That’s silly, Dad, I’m right here.”
“Doing alright, kid?” Healy asks from above her.
“Hope you don’t need Dad for anything important,” she says, keeping her head down, trying to keep her voice disinterested and sardonic. “You don’t really want to go in there unless you want your nose hairs burned out by the fumes.”
There’s a short silence, and then Healy hums, softly, considering.
“Do you mind if I sit?” he asks.
Holly does look up at that. She sees him take in her face and blink, but he schools his expression before she even remembers she’d been crying. She can’t really bring herself to be too embarrassed; she’s too tired for that. She shrugs and pats the ground — bed — next to her.
Healy comes over, lowers himself down with a loud grunt in that way that, when Dad does it, is usually followed by, “Never get old, Holly.” It’s strangely comforting, and his warmth radiating from beside her is even more so.
“Your folks’ bedroom, right?” Healy asks. “Or have we moved? I'm not quite used to the layout.”
“We haven’t moved,” she replies. He nods, glancing around interestedly like he’s actually taking in a room. It makes her add, in a bid for more of his careful attention, “Do you like the rug?”
He blinks, the corner of his mouth lifting a little, looking at where she’s pointing. “I do. It’s a very nice...”
“Yellow.”
“It’s a very nice yellow.”
Despite it all, she giggles. He grins down at her, small but real. She realizes she missed him — the regular way, the way you miss someone who isn’t in front of you, who you’ve grown used to being in front of you. She feels like she could get used to his presence — like it just might be safe to do so. Like it might not get ripped away the moment she trusts it.
Very tentatively, carefully, she leans over, and she rests her shoulder against Healy’s.
Equally carefully, he lifts his arm, scoots closer to her, and pulls her in against his side. Slings his arm over her, warm and heavy.
All the tension goes out of her so quick it makes her sag into him. She hadn’t even realized how stiffly she’d been holding herself. He takes her weight. His jacket feels weirdly smooth against her cheek, a zipper digging into her skin a little, but he’s soft and blood-warm underneath it. He smells like gasoline and cigar smoke and not a hint of alcohol. His thumb is stroking her upper arm, back and forth, gentle. Holly realizes her face is wet, tears leaking steadily out of the corner of her eyes, the rest of her body too tired to commit to crying but unable to stop the saltwater exodus.
“It’s been a rough few years for you, huh, kid?” Healy says softly. She can feel his voice rumbling in his chest.
She nods against him, messing up her hair.
“Want me to walk you home so you can get some sleep?” he asks.
Before he got here, she briefly considered spending the whole night out here in her old house, fantasizing about her dad waking up and panicking about losing her. Of course, she’s already gone when he wakes up, most of the time. He would probably forget it’s Saturday and think she’s just at school.
She nods again. Thinks, absently, that if he’s walking her home, she should probably get up. Before she can move to do that, he leans forward, slow so he doesn’t jostle her, and picks up her flashlight. He pulls a slip of random paper, a receipt or something, out of his pocket, and he takes her book out of his hands and marks her page. He puts the book and her flashlight in his pockets. Her brain is just about getting around to wondering where he’s going with this when he moves his arms, gets one under her knees and one behind her back, and scoops her right up off the ground.
She stiffens, startled, slinging her arms around his neck as he stands. She must look bewildered, because he laughs a little and says, “You looked like you were about to keel over right there on the grass. Figured I’d let you keep the mood going. I can put you down if you want.”
She should tell him to put her down. She can walk. She is far too old to be carried home like a sleepy kid.
Very quietly, voice choked, she says, “It’s okay,” and she rests her head on his shoulder. He presses his cheek to the top of her head briefly, strands of her hair catching a bit on his stubble, and then he starts walking.
She’s asleep before they even pass the first house.
In the morning, she opens her eyes in her bed — still in her clothes from the night before, sans shoes, but tucked so thoroughly in that she has to struggle against the blanket for a second — and lies still, staring at her ceiling. She’s probably going to have to peel her dad off the couch and get him to his room to sleep off the rest of his drunkenness. She’ll open all the windows to let the smell out, because it’s not like it’ll bother Dad, so he won’t think to do it. She wonders if they have enough milk left for cereal; it was running low a couple mornings ago.
She hears the fridge door shut in the other room, glass rattling. A quiet curse at the noise.
There is a scent on the air, and it isn’t alcohol.
That starved little creature begins to stir in her chest again. Down but not out. She throws her blankets off and creeps slowly out of her bedroom, tiptoes down the hall, like she’s trying not to spook a wild animal.
She peeks around the corner.
Healy is in the kitchen, his back to her, body blocking the stove. A glance at the living room — the bottles are gone; her dad is nowhere to be seen. A throw blanket is folded neatly on the back of the couch.
“Morning, Hol,” a rough voice says from the kitchen. She tears her eyes away from the couch. Healy is watching her, one hand holding a spatula. There’s a mixing bowl on the counter by the stove. “Sleep okay?”
She stares at him, her feet beginning to move without her thinking to move them. She wanders into the kitchen as though she is Alice entering wonderland, waiting for something to jump out at her.
Healy doesn’t seem to notice her demeanor — or, more likely, he does, but elects not to comment. “Orange juice on the table, if you want to get a glass. Breakfast’ll be ready in a mo’.”
He reaches out and puts a hand on the top of her head, like he had on the roof at the hotel.
“Okay,” she says, for lack of anything better. She can’t quite make herself move, even after Healy ruffles her hair and then drops his hand. She wants to be near him, to soak in this experience for as long as it lasts. She wants him to put his hand on her head again, wants to feel the bulge of his knuckles where they’ve been calloused and broken, the solid, present weight of him. Her mind, ever untamed, presents another unasked for image to her: Healy and her father, curled up in a big, soft bed together. Herself, cold from a nightmare, padding across the floor and climbing up in between them, tucking herself into the small space. Her dad’s breath smells stale with sleep and nothing else, and she falls asleep cradled, and wakes up safe.
Some of it must show on her face, because Healy sighs, a little sad, and reaches out to pull her into a hug. She buries her face in his shirt and holds on.
“I thought we were out of milk,” she says, nonsensical.
He huffs a laugh, his stomach flexing under her face. “Well, lucky for you, I recently came into some cash.”
“Dad has a meeting with a client later,” she adds.
“I’ll make sure he cleans up for it,” he replies. “I’ll even drive.”
She wants to keep testing him, so he can keep getting the answers right. “I have school Monday.”
“Well, I should hope,” he huffs. “Can’t all be parties with whores and firefights all the time.”
She grins.
“Do you want me to drive you to school?” he asks, poking her shoulder. She’s pretty sure whatever he’s making is burning, a little. It smells like pancakes. He keeps both his arms tight around her.
“Mr. Healy?” she says quietly. “Do you think you could take care of my dad for a little while?”
He takes a deep, slow breath. Puts his hand on top of her head. “Yeah, kid, I can do that. Don’t you worry about him. I’ve got you.”
She steps back from the hug. She looks up into his eyes, his square face, and the little creature in her ribcage looks up at him too. He returns the stare, steady.
“I got you,” he says again. Jerks his head toward the table. “Go get some orange juice.”
He scrapes the burned pancake off the pan; throws it in the trash without a fuss and starts another one. He puts her plate down in front of her, piled as high as his own. Pours her a glass of orange juice. Slides her a brand new bottle of maple syrup.
Every item on her mental to-do list evaporates into the sweet-smelling air. Healy hands her a fork.