What did she think? Even in moments of extreme weirdness like this, it was just easy to express herself to him. Much easier than talking to her mother.
“I think it sounds pretty messed up,” she said.
“Well, granted.”
“I mean, for one thing, I thought you were broke.”
“I wasn’t, it turned out. Though I kind of am now.”
“And then—” She closed her eyes, not because she was upset but just to try to get her thoughts in order. “Why would you want to go back there,” she asked him, “by yourself, when you made such a big display about wanting to get out when Mom and I were living there? You liked the house, it was just us you didn’t like?”
A lengthy pause on his end. “Good for you,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I know why, really. The short answer is, it’s my home. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way, because it’s kind of a mess right now, but I made it, and I feel like I should live in it. And it gets you and Mom some of the money you should have gotten in the first place, and it keeps somebody else from moving in and just painting over, papering over, what happened here. I have to live here because it reminds me every day of who I am.”
It was an event, this phone call, even apart from what was being discussed; she hadn’t heard the sound of her father’s voice in months. Texting had just seemed like the default way to communicate — it was the way she communicated with everyone, even Cutter — but she could see now that there was something else to it, some sort of insulation or remove, that maybe they’d both needed.
On the TV screen a baby’s crying was muted. Framing the set was a view out the window of hundreds of apartments, hundreds of lives, all too small and too far away to be made out in any detail.
“So you’re telling me all this why?” Sara said. “What do you expect me to do?”
“I don’t expect you to do anything. It’s not even important that you come back here ever if you don’t want to. I just like the thought of you knowing that the place where you grew up is still here and that nobody else is living in it.”
Her eyes began to sting. “This makes no sense to me at all,” she said. “You had this huge meltdown, and you just got out of jail for it. Why go back? Why not just take your money and go somewhere else and try something new?”
“Turns out it’s not so enticing,” he said. “Turns out it’s kind of frightening, being nobody. Anyway, telling yourself you’re nobody doesn’t make it true.”
“It’s better to be someone everybody’s mad at?” Sara said.
He said nothing for a moment, then laughed softly. “You should see what happens when I go into town, to buy food and whatnot. Everyone who recognizes me hates my guts. Which is both a bad feeling and a good one. Good because it’s bad. It’s hard to describe.”
Sara tried to imagine it. “Do any of them ever ask,” she said, “whatever happened to me?”
“No,” he said, “but that’s only because nobody who knows you will speak to me at all.”
“You said you’re broke now. Do you have a job?”
“Yes. Of sorts.”
“So you’re just going to live there like nothing happened?”
“No,” he said, “I am going to live here like everything happened.”
She had a strange urge to tell him about Cutter — the stealing, the ditching, the self-destruction — and to ask for his advice, if only because she knew he wouldn’t lose his shit over it the way her mother surely would. “So,” she said instead, “what was jail like?” but then she heard the key turning in the front door lock behind her. “Gotta go, bye,” she said to her father and hung up on him.
Helen came and collapsed on the couch beside her, coat still on. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “It just never ends. Every day I look up and suddenly it’s dark out. You poor thing.” She kissed Sara on the forehead, looking at the TV. “What on earth are you watching?” she said.
She disapproved lately of all of Sara’s habits, her likes and dislikes. As their circumstances bettered, her mother seemed determined to effect some corresponding improvement in Sara herself, some movement toward an ideal. This Sara resented intensely. Her mother wanted to change her wardrobe, to change the books she read, the TV she watched. She suggested that they join a gym together: “God knows I could use it,” she’d say, as if that made the whole notion any less repellent, or less insulting. In this atmosphere there was absolutely no question of discussing, or even mentioning the existence of, her shoplifting, class-cutting, alcohol-consuming, iPod-mugging, disobedience-encouraging boyfriend. Helen would have heard only the bad parts about him and would have devoted herself full-time to scrubbing this ethically compromised boy out of her daughter’s supposedly exemplary life. And this was why asking for advice on, or even mentioning, her sporadic contact with her father over the past several months would have been pointless as well. Her mother would have called the cops, and changed Sara’s phone number, and for what? For the sake of some perfectly untroubled adolescence she was apparently supposed to have, some perfect life she was supposed to aspire to, like that of some saint, never mind if the life she had right now, with all its flaws and drama, was hers. A saint was exactly what she was not.
Take the question of private school. Her mother wouldn’t let up about it lately. And it was true that the high school where she was enrolled next fall was overlarge and academically half-assed and socially fraught: but who imagined that Sara was too good for that? She herself was fraught in ways her mother was stubbornly unable to see. “It’s just the two of us now,” Helen loved to say. But it wasn’t. Her father, the more she thought about him, constituted a kind of parallel universe, a splinter family, and Sara was starting to think that maybe that was the family to which she truly belonged. Just as he had — only more literally — she’d become aware as she grew older that she was not living the life she had been born to live. And the guilt generated by her escape from that life was something she, like her father, had no desire to run from. Why her, after all? She was not so special. She was not without her weaknesses, her faults. And her advantages — where did they come from? What made her more deserving of luck or grace than anybody else whose real parents didn’t want them? It was important that she not pretend to be better than she was. Her father understood this kind of self-censure — more so than ever, in his current state. Her mother’s heart was closed to it.
Two hours later Sara’s phone went off again, this time a text from Cutter. Hungry? it read. Sara glanced up at her mother, six feet away on the couch in front of the TV, sound asleep. She texted back a single question mark, and a few moments later he had sent another grinning photo of himself, this time at a booth in a restaurant. It took her a few seconds to recognize it, from the menu he held in his hand, as the Hunan Garden just down the block from her apartment building. She felt her face grow hot.
Wtf are you doing?? she texted him.
Come on out. Free wine.
No way. Mom right here.
So I’ll come up to your place, then?
“Whoo!” Helen said suddenly. “I just nodded right off there!”
Sara willed herself to be calm as her mother slowly made the move from the couch to her own bedroom and shut the door. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she had gone to the Duane Reade to buy a new highlighter — lame, but better than no note at all — and slipped out the front door and down the hall to the elevators as quietly as she could.
Cutter looked euphoric, fresh as a daisy. It was after ten o’clock, and the waiters were glaring at him. He beckoned her into the booth where he sat with a pot of Chinese tea and an untouched tofu stir-fry of some kind. “I can only stay a minute,” she said. “You have to come back to school. Promise me you’ll be there tomorrow.”