Now he could fully realize how a little girl could become obsessed over a lighthouse. He was a grown man and it had happened to him. The mind, it seemed, was a vastly unpredictable thing.
“Dad?”
Jack turned to see Mikki standing behind him. She was in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, with a scared look on her face.
“Are you okay?” she said breathlessly. I... I heard you yelling.” She wrapped her arms around his burly shoulders. “Dad, are you okay?” she asked again.
He drew a long breath. “I’m just trying to understand things that I don’t think there’s any way to understand.”
“Okay,” she said in a halting voice.
He looked back at the Palace. “I moved all of us here for a really selfish reason. I wanted to be close to your mom again. She grew up here. Place was filled with stuff that belonged to her. Every day I’d find something else that she had touched.”
“I can understand that. I didn’t want to come here at first. But now I’m glad I did.” She touched his arm. “I look at that photo of Mom you gave me every day. It makes me cry, but it also feels so good.”
He pointed to the lighthouse. “Do you want to know why I’ve been busting my butt trying to get that damn thing to work?”
She sat down next to him. “Because Mom loved it?” she said cautiously. “And she wanted you to repair it?”
“At first I thought that too. But it finally just occurred to me when I saw you standing there. It was like a fog lifted from my brain.” He paused and wiped his face with his sleeve. “I realized I just wanted to fix something, anything. I wanted to go down a list, do what I was supposed to do, and the end result would be, presto, it works. Then everything would be okay again.”
“But it didn’t happen?”
“No, it didn’t. And you know why?”
Mikki shook her head.
“Because life doesn’t work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything that you think you’re supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won’t get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.” Jack paused and looked at his daughter. “People who shouldn’t be here are, and someone who should be here isn’t. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t change it. No matter how much you may want to. It has nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with reality, which often makes no sense at all.” He grew silent and looked out to the black ocean.
Mikki leaned against him and gripped his hand.
“We’re here for you, Dad. I’m here for you. I’m part of your reality.”
He smiled. And with that smile her look of fear finally was vanquished. “I know you are, baby.” He hugged her. “You know I told you I was scared when my dad was dying, that I withdrew from everybody?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when my mom left me, I pulled back even more. If it wasn’t for your mother, I think I would’ve just kept pulling back until I disappeared. I played sports and all, but I didn’t have many friends, I guess because I didn’t want them. Then we got married and I went off to the military. Then when I got home I picked a job that required a lot of hours and a lot of sweat.”
“You had to support your family.”
“Yeah, but in a way I think I was still retreating. Still trying to hide.”
“Dad, you were there for us.”
“I missed a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I know it, and so do you.”
She squeezed his arm. “There’s still a lot more to see,” Mikki said quietly.
He nodded. “There is a lot more to see, honey. A lifetime more.”
She shivered. He put his arm around her. “Come on. Let’s go in.”
As they walked past the lighthouse, Mikki glanced at it and said, “Are you sure?”
Jack didn’t even look at it. “I’m very sure, Mikki. Very sure.”
54
After Jack got back to his room, he dropped, exhausted, onto the bed, but he didn’t go to sleep. He lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Life was often unfair, insane, damaging. And yet the alternative to living in that world was not living in it. Jack had been given a miracle. He had already squandered large parts of it. That was going to stop. Now.
He opened his nightstand and pulled out the stack of letters. He selected the envelope with the number five on it, slid out the letter, and flicked on the light. What he’d just told Mikki, he firmly believed, because he’d once written down these same sentiments. He had just forgotten or, more likely, ignored them in his quest for the impossible. He began to read.
Dear Lizzie,
As I’ve watched things from my bed, I have a confession to make to you. And an apology. I haven’t been a very good husband or father. Half our marriage I was fighting a war, and the other half I was working too hard. I heard once that no one would like to have on their tombstone that they wished they’d spent more time at work. I guess I fall into that category, but it’s too late for me to change now. I had my chance. When I see the kids coming and going, I realize how much I missed. Mikki already is grown up with her own life. Cory is complex and quiet. Even Jackie has his own personality. And I missed most of it. My greatest regret in life will be leaving you long before I should. My second greatest regret is not being more involved in my children’s lives. I guess I thought I would have more time to make up for it, but that’s not really an excuse. It’s sad when you realize the most important things in life too late to do anything about them. They say Christmas is the season of second chances. My hope is to make these last few days my second chance to do the right thing for the people that I love the most.
Love,
Jack slowly folded the letter and put it away. These letters, when he was writing them, were the only things he had left, really. They represented the outpouring from his heart, the sort of things you think about when the trivial issues of life are no longer important because you have precious little time left. If everyone could live as though they were in jeopardy of shortly dying, Jack thought, the world would be a much better place. But in the end they were only letters. Lizzie would have read them, and perhaps they would have made her feel better, but they were still just words. Now was the time for action. He knew what he had to do.
Be a father for my children. Repair that part of my life.
Jack rose and went from room to room, checking on his kids. He sat next to Jackie as the little boy slept peacefully, his hand curled around his monster truck. Cory slept on his stomach, his arms coiled under him. A tiny snore escaped his lips. Next, Jack stood in the doorway of Mikki’s room, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the gentle sound of her breathing.
He closed her door and went downstairs and onto the rear screened porch. From here he could see the lighthouse soaring into the sky. He had built it into some mythical symbol, but it was only a pile of bricks and cinder blocks and metal guts. It wasn’t Lizzie. It had no heart. Not like the trio beating in the bedrooms above. Three people who needed him to be their father.
In this last letter he had been lamenting that there were no second chances left to him. Yet that insane, unfair world that he had sometimes railed against had done something remarkable. It had given him another shot at life.
I’m done running.
Jack went back to bed and slept through the night for the first time in a long time.