“I’m not planning anything bad,” Danna laughs. “I don’t even know what you think I would plan. I’d just like it if all of us could patch things up and get along.”
“What changed your mind?” I ask. “Whatever it was must have been pretty extreme. I mean, you actually moved out over all this.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘all this,’” Danna says, “but what changed my mind was Emma.”
Emma asks, “How so?”
“It was that interview you did on Ida,” Danna says. “That’s what finally stopped seeing you as the ghost of Damian and my past, but as the person you are.”
“Really?” Emma asks. “I never saw the tape, but I would have thought there would be nothing but partially veiled contempt for pretty much everyone in the room.”
“Oh no, that came through pretty well in a lot of places. Not gonna lie,” Danna says, “hilarious. That’s not what did it, though. It was your smile and what you said about it in those pictures. I see pictures of myself all the time after our parents died and after my diagnosis and I want to just tear every last one of them up. I know they’re different things, but I always felt the same way about those pictures of me. Seeing that smile on my face made me feel like a liar. When you described that in your own life, I don’t know if it was just the knowledge that we had something in common or what, but I finally started listening to you as you were speaking. You may be a bit of a scandal magnet, but I think you’re someone I’d like to have around. Besides,” Danna says, “I heard about how you broke that fucker’s nose when he tried to confront you after the show. That is just so fucking hardcore, you have no idea.”
Emma laughs, and though I’m still skeptical about my sister’s newfound pair of angel wings, I permit a smile to come over my face.
We sit and we talk for hours, and it not groundbreaking or particularly important for any reason other than the fact that it’s happening. The words themselves don’t matter so much; it’s just the fact that they’re being spoken at all.
After a while, the moving truck carrying all of Danna’s crap arrives at the house and they lug her shit i
nto her room. She goes off to unpack while Emma and I sit down to dinner.
Things are quiet for the most part. We’re just enjoying each other’s proximity.
Dinner comes to an end and Emma helps me with the dishes. It seems like things are starting to wind down when Emma asks if I’d like to go for a ride in her car.
I shrug and give my consent, and so we drive, Emma at the wheel, me looking for reasons why this moment isn’t just about perfect and only coming up with a few.
“I have some news,” Emma says.
“Yeah?” I ask. “What’s that?”
“My dad left town,” she says. “He gave me a call today to let me know that he’s back in Illinois, safe and sound, and that I don’t have to worry about him coming around anymore. Do you happen to know anything about that?”
“Me?” I ask. “How would I even know how to find your dad, much less convince him to go home?”
“Oh, come on,” she says. “Danna was staying at that same hotel and she denied even knowing that my father was in town, or for that matter, living.”
“There are a couple of possibilities,” I tell her. “One possibility is that he realized what he was doing was wrong and he decided to stop before he made things any worse.”
“Try again,” Emma says.
I chuckle. “Okay,” I tell her. “Maybe he caught wind of what you did to Ben and he decided that if he didn’t get the hell out of Dodge, he’d be next.”
“As great a fantasy as that is, I really don’t think that would do it, either,” she says. “I think he’d have gone on a killing spree before he’d admit, even to himself, that he was scared of his daughter.”
“Well, it’s a mystery then,” I tell her.
She doesn’t need to know that I ran into the guy one night after Danna started staying there and I asked him what it would take for him to leave and never come back.
Maybe I should have learned from Emma and maybe he’s just going to end up coming back for more, but I may have intimated that if we had any further trouble from him, I had some “friends” who would happily “deal” with the situation.
That seemed to do the trick.
We pull onto Emma’s street and her motivation to take a drive becomes clear.
“You know,” she says, “things taking a turn for the better after they’ve been bad for so long has a way of making a person feel pretty damn alive.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.