Heart Bones

I turn around to head toward the stairs, but my father calls after me. “Wait. We need to discuss this.”

Now that my rage has surfaced, I feel like I’m drowning in it. I need to get it all out while I have the chance. I spin around and face my father again.

“Discuss what? Everything else I kept from you? Do you want to know about how I lied when I met you at the airport? The airline didn’t lose my luggage. I never had anything at all, because every penny you ever sent Janean, she kept for herself. I had to start fucking a guy for money when I was fifteen just so I would have food to eat. So fuck you, Brian. You aren’t my father. You never have been, and you never will be!”

I don’t bother to wait for any of their reactions. I stomp up the stairs and slam my bedroom door.

My father opens it about thirty seconds later.

“Please leave,” I say, my voice completely devoid of emotion now.

“We need to talk about this.”

“I want to be alone.”

“Beyah,” he says pleadingly, stepping into the room. I stomp to the bedroom door, refusing to let the look on his face get to me.

“You’ve spent nineteen years being an uninvolved father. I am not in the mood for you to finally get involved tonight. Please, just leave me alone.”

So many things pass through my father’s eyes in this moment. Sadness. Regret. Empathy. But I don’t allow any of his feelings to affect my own. I stare at him stoically until he finally nods and backs out of my bedroom.

I close the door.

I fall onto the bed and pull Samson’s notebook to my chest.

To them, this notebook may be a list of everyone on this peninsula he’s wronged, but to me, it’s further proof that his intentions were good. He tried to do the right thing with nonexistent means.

I flip through the notebook again, reading every page, touching the words with the tip of my finger, tracing his sloppy handwriting. I read the address of every place he’s ever stayed. Half of the notebook is filled with pages of his handwriting. It’s choppy and hard to read in places, like he’d write these things in a hurry and then close the notebook before he got caught.

I flip toward the end of the notebook and pause on a page that’s different from the rest. It’s different because my name is at the top of the page.

I pull the notebook flat to my chest and close my eyes. Whatever he wrote was short, but that was my name.

I breathe in and out very slowly several times until my heart rate returns to normal. Then I pull the notebook away from my chest and read his words.

Beyah,

My father once told me love is a lot like water.

It can be calm. Raging. Threatening. Soothing.

Water will be many things, but even in all its forms, it will always be water.

You are my water.

I think I might be yours, too.

If you’re reading this, it means I’ve evaporated.

But it doesn’t mean you should evaporate, too.

Go flood the whole goddamn world, Beyah.

It’s the last thing he wrote in the notebook. It’s like he was afraid he’d be arrested before he could tell me goodbye.

I read the note several times with tears falling onto the page. This is Samson. I don’t care what anyone else believes. This is who I’m going to hold on to until the day he’s released.

This is also the reason I refuse to leave. He needs my help. I’m all he has. There’s no way I can just walk away from him right now. The thought of leaving this town before knowing his fate is a selfish move. He thinks he’s doing me a favor, but he has no idea what his decision is doing to me. If he knew, he’d beg me to stay.

There’s a light tap on my door. “Beyah, can I come in?” Sara peeks her head in, but I’m not in the mood to argue. I’m not even sure I have the strength to say that out loud. I just clutch the notebook with his words to my chest and I roll over and face the wall.

Sara crawls into the bed with me and wraps her arm around me from behind.

She says nothing. She just quietly slips into her role as a big sister and stays with me until I fall asleep.

TWENTY-NINE

The sunrise is the only peaceful thing in my life at this point.

I’ve been out here waiting on it since five o’clock this morning. I couldn’t sleep. How am I expected to sleep after the last week I’ve had?

Every time I close my eyes, I see Samson walking away from me without looking back. I want to remember all the times he looked at me with hope and enthusiasm and intensity. But all I see is that last moment where he left me crying and alone.