Recovery

I bit my lip, keeping my eyes locked on the trashy television show playing in front of me. “You…” Maury started, opening the envelope. Everyone in the audience was clearly on the edge of their seats. Was the dickhead the father? Or was the woman the slut she swore she wasn’t?

“Are,” he uttered.

And everything after that was inaudible, covered up by the sound of loud knocking at my bedroom door.

“Garrett!” I groaned, knowing very well the only possibly culprit was my older brother. “You ruined it!”

“Sorry,” he chuckled as he opened the door. “Can I come in?”

I turned back to the television and sighed when I saw the show had gone to commercial. “I guess,” I grumbled. “What’s up?”

He perched himself on the edge of my bed, sitting in a half-Indian-style position. “I just wanted to see if you…um, if you thought about talking to Dad at all.”

I stayed quiet for a second, trying to figure out what, exactly I wanted to say.

The truth was, I thought about talking to Dad a lot. But was I ready? I wasn’t sure. I still got a feeling of dread in my stomach when I saw him walking around the house. But maybe that was something that would only disappear if I talked to him to understand whatever he had to say. Like why he left. And why he came back.

“Yeah,” I answered finally, after a long pause. “I’ve thought about it. But I just don’t know.”

Garrett nodded. “Just make sure that you don’t jump the gun. If you’re not ready, just wait it out.”

Although he was saying the words, it was pretty obvious to me that he didn’t believe them. It was almost like he was reciting them because he heard it somewhere else.

“Okay,” I responded anyway, deciding against calling him out on his bluff.

“Catch you later, Eves.” He put his hand on my knee briefly, a comforting gesture, before getting to his feet and leaving the room.

I stared at the closed door, completely tuned out of the show that was still playing in the background.

All day, I hadn’t even thought of my father. But once Garrett brought it up, the thoughts wouldn’t leave my mind.

Instead of driving myself crazy, I picked up my cell phone and dialed Puck’s number.

“Hey, Evie,” he greeted lazily, as if he was almost asleep when he answered.

“Hi,” I responded. “Do you think I’m ready to talk to my dad and ask all the questions I have? Or do you think I should wait?”

There was a long pause on the other side of the phone. “Um, what? Sorry, can you talk slower? I was just taking a nap.”

Ah, so I had been close when I thought he had been almost asleep. I chuckled at him and repeated my questions just a little bit slower, controlling my bubbling excitement to get an answer.

“I think…” Puck started, speaking very carefully, like he was picking out every word just as he said them. “I think that if you’re calling and asking me what I think, then…”

Oh. He had a point. “Hmmm…” was the only thing I responded with, not really willing to tell him that he was right.

“Listen, Evie, I know that it’s bugging you,” he voiced, “but if you’re ready to hear the real story, you’re going to know it for sure. You won’t be asking other people if they think you’re ready. You’ll just know.”

I let out a sigh into the phone, which I knew must have sounded really awful on his end. “What if it just disproves everything I ever hated about him?” I asked in a quiet voice.

In a nutshell, that was my greatest fear. I had held so much against my father for so long, blamed him for so many things that went wrong in my life. That went wrong with me.

The thought of whatever Dad had to say canceling all that out made my stomach turn violently. Talk about ignorance being bliss.

“Evie?” Puck said loudly, as if he had said my name a couple of times before with no reply. “You still there?”

“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking. What did you say?”

“Just that if your dad tells you stuff that makes you not hate him so much, maybe that would be a good thing.”

“But if I stop being angry at him, then I have no one to blame but myself.”

The reality of my words hung between us, and I could feel my face fill with heat in a moment of total and utter embarrassment.

Instead of trying to pass off what I said as a miscommunication or a mistake, I just hung up my phone and chucked it across the room at the couch. It bounced off the front and smashed against the ground, but since I didn’t hear a crack, I figured it was alright and didn’t bother getting up to check.

I stared at the ceiling, biting my lip to hard that bits of skin came off into my mouth.

A whole part of my therapy at rehab had been to accept the fact that my sickness had started from something inside of me, but that had never been a good enough explanation for me. I felt like there was something tangible that had fucked me up so much that I hadn’t turned down Coach Sylvester when she first suggested the horrendous diet regimen.

And my mind immediately went to my father. After all, he’d told me that I was fat and worthless so many times throughout my childhood that there was no way I could possibly remember them all. Without that, maybe I’d have had enough self-worth and self-respect to say no.

But on top of everything he said to me, he also walked out on my family. I wasn’t good enough to keep him around. That, to me, was the cherry on top of the freezer-burned ice cream sundae that was my childhood.

The more I thought about it, the less I wanted answers to my questions. At the rate I was going, it was entirely possible that I would never be ready to hear out my father, that I’d harbor a grudge against him for the rest of my life.

That simply couldn’t fly with me.

Taking a deep breath, I got to my feet and ventured out of my room and down the stairs, keeping care to stay as quiet as possible. I really didn’t want Dad to know that I was on the move.

He was sitting in the living room, curled up on a chair, his eyes staring at the screen. Even though I watched him for what seemed like almost five minutes, he didn’t blink once. It was actually kind of creepy.

The light flashed across his face as the show went to a commercial, highlighting the various lines on his face that didn’t have a place in my memories of him.

Time could change a person, I knew. Lord knew time had changed me.

But was I big enough person to forgive? To put aside my grudges and hear him out?

I hoped so.

“Evelyn?” Dad asked, narrowing his eyes at the staircase, where I stood uncomfortably, my teeth latching onto my bottom lip again. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” I responded in a quiet voice, finishing the short distance down the stairs. Once I reached the bottom, I stopped, crossing my arms in front of my stomach to protect myself.

My eyes journeyed over to him again, over at his face that didn’t have a lick of unkindness written on it. “Dad, I think I’m ready to talk,” I whispered.

By some miracle, he heard me and nodded, reaching over to shut off the television before patting the couch next to him.

“Then come over here. We’ll talk.”