Outside the Lines: A Novel

I still had dreams about that night. I still saw my father bleeding out in the bathroom, but in my dreams, instead of being unconscious, he reached out while his wounds dripped onto the floor. I could not hear his voice but saw him mouth the words “Save me” time and time again. I willed myself to go to him, but I could not. I was immobile, paralyzed by fear. I couldn’t save him. There was nothing I could do to help. I woke with a start each time the dream visited me, my breath caught in my throat, my cheeks wet with tears. At fifteen, I’d given up hope my father would return, but a part of me just couldn’t let him go.

Most of the time I was a well-adjusted teenager. I fought with my mom and John about how late I could stay out on Friday nights and when I could go on a date alone with a boy who drove. I babysat Bryce, who at four years old had finally become something more than just annoying. He liked me to read to him and dig with him in his sandbox; I liked him to ask me in his cute toddler voice for “avamacados” or tell me a farm smelled like “cow madure.” I spent time with my friends and still hated anything to do with math. I was an average student in my other classes, determined to follow my dreams of becoming a chef. At sixteen, I pestered the owner of the café near our house for a job in the kitchen until he finally gave in and let me wash dishes a few nights a week. I was promoted to prep cook in less than a year. I learned to julienne and chiffonade, and how to debone a trout without tearing up its delicate flesh. John gave me his old Ford Explorer so neither he nor my mom would have to cart me around. For all intents and purposes, my life was full.

Since we had moved in with John five years before, my mother had made it clear my father was not to be discussed. She didn’t tell me this outright, but I learned it soon enough from how she carefully avoided any reference to him when she talked about our past.

“Eden’s a wonderful cook,” John said one night when I made spaghetti for dinner. “She must have had a wonderful teacher.”

“She certainly is,” my mom said, acknowledging John’s first statement but not the latter.

I sat at the table, spinning the noodles around and around on my fork. I could feel her eyes on me, knowing she didn’t want me to bring my father up. It was as though she thought my memory of him would fade away if we didn’t say his name out loud. And to some extent, I suppose she was right. He wasn’t in my thoughts as often as he was after he first disappeared. My longing for him had aged into something less tangible—an occasional craving instead of a constant sense of starvation.

There were moments when I missed him profoundly—I was a junior when my high school sponsored a father-daughter breakfast.

“You could take John,” my mother suggested when she read about the event in the quarterly newsletter the school sent out to parents. We were sitting in the living room, where I was trying to watch TV while my mother pretended to be cleaning. “Dusting with an agenda,” I liked to call it.

“He’s not my father,” I said, leaning to peek around her so I wouldn’t miss a moment of MTV’s Real World. Despite my issues with John, the change in my mother since my dad left our lives was for the better, I knew. After he was gone, she rarely got stressed out or angry, and even when she did—if I refused to pick up my clothes or Bryce accidentally broke her favorite coffee mug—her response was stern but never enraged. It was as though all her fury was used up on my father and what was left in its place was tolerance and a newfound sense of peace. I felt a little guilty for liking my mother more the way she was with John, as though I were somehow betraying my dad.

My mother sighed and set down her feather duster. “Can you at least pretend to respect him?” she asked wearily.

“I do respect him. I’m just not going to take him to the breakfast.”

My mother didn’t push the issue further and I didn’t attend the event. I had fantasies about it, though—visions of my father showing up on our front steps, dressed and ready to escort me. And then my heart would crumple in on itself, shattered by reality. Feeling his gaping absence from my life all over again.

“Your dad is nice,” my friends would say of John when they came to spend the night.

“He’s not my dad,” I’d tell them. “My dad is an artist. A painter.”

“What happened to him?” they’d ask, and I’d make up some story of how he lived in New York and traveled the globe, looking for inspiration. It wasn’t like he would come back to prove me wrong. And after all, considering the ugliness of the truth, it wasn’t like anyone could blame me for wanting to lie.