Outside the Lines: A Novel

The rest of December flew by in a rush of work and holiday preparations. I tried to go about my days without thinking too much about where my father might have gone, but the fact that he’d left sat like a boulder in my chest. I kept busy planning meals for Hope House, working out a deal with Doug at corporate that any excess food supplies would be automatically routed to the shelter’s kitchen as a charitable donation. Jack’s clients were suddenly offered tasty treats like prosciutto-wrapped poached asparagus and black-truffle raviolis in addition to the regular menu of meals I organized. I kept my eyes open on Tuesday nights as I served dinner at the shelter, ever hopeful my dad might appear. I worried about him, especially when Seattle suffered an unusual cold snap right around Christmas. The snow fell and fell and Jack found himself filling the hallways of Hope House with sleeping bags and extra blankets, trying to accommodate as many people overnight as the building’s fire code would allow.

Jack and I spent the holidays serving up as many meals as we could. I stewed huge pots of chili and hearty lentil soup that could be heated up when I couldn’t be there, stretching our supplies as far as they possibly could go. Even still, we lost a few clients during the cold. Saturn froze in an alleyway down in Pioneer Square. His heart stopped while he huddled beneath the thin blanket he believed would keep him warm throughout the night. We held a small memorial service for him on New Year’s Day. I wondered who would come to my father’s funeral if he were to be found in an alleyway, too. My heart ached picturing him suffering this fate; my ears perked every time my phone rang, expecting I might hear from the morgue. Expecting to identify the body and tell him good-bye.

“Aren’t you going to call Common Ground?” Georgia asked me one early January evening. “Maybe your dad ended up back there.”

“I thought about it,” I said as I tried to calculate just how many pounds of phyllo dough I’d need to serve mini spanakopita to five hundred people scheduled to attend a banquet the next night at work. “I was even going to write a note for him and leave it there in case he showed up again, but I feel like I had my chance and screwed it up. If he wants to see me, he knows where I am. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to hunt him down.”

“Are you sure?” Georgia asked doubtfully. She picked up her glass of wine and took a sip. “If you found him, you could just explain you made a mistake and apologize. Start fresh with him.”

“I can’t, Georgia. After what I put him through I really feel like he needs to be the one to initiate contact. It’s not that I’m not worried about him, because I am.” I looked out the window at the dark night. I imagined him huddled on a street corner, not having enough money to get a room to sleep in. “But if I pursue him now, he’ll just see it as me forcing myself on him again. I’m not going to do it. It goes against every instinct I have, but I feel like waiting for him to find me is the only way we’ll be able to start over.”

She sighed and set down her wineglass. “I’m sorry it worked out this way, sweetie. I really am.”

I shrugged and gave her a small smile. “Me too.”

“He’s so talented,” she said. “It’s really just so sad.” She threw her gaze to my father’s painting of the Garden of Eden, which I’d hung above my fireplace. I’d taken the other paintings to Hope House, and with Jack’s blessing I hung them in the hallway. The box of my father’s things was packed up and put away, all except his letters, which I kept in the nightstand drawer next to my bed.

“A thin line between madness and genius, I guess,” I said. I didn’t think my father was crazy, per se. Chemically imbalanced, yes. But cognizant enough to decide the kind of life he wanted to live, even if that meant it was a life without me.

Despite my resolve not to look for him, after the holidays I did go see Wanda and asked her to keep an eye out for my dad, just in case he decided to visit her. I also invited her to come help out at the shelter, if she would like to get out of her apartment more.

“I’d love to. Not sure how much I can actually help, but I can talk.” She reached over and squeezed my hand in her gnarled grasp. “And I’ll let you know if your dad shows up here, honey.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“How’s that handsome man of yours treating you?”

“Jack? How’d you know he was my man?”

She gave me a knowing look. “After you’ve been alive as long as I have, you know how to recognize these things. I could tell the minute you two sat down in my living room. He ask you to marry him yet?”

I blushed. “It’s way too soon for that. We’ve only been dating a few months.”

“You know when you know,” she said with a gummy grin.

You know when you know, I thought to myself every time I was around him after that. And I did know. I knew I was in love with Jack. I knew he was the best man I’d ever been with. There was a gentleness about him that amazed me, a level of self-awareness and compassion I’d never seen. He was committed to the work he did but also could be silly and fun. One Tuesday night as I cooked sloppy joes for the Hope House clients, he pretended to be Princess Leia, placing hamburger buns next to his ears and prancing around the kitchen like a fool. “Help me, Eden West!” he cried in a girlish falsetto. “You’re my only hope!”

“Carrie Fisher you are not,” I said, laughing. There was something cleansing about the easy happiness we shared. My heart was lighter than it had been in years, as if the heavy burden of all my father’s secrets had finally been lifted. I felt comfortable and safe with Jack, compelled to tell him every one of my thoughts and feelings, even when it was a terrifying thing to do. He listened when I needed to speak about my father, held me when I needed to be held.

“You’re just trying to get lucky,” I teased him when he took the initiative to fix a shelf in my bathroom that had been broken for months.

“I got lucky back in October, when I met you,” he said. There was not an ounce of insincerity in his words. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could fully trust a man. I felt like he knew everything about me and loved me anyway.

“Is he perfect all the time?” Georgia asked when I went on dreamily about some wonderful thing Jack had said or done. “I might have to hurl if he is.”

“No,” I said. “He’s hardheaded and opinionated, too. And he gets pissed off when things don’t go his way.” Jack had yet to reach out to his own father, but I knew pushing him on the subject would only make him dig in his heels. I had faith he would do it when he was ready, just as I had had to wait to be ready to find my dad.

As the days passed, I tried not to think about where my father had gone. Was he back in San Francisco or Portland? Was he around the next corner I’d turn? I couldn’t help but hope despite the disappointment threaded through my veins. I had to come to terms with the fact that I might never see him again.

“I’m sorry your dad isn’t here to see you be so happy,” Mom said during one of our Friday morning check-in calls. “With Jack, I mean.”

The muscles in my throat tightened up. “I find myself looking for him at the shelter all the time,” I said. “Ridiculous, I know.”

“Not ridiculous,” Mom said fondly. “Optimistic. It’s one of your better qualities.”

After we hung up, I thought about whether or not that was true. Was I an optimist? Or just delusional? I believed I’d find my father and I did. And even though it hadn’t worked out the way I’d planned, my search had led me to Jack and to the shelter. I finally felt like I was contributing to something that made a difference in the world. Something that might give another person their own quiet reason to hope.