Bridge. But there was also a tiny sliver of a chance that by doing what I’d just done, I’d saved her life. And maybe my own, too.
I crawled back into bed and passed out.
SATURDAY,
NOVEMBER
1
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
I WOKE UP WITH A head full of cotton balls spiked with broken glass. Every thud of my heartbeat felt like a monkey smacking my brain with a Ping-Pong paddle. Then I remembered the girl in my bed, and the monkey calmed down a bit. Her eyes opened: Pacific Ocean in one, Atlantic in the other. I was afraid she would freak out when she realized she’d spent the night with me.
“Good morning.” She smiled sleepily, then winced. “Oh my. I can’t remember the last time I had a hangover. We must have coffee, and quickly.”
We groaned our way out of bed. Zelda didn’t have any other clothes with her, so she ended up in my T-shirt and hoodie, along with the skinny black jeans she’d bought for me at the mall (which fit her surprisingly well). She was getting one of her socks out from under the bed when she found the box.
“What’s this?”
I’d almost forgotten it was there. A couple of years ago, my dad’s publisher had sent back a whole bunch of his unpublished work. I guess they’d been thinking about doing some kind of omnibus or something (final verdict: no thanks). My mom said she couldn’t bear to read any of it, so she’d just given it all to me.
D-a-d, I finger spelled.
Zelda looked confused. “Bab?”
D-a-d, I signed again, mouthing the word at the same time.
“Oh! Your dad! This is his work?”
I nodded.
She knelt down next to the box and pulled off the lid, revealing a chaos of papers and file folders and notebooks. Some pages were written in a dense, incomprehensible cursive. Others had been typed on a typewriter. There were pieces in Spanish and pieces in English. There were newspaper clippings and old photographs and a few bound journals labeled Diario.
“His diaries,” Zelda said, holding one up. “Have you read these?”
I shook my head. I’d tried once, back when the box first arrived, but the time it took to decipher the scrawl of his handwriting wasn’t worth the boring adult problems he’d written about. Zelda flipped through one of the journals and stopped at a random page.
“June fifteenth, 2005,” she read. “It’s the same old fight. She says there needs to be more money, I say there will be soon. She says she doesn’t mind working, I say I do mind.” I had no idea Zelda knew Spanish; to be translating on the fly like this was impressive. “And then one of us is shouting, then the other is shouting, then I break something that I can’t afford to break. Then I go for a walk to clear my head, only my head doesn’t clear.” She stopped reading, then set the diary back in the box and replaced the lid. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
I grabbed my journal and a pen from my desk.
It’s nothing I don’t already know, I wrote. He was pretty unhappy.
“So I see. Why do you think that was?”
I guess he wasn’t as successful as he wanted to be. His last book sold about two hundred copies.
“Wasn’t he good?”
I don’t know. But maybe he didn’t work as hard as he could have. I remember my mom and I came home this one day, and I closed the front door too loudly, and he came running out of his office. This was in the house we used to have, which was way bigger. And he got all angry about how he needed quiet to work. But a while later, I looked through the keyhole, and he was just sitting there playing solitaire and drinking a beer.
“Maybe that was part of his process.”
I gave Zelda a yeah right look, so I didn’t have to write it.
“Did he ever hurt you?”
Not like that. He wasn’t a bad guy. I think I’m making it sound like he was.
“There are no bad guys,” Zelda said, putting her hand on mine. “Only in bad movies.”
I slid the box back under the bed. We finished getting dressed and climbed down from the attic. I could hear my mom banging around in the kitchen below us. We’d have to find some way around her.
“This is your mom and dad?” Zelda asked, gesturing to the half-dozen framed photos mounted along the wall. I nodded.
“My God, it’s like a graveyard in here.