Chapter 6: What He Needed Me to Hear in His Voice
*You are going to be okay,* he said.
*I know you don't believe that right now.
But I knew you well enough to know that when you're sitting in the dark listening to this, some part of you is still waiting for permission to believe it.
So here it is.
From me.
You're going to be okay, Sarah.
More than okay.
I saw it in you even when you couldn't.*
I pulled my knees up to my chest on the couch, the laptop balanced against my shins, and I did not try to stop crying.
He kept talking.
He talked about Emily — specific things, funny things, the way she said a particular word wrong until she was four, the face she made when she didn't want to admit she was tired.
He talked about my father, how much he loved him, how glad he was that my father had come to live with us because he had spent years worrying about what would happen to him alone.
He talked about the farmhouse.
*I need you to go,* he said, and his voice shifted slightly, became quieter and more careful.
*Not because there's anything frightening there.
There isn't.
What I left is something I should have shown you while I was alive and ran out of courage to do.
I kept telling myself there was more time.
There wasn't.*
He paused.
*I need you to trust me one more time.*
The recording was eleven minutes long.
I know because the timestamp was on the screen.
When it ended, the room was very quiet, and I sat there for several minutes without moving.
Then I went down the hall to my father's room.
The light was still on under his door.
I knocked softly.
"Come in," he said.
He was awake in his chair by the window, a book open in his lap that he had clearly not been reading.
He looked at me when I came in, took in whatever was on my face, and simply said nothing, which was the right thing to do.
I pulled the wooden chair over and sat across from him the way I had earlier that afternoon, except that now it was nearly midnight and the house was dark behind me.
"He wants us to go to the farmhouse," I said.
My father nodded once, slowly.
"I know."
"You knew about this?"
"He told me there was something there.
He didn't tell me what it was." He paused.
"He said you would decide when and whether to go.
He said not to push you."
"He told you not to tell me."
"He asked me not to bring it up unless you asked directly." My father looked at me steadily.
"You didn't ask.
Until now."
I looked at my hands.
"Can you travel?" I asked.
"It's two states.
I'd want to drive, not fly.
It would take two days each way."
He considered this with the seriousness it deserved.
"I can travel," he said finally.
"I'm not d*ad yet."
The word landed between us and then dissolved, because there was nothing else to do with it.
"All right," I said.
"I'll take the week off work.
Emily has a school holiday coming up in three weeks.
We'll go then."
My father reached over to the small table beside his chair and picked up a glass of water.
He took a sip.
Set it back down.
"He was a good man," he said.
"I know."
"He loved you in a way I haven't seen very often."
"I know that too."
My father looked at me for a long moment.
"Sarah.
The thing I did not handle well — over these past months, the hiding, the secret — I want to say that I understand why you were frightened.
I was not angry when you said to leave the door open.
I want you to know that."
The careful formal weight of his words, the way he had clearly been holding them and waiting for the right moment, settled something inside me I hadn't known was still unsettled.
"I know, Dad."
"You were protecting her.
That's what a mother does."
"I thought—" I stopped.
Started again.
"I thought the worst.
About you.
And I'm sorry for that."
He shook his head.
"You were doing your job.
I would have thought the same." He paused.
"Daniel told me you would.
He said, Dad, she's going to notice, and she's going to worry, and she's going to think terrible things.
And I want her to.
Because it means she's paying attention.
It means she's still there."
My throat tightened again.
"He thought of everything," I said.
"He tried to," my father said.
"He ran out of time before he could finish.
But he got most of it."
I stood up and bent down and pressed my cheek against the top of my father's head, the way a daughter does when love and grief are the same motion.
He raised one large stiff-jointed hand and patted my arm.
I went back to the kitchen.
Poured the cold coffee down the drain.
Made a small list on a notepad — time off work, Emily's school schedule, what the drive would take, what the farmhouse might need.
I did not write down what I expected to find in the east room behind the loose board under the window.
I had no idea what it was.
But at the bottom of the list, without entirely meaning to, I wrote one word.
*Ready.*
I looked at it for a moment.
Then I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.
Three weeks was not very long.
But it was long enough to be afraid, and long enough to start to hope, and long enough for Emily to teach me seven of the hand signs before we left — not all of them, she said, we could do the rest in the car.
May you like
What none of us knew yet was that two days before we were scheduled to leave, something would arrive in the mail.
Something that had been moving toward us for a long time, from a direction none of us had thought to watch.
