Reality is Different: Afterword

The recitation ended slowly, drifting down as though imploring him to step into the quiet that it left. Her subtle sounds of breathing wrenching at his heart, even as he strove to harden it against them. But after a couple seconds passed her own reflective nature got the better of her, and she haltingly began to speak again, leading with a tone of faint admission, of abstraction. "...and I mean, I don't know for sure." Repeated. "I don't know, how can I know? The way I'll feel tomorrow, or a year from now, or ten. I did think about that, I'm not completely crazy. That even if something did happen, I might not like it, might regret it after all. Or that this might wear off eventually, like it's some magic spell that makes me feel like this, and then it would be awkward because of what we'd done. I don't know. But dad..." Her voice caught quietly within her throat, a lump, a little vocal quaver that snagged so pitiably captivating at his soul. "I know the way I feel now. I know how much I love you, how much I always have. And I know that I would never, ever resent you or be mad at you or anything like that, for doing something that I wanted. Something that I dreamed about."

His denial was a mutter, almost underneath his breath. "You don't even know that." And though Sarah scarcely seemed inclined to let this be the final word, he was mercifully spared of any further argument by the modest looming of their house upon the right as they arrived. "Finally." Another mutter. He pulled the truck up near the curb, half a foot away, and turned the engine off before continuing in flat and quiet tones, still looking distantly upon the steering wheel. "Head inside, please, Sarah."

"What do you mean?" Apprehension touched immediately to her voice, her manner. "Aren't you coming in, too?"

"Not right now." Even. That was all that he could manage - he didn't have the will to speak with lightness at the moment, or even honestly to try. "Please go inside."

"Wait, dad." She twisted towards him, reaching hesitantly out across the space between them. A reedy edge of worry in her voice. "Just listen, okay? Just-"

"Do I have to tell you a third time?" Anger once again, an edge of it as he compelled himself to turn a jot to face her, to see the fearful look that froze the corners of her luminous, beseeching eyes. The impact of the sharpened words as they bit into her, the way her satin lips fell subtly apart, the injured and conflicted feeling knitting at the fairness of her brow, her softly outstretched hand arrested in the air - he turned away again, back to the road, before he could see any more. And so he only heard, after a few more seconds passed, the slow, reluctant click as she unbuckled from her seat, and then another from her door before she stepped onto the curb.

It didn't close, however. Not before she spoke again, unhappy, pleading, raw. "I'll do what you tell me." Her wounded whisper scratched upon his heart. "Just please, dad, answer me one thing before you go. I'm...I don't know what you're thinking right now, or what you're even feeling, really. Maybe you're mad at me because you think I tried to - to seduce you." She took a breath. "Which I guess I kinda did, a little bit. Maybe you feel guilty, even though you shouldn't. And I mean, I did too, when I first started looking at this stuff, when I had fantasies about you, I felt like I was sick, that there was something wrong with me. But dad..."

Her voice was cracked by such a sudden surge of anguish he was forced to look, to see the way it pinched upon her lovely, earnest features as she gazed inward at him from the doorframe. The weak and slender shadow of a smile she attempted as her eyes met his, and then slid diffidently downward to the gearshift to try again in halting, woeful tones. "God, you're gonna think I'm crazy to bring up another of those stories right now. But I have to, I can't help it. Because there was one of them that was like trying to be realistic, where the girl and her dad got drunk and slept together on vacation, and then after they got home again he said he had to go away, abandon her forever because of what he'd done. And even though I thought it was a little silly when I read it, I didn't think that anyone would act that way, it still almost broke my heart." She bit anxiously upon her lip, spoke again in tones that strained and softly warbled with the load of feeling that they carried. "And I just wanted to be sure you know I need you, I really do. I don't know what I'd do, if you were gone."

"Lord." He managed to extract at least a thread of rueful humor from the intensity of her concern, from the absurdity of what it focused to. A faint shake of the head, wry in her direction. "No. No, sweetheart, I'm not planning to run away on you. Who does that? Where would I even go?" His bushy eyebrows lifted, as though baffled at the thought. "No, I just..." A beat of silence, struggling. "I just need some time to think. Alone. That's all."

"...oh." A trace of ambiguity remained at first, appraising his sincerity. But soon enough the mild spreading blush upon her cheeks conveyed that she believed him. As did the step she took away, proceeding with his earlier demands. She was about to swing the door shut on the cab when she abruptly seemed to reconsider, popped her head inside again to face him with an embarrassed paradox of deference and daring. "Then can I tell you one more thing, before you go? Just one more?"

His right hand lifted to his forehead of its own accord, rubbing slowly at his brow. Sarah waiting patient in the silence that he left, and after a few more seconds he felt little choice but to agree. "Sure. Fine. What is it?"

"I mean, you probably already know," she answered softly, in a rush, the glow of pink still simmering upon her cheeks. "But if you're going to go think about all this, about what we should have together, I want to tell you definitely that I...I would do anything for you." The final words were fainter, weakened by the effort that it took to speak them. "I would. Anything that makes you happy. Anything you want." A brief, embarrassed pause. "That's all."

He took a breath before he spoke, released it as a sigh. Distant, heavy, only half in her direction. "You know what I want, Sarah? Most of all?"

Attentive, instantly. Hope strained from her tongue, though there was caution there as well. "What? Just tell me."

"I want to be your dad." Forceful. "I want..." His jaw pulled tight, frustrated. "I want to be the guy who holds you when you cry, who picks you up when you fall down, who you can count on when you can't count on anybody else. And I don't want there to be any trace of doubt or of confusion, over who I am to you."

She waited a respectful silence there before she answered, soft. "There wouldn't be." Her voice pitched faintly upward with an effort at persuasion, uncertain with her words but still sweetly urgent and sincere. "All the rest of this, it fits with that, it goes together. It's just a little...more."

Pointless. Fruitless, arguing - he felt altogether weary as he pursed his lips, minutely shook his head. Intoned a quiet, "Go inside." And this time, mercifully, she complied. He watched her from the corner of his eye as she obediently bowed her head, shut the door and slowly trod the way up to the house. The shape of her, tall and lean, lithe beneath her cotton skirt and blouse. A veil that revealed just enough to tempt, to tease, without straying to immodesty. She was a good girl, yes, despite all this. A girl who would do anything for him. And he...god, what madness lived inside of him, that wanted to indulge that promise. Even what he'd said to her a moment prior, what it meant to be her dad - wanting her to cry so he could hold her, to fall so he could pick her up, to have no one she could count upon but him. To need him. There had been such a twinge, a tugging in his soul, every time she said she did. And now, as she turned back to look at him atop the porch with a woeful, hopeful little smile almost invisible upon her lips, to raise a hand in half a wave. Though she surely couldn't see it, he answered with a sliver of a smile of his own, before starting up the engine and shifting into first.

--

To think. That was the idea, was what he'd said. It was why he spent the next few hours driving aimlessly along back roads, locked in contemplation. But it was useless, futile. His thoughts were endless circles, tracing out repeatedly the ruts of what he knew. Bouncing back and forth between the dreams that she had sketched for him in hushed and longing whispers, the allure he had felt in them against the sickly certainty of what a father surely couldn't do. Quiet wonderings if she could possibly be right, that it was something not unheard of after all, merely secret, hidden, a taboo indulged in private more frequently than anyone could know. And through it all, the thought of her, his little girl in all her contradictions, all her chaste perversions, her shrinking forwardness, her independence blossoming into a yearning to submit. Her simple, plain appeal, artless, unadorned. The image of her thrown across his lap and squirming, or curled close against his side, or laying in her bed before him, her lovely eyes just softly shut, nursing blissfully upon his thumb as though the contact were her only source of sustenance, of joy, of life.

Perhaps it was inevitable that he eventually would wind up at the local bar, once he'd made his way back to the neighborhood still feeling ill-equipped to face her. The place was cheap, a dive, with walls of grungy brick that on most days he would have said just added to the charm. Today, he felt in little mood to contemplate the matter. He wasn't quite a regular of the establishment, at least not that he'd say, but he'd visited enough to trudge in silently without arousing any second glances from the people there who were, to order with a nod and settle grimly down amidst the subtle stink of ancient spills, and the inconstant jabbering of mumbled conversations. Hiding from his worries for a while with a glass of dissipation, before the final denoument that must be on its way.

He'd been there for an hour in the dim, half-empty room, perhaps a little longer, when the older man behind the bar elected to remain after he served his third refill, instead of ambling indifferently off as he had done before. "What's got you so mopey, then?" He knew the man, the bartender, through scattered conversations of before. Joseph was his name, though he only ever went by 'Joe.' He was in his early sixties, but still rather vigorous, wiry, with thinning hair that yet retained a bit of black around the sides, and a raspy voice that carried well across the chatter. "I expect to get a 'How's it goin', Joe?' outta you much earlier than this."

Even after three substantial drinks, it still took a couple seconds' effort there for him to stir up something like a casual response. "Must've slipped my mind." Though at least it sounded natural enough, he thought. "How's it goin', Joe?"

"Oh, no." The other man retorted with a waggle of his finger, dirty nails barely visible under pale incandescent lights. "Can't fool me that easy, buddy. Usually you're here actually enjoying your beer, not sliding into it."

"I'm..." He bit his tongue and started over, as politely as he could. Phrasing carefully around the mild blanketing of fuzziness upon his mind. "It's not something that I really wanna talk about." Though that wasn't even true, entirely. There was a part of him that longed to speak of it, to unload his burdens, complain about his troubles, to beg for the perspective of another when his own seemed badly warped. But for this, there could be no friendly chat over a pint.

"Ah." Joe, though, was completely undeterred, his narrow eyebrows raising up to a commiserating look. "Should have known. Trouble with a woman."

"No." He answered faster, sharper than he ought to have - and had no other option but to hastily elaborate. "Not - like that. 's my daughter, that's all."

"Hell, that still counts." Joe leaned in a trifle, grinned. "Little trick there, by the way. I had no idea, honestly, but practically all our problems boil down to women one way or another, don't they? So it's always a good guess." He paused a moment, clearly pleased, before continuing. "Your daughter, though, huh? I think you mentioned her before. She's away at college, right? What's the problem?"

"She's..." His fingers tightened at his glass, frustrated, wondering what he could say. If anything at all. It surely wasn't wise to speak a single word about the matter, no, but with the quiet there demanding a response, with the haze of alcohol upon his mind, and his own desperate wish to make some sense of all of this, to find some kind of answer... "No, no, not away. Just at the community college right now. Supposed to be transferring soon. And she's just...she just wants to get involved in something that I'm pretty sure will get her hurt, and I dunno what I oughta do about it."

"Sure, sure." Joe didn't seem to bat an eye before the other's slightly slurring vagueness. "That's a classic. Do you forbid her to see the guy with the tattoos and risk driving her away, plus not even doing any good when she just disobeys you anyway? Or stand aside and let her get a broken heart, maybe knocked up for her trouble, too." A nod, then, "You want my advice?"

He snorted quiet to himself, dismal, half-amused. Advice. It was ridiculous, when said aloud. Perhaps it even could be useful if it were from someone else, who somehow knew the situation, who could think about it with a level head and offer...something. But even if that were the case, it wouldn't be from Joe. The man was quite attached to the idea that a bartender was supposed to be a font of homespun wisdom, and never gave up trying to suggest what others ought to do. Unfortunately, he wasn't any good at it. Half of the time he didn't even manage guidance that would fit the situation, let alone that made it better. "You know I got nothing against you, Joe. But I don't figure you can give me anything on this one that I didn't think about myself."

He might as well have begged the man's instruction. Joe but nodded earnestly, abstractedly, and pressed onward in tones of somehow cynical enthusiasm. "See, the thing you gotta do is just..." The briefest little pause, bidding for suspense. "Not worry about it."

It took another couple seconds, waiting for some kind of an elaboration, before the sarcasm crept up to his tongue. "Ah! Right, of course. Don't worry about it." The words were sour in his throat, somehow disappointed despite his lack of any expectations - he took another drink to wash them down. "Can't believe I didn't think of that myself. Solves so many problems, when you just don't worry about'm. It's a damned...what's the word, a panacea."

"All right, all right, you don't understand. No need to get snippy." Joe stepped back defensively, grabbing for a cleaning rag to occupy his hands. "I know what I'm talking about, though. Had two daughters myself, y'know, and those two were like night and day, completely different. Jenny was my firstborn, and she was well-behaved as anything, the whole time she was growing up. Always listened to me, did her chores, asked for my advice with all her problems, brought her boyfriends home so I could check them out, the whole nine yards. And I took all that seriously, I tried to do my best with her, to guide her. Felt like I did a decent job. She got into Louisiana Tech, got a botany degree. But her sister now, Vikki, she was born six years later, and from the very start she was a terror. Ran away from home three times when she was eight, if you can believe it. And twice as bad when she became a teenager, of course, she smoked, she drank, she didn't listen to a word I said, and I can't pretend I know the half of what she got up to when she snuck out at night. And her, y'know, I still tried to do the best I could, but usually she'd just do the opposite of what I told her. She ended up pretty much just being gone more and more until she wasn't living with us anymore."

He rubbed a little at his forehead, where a headache was just beginning to take shape, and wondered if this story would seem more relevant if he'd had less to drink himself. He somehow doubted it. "So what's your point?"

"My point," Joe tugged upward at his khaki pants, a little bit too wide for him. "If you'd wait for me to finish, is that now both of them are living with their respective husbands and their kids a couple states away. And both of them seem pretty happy, more or less. Far as I can tell, at least - most years I just get a christmas card from each of them, a phone call now and then. The kid that followed all my careful instructions and the kid that told me I should go to hell, they ended up in pretty much the same situation. So don't worry about it. Don't wig out trying to arrange some kind of perfect life for her or to stop every possible mistake, cause ninety nine percent of that shit doesn't end up making any difference anyway."

"Y'think it doesn't even matter?" He couldn't quite explain the hackles rising, the sharpness of his tone, the anger and frustration stirring in his stomach at the man's suggestion. "There's no difference between being a good father and a bad one?" Ridiculous. Insulting, to dismiss all of his own efforts there as meaningless, as worthless.

Joe made a sound of faint aggrievement, aggravation. "Well now I didn't say that, did I? Course there's a difference with that big-picture stuff, and being a provider, a role model, all of that. If they don't have anything to eat or you're shooting up in front of them, then yeah, that'll screw them up but good. But all the little details, they're garbage. Just let her do what she wants. Or don't let her, whatever's simplest. Because it doesn't really matter, this late in the game. She's going to make her mistakes eventually anyway, once she's on her own. And honestly, if that's about to happen, if you said she's going off to college, you should probably just try to make this most of this time while you can. Cause once they've moved out of the house you never really get to be their dad again. Not in the same way."

The words were only casually spoken, matter-of-fact, as though they merited no special emphasis. Somehow that only made it worse, to hear off-handedly affirmed the fear that had been lurking in his heart for months, for years, that he'd refused to even think about for more than moments at a time. That he was going to lose her, as a normal fact of life, that she would drift apart from him, away, appear within his life as no more than a voice, a sometime shadow at his door. She would leave their home one day and only come back as a guest. He would put his daughter down, and never pick her up again...the thought of it was poison, tightening his hands to helpless fists, curdling his feeling to a hopeless, pointless fury, to despair. He didn't try to give an answer to the other man, just stared down fixedly upon the bubbles in his beer. And when he took another drink, eventually, he found it bitter suddenly upon his tongue, foul and putrescent. He pushed the glass away, back towards Joe, who still was waiting there with an inquisitive expression. "What do I owe you?" Muttering. "Should be eight or something, right?"

"Yeah, seven eighty six." Joe shrugged indifferently. "What about it, though? Useful, right?"

"Here's ten." He ignored the question, pulling out a couple crumpled bills from a similarly-battered leather wallet. 'Useful.' No, no, the actual advice was futile, pointless, blind to what he truly faced. But Joe had inadvertently reminded him how near the end of everything he was, and nothing suddenly was more important than returning home to Sarah once again, to see her and to be with her while he still could, whatever complication there might be between them. While she was still his daughter, before the world came to steal her away.