“Something on your mind?” he said.
“A lot.”
“That’s understandable.” Dad shoved his hands in his pockets and stared up at the streetlamps.
We arrived at the baseball diamond, the mist making the light from the floodlights weak and pale. He stood where the batter would stand and I stood on the pitcher’s mound, mitt on my left hand and ball in my right.
“Why do I have to wear the mitt on my left hand?” I said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to catch with my right?”
“Sure,” Dad said, “but can you throw with your left?”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. I hauled back, cocked my arm, and threw the baseball to him as hard as I could. It sailed over him and a few feet to the left, clanking into the chain link fence protecting the bleachers. “Oops! Sorry.”
I saw him smiling as he jogged back into position and couldn’t help laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he said, tossing the ball in the air absentmindedly.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just sometimes I wonder what my past self would think if she saw me, and I wondered what our past selves would think if they saw us right now.” He thought about it for a moment, his smile widening more and more, until we both snorted and the laughter popped out of us. We carried on like that for a little while, him throwing, me failing to catch, me throwing so wildly that he had to duck out of the way or run halfway across the field to retrieve the ball.
“So when your mother and me talked before you came to live with me,” Dad said, finally breaking the silence, “she told me your therapist said you were real fragile after what happened last summer, at the mall. I wouldn’t—” he started and faltered. “If anything like that ever happened now…”
“Oh,” I said, shrugging. “I think maybe I’m stronger than that now.”
Dad nodded, the relief plain on his face. “I think maybe you’re right.”
“Yeah?”
“The girl who moved in with me wouldn’t have been okay after that homecoming dustup.” I nodded, thinking of the shocked faces of my classmates in the dim light of the gymnasium, the twisting in my gut when Grant said It’s not true, right?, the horror of racing away from Parker in the darkened woods. “Dustup” seemed like an understatement.
“I guess not,” I said.
“I’ve just been thinking,” Dad said. “You know I went in the navy after high school, don’t you?” I nodded and threw the ball so it rolled between his legs. “I thought I was tough. A lot of guys thought they were even tougher.” He threw the ball. I yelped, closed my eyes, and by some miracle actually caught it. “I don’t think we held a candle to you.”
“I’m not brave,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Bravery implies I had a choice. I’m just me, you know?” I threw the ball into the palm of my glove over and over while I spoke, staring at the floodlight until blotches danced in my eyes. I had sent my application in to NYU, and in a few months I would find out whether I got in. I imagined falling off the face of the earth again, drifting out of Layla, Anna, and Chloe’s lives, being mostly forgotten by my classmates except as an occasional story trotted out at parties. Grant was gone, which hurt but was also kind of a relief—he was one less complication when it came time to pack my things and head up north. Everything about that plan was fine except for one thing: I didn’t want to disappear anymore.
I looked up at my father. “What if I told you I wanted to go back to Lambertville?” I saw him staring at me. Was his face white from the chill, or from fear? “Would that be a brave thing to do, or would it be stupid?”
“Both?” Dad said, running a hand over his moist hair and blowing out a long breath. “But that’s what being young is, really. I think I’ve been so afraid for you all this time that I forgot that.”
“Since I moved in, you mean?” I said, throwing the ball so that he only had to jump a little bit to catch it.
“Oh no,” he said, “longer than that. Since you were just a baby.”
“I thought you were embarrassed of me.”
“I was,” he said, chewing his lip. “I pray the Lord forgives me one day but I was. More than that, though, so much more than that, I was terrified for you.” I looked down and flexed my glove. “I had to drink just to let your mother teach you how to walk; I kept seeing visions of you falling and cracking your head open.”
“I think I get that from you,” I said, smiling. He chuckled darkly.
“I couldn’t stand the idea of you hurting. I couldn’t stand the idea of anything taking away your happiness.” He shrugged and sighed. “But everything that made you happy, from the way you wanted to walk to the toys you wanted to the way you wanted to dress … it put you in danger. So what could I do?”
“You ran away,” I said.
“I ran away.” He walked over to me, taking his glove off and slipping it under his armpit. “Or I let you run away and chose not to follow. Either way…” He put his hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. “You are brave,” he said. “You get that from your mother.” He removed his hands and stared off at the dark, empty park. “After homecoming, when you walked in that door—I was furious. So mad I felt like I could kill someone. Mad at you, mad at myself, mad at whoever had done that to you. But then when you were gone and I was all alone in that apartment, thinking about everything you went through … I wanted another chance to get it right.” He took a deep breath and looked back at me. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you want to come back to Lambertville, well, I’d be real happy to have my daughter back.”