TWENTY-ONE
Okay, this. This, um. This was not how I’d expected the discussion to go. I’d expected her to tell me right off where she thought Dad was or that she had no idea and her husband’s whereabouts were none of my business. Not avoidance, which—I had to give the Ant credit—wasn’t ever her style. In fact, she went out of her way to avoid avoidance, always delighting in being blunt and confrontational, whereas in any confrontation you’d find my dad in the other room, and sometimes the other state. She was the yin to his yang, the Demi Moore to his Ashton Kutcher. Wait. Never mind.
The “conversation” we were having was like prepping to tangle with an arsonist, only to realize you were tangling with a burglar instead. You had to think up entirely new rules to deal. You had to understand that what you thought would get burned would instead get stolen. I’m giving way too much thought to this metaphor, possibly because the conversation was freaking me out.
“Neither do I? Neither do I?” Repetition worked pretty well with the Ant; she was like a parrot that way. “Is that what you think? Not your call.” I made a determined effort to ignore how my stomach plunged and kept at her. “And you’re not the one who gets to tell me what I do and don’t have time for. In case you missed a recent shift in power dynamics, I outrank you. Which means you’re going to make time.”
She snorted. “That’s convenient. You spend weeks wiggling on the hook like a whiny worm—”
“Gross. Don’t make fishing metaphors if you don’t know dick about fishing. And could you turn around? It’s so unsettling to argue with your shoulders.”
“—and telling everyone who would listen that you’re not suited for this job, right up until you want to use the perks to pull rank.”
Damn. “Good for you,” I said with grudging, painful approval. “You’re still going to have to make time.”
“Why would you think I know?”
I nearly fell down, for a couple of reasons. In her capacity as the Executive Assistant from Hell, the Ant had answered questions I’d had on other trips here I hadn’t been able to get out of. But even putting that aside, the Ant, in life, had always known my dad’s whereabouts pretty much all the time. She was always aware of the karmic retribution that is when you marry your mistress, you create a job opening. (My mom had pointed that out to her with gleeful fury.) I couldn’t imagine she would be much different in death. So far no one I’d met was different in death. The fact that she even asked me that question showed the size of the wall she’d just slammed between us.
“You must know,” I replied, shocked. “You’re the expert on Hell since Satan quit/got her ass killed. And even if you weren’t, you died with him. And—and if you ‘woke up’ here or whatever by yourself, you could have found out. You and Satan were practically besties. She could have done the Hell equivalent of making one phone call and finding out for you.”
“She did say I was her favorite unholy vessel,” the Ant mused. Even while stonewalling me, she managed a secondhand compliment.
I could learn from this woman.
Naturally I banished that thought the instant, the second, it surfaced in my mind like a fart bubble in a bathtub.
“Billions of souls,” the Ant was saying, because it might have started as a monologue but had eventually turned into a conversation. “Needle in a haystack. And it’s none of your business, anyway.”
This was the—what? The sixth or seventh time this week I was so staggered it took me a minute to remember how to talk. Some people found shock upon shock to be exciting, a ticket to an adrenaline high. I . . . did not. I liked my adrenaline highs to come from sample sales and banging the vampire king. And maybe smoothies.
“None of my business? Oh God, anything but that!” I cried, horror-struck. “You mean there’s actually something to this? No! No, you’re doing it wrong, it’s all wrong, how can you not know how this goes after all these years?”
She twitched a little, alarmed. “I don’t—”
“This is how it goes! This is how it’s always supposed to go! You’re supposed to mock my black friend’s sleep-deprivation-fueled conspiracy theories and say something faux-supportive yet racist, like how it’s not her fault but the more babies she has, the more welfare checks she’ll get or something just as terrible and then I’ll lose my temper and you’ll remind me what a burden I was on your husband.”
“But she’s rich. Why would she need to go on wel—”
“I don’t know!” Really? That was the part of the expected response she was going to focus on? “Racism isn’t logical, for Christ’s sake! But you’ve gone all squirrelly and that is freaking me right out!”
“I’m right here,” she pointed out. “No need to scream.”
“Dammit dammit dammit!”
“You were right.”
Well. Those were the magic words that took the wind out of my sails, so I forced myself to get a grip before my rant could gain momentum and become sentient. “Okay. Thanks for that.” Had I ever heard those words from her? Maybe, if one of her charity-bim pals dared her. Or if she had a fever. A really high fever. Like, boiling-point high. “Which part was I right about?”
“Your time is your business and it was inappropriate for me to tell you otherwise. But my time is my business, and I don’t have any for this.”
“Again: this is not how this conversation goes. You’re supposed to—to—” Wait, why was she smaller? Was she—? She was! The pineapple-haired bitch was walking away! “Antonia, where do you suppose you’re going? Antonia? Ant?” Farther and farther away, the nothing was swallowing her even as I watched. “You get back here this instant, missy! This isn’t over and we aren’t even close to done. Don’t make me hunt you down! You think I won’t? I’ll hunt you like Khan hunted Kirk!” Oh, jeez, did I just yell a Star Trek reference at my dead stepmother? That was it. Marc’s biweekly sci-fi movie marathons were hereby canceled. “There’s no point in running, you know. You’ll never escape me so you should just suck it up and accept the fact that—annnnnd you’re gone.”
I was standing by myself. Entirely by myself. In a Hell dimension populated by billions, I’d managed the trick of being alone. I had no idea how to feel about that. I had no idea how to feel about the fact that I had no idea how to feel about that, either.
The worst part was, the entire confrontation had settled exactly nothing. I’d forced myself to ask the question, something unthinkable only a few hours before. By asking, I was forced to acknowledge (to myself if no one else) the fact that his death was not, perhaps, what it seemed. So I’d sacrificed my complacency for next to no gain.
Shit, maybe my dad was in Hell and just didn’t come when I wanted him, knew I was playing (and losing) the Game but keeping well out of sight. No question at all, that would have been one hundred percent in character.
He’d been a lousy father. It was hard even to admit that and had taken years for me to acknowledge, never mind face. It didn’t help that I felt guilty complaining when so many people had it worse, endured fathers who beat them or sexually abused them or stole from them or killed them. Jessica’s father had been much worse; I couldn’t imagine enduring a tenth of what she’d been subjected to. I tried to count my blessings but I always fetched up against an undeniable fact: all my father’s sins against me hadn’t been out of anger. They’d been born of indifference, which somehow hurt the worst.
Men who knew me briefly and sometimes not even that long had been more interested in my life, more helpful and concerned, than he had been in three decades of what Jessica dubbed “kinda parenting.” When I was younger I wished he’d care more. Or, if he did, show it more. By the time I was in my late teens I’d given up on that as a hopeless fantasy (like my fantasy of Christian Louboutin deciding I was his shoe muse and designing pair after pair for me only for me ALL FOR ME, ALL OF IT!).
Instead I’d indulged in different wishful thinking; I wished for a different father. Childish, I guess. But I had clung to it for years and even now it was a tempting thought.
Another father, and now I was thinking of some of the older men I’d known over the years. Such as the retired mailman who’d lived across the street from my childhood home. He’d leave cupcakes in our mailbox sometimes, which I found hilarious and delicious. Mr. Reynolds had been rising before dawn for over thirty years and, though retired, couldn’t shake the habit. So he’d filled his mornings with baking and was always leaving Mom and me mailbox goodies. Mom hadn’t been able to resist reminding him that it was a federal offense for anyone but the owner or the PO to put things in mailboxes, and being retired didn’t shield him from federal law. But she said it with a smile on her lips and a dab of frosting on her chin. Today that would probably come off as creepy, but back then we didn’t worry about it and it worked out fine; the treats were always delicious and Mr. Reynolds didn’t push boundaries any further.
Or someone like the priest I’d run into not long after waking up dead. The father had always been nice to me even though he knew what I was. He was upset when a member of his flock staked me, even though he was one of the reasons I’d been in danger in the first place. He’d shown more anxiety over my staking than my actual father had about my fatal car accident. What was his name? Mark something, no, I was getting him mixed up with our Marc, I think it was Father Mark and whatever happened to that guy that father that Father Mark Father Mark Father . . .