“Hello, Daddy. I knew you would come for me.”
“That’s right. It just had to happen, you and me. What are we without each other?” He leans in until I can smell his breath, the alcohol stench so familiar.
“How you’ve grown, little girl, grown to a woman. Me, I’m an old man with nothin’ to do and nowhere to go. Except to you.”
I send up a hopeless prayer, but I have no faith. Daddy looms above me and there’s nothing I can do, not now, not before. His hand reaches out to gently stroke the side of my face, once, then again. I’m supposed to run, but I can’t move. I’m frozen forever.
“You’re not supposed to touch me.”
“I know, honey, I know. We’ve had some hard times, the two of us, and they took you away from your daddy. But you were always a good girl.”
Then why did you punish me, why, why, why, why, why, why … I have to ask. I can’t ask. I say, “Yes, Daddy, I was always good.” My insides tighten and twist and I feel the burning pain in my belly. I hear my father asking why I make him do this to his little girl. And me with never an answer.
Daddy steps back. People are looking at us. He takes my arm and leads me past a mummy’s coffin, along a corridor to an open court, gigantic, with a glass floor and a window instead of a ceiling. I stop when he tugs on my arm and look up to find nothing changed. The body I occupy is still a little girl’s body. Daddy has never been taller or stronger. My will is sucked up inside him. He gives. I receive. For all of my life, I never knew otherwise. I find myself wishing I’d grown up, knowing I have to grow up, that my girlhood is over, that it’s finally time.
“I want you to come to me, little girl. Will you do that?”
I wonder how he knows it’s me. I wonder if he waited and waited, never coming close until he was sure. I wonder what he’d say if it were Eleni or Martha. What would he say if he ran into Kirk? Now he speaks to me, only me.
“I will, Daddy. I’ll come to you.”
“Let me give you this, to help you remember.” He takes a folded piece of yellow paper from his shirt pocket and tucks it into the small purse I carry. “Tonight, baby girl. Be on time, okay?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Good, good.” He smiles and nods as his fingers tighten on my arm. Harder and harder, until the tears well up. “Because you don’t wanna make Daddy have to find you, Carolyn. You really don’t.”