BRENNAN TAPPED ON THE DOOR. JOHN KNEW IT WAS HER BE- cause of the way she used her fingertips, pinky to index finger, softly, twice. He slid the letter he was writing into the desk drawer.
“Daddy?” Brennan asked through the door.
“Yeah.”
She opened the door,slipped around it, gripping the knob as if the building had tipped onto its side and if she let go of it, she would drop the ten feet from the door to the other side of the room. She wore her school uniform even though she had been home for nearly an hour. He hadn’t seen her or Hunter since they arrived, but he had heard them arguing through the door, sniping at each other for various perceived offenses.
“Are you working?” she asked.
“Yes.” His desk was clear except for his Montblanc pen.
“Can I do my homework in here with you?” She saw the look on his face. “I promise I’ll be quiet and won’t bother you. Hunter is really annoying me.”
John didn’t want her in the office with him. But maybe it would be better for the kids if they had some separation.
“Fine. But you have to be quiet.”
Brennan darted from the room and returned with her backpack before John could change his mind. She sat on the floor and pulled out some penmanship worksheets and a pencil. She laid across the floor and began to practice cursive letters across the top of the page. It was nonsensical for her to practice writing in that position. She was making it more difficult than it needed to be.
“Brennan.”
She snapped her head up, eyebrows raised in concern.
“Do you write like that in school?”
“With a pencil?”
“No. Lying on the floor.”
She shook her head.
“Then why practice that way now?”
Brennan shrugged. John huffed and pointed to his desk. With nothing on it, there was plenty of space for her papers. She pulled her father’s reading chair to face the desk. When she sat, she was small enough that her feet only grazed the floor. She bent over her paper and began to trace the dotted lines teaching her how to write a cursive b before casting herself into the uncharted space where she had to repeat them without the guides. When she completed the first line, she looked over.
“Don’t you have work to do, Daddy?”
He shook his head. She knew he didn’t have work. Could she even remember a time when he worked? When he would wake, shower, and walk them to school, wearing a suit, a shirt and tie, carrying his briefcase? Could she recall holding hands with him as they crossed the street, the little squeeze he would give before letting her race ahead to the next corner, or how he would lift her up in his arms to kiss her face before she disappeared into her classroom?
He knew nobody would ever look at him the way that she did. When Brennan was small, he used to hold her out in front of him, spinning her through the air in the playground, her laughter delighting him, her eyes teary with joy. When she looked at him with happiness, it dampened the anger always radiating within him. In those moments, he could forget—no, not forget, rather forgive himself however briefly for the way Jane looked at him before she’d slam the door when they argued, or when he would stumble home drunk, or every night he climbed into bed when they still shared a bed. Except when was the last time he had made Brennan smile or laugh or even giggle?
He still could lift her and spin her through the air. But even if her laughter was the same unguarded child melody—a single innocent trumpet ringing pell-mell through its entire range, reckless of structure and key—his guilt roared like a subway train through the concert.
Brennan concentrated on the lined paper in front of her as he studied her, but then glanced at him, eyes wide with concern as if she were a nurse and he a dying patient. Or was it because she was a prisoner and he her warden?
He didn’t understand her at all. He thought he would recognize some of himself in her, but she seemed to be entirely composed of the qualities he wished he had but lacked. Whatever DNA of his that she carried had been refined, creating a being unrecognizable as his progeny.
The next day, Brennan came back to work at his desk while John forced himself to read through the classified section of the newspaper yet again. The day after, Brennan completed a sheet that involved counting various animals and adding the totals of different groups together. Cows and chickens. Chickens and horses. Cows and horses. Each day she appeared at his desk after school and toiled away. Hunter did his home-work at the kitchen table or at a little desk in the kids’ room.
One afternoon, Brennan looked up from another handwriting sheet and said, “Can I tell you a secret, Daddy? If you promise not to get angry.”
“Sure.” John was looking through bank statements watching the savings he and Jane had carefully built, a breakwater against a disaster, erode further and further. Jane’s salary on its own—lucrative as it was—couldn’t keep the kids in their private school and the nanny employed and the mortgage and the co-op fees paid and food on the table. Eventually, they’d have to put the kids in public school or maybe let the nanny go—after all, why did they need a nanny when he wasn’t working? To make sure he didn’t have to show his face at the school, of course, with the teachers and parents looking at him, one of the few Asian faces and the only one who was tried for murder. Better that they not associate him with his kids.
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“My secret? Can I tell you?”
“You know what they say about secrets, Brennan?”
“What?”
“Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”
Brennan cocked her head, trying to decipher what he meant. John regretted saying it. She was old enough to read into the statement, maybe even believe he was trying to send her a message.
“What’s your secret, Brennan?” he said before she could put more thought into what he had said.
She smiled and leaned close, so she could whisper to him.
“Before you started working from home, when you still went to your office, I would come in here and sit in your chair to do my homework and pretend I was you.”
John knew this. The nanny had told Jane, and Jane had mentioned it to him one night as he climbed into bed with her. But he pretended to be surprised.
“Really?”
Brennan laughed. “Yeah. I want to have a big important job like you one day. And a nice desk like this one.”
“Yeah? Well, you can have this desk if you do that.”
Brennan’s eyebrows rose, and she spread her hands across the surface of the desk like she might try to start scooping it up then. John sat back to imagine her as an adult, sitting in her own place, hunched over the desk, casebooks open around her as she scribbled on a yellow legal pad. He knew that she was doing the same, hopefully better than he was, because the adult daughter he imagined was a stranger. He had no idea who Brennan might grow up to be. Maybe by the time she was an adult, she wouldn’t give a shit about his old desk, too big for whatever starter apartment she might live in, too stodgy for her tastes, which would be metal and plastic if television and movies were to be believed.
“You okay, Daddy?”
“Yeah.”
A few days later, after the weekend, she crept in while he drafted a letter with a counterproposal to the firm that would let him return on a provisional basis with impossible-to-achieve business generation and billable hour goals. When he looked up from scratching out 3,500 hours and writing 2,750 hours, he saw that she was drawing with a box of colored pencils.
“Don’t you have homework?” he asked.
“This is my homework. I have to draw someone important.”
John’s chest constricted when he saw the image, but he walked around his desk to stand behind her so he could see it better. It was a humanoid figure, rendered in her child’s hand as a somewhat proportional series of rectangles representing his limbs and torso topped by a circle representing his head.
Brennan used a blue pencil to point as she explained her drawing. “I made your shoulders big, because you’re strong. You can lift me over your head. And see this on your hand? That’s your wedding ring because you’re married to Mommy. And I know you used to have short hair, but I like it longer like you have it now, so I let you keep long hair in my drawing even though I know you’ll cut it when you go back to work. And because you’re smart, you see I drew all your books here? And your desk, too, because you work so much.”
“What am I wearing?”
“Your blue suit. The one you wear to important meetings.”
It was the suit he wore the day the verdict came in during his murder trial.
“Do you like it?” she asked, looking up at him from the chair expectantly.
He looked back to the drawing. Brennan saw him in the shapes on the page, a version of him that didn’t exist—not because he wasn’t rectangles holding up a circle, but because she had not captured his weakness, his faithlessness, his stupidity, his villainy. He turned away, worried the weight of the expectations and illusions on the paper would crush the desk.
How many women had looked at him the way Brennan did now, full of trust and love and faith that he was a good person? His mother died before she could see him for what he was. Jane saw and couldn’t bear the sight of him anymore. She endured his presence because Brennan still looked at him like the past two years had never happened. John didn’t know if he could bear to see Brennan grow to look at him like Jane did, but he knew he wasn’t strong enough for her to keep seeing him like she did now. Jessica had seen, too, in the end.
The night he got back from fucking Jessica for the first time, he brushed his teeth and glanced at himself in the mirror. He expected he wouldn’t recognize himself as the man who had betrayed his wife earlier that night. But the same face that looked out at him that morning from the other side of the glass stared back with the same amount of anger and revulsion as it always did, no more and certainly no less. The only additional emotion was the disappointment that not only was he able to look at himself in the mirror without flinching, but the face in the glass was more recognizable than it had ever been.
“It doesn’t look like me,” he said.
“But…but I told you, Daddy. I showed you how—”
“It doesn’t look like me. And even if it did, you should draw someone else for school.” John stepped back and crossed his arms. “You can’t go in with a picture of me. You should draw your mother.”
Brennan was blinking against the tears collecting in her eyes. “But other kids are going to draw their dads.”
“Draw. Your. Mother.” John was barely able to breathe. Brennan’s chest was heaving. His rage sucked all of the oxygen from the room.
Brennan grabbed her pencils and ran to the door, where she turned. John waited for her to shout or call him a name or accuse him of being a terrible father or throw her pencils at him or do any of a dozen things he would have done. Instead, she glared at him. He stared back—her anger was a painful relief, like pressure on a bleeding cut. But then Brennan wavered, tears fell down her cheeks in fat drops like the start of a summer shower, and she spun away and through the door, leaving John alone in his office with her drawing.