Twenty-seven steps.
She knew the number well. That’s how many steps it took to get to her condo on the third floor. Fourteen steps from the entry door to the second-floor landing, then thirteen steps to get to her door. Why there was a discrepancy, Lacey didn’t know. She was missing a step. She didn’t know how many times she had thought of that missing step, but it came to mind more often than it should.
Like now, as she opened the door that she had forgotten to lock the last time she was here. Maybe it was because her arms had been holding boxes of Chinese takeout. Maybe it was because deep down she wanted someone to come to her rescue.
Maybe it’s just the randomness of life. Like being here on my own.
Yeah, maybe. Just like step twenty-eight. It was somewhere out there and she could spend the whole rest of her life looking for it.
Daylight was fading outside, but it was already mostly dark in her place. The place her father had helped her buy, the place she already felt indebted to him for. Money wasn’t the issue but Lacey wished he didn’t have this to make him feel better. He had helped her with this condo, with her car, with her college payments. And maybe that allowed him to help justify staying out of her life. What more did she want? Maybe that’s what he was thinking. Lacey wasn’t sure. She probably would never quite know for sure.
She turned on the lights hanging over the kitchen, then she leaned against the counter and found his name in her phone. Soon it was ringing, and soon she got a familiar voice answering in a familiar way.
“This is Rich. Leave a message.”
Spoken as if he were rushing through the airport too busy to even leave a voice mail message. Then again, maybe that had been the case.
“Hi, Dad. It’s me . . .”
Your little girl who just tried to kill herself last night.
“I haven’t seen you in a while, and I was thinking that we could get together.”
She paused and wasn’t sure what else to say. She didn’t like leaving messages. Too many of them went unanswered.
“Just give me a call if you can,” she said. “It’d be nice to talk.”
Lacey put the phone on the counter and then looked at the couch she’d been sitting on when she was last here. The air inside felt thick, the silence suffocating. It never went away.
She didn’t feel like staying there, but she had avoided coming inside here all day. She needed to start living again. Maybe she could call up a friend. Or maybe she’d head out to go try to find some.
Why bother?
These two words were like headphones over each ear. Why bother? Over and over again the answer to the ideas she had was why bother? Maybe a friend should call her up. Maybe someone could come over to her place.
Your neighbor did and saved your sorry life, Lacey.
But that was a fluke. How many times had Pam not come over, forgotten about things, held parties and neglected to tell her about it.
Lacey knew her father probably wouldn’t call back, that nobody would call tonight, and that this closet of a condo would remain dark and seemingly abandoned. No amount of reality television could allow her to try to escape. No amount of distractions could divert her attention from the obvious.
I’m alone.
She opened the fridge and looked inside, then closed it. She turned on the TV but then soon shut it off, too. She wasn’t hungry and wasn’t interested and wasn’t motivated to do anything.
The world moves on.
Sitting back on that same couch, Lacey was jolted out of her doze by the sound of her phone. She couldn’t believe it, even when she grabbed it and the caller ID said DAD.
It hadn’t even been ten minutes.
“Lacey?”
He sounded more interested than normal. Or maybe more concerned.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, faking her mood.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I just wondered if—it would be good to see you.”
“Is there anything wrong?”
Life. That’s what’s wrong. How about that?
“I’m just—I don’t know. I get bored in the city. Maybe you could come out here sometime. Or I could even come and visit you.”
Her father lived an hour away, forty minutes if there wasn’t any traffic. Burr Ridge was west of the city, but it wasn’t like he was living on the West Coast.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, you know how Violet can be.”
Her father was dating a woman named Violet. That was a color, not a name.
“I’m not talking about her,” Lacey said.
“You know she’d be here if you came out.”
She wasn’t sure just how long Violet had been living with her father, but it had been long enough. Long enough to keep Lacey away from a place she had once said she never wanted to come back to. The last couple of times she had been back to her father’s home, the experience had been excruciating. All because of the thirty-something blonde that had latched on to her dad.
“Maybe I can pick a time she’s not there.”
“Lacey . . .”
“Or maybe you can come down here. Without her.”
“We’ve already been through this,” he said.
No, we haven’t even started to go through this. We’ve avoided it. We’ve lived with it.
“There are things the two of you need to work out,” he said.
“There’s nothing to work out,” Lacey said, now frustrated like she always got with her father. “It’s not like we need couples counseling or something. I know she doesn’t like me. I don’t really like her, either. But I’m your daughter. Doesn’t that count for something?”
There was a pause and a sigh on the other line. Then a curse.
“You sure know how to make someone feel like a failure,” he said.
“No, that’s not . . . I’m not trying to make anyone feel guilty.”
A hundred scenes suddenly burst through her mind like some kind of shotgun blast. The words and the silence and the screaming and the cursing and the leaving and the undoing all shook her like they always did. The hurt always washed onshore every time she stood on her father’s sand.
“But why do you always take her side?” Lacey continued, not trying to hide her anger. “Just once it would be nice if you would think about how I feel.”
She waited but nothing came. Then soon the phone alerted her that the call was done.
Call ended.
But Lacey didn’t want it to end. She never wanted it to end. She never wanted anything to end. But things just always ended.
Once Mom had left them, Lacey knew that anything and everything could happen.
People always ended everything and they never came back.
For a moment she stood there, holding the phone. Then she put it down on the table, and waited and held it all in to see whether he would call back. Her father lost his temper almost as many times as she did. She took after him in that way. It wasn’t something either of them was proud of.
She waited, and waited, then knew he wasn’t going to call back.
It’s safe now.
The tears came again. She put her arms around her body and tried to hold herself together. But she knew she couldn’t. For a while now, Lacey had known this was impossible.
She was tired of everything simply ending without her having a say in any of it.
She was just tired.