Dad stands at the living room window with his back to me. It’s 5:20 p.m. on March 16.
“The days are getting longer,” he says.
I’m rereading an old Newsweek in the easy chair. “Dad, is that longer-good, as in more natural light/more time to enjoy activities, or longer-bad, as in you can’t wait for the day to end?”
Dad looks at me, then turns back to the window.
“The days are getting longer,” he repeats.
The house is quieter now after school. Linda and Jodie have disappeared from the afternoons and are now meeting at Jodie’s house. They left behind clumps of brown paper wadded with ink, and some burnt ceramic scat that may have been beads that stuck to the oven when I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t have to clean up because Mom said I should take it easy for a while.
But beyond that, there is a sense of peace in the house, though I can’t put my finger on it exactly. Dad’s right—the days are getting longer. Could that have been what went wrong with Dad, that the days were getting too short? Might the light box really have worked, if we hadn’t been so quick to discontinue it?
But thinking this way doesn’t do any good. We had another follow-up visit with Dr. Fritz, and he said that although, again, he wished we had come back in sooner, we shouldn’t be kicking ourselves, because to a certain extent we were just doing the best we could with the tools and resources we had at the time. But it seemed to take a lot of effort for him to say this, and while he said it he looked at our file and not at us, not staring at us at all, as if he didn’t like us anymore, and this made us feel worse.