dad patted the hospital bed. I sat on the edge and it reacted with an angry creak. We both laughed warily. I pulled up one of the visitor chairs instead.
“We’ve barely said two words to each other since you got back from your grandparents’.” He managed a wry smile. “I’ve had the sneaking suspicion you might be avoiding me.”
I didn’t know how to answer. He wasn’t not right. But I didn’t want to agitate him by admitting it now.
Dad’s heart monitor kept a steady beat. “I assume you’ve been spending time with our young friend.”
He meant Oscar. I nodded.
“How is he?”
“He . . .” I scooted back, but the question didn’t seem loaded, like when Nora asked. “He’s definitely got some anxiety issues.”
“You don’t know the half of it. It’s not his fault, it’s . . .”
I did know the half of it. Maybe even two-thirds. But he didn’t realize that.
There was one thing I had to risk saying. “Listen, Dad, Oscar and I are together. I’m his girlfriend, and I know you’re his mentor, but ultimately we’re the only two people who should be making decisions about our relationship. So I hope you can find a way to be supportive.”
Dad’s eyes fixed on mine with strange intensity. I expected an argument, a capitulation, a sigh, but what he said was, “Don’t clean our house.”
I blinked.
“I heard Alice asking you.” He winced, adjusting himself against the bed back. “You know, it took you being away for me to finally figure out what’s been wrong. Second day you were gone, I yelled downstairs for you to bring me a coffee. The only person to answer was myself! And do you know what I said?”
I waited, smiling.
“I said, ‘Marty? You’re an asshole.’”
I started to laugh, but he leaned forward, intent.
“You don’t have to be useful, Ruby. You don’t have to be anything but happy. Your job is to get good grades, do what you damn well please. Within reason.”
“Dad . . .” I glanced at his heart monitor. “We can talk about this stuff later.”
“I want to get it out now. This is routine, I’m not worried, but . . . there are things I need to say.”
I settled into my chair again, trying to stay calm so that he would too.
“I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like . . .” Dad squinted strangely, like he’d figured out the right word but disliked the way it tasted. “Like you’re less important than the rest of us.”
My body went pinprick numb. He’d never admitted that before.
“You’re my child, Ruby,” he said, reaching for my hand. “You’re why I’m here. In the world, not the ER.”
I laughed, wiping my streaming eyes with my free arm.
“See, look at that,” he said, sniffing his tears back. “It shouldn’t take surgery for me to say these things. I should have said them all along. I should have let you run free and explore the wide world instead of slotting you into our little corner of it. Assuming that if it was right for us, it’d be right for you. It was lazy and it was wrong. And while we’re at it, I’ve gotta tell you something else—I was wrong about Oscar.”
He let go of my hand with a pat, retreating.
“He’s better with you around, work-wise. Less wound up, more focused. When you’re not here, the music becomes everything. And everything? It’s too much.” Dad sighed. “Hard to believe, but I was like him once . . . not this washed-up wreck.”
He grinned at his hefty stomach.
“Nobody in the entire universe thinks you’re washed up, Dad. You premiered a new opera two years ago.”
“It was flat, everybody knew it. My best years are behind me, and that’s all right. I’m looking toward the future now.”
I thought he meant Oscar but his eyes were warm on mine.
“Does Oscar make you better? Happier?”
“I . . .” I frowned, unsure how to answer. “I’m happy when I’m with him. But he doesn’t make me better. I make me better. And . . . he makes me feel like it’s possible.”
Dad nodded, but there was something endlessly sad in his smile. His gaze drifted upward, remembering something.
“Your mom is a brilliant pianist. Just astonishing.”
My throat clenched. His eyes had drifted, the way they had that night he spoke to me at the piano. He was seeing her right now.
“Living with me, my last name, my music in the headlines, my work dominating everything—it suffocated her.”
“Do you miss her?” I glanced at the curtain to see if Alice had come back. “You’ve seemed fine this whole time, so I didn’t—”
“God, do I miss her?” He started to press a hand to his chest, then, not wanting to alarm me, let it drop. “I’m going to get healthy, Roo. But that?” He pointed to his heart. “That’ll never heal.”
He seemed proud of it. My face started to crumple, the pain as fresh as the day I’d watched her taxi drive away.
Dad leaned forward to stop me. “But Ruby, I am glad she left. She had to go. She had to. She survived here as long as she could.”
Mom was selfish. She was unmentionable. But he held no rancor. Just loss.
“She shouldn’t have left me.”
“No,” he said gently. “She shouldn’t have. And I should have brought you into the fold, instead of resorting to business as usual, like we were . . . I don’t know, roommates. I didn’t want you to worry about me. I thought it would help you, but—I should have told you more.”
“About your health?”
“That, yes.”
I squirmed, frustration rising now. “I heard you arguing with Nora and Bill at Amberley. Before . . .”
I motioned to his chest and my anger retreated.
“Right. Well, I couldn’t have told you about that one. Not until I knew for sure.”
I opened my mouth to ask a question, but he cleared his throat the way he always did before a Meet the Conductor talk, so I tucked my legs under me.
“I’d been . . . vaguely suspicious for a while,” Dad started, eyes fixed on a blank spot on the far wall. “Everything in the open?” He spread his hands like a book. I nodded, yes—open, open, open.
“Those two were my lifeline when your mother left. They got me through. They and Amberley gave me purpose. They are also . . . in the midst of a long-term affair.” He sighed. “I’d thought that’s all it was, that nagging feeling I got in the back of my mind—the way it feels when somebody’s out of tune. But then I saw the way they latched on to Oscar. And what they were doing with his premiere—major donors, thousand-dollar seats, making him sign away publishing . . .”
“You were there,” I said, a flat accusation.
His heart rate picked up. The monitor beeped and quickly resettled.
“I didn’t stop them,” Dad said, his voice cracking. “I encouraged him to sign the damn thing. I had no idea what he was capable of, that what he would turn out would be this. I thought it would be a minor work, practice, some juvenilia we could frame in the library—not something so . . . monumental. Amberley doesn’t deserve the Summer Symphony. We don’t deserve students like Oscar Bell.”
Bill’s words sprang to mind . . . would you rather have Oscars or Rubys? My stomach twisted with resentment.
“I felt guilty after that, I’m not gonna lie,” he went on. “I’ve been distracted, and I got carried away by Oscar’s promise, but I should have protected him. So I got smart. Suspicious. I didn’t like the way Nora pulled you in, either. It bugged me from the start, and I couldn’t pinpoint why. She’s your godmother, why shouldn’t she take an interest? But there was something about it I couldn’t shake. So I faced it, I started digging into the school’s financials—and there’s money missing. A lot of money.”
“How much?”
“Amberley operates on a paper-thin margin.”
I leaned forward. “How much?”
“Enough to shutter the school.”
“And you’re sure they stole it?”
“I wasn’t at first. I thought they’d mismanaged it. But they gave themselves away practically the second I asked the question.” A vein pumped in his neck. “The money’s gone. Stolen and mismanaged. They’d been hoping to patch the budget gap with donations from Oscar’s performance and this new diversity fund—which doesn’t even exist! It was a way to throw donations into the general account so they could fudge the numbers before presenting them to the board. It’s a damn mess.”
“So that’s why Oscar is suddenly the face of Amberley.”
“It’s too much pressure for a seventeen-year-old kid.” He let out a disgusted huff. “It’s too much for anybody.” His eyes slowly rose to meet mine. “You knew it too. The day of Oscar’s interview. All those questions you asked about the school, its finances—but I didn’t want you to take it on. I . . .” He winced. “No. I just didn’t want you to know. I was an asshole. I should have been proud of you, but it was self-preservation and I—”
“What now?” I interrupted gently, wary of how tense Dad had gotten over the course of this explanation. “Are you going to tell anyone? Besides me, I mean.”
“That’s the million-dollar question. Or should I say the eight-hundred-thousand-dollar question.”
“That’s how much . . . wow.”
Dad squirmed to get comfortable. I adjusted his pillow behind his head.
“On the one hand, I’ve got these people, who I’d thought were my friends, who pulled me out of one of the roughest years of my life. On the other, I’ve got my school . . . the victim of this. I’ve got the slight chance they can pull this off and cover the shortfall, get away scot free, my own legacy . . .” He squeezed my hand. “Our legacy intact. Your name, untarnished.”
I don’t care about my name, I thought, but stopped short of saying it. It wouldn’t be a comfort to him. Just a slap.
“And on the other hand,” I murmured instead. “You have your conscience.”
He gazed silently at the divider wall. This was where I usually waited, silent, preserving the maestro’s train of thought.
Not today.
“When I was little and people used to talk about you, your talent, your place in culture, I always thought they were talking about somebody else. Because you weren’t that to me. You were my dad, you know? I looked at you and I saw a good man. The best.”
Dad was crying now. He reached out and I hugged him like he was little now and I was big.
“That’s who you are. Not Amberley. Not your symphonies or operas. You’re a good person.”
“I’m not,” he murmured, his eyes blinking dry. “No. You have no idea how much I appreciate you saying that, Ruby, but I’m not the person I thought I was. I saw myself as a mensch—I did—a mentor, a dad. I’ve been patting myself on the back for years, but I’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do. And I can! I’m old—not that old.”
“You’re not old at all.” I wasn’t sure if the lie was more for him or me.
“What I did to that kid . . . I’ll never forgive myself. But I’ve got to try to make amends.” He drew a great shuddering breath, clapped his hands, and said, “So could you do me a favor? Just one, I swear, and then you go be a teenager and Alice can fight the nurses over who gets to fuss over me . . .”
I smiled, nodding. “What do you need?”
“A number.” He waved at the windowsill, where a few random objects were sitting—a ballpoint pen, a wallet, an iPhone.
I grabbed the phone and clicked on contacts.
“Simon Wilkerson,” he said.
“The New York Times reporter?” I glanced at him, finger hovering.
“That’s the one.” Dad looked exhausted but resolute. “Bring me the phone and I’ll call him real quick. Then tell Alice to come in and say hi. And Ruby? In terms of Oscar and everything else?”
I handed him the phone, wondering where his verdict would fall after all we’d hashed out.
“There’s a loophole in his contract.”
He waited while I switched gears. I nodded and he nodded back.
“Look for the words in lieu of tuition. The summer term isn’t over until the concert ends. He can—”
“Oh my God.” I nodded, quickly now. “Okay, yeah. Thank y—”
“Don’t thank me. I’m the one who caused this mess in the first place. Just do me a favor and help me fix it.” He smiled ruefully. “Since, you know, I’m a little laid up at the moment.”
I started out. Then I turned, the reality of his surgery hitting me like a gut punch. I was still angry with him, confused, muddled, but I had to say it.
“Love you, Dad.”
He looked surprised, even after all this, and that just about broke my heart. “I love you too, Rooster. You go on now.”
Through the crack in the curtain, I could see him squinting at his phone, beginning to search his contacts.
He was doing the scary thing. Finally doing the right thing.
Now it was my turn.