Leo

LEO

NOW

Before bed, Dad comes into my room where I’m doing algebra. Algebra is about the only class I like because there’s a right and a wrong answer, and no in-between. There’s no gray area, unlike in life. Life is all gray area.

“Can I come in?” Dad asks.

I shrug. “It’s your house.”

“Don’t be like that, Leo.”

“Then how do you want me to be?”

I’m not usually so stubborn.

He comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. I turn my back to him.

“I want you to listen. To hear me out. You’re not giving her a fair shake.”

I turn around in my chair. I look at him. It’s a swivel chair. I can go back to not looking anytime I want.

I tell him, “I’m listening.” The way I say it is petulant. All my life I’ve had to be a grown-up. It’s nice acting like a child for a change.

Dad ages every day. He aged about a decade when Mom died. He’s aged another now that you’re home. His hair is gray. He has a paunch. There are dark circles under his eyes because he doesn’t sleep. He’s always tired. He doesn’t eat much, either, not real food, though he’s taken to feeding his depression with potato chips and beer. It’s the reason for the paunch. He was an athlete once. I was a skeptic when he told me he competed in a marathon before I was born. I called bullshit. He showed me the medal to prove it. The only reason he ever runs now is when there’s been a potential sighting of you.

I don’t remember Dad before. But there are the pictures, the home videos. In them, he’s pretty jacked. He’s a stud. He has brown hair, and plenty of it. His hair wasn’t thin like it is now. It wasn’t gray. His smile wasn’t bogus back then, either.

He’s let himself go.

“The way the psychiatrist explained it to me,” Dad says, “being isolated in the dark for as long as your sister was drives people to the brink of insanity. It impairs their sense of time, their sleep cycles. Without being able to see, they suffer sensory deprivation. It fucks them up, Leo,” he says. I go rigid because Dad just said fuck. Dad doesn’t swear.

“This friend of Delilah’s was a hallucination. But to her,” he says, “he was entirely real. Where she was kept, she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. In the absence of all other stimuli, Leo, her mind kept working, and it created Gus, who, to your sister, was as real as you are to me. She wasn’t lying. She’s not a liar. She believed one hundred and ten percent that Gus was real. It’s possible that Gus was the only thing that got her through all this.”

When he says it like that, I feel like a shithead for calling you a liar and a schizo.

Dad doesn’t make me apologize. I do it, anyway.

I get an idea then. I ask Dad to drag out the home videos and we watch them. For just a little while, it’s like you are you again and Mom is still alive.