fifteen years quiet

He was already there when she arrived, and she worried at first that he might think she was arriving later than he in order to make an entrance: the prodigal child sweeping into the room, authoritative and proud, I'll-show-you stitched across the surface of every flexing muscle and practically screaming to be vocalized. And then she remembered that she was early -- twelve minutes exactly -- and it struck her that he had thought the same thing she had: arriving early might easily be construed as a sign of truce, and it was about time. That he'd beat her to the punch should have infuriated her, but it didn't.

Eleanor wasn't intent on making an entrance at all, and in fact was so slippery that she was standing beside his table before he had noticed she was even in the room. He looked up, perhaps expecting to see the waitress, and the paper cup of coffee in his hand stopped in mid-lift.

"Daddy," she said, and what she wanted was to throw her arms around him and cry, but what she did was bend over and kiss his cool cheek, then pull out the chair across from him and sit down.

He didn't seem to have the words at first, and then he put his cup down and, still looking at her, dumbfounded, said her name, the way he always had: "Ellie."

She said, "Hold that thought," and stood up again, and went to the counter and waited in a short line and ordered a cup of hot chocolate, and thought better of returning to the table while she waited for her drink. She'd only have to get up again when they announced it, and anyway, the more time he had to absorb the absoluteness of her presence, the better.

She came back to the table with her cup a few minutes later, and he was moving again, sipping his coffee. "Still hot," he said, unfastening the lid to release a column of steam. He pursed his lips and blew on it. The steam scattered and disappeared. He put the lid aside, and drank slowly from the open cup, and when he stopped, said, "I guess I really didn't think that you would come."

"I didn't think that you would," she said.

He nodded somberly. "I had to. It's -- do you realize that it's been years? Years, Ellie. Your mother still isn't right about this, though. She isn't ready," he offered, and then he snatched the words back. "Well, maybe she would be, but frankly ... I didn't tell her that you had called. I didn't tell her where I was going. I can't handle the scenes any more."

Eleanor didn't know what to say.

"Do you want to know the worst thing I never told you?" he said, and then he chuckled bitterly. "What a way to start things off! But probably it's better that we just say these things and be done with them. There's always time to move past them. There is time, isn't there?"

When Eleanor didn't answer right away -- her answer would have been yes, of course, my God, do you know how much I've missed you both? -- he said, "Never mind. How have you been? Where have you been? Jack wrote to us once, maybe two years ago now, and he said that he was sorry he couldn't say more, but that he'd spoken with you, and even seen you, and that you were doing just fine. Your mother never laid off of that boy, but I knew. He was a good kid. When I read what he wrote, I rested a little. I've been so worried all this time."

"Daddy," Eleanor said. "Slow down! I'm right here. We have plenty of time."

He nodded again. "Right, of course. It's just -- Ellie!" And he stood up suddenly and came around the table and took her by the shoulders and lifted her out of the chair and hugged her, fiercely, and it was not until that moment that she realized how absolutely horrible she had been, and how terribly she had missed this man. But she would not cry. Not yet, at least. She suspected she'd lose this internal battle before too much longer.

He finally let go, and sat down, rubbing at his eyes. The skin around them was looser than she remembered, and was that white threading through the gray in his hair? He was getting old. She sometimes forgot that for every day she aged, he aged two. This year she was thirty-eight. That would make him, oh, two hundred or so.

His eyes were young and lively now, though, and for that, Eleanor thought, maybe she wouldn't be so hard on herself right now. He reached over the table and took her hands and said, "So tell me!"

"Where do I start?" she asked. "You're right, Daddy. It's been too long. And there's so much ground to cover. How can I?"

"Well," he said, "what about now? Just now, let's talk about now. Where do you live?"

She didn't want to say, because she knew how it would make him feel to know that all these years she'd been just a few hours away. But she answered him. "Eugene, most of the time. And sometimes I drive down to the Pass to see Jack for a little while." She grinned. "He keeps a room for me there, the largest one in his house. It has windows, Daddy, like you wouldn't believe. It's like sleeping in a terrarium."

"Eugene," he said. "All this time?"

"Not all of it. After college, there was a little while in California. Los Angeles. And I spent a year in Houston, and a few more years in Denver. And about eight in New York."

He said, "New York? Los Angeles? Ellie, what do you do?"

And this one she didn't know how to answer. "I don't do anything, Daddy. I ... look."

He wrinkled his heavy brow. It made his eyes almost disappear. "Look for what?"

She said, softly, "I think that you know."

"Ellie," he said, sadly. "Still?"

She nodded. "I know that you and Mom never understood, but it happened, or at least I believe it did. It changed my life. It was -- magnificent. And you don't know what it's like to peak when you're fourteen, and not even awake, Daddy, not even conscious, and to spend the rest of your life realizing that nothing you do can ever make you happy." She was tapping her fingertips nervously on the table. "I live every day with that, as stupid as it sounds. It's hard enough to find the energy to breathe, much less some greater reason for why I even bother sticking around."

As soon as she said it, all of it, she felt ridiculous, like she was fourteen all over again, and engaging her parents and everybody around her in bouts of theological warfare. She felt like a child, that is.

A long, dusty moment went by before he said, "What I almost said earlier is that your mother decided once that we should have another child."

Eleanor looked up.

"This was years ago, you were away at school," he clarified. And then his face crumbled, and he went on. "She always thought that we made a terrible mistake with you. She thought that she was to blame for what happened, and for who it changed you into. She told me one night, she was crazy with depression, Ellie, she said, we have to have a baby, a boy maybe, it'll be --" He trailed off.

Eleanor, her hands still tucked beneath his, extricated one and sandwiched his hands between her own.

He said, "It'll be like we never had her. She said it just like that, couldn't even say your name, Ellie. She couldn't even say your name. I almost went away that night. Do you believe? I almost left your mother.

"But I had to stay. I had to. And every day since I have been afraid that you thought that I felt the same as she did, and afraid that I would never ever see my daughter again, and do you know? I felt that I deserved this. For letting her, for letting all of it."

Eleanor had lost her fight, and the tears gathered at the corners of her round nostrils, and then fell heavily to the table. There weren't any words left; she had none to comfort her that her presence hadn't already whispered. They sat that way for the rest of the afternoon, alone together in the crowded coffee shop, neither wanting to leave, neither with a thing to say. That could come later. For now, this was enough.