She Sounded Happy

***This story was originally published in Harpur Palate Spring 2017 issue***

When I accidentally came across my daughter’s porn site, I sat there, penis in hand at my computer, feeling ill. Then, I saw myself. My pants were around my ankles, the glass of red wine on the bookshelf near my computer desk, jerking it to other men’s daughters. I never felt so pathetic in all my life, not even when I walked in on my ex-wife having sex with her co-worker at her office. I had brought her a long-stem rose and dinner from an Italian place where we used to go to on special occasions. She had been working late for over a year, but there had been nothing to suspect. She had gone back to law school five years before and had just passed the bar. I had known the hours would be long at first.

Anyway, the point being, I know what it feels like to be pathetic, but sitting there, at the computer, dick-shrunk and pants down, I cried. I thought I might have killed myself, if I hadn’t finally sold my dead father’s handgun collection a couple years ago. Well, I did sell it. So I sat there crying until I was cried out, and then, I tucked myself back in and pulled my pants up. I immediately felt better. The pathetic was gone, or it had receded at least.

I took my wine glass back to the kitchen of my one-bedroom condo, filled it, and sipped. Nothing. I took a long drink. I remembered it was Tuesday. Tuesday was her night off from work, and she got out of class at 7. She would be calling at 10:30, my time.

Night off? Class? I felt the red tint of the wine filling my face. For a minute, I was so mad I thought I might pass out. I could still see her in the link bar at the top of the page, made up like a Barbie doll, and some stranger-without-a-face’s penis next to the cheek I’d dried countless times when she was a little girl. After countless skinned knees. And for only $9.95 a month. A seven day trial membership for free. I had to click on the link to make sure — it didn’t really look like her, after all. And the things she said she did in the different sections. What would I say when she called? I felt short of breath, like water was rising around me, and my brain couldn’t remember how to tell my muscles to swim.

I picked up the phone, immediately started dialing my ex. My daughter’s mother should know — that way, we could figure out what to do about it. How to stop it. But I restrained myself. I didn’t know what to say just yet. There was anger there, too. I wanted to think this was her fault, my ex, forcing a divorce in my daughter’s formative teenage years, but for once, I found I didn’t want an argument about it. Not right then.

I thought: No, right now, I need to talk.

I thought of Terri. My only real friend since the divorce, the only woman I’d been with since my wife. I used to work with her at the Community Service Board. She was divorced too, and we went out on a couple of dates, tried it out one night, but it had been awkward, so we decided to stay friends. She had a grown daughter, I figured I could call her.

I dialed. It rang once, and I realized: whoever I called, I would have to explain how I found out. I remembered our awkward night, groping around for each other in the dark. Lying next to her after, not really knowing what to say. I knew then I’d be too embarrassed to admit how I found out. Too afraid she would be thinking I deserved it. I hung up.

But she called back.

I debated letting it go to voicemail, but I felt like I had to answer.

“Hello? Hey, Terri. No, no, I dialed accidentally.”

“Well, darn,” she said, sounded disappointed. “I thought you were actually calling me to catch up.”

“Yeah I know — it’s been too long. What, six months?”

“Try a year. Well, while I’ve got you here, how’s the practice?”

“Fine, fine. You?”

“A little slow,” she said. “But I’m still part time at the CSB, you know. Same as it ever was.”

Then, she asked about my daughter.

I hesitated. I almost told her, practically mouthed the words.

“She’s fine. Listen, Terri, I hate to be a jerk, but I’m expecting her to call any minute. I was checking my phone when I accidentally dialed… Listen, I’ll call you this weekend to catch up. How does that sound?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she said. “You sound like you’re underwater.”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

There was a pause.

“I mean I’ve been working a lot, seeing patients.”

There was a short, thick silence. “You know how on airplanes they tell you, when the oxygen masks falls, secure your own mask before assisting others?”

“I know, Terri. I hear you.”

“Well I’m around this weekend if you want to talk. Maybe dinner?”

“Sure. I’ll call you.” I hung up.

I felt like I had dodged something, but I didn’t quite know what. The practice hadn’t been going well. I was seeing patients, maybe even too many, because I was feeling tired, withdrawn. I was making money, but I felt divorced from human issues in general. Disconnected. I put down the phone, took my wine over to the couch and sat in the dark. There was the track lighting from the kitchen, but still. I stared at the blank TV screen, then the city lights outside the sliding glass door to the balcony. I started thinking about all the lies.

She was supposed to be in school out on the West Coast. The money she had, where it had come from — waitressing, she said. At some bar where all the celebrities drank. Then, a few jobs she’d lucked into as an extra on some movie sets. I remembered giving her a hard time, half in jest, half-serious, about not wanting her to become an actress.

Daddy! she’d said into the phone. Don’t you remember how shy I was? You think I’d really want to be an actress? And I’d remembered how when she was little, to make her feel better in crowds, sometimes I’d have her wear a hat and those sunglasses with Minnie Mouse on the nose. Go incognito, I told her, and she’d laugh and say the phrase over and over, loving the way it sounded. Go incognito…

And the BMW. The one time I had gone out to visit. At first when I saw the car, I was a little afraid she was selling drugs. Staying with her, I had found some rolling papers in the crack of the sofa cushion. But the way she had told me about the car put me at ease. She told me a friend’s father owned a BMW dealership and gave her a great deal with low payment financing.

Was this the same little girl who I could always catch in a lie? Who I called her out on smoking cigarettes one time, and when she tried to tell me she wasn’t, she couldn’t stop blinking? Who was unable to look me in the eye? Who I let go to her room without saying anything about the lie, and who brought me back a pack of Marlboros and a lighter five minutes later, head hung low? I raised my eyebrows, and she said: What? It’s not like you didn’t know I was lying.

As I started to feel the wine, there were more memories. Like how drowning men supposedly see their lives flash before their eyes. I was actually having trouble breathing. I thought about the time she was six and got into the cookie jar and made herself sick. The time she came home drunk, the summer after she graduated high school. She was grounded, but went out to a party anyway. I waited for her at the back door, surprised at her audacity when she came in the front. I was so incensed I let her go to her room and go to sleep. I never said anything.

Good things too, though. Her high school graduation, the Christmas when she was four, and we bought her the puppy. Camping at Cloudland Canyon, a year and a half later. I remembered how she had started screaming when the dog got loose, jumped in the water, and started swimming out to the waterfall.

She had been having the hardest time learning to swim. All summer long, my wife had dragged her to swim lessons, and every time, it seemed, she would come home in tears. Of course, she had thought that the dog would drown until I told her that dogs didn’t have to learn to swim. Pointing to the dog’s head sticking out of the water, I showed him to her. I could still see the relief settle over her face. And how, after he had come out the other side, she was unable to stop giggling at the wet dog shaking off the water.

And her first car. That third year, when the practice really took off, the mustang I bought her — admittedly, to piss off her mother. All these things. I wondered where they fit in. I found myself wishing it was drugs, and I hated myself for it. After all, at least this was legal, right? As I had these thoughts, I had to keep reminding myself to breathe.

Then, I heard my phone vibrating. In on the kitchen counter. I got up to answer it. I thought about not, but what was I going to do? Not ever talk to her again? I picked up the phone off the counter, looked at the screen. It was her. I’m terrible with technology, and the last time she was home, she set it so a picture of her came up under her number whenever she called.

I answered.

“Daddy?” she said. “Daddy, hey!”

I waited.

“Daddy, are you there? Is everything okay?”

“Hi sweetheart. No, things are fine. Just fine. I was asleep, is all.”

“Oh. For a second it sounded like you were crying.”

“No,” I said, my voice cracking. “Yawning, maybe.”

“Oh,” she laughed. “Sorry to wake you.”

“No, it’s fine. I was on the couch. I fell asleep watching the news. Had a bad dream.”

“Oh, well that sucks. I’m glad I woke you, then!”

And so we talked. She told me about school, the classes she was taking this semester. The way she talked, I knew she was at least still in school. And I remembered: just two months ago, she had sent me her grades. To hang on the fridge, she’d joked. She was still in school at least. I felt better about that.

We talked about the basketball tournament, the upcoming NFL draft — she’d always liked sports. As a girl, she never played with Barbie dolls, she preferred shooting hoops or going to the batting cage.

Then, she told me about an article she’d read in Psychology Today. How the article said we have another brain in our stomach. “I know you hate that magazine, but it was in a doctor’s office, and the article was really interesting. Apparently, there’s as much nerve activity down there as in the brain…”

“I must be pretty smart in that case,” I said, a half-hearted joke. “With my belly…”

“Daddy, you’re not that big,” she laughed. “I bet you got all kinds of women trying to talk to you. But really… you know how they talk about gut instincts? Maybe there’s something to it.”

“Maybe…”

It was good to hear her laugh, I had to admit. And she sounded happy. I listened really hard for something else — a trace of misery, an underlying detachment, something — but I didn’t hear it. I couldn’t believe it, but she sounded happy.

“Daddy,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Fine, sweetie, just fine.”

There was a silence.

“And you?” I asked. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Daddy, I’m fine! You were having a bad dream, weren’t you?”

“No, I’m okay. If you’re fine, I’m okay.”

“All right…” she said. “Well, I’m going to let you go. I have an early class. Love you!”

“I love you, too.”

“Daddy?”

“What, babe?” I held my breath.

“No more TV news before bedtime,” she laughed.

When she was gone, I felt myself begin to sink back into it. I almost called back. I got up, stepped outside on the balcony, looked out over the thousands of tiny lights that composed the constellation of the city skyline. My stomach growled. I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner.

I remembered how when my daughter was a little girl, my wife and I used to say it was her tummy talking. In the house we lived in, the one on Leeds Court, we had a front porch swing. I remembered sitting out there one evening, all three of us, as the night got dark. My daughter was fourteen, but for some reason, we had all crowded on the swing like we did when she was little. She was sitting there, texting her friends. Text messages were a brand new thing at the time, and I was constantly fighting her to put down her phone.

This was maybe three or four months before I discovered my wife’s affair. I remembered she had started talking about quitting the firm she was working for — that she had thought she was prepared for the work, but she wasn’t. I just didn’t expect it to be so impossible to have a career and a family, I remembered her saying. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t.

For years, I looked back at that moment, wondered if it had been my chance to save us. But I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about the long-awaited second salary we had so desperately needed, the student loans we had accrued, the second mortgage on the house. And so, the conversation stopped. Somewhere in there, my daughter even quit texting, and it was silent. It was getting darker, and I thought I should get up and turn the porch light on, but I didn’t even do that. We were very still. Everyone just sitting there, so quiet, I wondered if they were asleep.

Then, my daughter’s stomach growled. Then mine. Then my wife’s. Just like that. My daughter laughed once, awkwardly, but other than that, no one said anything. Someone’s stomach growled again, and I thought: We should go inside, make dinner. We’re all starved. But it was as if something was telling us to keep sitting there.

Standing on the balcony, looking out at the city lights, I thought: At least she’s safe. Though I could hear her mother’s voice, incredulous: Safe? What about disease? What about drugs? What kind of people must she be involved with? And it’s not that those weren’t questions in my mind too. It’s not that I could just let this go, let her go on forever thinking I didn’t know. But hearing her voice, I knew that if those were things to come, they were in the future. Tonight, I could just be grateful she was okay.

I thought once more about that time at Cloudland Canyon, carrying her back up the trail on my shoulders to meet her mother, who had stayed back at camp. The wet dog kept running out ahead of us, then stopping to wait. She said what seemed to me at the time one of the saddest, sweetest things I’d ever heard.

It must be nice, she said, with that intense seriousness that only children are capable of. She was looking ahead at the dog.

He was panting happily, waiting for us to catch up.

What’s that, sweetheart? I asked her.

To not have to learn to swim, she said.

Then, she asked me to put her down, and I found myself trying to keep up as she ran behind him the rest of the way.

***photo from Unsplash***