I fell to my knees on the marble beside that tub, and I pulled the locket out from under my blouse — the locket I’d worn against my heart for twenty years, that I’d never taken off, that my husband had always assumed was just a piece of sentimental jewelry.
I opened it with shaking hands and held it up.
Inside was a photograph: a man in his forties, laughing, with a sixteen-year-old girl on his shoulders. Me. And my father. The last photo taken before he disappeared.
The man in the bath looked at the photo. And something moved behind his eyes — something that had been buried under twenty years of trauma and homelessness and a mind that had protected itself by forgetting.
“Where did you get that,” he whispered.
“My father gave it to me,” I said, and I was crying so hard I could barely speak. “For my sixteenth birthday. Two weeks before he went to work one morning and never came home. There was an accident at the construction site he worked at. They never found him. They told my mother he was gone.
He had a birthmark. Right there. On his right shoulder. Shaped like a crescent moon. I used to trace it when I was little.
Dad. Dad, is it you? Please. Look at me.”
The old man looked at me. And I watched twenty years crack open in his face.
“Gracie?” he whispered. The name only my father ever called me. A name I hadn’t heard in twenty years. “Little Gracie. You had a gap in your teeth. You were going to be a doctor.”
I collapsed against the side of that tub, sobbing, holding the hand of the filthy, forgotten, homeless man I had spoken to with such cruelty an hour earlier — my father. My father, alive. My father, whom I’d just called a mess for someone else to clean up.
He’d survived the accident. Head trauma, we’d later understand, had taken his memory and his identity, and he’d wandered out of a hospital before anyone connected him to the missing man, and for twenty years he’d lived on the streets of a city where his own daughter grew up, married a millionaire, and learned to look down on people exactly like the man he’d become.
For twenty years, my father had been out there. And I’d been in here, in my climate-controlled house, scoffing that some people just prefer to live that way.
PART 3
