I joined Bryan in the living room five minutes later.
He said nothing to me beyond what he was able to communicate with the cold,
ferocious glare I had come to recognize as the precursor to his verbal
wrath. But too angry to care about the mushroom cloud forming over
his head, I turned to Julia and gave her a big hug. “Thank you so much for
everything,” I gushed. Julia, her eyes glued to Bryan, merely flashed me a wan
smile in return.
Bryan vacated
the premises without so much as a peep in her direction. Neither did he
utter a word to me until we had crossed the border into Illinois.
The last time he had been that quiet, he’d thrown me into a piece of furniture
and booted me from the apartment. For this reason only it was a relief to
have him say, in a voice that rumbled through the car like the echo of
approaching thunder, “Why did you run away?”
“I didn’t run away. I just came to visit.”
“Without asking me first?”
“I’m seventeen. Do I have to ask for permission every time I
want to leave the house?”
“To leave the state? Yes. You do.”
“I don’t see why. You aren’t my father. And, contrary
to what you seem to believe, you aren’t God either.”
“Yet I am the one who has the final say,
Rachel.”
“So you keep claiming, but I don’t know what your problem with
Julia is. What has she ever done to you?”
“My problems with Julia aren’t relevant to you and me.”
Yeah, right. But not daring to trot out the blackmail
story—there was insolence, and then there was just plain idiocy—I said, “In a
matter of months I can do whatever the hell I want, and I don’t have to tell
you the first thing about it.”
“Which is also irrelevant. Until that day comes I make the rules. You don’t have
to like them. You just have to live with them.”
“No.”
Bryan glanced over at me. “What did you just say?”
The undercurrent of menace electrifying this challenge was such that,
had I been less damaged, I might have been quaking in my boots. Damaged I
was, though, so I answered him, “I don’t think I want to do that.”
“And what the fuck is it you want to do?”
“You know what the fuck it is I want to do. You just won’t
let me.”
“You can’t want to live with Julia.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d be dead of lung cancer in six months, and she’s
incapable of providing you with a structured home.”
“I don’t need a ‘structured home’ anymore. Anyway, you
should talk. I don’t think kicking your ward out in the middle of the
night counts as providing a structured home.”
For a brief second I thought Bryan might go apoplectic. But
I have to hand it to him: proving that you never know someone as well as you
think you do, he exhibited the kind of self-restraint he was famous for
lacking, and allowed my remark to dissipate into the air. While unsure of
how grateful I should be for that, I decided not to look a gift horse in the
mouth.
The rest of the trip passed in a dead silence filled with the
despair of two very angry people—one of whom had at last come to terms with the
only alternative left her.
