Page 12 of Mischief

Somebody's car up on blocks in the side yard, weeds grown through the wheel wells.

It looks like nothing. It looks like every tired house in every tired town.

It looks like the worst place I've ever been.

I sit there long enough that a neighbor twitches a blind, and I think about Tindra's parking lot, about sitting outside her shop yesterday morning unable to make myself walk in.

I almost laugh, because here's what nobody's clocked about me yet.

I'm a man who keeps arriving at doors he can't go through.

Then the front door opens, and it's not my father standing in it.

It's a girl.

Marit.

The last time I saw her she was seven, gap-toothed, hair in two braids I did myself and did badly, small enough to carry on my hip when our father's voice came up the stairs.

The girl in the doorway is sixteen, tall and thin in a way that isn't the good kind, arms crossed over a hoodie two sizes too big, watching me cross the street toward her with a face that's decided nothing yet.

"You came," she says.

Not glad. Not surprised. Only marking it, the way you'd note weather.

"I came." My voice comes out rough from the road, the cold, and nine years of not using it to say her name. "Look at you. You're?—"

"Don't." She steps back to let me in, and it's not a welcome, it's just moving out of a doorway. "Don't tell me how big I got. You missed it. You don't get to be amazed at the part you missed."

She meant that to sting, and it does.

I follow her inside, and the house swallows me the way I knew it would.

Same smell, cigarettes, dampness and something fried a long time ago.

I keep my eyes off the staircase and mostly manage it.

She takes me to the kitchen and puts the width of the table between us and looks at me.

I make myself look back, and what I see makes my stomach drop through the floor.

It's not the thinness, though that scares me.

It's not the chipped black polish or the way she holds herself like she's bracing for a hand that hasn't been raised yet.

It's her eyes.

She's got our father's trick already, the flatness he puts on like a coat, the nothing you show the world so the world can't use what it finds.

Sixteen and she's already learned to go empty on command.

Somebody taught her that. I know exactly who, and I know exactly what it's for.

"How bad is it?"

"How bad is what?" She doesn't uncross her arms.

"Here. Him. Whatever he's got you doing." I hold my voice level and it takes everything in me to keep it there. "You called for me. He said you asked for me. So talk to me, Marit. How bad?"