Blast | April 26, 2024

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In Paul Curley’s “The Side Effects,” a recently bereaved father and his thirteen-year-old daughter find out they aren’t related and have to adapt to the strange new parameters of their relationship. At her request, Tom takes Fallon on a road trip to meet her “birth dad”—his dead wife’s former lover. A runner-up in TMR’s 33rd Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize competition, “The Side Effects” is about the distances we sometimes have to travel before we can love the people we’re trying to leave.

The Side Effects

Paul Curley

 

Fallon isn’t my biological daughter.

The DNA results came after my wife had died. By then, the hospital bed had been hauled out of the living room, the condolence flowers composted. Fallon and I snuggled on the couch with the laptop open to our 23andMe accounts, and Val smiled back at us from the photos that we’d set out on the coffee table. I thought it would be a sweet way to remember Val, maybe share stories and get Fallon to process her feelings. If only I could take it back.

Side effects included losing Val all over again. Side effects included wanting her alive again to answer for this. Side effects included Fallon calling herself an orphan and calling me Tom.

Fallon is angry. I tell her that she has a lot to be upset about, but that doesn’t seem to help. My counselor tells me that Fallon’s anger is good, that it tethers her to me, but if Fallon’s anger tethers her to me at all, it’s only so she can torture me. She’s some kind of angry. Not sure she wants to live with me anymore angry. Wants to meet bio dad angry.

We’re two hours into our drive from Portland to Idaho to do just that. In the Columbia River Gorge, lush forests of Douglas fir swept from the roadside clear up to the cloud-capped half domes, where waterfalls spilled from the cliffs. That was just minutes ago and already the shift to desert is nearly complete.

Fallon is in the back seat with her bestie, Max. As we were leaving home, Fallon had said to Max, “I call aux.” They speak fluent middle school and I’m struggling to keep up. If Val were still alive, she’d have this new dialect nailed and Fallon wouldn’t be drifting.

“Let’s go!” Fallon shouts to Max. They’re playing a game, which seems to be Who said it—Donald Trump or Michael Scott.

“Pull up, sister! Three to two you,” says Max.

A Lizzo song plays. “She’s such a queen,” Fallon says. “Turn it up, Tom.”

It wasn’t that long ago that I was Daddy, but now I might as well be the chauffeur. When my relationship with Fallon is difficult, like now, it helps to conjure a younger version of her, at an age when Val and I could solve her problems. My mind clicks over to Cannon Beach when Fallon was about four. We had bought her a foil balloon, a yellow and black smiley face, which I’d tied around her wrist just in case. Above the high tide line, the wind whipped the dry sand so hard that it stung our legs, so we stayed by the water where we chased the waves out, then let them chase us back in like three sandpipers. Fallon was running between me and Val until she wasn’t. I turned to see her standing in water to her knees, her arms reaching for the sky. She was still and quiet the way kids are before the tears come. The balloon had slipped off her wrist and was rising rapidly. Fallon buried her face in Val’s legs and bawled, but Val knew what to do. We walked back to the same shop and bought two more balloons of different sizes, then we returned to the water. Val told Fallon she could keep the bigger balloon as long as she let the other one go. This time, Fallon watched the second balloon rise erratically in the wind, watched it fade from balloon to dot to nothing.

Fallon and I watched Val disappear in slow motion. When Val came home from the hospital for the last time, we set up the hospital bed by the living room windows where she could look at the garden. She made me promise to go to counseling. I waited until she was gone. At the first appointment, my counselor suggested that I start a journal to Val. This first entry was before Fallon had started middle school and before the DNA results had arrived. My grief was still simple then, sweet and private.
 

Dear Val,

I want to back up to the community garden when I didn’t yet know your name. I want to back up to that first August when we were slicing Black Krims in the plot, eating them with bread and getting drunk on wine. I couldn’t wait to take you home, kiss your neck, unbutton your blouse, and run my lips over your breasts. I want to back up to that July when you were gardening braless in cotton shirts. Your breasts were young and pert, and the scent of tomato plants wafted up from your blouse—your own variety, the Valerie. I want to back up to June when your tomatoes had grown beyond their cages, and you were looking at my cedar beds. The tendrils of hair that hung across your face couldn’t hide the smile when I asked if you wanted to join plots. I want to back up to May when you had put in the starts—Sun Gold cherries, Glacier slicers, the Krims—and I had only planted carrot seeds. I want to back up to that April when you were already harvesting arugula, kale, and red leaf lettuce in your plot, and I was still building raised beds in mine. You wore red rooster earrings, had smudges of dirt on your face from pushing your glasses up the bridge of your nose. You didn’t care that your overalls were soaked with rain, and I didn’t yet know your name.
 

Now Fallon has become the balloon struggling to break free from my wrist. If I were driving a Greyhound bus, she would be in the way back, but our Subaru only has two rows. I fantasize about getting a Smart car just to torture her back.

Boise tonight, McCall tomorrow to meet bio dad. The transition to the dry browns of the high desert is devastating in its abruptness. Where water and lush forests were abundant and indomitable in the Gorge, now they are almost nonexistent.

This is Fallon’s spring break. She and Max are sixth graders at the arts middle school, where kids try so hard to be different that they all look the same—dyed hair, Vans, mom jeans, and oversized secondhand clothes. It’s an androgynous fashion that seems designed to confuse adults. When Fallon first asked if her new friend Max could spend the night in September, I asked her if Max was a boy or a girl. “Dad, you’re being so binary,” Fallon said. She informed me that Max’s preferred pronouns were they/them. “They’re gay but self-partnered,” she told me with an if you must know tone of voice. As annoying as she can be, I have to empathize; even aside from losing her mother, her life is far more complicated than mine was at her age.

She and Max have been quiet for a while. Searching their phones for the next quote, I guess.

“I’ve got one,” I say. I look in the rearview. “That’s what she said.”

“Kinda obvi, Tom,” Fallon says.

“Nice try, though. That’d be a winner in, like, the junior version,” says Max with no trace of irony in their voice.

“I got one,” says Fallon. “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”

“Donald Trump,” says Max.

“You’re failing, high key,” says Fallon. “My turn.”

“OK, I’ve got one,” says Max. “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

“Michael Scott,” says Fallon.

“You suck, sister.”

“Are you sure I suck, ’cause I think I slay. Sister.” Fallon puts her phone down and leans her head against the window. “I have to stop. Side effects may include barfing in Tom’s car.”

“You OK, kid?” I ask. No answer.

Even before Val got sick, she and I used to make fun of the drug commercials with their long lists of side effects. The most absurd was anal leakage. We immediately forgot the drug, but whenever a pharmaceutical commercial came on TV—it didn’t matter which drug—Val and I would say, “Side effects may include anal leakage.” Later, as Val’s meds replaced the coffee mugs on the shelf by the kitchen sink, the side effects became our way of not taking things too seriously.

Fallon played along. One evening, we were eating dinner on the back deck. It was late summer, and the tomato plants in the garden were laden with Moskvich and Indigo Rose. It was just before Fallon started fourth grade. She was holding one of Val’s medicine bottles. “Get this,” she said. “Side effects may include nausea. This drug is literally to help Mom have an appetite.” She held her hand against her forehead in disbelief. A few weeks later, when Fallon had to give a presentation in school, she said, “Side effects may include shaky voice and hands,” and when Val was too tired to read at night, Fallon said, “Side effects may include reading with Dad again.”

Now Fallon is feeling carsick. I look at her in the rearview, and before I can stop myself, I say, “Side effects may include anal leakage.” This is a desperate attempt to connect with her, which is too bad for me, because if she’s an expert at anything these days, it’s spotting my desperate attempts to connect.

“That’s super cringey,” she says without opening her eyes.

Max makes a face and I resist the urge to explain.

The kids fall quiet for a while. We drive past the mounds of the old Umatilla chemical weapons depot on the left, concrete bunkers covered by brown weeds as far as the eye can see. A few runty trees dot the horizon like runaways sneaking away from their parents in the Gorge. I read once that after a heavy rain in the Sahara, grasses and other plants will sprout from the dunes. It gives me hope to know that even here, even in this desolate, fallow landscape, life is ready. All it takes is a change in the weather.

I angle the rearview to see Fallon better. She’s very still, her eyes are closed and her face pale. There are moments like now that she looks so much like Val—the slight bend in her nose, her small ears and long chin. I used to see myself there too, in the shape of her eyes and arc of her brows.

Genetics isn’t everything. I know to hide her birthday presents in my office because she’s a terrible sneak. I know that she doesn’t like attention when she’s hurting and that she likes her Band-Aids ripped off all at once. I know that she hates long hikes, puts her shirts into the laundry inside out, and can’t tolerate braggers. I know that she hates being treated like a little kid but likes it when I call her “kid,” and I know that the beach is her favorite place and she now likes to buy balloons just to watch them float away.

Her eyes that used to be mine pop open in the rearview. “Tom, I need a bra.” There’s an urgency to her voice.

What, now? She’s never even mentioned a bra before, and now all of a sudden she needs one? Did she grow breasts on the drive?

“Can I?”

“I guess.”

My tone must betray my skepticism, because now Max says, “She’s nipping out back here, Tom.”

“Stop,” says Fallon.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Anywhere.”

“Victoria’s Secret, Tom.”

“Literally, stop,” Fallon tells Max.

I tolerate Max for Fallon’s sake. It’s not the pronouns, though that does get confusing. It’s their drama. Max’s dad is evidently a meth user, and even now during the pandemic Max often ends up at our house. Worst of all, Max has a way of bringing everything back to themself. The first time that Max came to the house, Fallon was showing them pictures of Val. Max said, “When I die, I’m gonna be cremated and am gonna have my ashes compressed into a diamond, put at the tip of a bullet, and shot from a gun in space.” I worry that their drama is too much for Fallon, but then again, maybe it’s only too much for me and is exactly enough for her.
 

We enter Boise a few hours later. Our exit has options. We approach a mall on the right with a green air dancer in front of a sign that lists Dillard’s, Macy’s, and JC Penney.

“Those are for old people,” Fallon says.

We keep driving. “Ross,” I call out.

“Ew.”

“How about Target?”

“Whatever.” She’s talking to me like I’m a dipshit.

“Fallon, we don’t have to stop.”

“Fine,” she says with some sass, which she quickly corrects. “Target’s fine, Dad.”

That’s the old Fallon sneaking through. I live for these moments when she escapes through a crack in her concrete casing. I know she wishes that she could take it back, but that speck of concern that she just showed for me is a sprout in desert sand after a good rain.

We put on our masks and enter Target through the shopping cart corral. It suddenly occurs to me that the dressing rooms might be closed, or that they might not just let people try on bras. I’ve never gone bra shopping, what do I know. I spot a woman in Office Supplies who’s wearing a red Target vest, and I wave to her. I’m about to ask if my daughter can try on bras when I see that Fallon and Max are walking away from me. God, they’re smart. If they were Marvel heroes, their superpower would be sensing cringey parental moments.

I get a coffee. From the other zip code that is the Starbucks lounge, I see Max fetch bras and pass them over the dressing room door. I feel useless, but that never would have been my job. It should have been Val. I’d be naive to think that it would’ve been a beautiful mother-daughter bonding event, but still it should’ve been her. A gay, self-partnered they/them is a good stand-in, though.

I pull my laptop from my backpack and open the Val journal. My counselor tells me to think of grief as having phases, not stages, because they’re not sequential. Val went straight to anger. This journal entry was still before the DNA results.
 

Dear Val,

I’m sorry that your life ended with so much anger. I remember the night when you burst into tears in bed. “Why don’t you touch me anymore?” you asked. I didn’t mean to stop. At first, I was afraid that your breasts might be fragile, that pieces of cancer might break off, travel to other parts of your body. What did I know? Then the chemo turned your tomato leaf scent into a chemical stink. That pissed you off. I pissed you off. Everyone pissed you off. Jan from payroll who asked, “So how you doing?” in front of thirty people on a zoom call. Then on a walk, Maura told you that the best cure is prevention. You were fuming that night. “It’s a little late, first of all. And second, fuck you for blaming me for not preventing my own cancer. The worst part is that everyone means well, so if I say something, then I’m the bitch. Why is it my job to protect everyone else’s need to feel like a good person?” Even in your anger you were so good at sharing what was going on for you. I’m sorry that I wasn’t.
 

I never saw Val make deals. No, bargaining was more my thing. I promised a God that I don’t even believe in that if Val lived, I’d take a demotion at work so that I’d be home more and be more emotionally available to her.

Lack of emotional intimacy was Val’s biggest complaint about me. Not only did I not express emotion or talk about myself enough, I also used humor to deflect. When she tried to talk about the lack of intimacy, I’d say, But we got intimate just this morning, or When you say things like that, I feel like you don’t even know me. She’d say, Thanks for proving my point. It became one of our routines, which also pissed her off.

I didn’t understand how emotionally stifled I was until my dad died. I didn’t cry. After the funeral, Val asked, “What’s wrong with you?” I told her that whenever I was about to cry as a kid, my father would say, “What, you gonna cry now? I’ll give you something to cry about.” One time I yelled back at him, “I obviously already have something to cry about!” He spanked me and sent me to my room to think about it, but the only lesson I learned was not to cry. I was proud to turn eighteen and to have not cried for five years. Five became ten, then twenty. Val hugged me and thanked me for telling her. Not that I suddenly became the emotionally expressive husband that she wanted, but at least I finally understood what she meant.
 

At the hotel in Boise, I’m on one queen, the kids on the other. They swam in the indoor pool after dinner, and now there’s a faint smell of chlorine. They’re taking turns tickling each other’s arms as they stream episodes of The Office on Fallon’s Chromebook.

My laptop is open to 23andMe, and I’ve got ear buds in so that the kids think I’m watching a show or listening to music. If I ever felt guilty about this sort of trickery, I don’t anymore. It’s what Val would’ve done.

“Where are you meeting?” Max asks.

“At his brew pub. It’s like in this lit resort town on a lake and everything. I’m gonna work there someday ’cause in Idaho, you only need to be twelve if it’s a family business.”

“Soon as I’m eighteen, I’m gonna buy an old school bus, replace all the seats with mattresses, and whip all my friends to South America. Wait, I don’t get it. You might actually, like, move?”

“Not right away, but Portland’s boring, not gonna lie.”

“But it’s your home. Your dad lives there.”

“You mean Tom.”

“Wait, what? He’s still your dad.”

And just like that, I think Max isn’t so bad. Fallon falls real quiet, but Max rambles on, says they’re going to become TikTok famous and start a Portland version of the Sway House, whatever that is. Then Portland will be cool and Fallon will have to stay.

Sometimes it hits me how strange my life has become. Not only to have lost my wife, but to now be on the road to meet my daughter’s biological father, when a few months ago I still thought that was me. I poke around in the DNA results and remember the missteps that led me here.

By the time Val was lying in a hospital bed by the garden windows, tumors bulged under the skin on her belly like the roots of invasive weeds. I prayed for her to die, she was in that much pain, but when it became clear that she could die any day, I panicked. We had already discussed testing her and Fallon for genetic markers for breast cancer, and now in my panic, I collected saliva samples from the three of us and mailed them.

When the DNA results finally arrived several weeks later, I had almost forgotten about them. I’d been dealing with the business end of Val’s death—funeral and medical bills, the insurance company, and communicating with family and friends. The results were a welcomed break.

It was October. Leaves blew sideways as the first rainstorm of the season tapped on the garden windows. With a fire popping in the wood stove, photos of Val on the coffee table, and mugs of hot cocoa in our hands, Fallon and I cocooned on the couch. We started with Val. Half German and half Italian, no surprises there. Relations were listed from closest to more distant, and Fallon beamed at her name at the top. Daughter: Fallon Finlay O’Regan. Then we switched to her account. The first sign of trouble was that Fallon Finlay O’Regan had no Irish ancestry. She didn’t see the problem just yet.

“So I get the German and Italian from Mom, and the Danish from you?” she asked.

My brain wasn’t ready to see the truth. It must be a software glitch or a data entry mistake, who knows. Fallon scrolled down to her relations. Mother: Valerie Anne O’Regan. Father: Clint Kristensen.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

Yeah, who the fuck is that?

That’s what I should have been asking, only I wasn’t. Not yet. Who wants to believe that his beloved wife who he just lost had cheated on him? One misstep led to the next as Fallon began to obsess over it. She became insecure and clingy, following me around the house and sleeping on Val’s side of the bed at night. I set up a paternity test to confirm what I already knew, that I’m obviously Fallon’s father, only it confirmed that I’m not. “At least not biologically speaking,” the doctor said.

I didn’t yet worry about losing Fallon. That day, I lost Val a second time.
 

Val,

What the fuck! All the times you told me that I was a mystery. I’m the mystery? Thanks for leaving me this little gift of shit. Thanks to you, Fallon is now calling me Tom and calling herself an orphan. She’s got blue hair, wears makeup to school, and speaks a dialect of English that I barely understand. Did you think of him when you were with me? Did you know about Fallon? Did you search for his features in her face?
 

Fallon is up, walks past the foot of my bed to go to the bathroom. Many times in the past months, I’ve spotted something in her as though for the first time, and wondered if it’s a bio dad trait. This time, it’s something about her gait, a loping stride that Val didn’t have.

I’m in Val’s 23andMe reports. She didn’t have the BRCA mutations, so her cancer wasn’t likely inherited. I scrutinize her DNA results like they’re tea leaves. Val was predisposed to experience motion sickness and to get nervous speaking in public, but there’s nothing about her intolerance for a relationship that lacks emotional intimacy. There’s no mention of a predisposition to cheat on her husband, to feel guilt, or for guilt to fester into disease. Val’s voice pops into my head. Thank you for blaming me for my own cancer.

I toggle to my page and see my genetic predisposition to wake up early in the morning and to prefer salty foods over sweet. Nowhere does it say that I’ll suck at telling my wife how I feel, or that I’ll tell stupid jokes to avoid talking about my emotions. I leave the DNA results and open my Val journal. I type.
 

Dear Val,

We can’t back up. But if we could, I would back up with today’s understanding of what you were always trying to tell me. I regret not being more available to you. I’m still beyond pissed and am not ready to forgive you, but I don’t regret that we had Fallon. I’m trying to be available to her, and I’m afraid that I’m not up to the job of being her father right now. This whole bio dad thing. Remember after my father died, when my mom awoke in the middle of the night to a powerful smell of roses? I’ve been hoping to awake to a smell of tomato leaves. I would see it as an apology, as a sign of your love for me. It would be enough.

P.S. Fallon got a bra today.
 

It was easy to find Clint Kristensen. I had taken over Val’s Facebook and email accounts even before her death. There were email threads with Clint from thirteen years earlier—the math worked. They’d met at an organic farming conference in Wisconsin. Met there, slept together there, conceived my child there, then became Facebook friends. He’s an outdoorsman. Lots of tattoos, muscular, younger and far hipper than me. I scanned his face for signs of Fallon, scanned Fallon’s face for signs of him. She has his eyes.

Around the holidays, Fallon said that she wanted to meet her birth dad.

“Your biological father,” I corrected her. “I was the one who sang to you and read to you at night when you were still in Mom’s belly. I held you when you first came out and made promises that I aim to keep. I’m your birth dad.” She smiled at my defensiveness. In a fit of frustration, I even sent her to her room to think about it, but the only thing she learned was to keep asking to meet her birth dad.

My counselor said that Fallon was testing my commitment to her. “She’s not shopping for a new dad as much as testing the one she’s got.” Right or wrong, I felt that I had to follow through. It might be the only way to get her back for real.

I emailed Clint. He seemed to know that Val had died and didn’t seem surprised about Fallon; they were Facebook friends, after all. I dictated the terms of the meeting—figured he owed me that much. It’s a gamble that Clint sees it that way, but I’m about to find out.
 

Highway 55 heads north out of Boise, picking up the Payette River in a town called Horseshoe Bend. The river and road are paired, the road on the right at first, then crossing over. Bands of snow on the roadside become banks of snow as we climb, and the Payette is a turquoise ribbon that cuts through the white conifers.

Fallon and Max are making TikToks in the back seat. She’s nervous. I know because she’s boisterous and high energy without being joyful, and she keeps fiddling with her bra strap to make sure it’s visible. I think I get it—she doesn’t want bio dad to see her as a needy little kid.

My fear of losing Fallon grows as I steer through the curves. For reassurance, I tell myself that she’s a city girl and this mountain beauty won’t mean much to her. I tell myself that Clint will do the right thing. He’d emailed me something like, “’Z’all good, my friend, we’ll do it your way,” but my trust is as thin as spring ice. After all, he’s the one who fucked my wife, this Clint who’d been buried underfoot for thirteen years like a landmine waiting to blow my chest open.

We slow as we enter McCall and Fallon gets real quiet. The road doglegs left and runs along the shoreline where empty boat docks are still locked in by a rim of ice. The center of the lake is ice free, a deep blue that’s made bluer by the snowy landscape that encircles it. I imagine fish hunkering down at the bottom, alive but not really living as they wait for winter to finally let up.

Clint’s brewpub is nearby, and nerves tie up my stomach. We soon find the spot, the Payette Alehouse. It’s not open yet, and there are only two other cars in the lot, a primered Honda something or other and a Jeep with enormous wheels. Let me guess.

I imagine that Clint has been looking at Val’s Facebook page off and on for years, remembering his romp with her. He watched us have a child, watched us go on vacations, and watched us age. Even if he’s never scrutinized Fallon’s photos for signs of himself, I’m about to see him do it.

If I’m this nervous, I can’t imagine how Fallon must feel. I pull into a spot and kill the engine. I twist to look at her. “Ready, kid?”

She hesitates, seems powered down, then something inside, some instinct or desire or anger or grief, snaps her back to life. “Yas, queen,” she says.

The three of us put on our masks and walk in. The pub is a single, bright room with windows to the left that face the sidewalk and windows to the right that look onto the lake. A young woman is setting tables, and music and voices spill out from the kitchen. Clint is behind the bar, dressed like he is in many of his Facebook posts, a tight t-shirt that shows off his muscles and full sleeve tattoos. He wipes his hands on a bar towel as he walks toward us.

Boom, boom, boom, he says as he elbow bumps each of us. “You must be Fallon. You look so much like your mom.”

OK, that’s a good move, I’ll give him that. If he’d said Fallon looked so much like him, I’d have flipped.

Clint waves over the woman who’s been setting tables. “This is Crystal. She’ll take care of you and Max. On the house.”

Crystal gives us a lake view, while Clint and Fallon sit on the other side of the room.

The menu is uninteresting. I ask Max what they want to eat and they say, “If this were my bar, I’d take the dead animal heads off the walls and throw a deck onto the roof with a zip line down to the lake.” Crystal returns and we order just to order. Two chicken sandwiches with fries, a Coke for Max and an IPA for me.

Max asks, “How come seaweed is a thing, but lake weed and river weed are disgusting?”

I don’t know what to talk about with Max under the best of circumstances, but it’s especially hard now with Fallon interviewing for a replacement dad across the room. I stare at the lake and tell Max that I never thought about the weeds, then default to quiet. It takes all my willpower not to stare at Fallon and Clint, but if this were a cartoon, my ears would be satellite dishes. Lucky for me, Clint talks loudly, so loud that I wonder whether it’s for my benefit.

He asks Fallon, “How have you survived all the home time during the corona?” Without waiting for an answer, he says, “When we shut this place down, I turned it into a win for myself. Nature’s my gym, so I trained a lot. Rock climbing, backcountry skiing, even took up base jumping.”

“He’s barely even looking at Fallon,” Max says to me.

It helps to know that Max is doing the same thing as me. It feels for the first time like we’re in this together.

“I used to only ski the front side of the mountain, but the first time I got dropped from a chopper, I was like fuck me, you know?”

“Somebody loves himself,” Max says.

A woman who I recognize from Facebook as Clint’s wife comes through the door with their baby daughter. She sits next to Clint and hands him the baby.

“This one here is my princess. Now she’s my biggest thrill.” He holds the baby in the air and makes faces at her. “The best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“He’s an asshole,” says Max.

“I know, right?” He’s exactly the asshole I told him to be.

“He’s not asking Fallon any questions. This is going terrible,” Max adds.

It’s going great.

They go on that way, with Clint as self-absorbed as possible. Crystal brings the food, but I’m not hungry. My heart aches for Fallon even as I celebrate how poorly it’s going for her. There is no conflict between the two. After some time, Clint says, “Well, we’re gonna open soon.” He stands, then Fallon. Clint says, “If you’re ever in town again, have your dad let me know.”

Fallon shuffles over. “Can we go now?”

Max and Fallon step out to the parking lot ahead of me. I stop in the doorway, turn, and wave to Clint, who gives me a thumbs-up.

Fallon rides shotgun. She presses her right temple against the window, and I know to give her space.

“So how was it?” asks Max.

Max doesn’t know that Fallon won’t answer their questions. “Did you know you have a sister? Maybe you can, like, go on vacation with them, hold their baby while they climb mountains. Hey, who am I? Before I’ve even had breakfast, I do a hundred reps on my fingerboard.”

Max is mad, which is sweet, but I make eye contact with them in the rearview and say, “Just a little space right now, OK, Max?”

“He seems like a dick, just saying,” Max adds.

We turn away from the lake and soon we’re coasting on Highway 55 again. Fallon has never wanted to show people her pain. Even as a little kid, when she fell she would pop right back up with a big smile pasted onto her face and say I’m fine, her big eyes trying not to blink the tears down her cheeks.

Her face is turned away, and she doesn’t move except for an occasional wipe with her sleeves. We rejoin the Payette River and I settle into the curves, the slowdown then the acceleration. With the car quiet, my mind clears and I get lost in the rhythm. I don’t mean to spoil Fallon’s relationship with Clint forever, just long enough to get her settled again, just to get her to trust that I’m the same dad that I’ve always been. If she wants a relationship with Clint and her sister later, I’ll support her. I will even encourage it, once she’s settled.

“Dad.” Fallon’s voice snaps me back.

“Yeah?”

She wipes her cheek again, then says, “Side effects include wanting to go to the beach.”

“Me too, kid.”

My mind clicks over to a day that hasn’t yet come. At the water’s edge, Fallon and I will feel the roar of the waves and tufts of sea foam will bounce past our ankles like tumbleweeds. She’ll let go of the balloon, and we’ll watch in awe of how quickly something that was just in our hands can vanish from sight.

***

Paul Curley lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches English as a second language at a public high school. His short fiction has appeared in December Magazine, The Madison Review, Gold Man Review, The Timberline Review, and elsewhere.
 

 

 

 

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Header image credit: Girl with Tomato Bowl, Maria Marga Thomass