Page 49 of Keep Me

“Seren.” His voice came up through the house before he had even reached the stairs.

“Up here,” I called back.

I heard him on the stairs, then in the hallway, then in the doorway of Tom’s room. He took in the scene without comment. Me on the floor, the open vault in the wall, the photograph in my hands, the general evidence of a person in the middle of something she had not started on purpose.

He looked at me for a long moment, the slight shift in his eyes that meant he was deciding how hard to come in. Then he crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside me, his back against the foot of the bed, his legs stretched out in front of him. He did not ask what I was doing. He did not ask how I was. He just settled himself in like he’d been planning to be here all along.

“You don’t look good,” he said. “But you’re talking to me today, so that’s something.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. “You don’t look great either.”

“Yeah, well.” He glanced around the room, taking inventory the way Austin instinctively does, quietly filing everything away. He and Zane have that in common, though neither one would ever admit it. His eyes landed on the open vault. “Find something?”

I held up the photograph. It felt heavy, though it was only a slip of paper with ink on it. He took it and looked at it for a minute, his expression doing little, which with Austin, meant it was doing a lot.

“That’s you?” he asked. “Baby Seren.”

“Five years old. Maybe. I don’t know, I can’t remember.”

He looked at it a moment longer. Then he turned it over and read the sticky note, and something in his face went quiet in a way I recognized. Austin, who had been in the same room with me through some of the worst moments of my entire life, and who almost never let me see him be undone by any of them, very briefly looked like someone had hit him somewhere already bruised. He handed it back without a word. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette and didn’t light it, just held it between his fingers, a habit he’d mostly broken and reached for only when he was managing something.

“He kept it in a vault,” I said. “The combination was my middle name.”

Austin turned the unlit cigarette in his fingers. “Of course it was. I don’t know your middle name. Is that weird? I thought I knew everything about you. Maybe that’s not true.”

“Maybe. I don’t think I even know everything about me.” That was a truth I accepted a long time ago. When memories are blurry from the hurricanes and storms and sea waves, tsunamis and riptides that have been frozen and thawed repeatedly… things get lost.

We sat like that for a while. The afternoon coming through Tom’s window, the awards on the shelf catching the light, the suits in the wardrobe, the whole room full of the man who had been other things before he was my father.

“I don’t really know him,” I said eventually. “This room. The person who built it. I thought I was starting to, and then.”

“Yeah,” Austin said. He knew how that sentence ended. “I know.”

“I think I’m angry.” I watched the light move on the wall. “Not at him, exactly. Just at the time. At how much of it there wasn’t. Feels like a broken promise. Feels like time shouldn’t lie to me anymore. I kind of… I don’t know.”

“That’s the one thing you can’t argue with,” he said. Not trying to fix it. Just agreeing with the shape of it. “Time.”

“Maybe it felt like time owed me something. Like I went through the bad things, and I survived them. Kinda thought that was the deal. I made it through so now I get to just stay still.”

Austin sighed, and I saw him subtly shaking his head. “Doesn’t work like that. I wish it did.”

“I think I genuinely believed I’d earned it,” I said. “Like there was a deal. You survive the bad things, you do the work, you get three years clean and a blue apartment and a dad who’s finally learning how to hug you, and then time just lets you stay there for a while. Lets you enjoy it. I had everything stored in after. Lunch with him after finals. Sunday phone calls. Another year in the apartment. I was so sure time was going to let me collect on all of it.” I stopped.

“I just trusted in time. It took so many things from me and in some way, it felt like a test. I passed the test, didn’t I? So why did this happen?”

“I don’t know, love,” Austin told me. He was looking at me, but I knew Austin well enough to know when he was lost somewhere else, in the past and in memories. “Sometimes bad things happen. Without any reason.”

“Austin.” I looked at him. “Did you know? That he was sick?”

He met my eyes, and the answer was plain in his, the same guilted plainness it had been since the funeral. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know. If I had.” He stopped. “I didn’t know, Seren.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. And I meant it, but I had to ask the same way I had to wonder about wind.

He stopped again, jaw working in overtime. He turned the cigarette over in his hand one more time, then put it back in his pocket. “You talking to anyone? Your therapist, whatever her name is?”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy, right. You know Blair’s therapist has the same name?” Then he shook his head like that detail was not important. He tilted his head at me. “You avoiding her, like you avoid everyone when bad things happen?”