Christy laughs just like her mother. It’s a giggly, bubbly laugh which exudes the type of femininity boys can’t help but be attracted to. Sometimes it seems like she hasn’t laughed like that since my ex-wife and I split, but I know that she has. Where there once was conversation enveloped in laughter, there are now frustrating series of my questions and her one-word answers. Everyone has walls, I suppose.
It’s difficult to pinpoint a moment when our relationship began to transition to no access, but I know it was around the time that Janet and I divorced. This could be because we decided never to tell Christy the true reason for the divorce. Perhaps Christy knew what we told her was a lie.
I’ve never told Christy that I spent over a year saving up enough money to replace a gold necklace Janet had lost at the beach. It was a gift her mother had given her when she had graduated from university, certainly one of Janet’s most cherished items. For over a year, I spent every janitorial shift at Laurentian High School sweeping hallways and scrubbing toilets knowing that a significant portion of my paycheck was going towards the necklace. When I went to put the necklace and card in Janet’s jewelry box, I found the note that ended our marriage. It was a note from our family doctor describing intimate sexual moments he had had with my wife. The way he fondled her breasts, the way he loved her scent, the electricity he was overcome by when his lips met hers. It even described a trip to
I was sitting in the main room of our two-bedroom apartment listening to Tim McGraw when Christy came home, providing me with a welcomed distraction from my thoughts. She had gone on a date with a boy from school and that was the extent of what she had told me. The music was playing pretty loudly and I almost didn’t hear the door open, in part because she was trying to be as discreet as possible.
“Christy? How was your night?” I asked.
She mumbled “fine” and went straight to her room. Although this was a normal answer, her voice had a faint tremble that worried me. Her shoulder-length blonde hair and petite physique make her appear young, but for a fifteen year-old girl, she’s quite mature. I questioned whether or not I should pursue a conversation, so I gave it a few minutes. Finally, the awkwardness in her voice was too much for me to handle, so I got up off the tattered rocking chair and went to her room.
“Don’t you knock?” she asked angrily.
I laughed and said
“Sorry darlin’, but I was just wonderin’ how your date went.”
Christy stared at me as though I had asked a perfect stranger the most intimate of questions. She folded her arms and rolled her eyes.
“I said fine, didn’t I? I’m waiting for Mom to call me back. She was just busy for a few seconds. You can go back to
I took a couple of extra seconds to look at the posters of Justin Timberlake and Leonardo DiCaprio which adorned her wall before turning around and going to my room. It was funny going from Christy’s room to mine because the size difference was laughable. After the divorce, I knew that it would be hard on Christy to get used to living in a cramped apartment after spending years living in a nice suburban home. Yet without Janet’s nursing wages, I simply couldn’t afford anything bigger than this apartment. I understood that with the change of housing and Christy being a teenage girl, she deserved the privacy the big room could afford. It still hurts to think about how she had pushed so hard to live with Janet during the whole ordeal. I knew how important her mother was to her, so I had offered every weekend to Janet, but she had said that two weekends a month was plenty of time for mother-daughter bonding. An uncomfortable smile still creeps onto my face when I think of the selfishness of her reply.
I slowly undressed and climbed into bed. The sheets felt frigid, but I’ve always enjoyed the feeling you get when you bring warmth to something cold. As I lay there knowing a good sleep was necessary to tolerate work the next day, I thought of Christy’s make-up. Christy had refused to let me help her with it before she went on the date. Instead, she had called her mother to see if Janet could drive over to our apartment to help her with it. Apparently Janet was pretty busy. She and her boyfriend-of-the-day were going to a musical, and she needed that time to find a babysitter for his daughter. Christy had spent a couple of hours in the bathroom trying to teach herself how to do it, and came out asking me if she looked all right. She was wearing far too much eyeliner, blush and mascara, but I told her she looked beautiful. I really thought she did, but whoever was taking her out probably would not agree. That same independent girl was sleeping, or on the phone, in the room right next to me, refusing to tell her own father how her night had gone. As tired as I was, that thought prevented me from sleeping, so I got up, grabbed the robe Janet bought me for my thirty-second birthday and went to Christy’s room.
She was sitting there on her bed with her legs crossed, squeezing her teddy bear as hard as she did the first day I bought it for her. The mascara was running down her cheeks, and she didn’t even look up when I entered the room. My initial instinct was to hug her, but if I had, it would have risked any chance of her opening up. She probably would have told me where the door was. I went over to her bed, and sat next to her.
“If you squeeze that bear any harder, it’s gonna stop breathin’,” I said.
She didn’t respond, but I could swear I heard a giggle under the sniffling and crying, so I smiled.
“Your mom didn’t call you back, did she?” I asked.
Again, there was no response. I didn’t need one. I made no attempts to hug her, but I ruffled her blonde hair. She dropped the teddy bear on the floor, and walked over to her full-size mirror. She wiped the tears from her cheeks, which was useless, as they were pouring from her eyes uncontrollably. She ran her fingers through her hair, preening. She adjusted her skirt, her top, and her bracelets as though she was going on another date. I sat there watching her fidget over the tiniest things, obsessing over a few out-of-place hairs, wondering what it was that she saw. As I looked at her, I could have told her all the things that I saw, things I admired in her, all that father-daughter kind of stuff that no kid wants to hear, but it wouldn’t have mattered to her.
“You know, I’m not your little girl anymore,” Christy said as clearly as she’s ever said anything to me before.
I took a moment to ponder what she just said, and thought she was just telling me to leave the room in her own way. I said “I know” and was about to leave when she spoke again.
“No, you don’t. After tonight, I’m really not your little girl anymore,” she repeated, but this time she laughed one of her bubbly laughs underneath the tears.
That same laugh that is the sweetest sound to me in the entire world, at that moment, was alarming. She stopped adjusting her outfit, and she even stopped looking at herself in the mirror. Her head dropped, she folded her arms, and her eyes were glued to the floor while the tears continued. I felt an ugliness in her body language. My heart was racing, my anger was becoming too much to handle, and I was starting to grind my teeth as I looked at her. I handled the situation in a manner I never would have before. I got up, walked over to my daughter’s side, and spoke.
“Never pretend to laugh when you’re trying to say something serious. Just say it,” I said convincingly, while looking at myself in the mirror.
She nodded her head a few times, and I took that as a sign that she understood what I meant. I glanced over at the pink, heart-shaped clock I had bought Christy for her tenth birthday. I was shocked at how awake I was considering it was 2:00 a.m.
“Why did you do it?” I asked in as soothing a voice as I could muster.
She took close to a minute to respond, but I would have waited an eternity for the answer.
“I don’t know. He took me to the movies and dinner, paid for it all. We were talking in his car afterwards. It just happened,” she said. “It felt good to be wanted.”
She didn’t move her body or her eyes. I didn’t move either. We both stood there letting our short bursts of conversation sink into our minds. I, however, looked at her reflection in the mirror the entire time. Nearly another minute passed, and she spoke again.
“If I don’t let myself be happy now…then when?” she said in almost a whisper.
My heart stopped racing. My anger evaporated. I stopped grinding my teeth. I didn’t hesitate. For the first time since I had become a father, I didn’t hesitate. I put my hand on her shoulder, and I looked at her. Her tears were pouring with more and more consistency, but I didn’t care. I waited. I wasn’t waiting for anything in particular, I just stood there next to my daughter, with my hand on her shoulder, waiting. She finally faced me, and our eyes met. Mine, dry and anxious. Hers, red and drenched in pain. She wrapped her arms around me. It wasn’t uncomfortably tight, but she hugged me tightly enough that I knew we hadn’t hugged in a while. We hugged for several minutes, and said absolutely nothing. Then we shifted positions. I was behind her with my arms wrapped around her chest, and her hands gripped my forearms sternly. We both looked at our reflection in the mirror.
I noticed something I hadn’t ever noticed before or, perhaps more accurately, taken the time to notice before. I noticed the lines on her face. It was challenging to see them because of the makeup which had run down her cheeks, but I noticed lines. Lines around the edges of her lips, lines by the sides of her eyes, and one very faint line on the top part of her forehead. As I looked at every aspect of her face, I couldn’t decide if I saw a girl, or a woman.
