Two years after I’ve left, on a Saturday, I am hand-rolling sushi in my mother’s kitchen when I decide to bike to Baker Street. I’ve been making good tips at work. Really good tips. Sometimes sixty dollars a night. I woke up this morning thinking today was something special, and so I ran to the grocery and made it special. The cut of salmon I’ve chosen is richly pink and flowers like a wild rose when I draw my blade through it. My younger brother eats his fill, then me, and then there is some leftover.

I think to myself, “I haven’t seen Tom in two years.” That’s all I think. 

I’m almost sixteen, but not quite. When I left his house I felt older than I do now; two years have softened me up, and I am starting to feel young again in the places I’m supposed to. Except my knees, but that’s genetic. I cry sometimes now. And once in a while I burst out laughing for no reason at all — the sun strikes me right, or I remember how I once dropped my grandmother’s bowling ball down a flight of stairs and it rocketed clean through a windowpane. That memory shakes me silly now. When I choose a shirt in the morning I think hard about it. I even practice braiding my hair in the mirror in the evenings. The list goes on.

It’s bright out today. The sunlight gathers in a shimmery mirage on the driveway and the heat bends air as though it’s candlewax. We’re shin-deep in autumn; this is one of the last hot days before Minnesota plunges into overnight frosts and waxing leaves. Only the sugar maples are beginning to yellow in the sun –- otherwise there is no other indication that one season shivers on the border of the next.

I take a paper dish and arrange the rolls of sushi so that they form a sectioned coil leading to the center of the plate. A couple fall apart between my thumb and forefinger and I remove them, licking the sticky rice clean from my hand. I don’t want him to have any ugly ones. When I’m done I wrap the plate and its contents over and over in saran wrap, lest anything be tossed about in my backpack, until the food is so stifled by film it’s hard to tell what’s beneath it.

As I do this I am not afraid. Nerves don’t reduce thoughts to static the way they used to, my hands are steady. I don’t think about the ways Tom, my father, has hurt me. These days I just think of the ways he’s hurt himself. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong, I don’t think he ever will. I saw it in the way his grey eyes flattened like a salmon’s when he threw his fists through the wall or bent my fingers backwards until I cried out. I heard it in how his throat twisted and collapsed when he finally said goodbye, as though his trachea had been expelling a plume of sawdust. I was leaving him and he couldn’t fathom why. Before I left he made a final offer: I could go outside if I wanted. Not for chores — just for me. I would have this privilege once a day, if it was nice out, and under Tom’s supervision. I could sit on the stone bench at the edge of our rock garden and enjoy the sunlight until it was time to cook dinner. This was how small he thought my needs were, how easily they were corrected.

I wanted to tell him about the way my fingers shook and swelled like wet balloons after he’d punished me, or about the hole in the drywall beside my bedroom. Other things, too. But I could see his confusion and pain in front of me, knotted like a ginseng root, and knew he didn’t understand. Instead I said, in my most adult voice, “I just need to go.”

This is what keeps me up at night. I can feel it sitting on my chest as though a branch has fallen across me. Everyone has left him and he doesn’t know why. And, because I’ve participated in this exodus, of which I was the last, I feel culpable. I am the one who left him truly alone – everyone else had just thinned his herd.

I pull on my shoes, slip the straps of my backpack over my shoulders, and head out into the heat.

The bike over to my father’s house is littered with buckthorn berries. At this time of the year they are thick on their boughs; throughout the day they bounce and roll onto the sidewalk like inky purple eyes. My father lives on the top of the hill on Baker Street. All throughout my life he’d told me if the second Great Flood came, we would be the only ones in the neighborhood who survived. Maybe even the town. Everyone else, with their potted plants and lawn chairs, their beige sun umbrellas, their trampolines and labradoodles, would slide down the hill like water down a wing. So far the only thing I’ve ever seen roll down this hill are buckthorn berries. And, once, a boy with a red sled in the dead of January.

My legs aren’t used to the steep incline. Pedaling to the top of Baker is an agony. As I bike I’m reminded of the salmon that swim upstream and glossy National Geographic spreads of grizzlies catching their glistening bodies midair, all that struggle reduced to a red pulp of nothing. My father and I used to take a boat out to Lake Superior once a year too, in September during the salmon run. In a little shack beside the shore he showed me how to drive a skinny knife the width of a finger up behind the fish’s jaw, then down the length of the its flank. Scales gathered under my fingernails, juices pooled beneath flat, speckled bodies. Proud, disgusted, I would hand my father each pink lump perfectly flayed. With the other hand I’d sweep the guts, spine, and head into a pail.

I pant like an animal until the slope momentarily plateaus, then, reduced to sweat and gasps, I walk the rest of the way. The buckthorn branches break the sunlight overhead, and I move in and out of tangled shadows as I walk. My bike wheels roll over scattered berries and spray red juice over my shoes. If someone did not know better, they’d think I’d kicked an animal to death. By the time I get to the top of Baker and see my father’s house through a twiggy mesh of dead California blue spruce, I’m bathed in red up to my shins.

I hesitate at the top of the driveway. I haven’t seen this house in years and it fills my mouth with bitterness, like biting into the peel of a grapefruit. For the first time, looking down upon it from the incline, I realize that it is small. Very small. We were more poor than I thought we were, and my memory has not been forgiving. My father hasn’t kept up the garden while I’ve been away either; it’s a simple rock garden, but the two scrubby pink azaleas framing the concrete walkway are now fringed with hardy ash seedlings fluffing their jagged plumage from beneath chunks of pink granite. One evening, two months after I’d left my father’s home, I found one of these exact stones on my mother’s kitchen floor surrounded by shards of glass. In the kitchen sill the moonlight lit whatever glass remained upright, each fracture collected in a webbing as delicate as spider silk.

It would have been easier to leave the shards on the floor for the morning; if my father was coming in, he wouldn’t have thrown a rock in the first place. He had thrown it to scare me. He did that sort of thing when he was hurt. Still, I fumbled in the darkness for the broom. The pink stone glittered in the moonlight as I collected the glass into a dustpan, double-bagged the shards, and dropped them into the waste bin. I swept again, but not well enough — without realizing, I’d left a trail of blood from my heel down the hall and to my bedroom. In the morning there was a dry, splotchy stain at the foot of my bed the color of a pressed poppy. Through the door, the uneasy whinny of my mother’s voice.

I approach my father’s door and knock three times, hard. He might be downstairs or in his workshop. He doesn’t hold a job, so at the very least I know he’s somewhere on the property. He never leaves.

I don’t know what I am expecting, but his prompt answer stuns me. For the first time today I realize what I’ve done – I nearly gasp when the cold shock grips my bones. I want to run. The door swings open and we are face to face; the sunlight stretches and ends at the front step, so my eyes take a moment to unscramble all the darkness beyond the doorway. He stands six inches higher than me, grey hair and a pin-sharp nose. Across his jaw spans a russet birthmark the size of a hand, which tapers off beside his left earlobe. An electric moment of recognizance passes between us — his beard has grown out now, faded and grey. His eyes are flatter than I remember. And, in the two years that have passed, the razor-blade lines of his jaw are muted by skin having grown patchy with age. I realize I have grown up while I was away, too. I can see he’s surprised. I’ve hit my growth spurt, cut my hair close to my scalp, and wear clothes that fit me now. It must be shocking to see me in an outfit that I have not been wearing since I was nine or ten years old, each garment having shrunk around my developing figure and bleached-grey from sunning on the clothesline. I’d left nearly everything with him. All the things I own now are things I’ve bought for myself.

“Charlotte,” he says. “It’s been a long time.” Past his surprise I can see he is already exhausted. My appearance has let the air out of him, as though all this time he’s held his breath. Now, deflated, he looks like he needs to be put to bed. If he’s happy to see me he’s hidden it well.

“I brought you some sushi,” I say. “I was making some at home, so.”

“Your mother’s home,” he says, tone landing somewhere between correction and clarification.

I don’t answer that. I swing my backpack around so that it hugs my chest and tear the zipper down to the end of its track. With the other hand I shimmy out the plate and hand it to him. As he watches his head dips forward; I notice as his cheek catches light, the port wine birthmark jumps from muted to gasping red in an instant.

He doesn’t invite me in, I don’t expect him to. Instead he says, “I haven’t made lunch yet. So,” he grunts, “this is good.”

“I hope you like it.” I am all nerves now. Sweat suddenly begins to run down my back. My stomach squeezes into a raisin. I can’t believe I’ve done this.

“I’ll eat it,” he says. His tone encourages me a little. My father is a good cook, but he had me prepare most of the meals when we lived together. I wonder how long it’s been since someone has made him something to eat. Maybe two years. Guilt gives my heart a squeeze.

Before he got sick and angry we cared for one another. And I can tell, right now, this is why I am here. I am not here for the man who heard voices, who punched walls, who snapped his jaw like an animal at ghosts in the room. I am here waiting for a younger man, who looks just so, to fill the doorframe. With a port wine birthmark and both knees still working. But, my father in front of me now, his grey eyes narrowed to slits in the sunlight, I know the man in my memory is not coming back. I think I already knew all of this somewhere, but now the knowledge sticks in my body and holds. 

“Stay here,” he says. “I have something for you, too.”

He closes the door and disappears behind the thick curtains that stifle the sunlight. I don’t have to see it to know that no lights are on — we always lived in the dark. Forty-five seconds pass. I stand so still that my whole body begins shaking, as though I’m doing a plank midair.

The door opens again and there he is, holding a tall mason jar with both his hands.

“From this year’s batch,” he says. It’s maple syrup; I can tell by its amber color, the way little opaque sugar crystals, gathered together like rock candy, stir at the bottom. Every year we’d spend a week boiling down tree sap, minding the fire in shifts as one day spilled into the next. He’d call me in sick from school to tend it. Looking at the jar in his hand I can nearly feel the sweet condensation on my bangs, the scent of burning sugar and sweat clinging to my clothes. I can sense the clamminess in my boots and steady sting in my eyes like ghost limbs of a younger self. I am there and here all at once. I pull the jar under my arm and smile.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I think I finally got it right this year,” he says. “Lower heat, longer burn.”

“I’m excited to try it.” I’m not sure what else to say.

“School’s been good?” The transaction now complete, my father trades his weight between one leg and the other.

“School’s great.” And it is. I’ve never been on the honor roll before; this year will be the first. Now that I’m allowed to leave the house when I want to, I see friends over the weekends. I go to an after-school club too — I didn’t make try-outs for this semester’s run of  The Secret Garden, but I’m helping build the set.

I want to return the courtesy by asking him how things have been, but I’m afraid of the way his answer will gut me. So instead I say, “I can’t wait for the weather to cool down.”

“It’s right around the corner, can’t you feel it?” My father loves talking about the weather. He doesn’t quite smile, but his lips twitch.

“I can, yeah.”

A pause.

“Well, I think it’s time I sit down and eat,” he says. I finally see it, a flash of sadness rip through his expression. Every muscle in his face tightens. He shrinks into the doorway and stands stiffly to its side, as though bracing for a blow.

I nod a hollow nod. “I hope you like it.” I’m repeating myself but I have nothing else I want him to hear. I just want him to like it. Watching him cringe away feels like pressing my hand to a burner.

He says goodbye and I say goodbye. It’s not at all like the first time. This time it feels like we are in agreement.

Once the door is closed I shimmy the jar of syrup into one of my backpack pockets and zip it shut. I bide my time a little, until I’m sure he’s walked away. After a few moments of certainty I unzip a smaller pocket at the front of my bag and grip the glittering piece of granite lodged inside.

I hold it out beside the azalea and drop it. There’s no ceremony about it, I just want it back where it belongs.

I walk up the driveway to Baker’s peak and stare at the hill that plunges downward in front of me. From up here my father’s house is barely visible; I see clippings of grey siding through plumes of blue-green pine needles, flashes of pink azalea petals, and nothing else. The jar of maple syrup is heavier than the sushi was, but the weight is reassuring. It makes me feel like I’ve left with more than I came. I don’t use my bike pedals on the way down; I let my legs go limp as the earth flies beneath the wheels. It sounds like a fishing rod unreeling into the daylight.