The Daughter They Sacrificed Chose a New Life novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terminal B

Her professor meets her at the gate with a slice of birthday cake, and in Los Angeles Saskia gets a photo of her father in a hospital bed.

My professor was waiting at the gate in Terminal B with two coffees and a white bakery box.

She was fifty-six, small and quick, with gray hair cut short and paint under her thumbnails that no soap had ever gotten out.

She looked at my face and then at my one suitcase.

"That's all of it?" she asked.

"That's everything I own that Chloe hasn't taken."

She handed me a coffee and didn't say anything else about it.

That was why I had texted her instead of anyone else.

We boarded at nine.

She had booked me the window seat, and I watched Boston get small under the wing.

My phone had thirty-one missed calls. Fourteen were from Clayton.

I turned it face down on my knee.

Over Ohio, my professor set the bakery box on my tray table.

"Your admissions form had your birthday on it," she said. "You turned eighteen yesterday. I looked it up this morning."

Inside was a single slice of lemon cake with a plastic fork.

There was no candle, because the airline would have had something to say about it.

I looked at the cake for a long time.

Nobody had put a cake in front of me on my own birthday since I was nine.

"Eat it," she said. "Then tell me what you want to paint first."

I ate the whole slice with my eyes stinging.

Then I told her I wanted to paint my mother's hands, and she laughed so loudly the man across the aisle looked over.

"Good," she said. "Start there."

Somewhere over Nevada I asked her about money.

"My card is frozen. I have two hundred and twelve dollars from tutoring. And my grandmother left me nine thousand dollars that my mother holds until I'm twenty-one, but the bank said I could ask for it at eighteen."

"Ask on Monday," she said. "In the meantime, my spare room has a bed and a window. The rent is that you wash your own brushes."

"Professor, I can't just move in."

"Saskia. You've been paying rent your whole life. Let somebody else pay for a week."

I turned toward the window so she wouldn't see my face.

It was ninety degrees when we landed.

She drove a dented green hatchback with a canvas stretcher in the back seat, and she took the freeway at eighty with one hand on the wheel.

Her house was in Silver Lake, up a hill so steep the car groaned.

The spare room had a narrow bed, a desk, and a window full of lemon tree.

I sat down on the bed and listened to the quiet.

No one was calling me down to be useful.

I took my phone out at last.

Clayton had written: Pick up. Mom is losing it.

Clayton again: You're making this harder on everybody.

Clayton again, forty minutes later: Chloe hasn't eaten since the party. Hope you're happy.

Nothing from Dad.

I was about to turn the phone off when a photo arrived from Mom.

It showed Dad in a hospital bed with a plastic bracelet on his wrist, looking at the camera with his mouth tight.

Under it, she had written: You did this. Come home and apologize to your father.

I stared at his hand on the blanket.

It was shaking.

My professor knocked on the door frame. She had a dish towel over her shoulder.

"Dinner's in ten minutes," she said. Then she saw my face. "What is it?"

I held the phone out.

She read it twice and handed it back.

"Is it true?"

"I don't know," I said.

I looked at the photo again.

Dad had a hospital bracelet on his wrist, but he was still wearing his gray cardigan, buttoned up to the collar.

There was no monitor behind him and no line in his arm.

Mom had taken the picture from the foot of the bed, and Chloe's pale hand was holding the blanket flat at the edge of the frame.

I told myself that people got photographed in all kinds of ways.

"I'm going to call him," I said.

"Eat first," my professor said. "Whatever he says, you'll hear it better with a plate in front of you."

I followed her down the hall to a kitchen that smelled like garlic and turpentine.

She had set two places at a table covered in sketches.

She moved a stack of them aside so I would have room.

I ate her pasta and kept the phone beside my plate.

It didn't buzz again.

When I called Dad's number after dinner, it went straight to voicemail.

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