Where You Are. J.H. Trumble

way. I want to close this chapter in my life and move on; I want him to die, but I’m so afraid that makes me some kind of monster.”

      “Robert,” he says, reaching across the table and laying his hand on mine. His fingers curl around the edge of my hand and dig into my palm. “I don’t know your dad, and I don’t know what’s happened in the past, but I do feel like I know you. You are not a monster. I suspect that what you feel or don’t feel toward your dad has more to do with self-defense than it does any kind of pathology.”

      I look at his hand gripping mine, and I desperately want to turn my hand over and feel our palms meet, our fingers lace together. I force my hand to remain where it is. “He doesn’t love me,” I say, lifting my eyes to meet his.

      “Are you sure about that?”

      “He resents me. Sometimes I think it’s because I have the opportunity to become what he couldn’t. I don’t know. The crazy thing is, he didn’t want to be a doctor any more than I do. But in the Westfall family, if you’re not a doctor, you’re nothing. They blame my mom for getting pregnant, which is just stupid. She quit school—another Westfall sin—got a job, and supported us while dad played at being a student. The seizures started during his final year of med school, and he just never finished. He’s never even held a job. But do you know that his sisters still tell people he’s a doctor when they talk about him or introduce him. That status is everything to them; it’s everything to him. And I’m . . . nothing.”

      He retrieves his hand and props his chin on his fist again and studies me. My hand feels naked, and an ache blossoms in my chest. A silence grows between us, like he’s working out some problem in his head, and I’m waiting for the answer. Then he asks, “Do you know what chaos theory is?”

      “Yeah. The butterfly effect.”

      “The math of messes,” he says. “Tiny differences in starting conditions—the beat of a butterfly’s wings, a temperature differential of half a degree, a bottle withheld a few beats too long, an ear infection that went undetected for a day or more—any little difference can lead to a totally different outcome later on. The entire Back to the Future movie trilogy was based on that very concept.” He shrugs. “Who knows what little things made your dad the way he is. Maybe what he took from his experiences left him insecure and unable to develop into an independent, fully functioning adult and a loving father. I don’t know.