I never expected to be in an RV again, but it's kind of nice, really. Comforting, like . . . Dale nudging back into our lives, just to check in and let us know he's rooting for us. God, I miss him. After all this time. Still miss him . . . still miss them all.
I'm separated from the others – everyone but Rick, Michonne, Glenn, and Aaron, who are all ahead of us in the car – by a curtain in a doorway. There's the front room with the dining table and driver's seat and then there's this room, with two beds, and I'm on one. It's pretty comfortable, even if I can't sleep. I know I'm not safe, but . . . I can almost pretend I am, watching the sky and the tops of trees fly by in the window above my head, and listening to my people whisper to one another a curtain away. We're going to a place with steel walls, and maybe things will be okay there. I have to hope. Hope is helping. So are the expired pain pills we found in the back of one of the RV's cupboards. I feel fuzzier than I probably should. But my hand isn't screaming.
The curtain to the front room rustles open. Dad steps through. "Told you to get some sleep." He closes the curtain behind him.
"Told you I couldn't get any." I sit up and brush my hair back. Oily. The place we're going to, it would have showers. "Everything goin' okay?"
"Still got a ways to go. We'll see." He feels my forehead and then sits on the bed across from me. He sets his crossbow on the floor next to my compound bow, rests his head in his hands for a minute, then puts his hands together, looks at the curtain, at the sky above my head, and finally at me again. He pauses. "We okay?"
I crack a knuckle. I didn't think we would talk about serious stuff again for a while. I figured we'd wait a week or so, maybe almost die a couple of times. "Yeah . . ."
He rubs his hands together, flinches at nothing. "'Bout yesterday."
Okay. We are talking about this now. I actually don't think I mind that much. That might be the pain pills, though.
"What I was doing," he says, not looking at me. "With the cigarette? That ain't okay. That's never okay."
"I know."
He licks his lips. Twitches his fingers around. My mother never had trouble finding words. Dad always has. At least when it really matters. "You asked if I'd done it before. Never like you, never like that." He nods at my left arm. "But . . . yeah, I did it some. After . . . after I got outta my old man's house."
"Why then?"
Dad takes a minute to answer, swaying back and forth with the movement of the RV. "You get used to hurtin' after a while," he says softly. "Like anything else." He clears his throat. "I just started doin' a lotta stupid stuff, eventually. Mostly with your uncle. You don't need to know 'bout any of that . . . But I did understand. When I realized what you were doin' to yourself, back at the prison. I got it. That's why it scared me so much. I know how low you gotta get, before you start doin' that."
"I wish you'd told me then."
"Maybe I shoulda. There are a lotta things I shoulda done differently with you."
"That's not true."
He snorts.
"It's not. You're a great dad, I've told you that a thousand times." I want to hug him, want him to hug me back, but if I go to him now, this will be over, and this can't be over yet. A moment like this is too rare and valuable between us. "Why'd you get that low yesterday?"
He wrings his hands and takes a long time to answer. "I did wrong by you after the prison, Syd. I'm gonna feel like shit for that for the rest of my life. But it was never about not wantin' you back, baby girl, it . . . I was just sick of hopin' for things. Believin' in anything, just to have it fall apart. I didn't think I could do it anymore . . . But she made me."
"Beth."
He takes a deep, rough breath. "If it had been just me and Leah, we wouldn'ta gotten anywhere. Not then. But Beth . . . Shegave me somethin' to care about. When I wanted to stop carin'. Don't even know why. She was just . . . If she hadn't been there, I don't know what I woulda done, where I woulda been. But I know I wouldn'ta wound up chasin' after a car that led me to you. So I owe her everything . . . And I let her down, and I ain't been handlin' that very well –"
"No, that's bullshit."
He looks up sharply, more surprised than anything.
"It is. It's bullshit." It's amazing how if you say something forcefully enough, you can keep your voice from cracking. "You did . . . everything you could. You look in my eyes and tell me you didn't try like hell to save her. That you didn't give it everything you had."
He rubs his face.
"You can't. Because you did try like hell, you did give it everything you had. Just like she wanted you to after the prison, right? That's who you are. Even if you forgot for a while, she knew it. I know it. You've made up for anything wrong you did, with her and me both. I promise. And she would tell you the same thing. You know she would." I clamp my mouth shut, hold my tongue to the roof of my mouth, because at this point, I would say anything, talk for hours, if Dad could feel okay and I could feel okay and we could just be normal again, for a little while. I need my father. I would give anything.
He holds his hand out to me. I jump up and throw my arms around him. He wraps me up. Something settles into place inside of me.
Dad's hand clasps the wrist of my bad hand. "I let that walker get you," he whispers. "I'm so sorry, Little Bit."
"It's okay," I whisper back, and even though we're both crying, it really is okay, for right now.