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Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Now I Think I Understand

The whirring of the coffee grinder masked the sound of Berkeley’s nails on the hardwood floor as he ran through the front door in search of Ellie. The pup jumped up and leaned his front paws against the back of Ellie’s thighs in search of attention, which he received after Ellie made him sit at her feet. The pup sauntered off once he was content with the few pets that Ellie gave him, which caused her to smile at his independent nature. She turned her attention back to making coffee, slowing down her movements as much as she could since she also heard the soft steps of her father entering the room behind her.

“Pour the water and sit down Ellie,” her father said sternly. Leon Brandt was strictly a no-funny-business type of man, which was partially why he excelled in his legal profession. It made him a harsh family man, which left no room for emotional bonds in their relationship, particularly since Ellie’s angsty teenage behaviour quickly spiralled to her acting out and breaking the law.

Ellie rolled her eyes in the safety of her position facing away from her father and reached for the kettle, which had been indicating the water inside had reached its boiling point around the same time her dog had entered the room. Ellie filled the french press to the fill line and placed the plunger and the lid in place, before grabbing the press and setting it in the middle of the kitchen table, beside the two coffee mugs she had already set out.

“Why would you sent Matt to Florida, Dad?” Ellie asked, not wanting to grant her father the advantage of asking the first question.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to say no to Matthew,”

“What’s the point of me coming back here if I have to be manipulated by you in the process?” Ellie was furious by her father’s nonchalant response to her first question. She found herself focusing on a few deep breaths to calm herself down, not wanting to become flustered this early in what was sure to be a long conversation.

“Can’t a father want his daughter back in time for the holidays? You’ve been gone long enough, it was time you came home,” Leon’s expression was emotionless as he spoke, which amazed Ellie. She couldn’t believe he was able to be so emotionally detached from the topic. He was the reason she hadn’t come home in years; the reason she was sent away in the first place, yet here he was, audacious enough to place the blame on his daughter.

“How dare you,” Ellie paused, needing a moment to gather her thoughts. Her father’s eyebrow twitched upward slightly at her words, but he otherwise maintained an expressionless gaze.

“I might have been a difficult teenager, but you’re the one who shipped me off to the other side of the country and washed your hands of me. Don’t you dare act like my absence over the past few years was my decision. I went through hell after graduation, and you weren’t there to support me. You stopped answering my calls. The only reason I knew you were still alive was because the direct deposit into my bank account was reflective of my spending habits each month.”

“You left me no choice, and you know that. I did what I had to do to protect you,”

“Protect me?” Ellie exclaimed, “What part of sending me off to a different state and forcing me to live on my own was protecting me? How was forcing me to leave behind all my friend protecting me?”

“You needed to get away from those boys, Ellie, and you know it. Look how on-track you are to becoming successful. You have made something of yourself, and you managed to do it without their influence. I wanted to protect you from a life of bad decisions and removing them from your life was the best way to do so.”

“You wanted to protect me from those guys, yet you sent one of them to come to get me because you knew that he’d be the only way I’d come back; classic. You mean you wanted to protect your pristine image, Dad. You weren’t really that worried about what was to become of me. Isn’t that why that room upstairs is completely void of anything I left behind before leaving California?”

“Don’t be so childish as to be upset over redecoration of a room, Ellie. This is my house, and I can do as I please with it,” Her father’s tone was patronizing, which had Ellie seeing red.

“You wanna talk ownership and decision making? How about my body and my rights to it, Dad? Let’s talk about how fucked up it was that you gave me an ultimatum that you never followed through on. I gave up a child. Do you understand that? I was so fucking scared that I would upset you more than I already had that I called the number of the clinic that you had given me and had that abortion that you pressured me into. That was just an image concern too, wasn’t it? You couldn’t have an unwed teenage mother as a daughter. But the jokes on me, because past that phone call when I told you the procedure was done, I never fucking heard from you again. That is, until a few weeks ago, when you decided it was appropriate to call me out of the blue and demand that I return home.”

Leon cooly poured the now brewed coffee for himself and his daughter as she ranted. He placed the almost empty press back in the middle of the table and pushed one mug toward Ellie before pulling the other backward for himself. Ellie watched him intently as he wrapped his fingers around the light grey ceramic cup. Leon welcomed the warmth against his icy cold hands; he was finding that recently, his extremities were always cold regardless of the weather.

“You’ll understand it one day Ellie, but focusing on your education and making that call was the best decision you could have made for your future. It might not seem like it right now, but you’ll look back and appreciate that I looked out for you,” Ellie watched as her father shuffled his coffee between his hands before finally bringing the mug to his lips to take a sip. She wasn’t sure if it was her hangover hitting her at full force or if it was her physical reaction to her father’s words that was making her stomach uneasy, but the coffee before her couldn’t look less appealing at that moment.

“You might think that, but it shouldn’t have been your decision to make. How am I supposed to tell Zack that he could have had a child, but I was blackmailed into terminating the pregnancy in hopes of making you happy,”

“Ellie, you need to understand one thing here. I never forced you to do anything. I merely suggested to you what I thought was best for you in going forward, but your hand was never forced, and your decisions were made on your own. If you haven’t told that Baker boy about the fact that your negligence produced a child, then that was your decision. If you thought that sending you to school was some sort of conspiracy, then I’m sorry, but I knew that since you had failed to apply anywhere on your own, that I would only be able to play a hand in your acceptance at my alma mater.”

Ellie felt a lump in her throat form as she digested her father’s words. She spent so much time being angry, but now hearing him explain himself made her feel foolish. His words were a bitter pill to swallow. At the time, Ellie had been mad at her father for not allowing her to make her own choices like an adult, but it was in that moment, years later, that she realized that she had the opportunity to make whatever choice she felt appropriate. It was her evident lack of experience and fear of the unknown that resulted in her making decisions that were so heavily influenced by her father. It was her anger and naivety that allowed her to blame him for all this time.

“Why did you stop answering or returning my calls?” Ellie asked after a few moments of silence engulfed the father-daughter duo.

“I didn’t want you to worry; I wanted you to stay focused on school and excel,” he sighed. It was visibly evident that he struggled with verbalizing an update on his health that his daughter wasn’t ready to hear. Ellie scoffed and stood from her seat at the table, keeping her coffee mug in hand as she leaned back against the kitchen counter, needing to put a little more physical space between her and her father.

“I’ve been sick for a very long time, but I can’t deny it any longer. I’m dying, Ellie.”



Zack hated himself for getting up and leaving a speechless Ellie behind the second he walked out of Johnny’s. He was still mulling over their meeting the next morning, and the headache that was setting in was a reminder of the second bad decision he had made that night: coming home and drinking himself oblivious. Zack rubbed his temples tentatively to distract himself from the throbbing he was experiencing that felt like it was radiating towards the back of his skull.

He was so angry at Ellie for continually closing herself off and isolating herself from him. All he wanted was to break down the walls that she built around herself, but he knew very well that was a task that was too risky given Ellie’s emotional state. He hated how different they were when it came to handling the turmoil in their lives. Ellie buried her problems while Zack aggressively dealt with them head-on.

He massaged the lower part of his left palm, where his carpals and meta-carpals met under his thumb, with his other hand. The pain he was feeling was a reminder of how hard he had hit his steering wheel out of frustration the night before. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but it made holding onto the wheel difficult; he was worried that he had potentially fractured a bone, which would be detrimental to his guitar playing.

“I just don’t know how to be us after all that’s happened,”

Zack had found himself replaying Ellie’s words over as he drove home from the bar, as he settled into a drunken stupor before crawling into bed that evening. Her words were fresh in his mind from the night before and the more he found himself dwelling on the situation, the more he found he was getting angrier with himself for expecting so much out of her. She had reached out to him on the first night that she was back in California in years and he walked out on her after all but begging her to come back into his life. All he wanted to do was to call her and apologize; to meet her for coffee and let her rant without any interruption, like he should have the night before. Zack sighed and blew his black hair out of his eyes as he rolled over to look at the clock beside his bed. It was nearing 10 am on Christmas Eve, which meant that he had familial obligations for the next two days. He would call her at the very least. A small part of him hoped that the tensions between Ellie and her father would be enough that she would need to get out of the house.

He also realized, in that very moment, that he had so easily described the feelings that he and Ellie had once shared for one another as love. He had spent the last three years and four and a half months since Ellie left for school (not that he had been counting) denying there were any real feelings there when his bandmates had pressed the issue, yet he had casually stated that he and Ellie had been in love.

“Such a fucking idiot,” he cursed under his breath as fumbled out of bed and searched through his drawer for a pair of boxers to throw on his naked frame. He paid no attention to his sister’s curious glances as he walked past her to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Zack didn’t even hear his sister call his name as he paused mid-pour, distractedly holding the coffee pot above his mug as he responded to the chime of an incoming message on his phone. He was grinned and returned the pot of coffee to the burner on the machine with such enthusiasm that caused his sister to call out his name again, this time with a scolding tone for his rough treatment of the appliance. Zack didn’t care as he continued to reread the message he had just received on the screen of his T-Mobile Sidekick: an apology he didn’t deserve from Ellie, followed by a request to meet for coffee.

Zack had beat Ellie to their favourite local coffee shop. There were two mugs on the small table he had secured for them, and he jumped to his feet to engulf her in a hug when she approached. Ellie was immediately grateful for the security of his embrace and for the coffee mocha with whipped topping that was waiting for her. She smiled and thanked him for not only buying the drink but remembering what her go-to comfort beverage was and cradled the mug between her two hands as she settled into the chair across from him. Zack brushed off the gesture as ‘not a big deal’ and sipped from his black Americano as he waited for Ellie to initiate the conversation.

“My dad is dying, Zack,” Ellie whispered as she stared into the whipped cream that topped her drink. The second those words were out of her mouth, she was mentally reliving the conversation that was had in her father’s kitchen that morning. The sound her coffee cup made as it hit the tile floor and shattered, followed quickly by the sound of her hot coffee splashing against the floor played over in her mind like a recording. Had she not been leaning against the counter, she would have hit the floor as well given the way that her knees had buckled upon receiving the news. Her father didn’t make eye contact with her as he continued to disclose the details of his illness.

Zack was much more patient with Ellie than he had been the evening before as she slowly recalled how her conversation with her father about his illness had unfolded that morning. He kept his commentary to a minimum over her dull moments of silence where she kept her attention focused on the drink in her hands. He didn’t want to say something to upset Ellie like he had the night before, but he also honestly wasn’t sure what to say in such a delicate situation. Learning that her father had hidden a lung cancer diagnosis from her for 6 months longer than she had been away from school was shocking as it was. Realistically, Zack had no clue how to address that, let alone the fact that the treatments were no longer working and that the heart attack her father had suffered that prompted his call to his daughter had led his doctors to discover a tumour on his heart that ultimately meant he had a mere few months to live.

Zack eventually reached out across the table to take Ellie’s hand in his own to stop her from distractedly spinning her empty mug between her hands. She had been using the cup as a mechanism to distract herself from where she knew the conversation needed to go. She wasn’t really ready to give Zack the answers to all the questions he had been asking since she left but she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer.

“There’s nothing I can say to you right now Ellie that is going to make any of this any better, but just know that I’m here for you whenever you need it. I’m just a phone call away,” Zack spoke before she had the chance.

“You say this now, but there’s so much more I need to tell you. Let’s get out of here and take a walk on the beach,” Ellie sighed as Zack eagerly hopped up from his seat and pocketed his wallet and phone. She was about to break his heart, and she hated herself for it.

Notes

Zack and Ellie both are getting the answers they've been searching for the last few years. It's a Christmas miracle.... maybe? Is Ellie finally going to tell Zack her secrets? How is Zack going to handle it? How is Ellie going to handle her father's newly disclosed illness?

I'm working super hard at getting some updates out really soon to make up for how inactive I've been lately. Hope you all stick around!

xo



Comments

Loved the update :)

Loved the update. I hope all goes okay in Cali :)

@Joy1979
@SynyaterVenegance13

Thank you both for your comments and support for this story. I'm sorry this is coming to you so late, but the next chapter is here! :)

Loved the updates :D

Update soon please.

Joy1979 Joy1979
6/2/18