“That’s my dad. My dad.” I slap the door. “He’s on the other side. The pixies will get him.”
Nick shows me his teeth.
“I can’t lose him again, Nick.”
The wolf snarls like he’s ready to bite. My head jerks back and away, but then I steady myself.
“Get . . . out . . . of . . . the . . . way.”
Pushing against his thick neck, I slam my hands against him over and over again, pummeling him. He doesn’t budge.
“Move!” I order. “Move.”
“Zara, is there a wolf in there with you? Do not trust him,” my dad’s voice says, calmly, really calmly.
I grab a fistful of fur and freeze. All at once it hits me that something is not right. My dad would never be calm if I was in my bedroom with a wolf. He’d be stressed and screaming, breaking the door down, kicking it in like he did once when I was really little and had accidentally locked myself in the bathroom and couldn’t get the lock out of the bolt because it was so old. He’d kicked that door down, splintering the wood, clutching me to him. He’d kissed my forehead over and over again.
“I’d never let anything happen to you, princess,” he’d said. “You’re my baby.”
My dad would be kicking the door in. My dad would be saving me.
“Let me in,” he says. “Zara . . .”
Letting go of Nick, I stagger backward. My hands fly up to my mouth, covering it.
Nick stops snarling at me and wags his fluffy tail.
How would my dad know that it is a wolf in here and not a dog? How would he know that it isn’t pixies?
I shudder. Nick pounds next to me, pressing his side against my legs. I drop my hands and plunge my fingers into his fur, burying them there, looking for something. Maybe comfort. Maybe warmth. Maybe strength. Maybe all three.
“You’re dead,” I say and a sob breaks through my chest, exploding out of me. “You can’t be here.”
“I’m not dead, Zara.”
I move away from Nick, grab a pillow instead, clutching it against me like a shield. The memory of my dad on the floor assails me. I see the water bottle rolling across the wood. I see his mouth, loose, open, aching for air.
“Yes, you are. You’re dead,” I say. “You left me. I saw you. You left me. And now I’m here in Maine where everything is crazy and you can’t run at night and it’s cold.”
“Zara, let me in. I’ll explain.”
I throw the Annual Report on Human Rights 2009 at the door. It wallops against the wood. Nick ducks and scrambles out of the way. I grab another annual report and smash it against the doorknob.
“You liar! You can’t explain. You can’t! You left me!”
Sobbing, heaving, I race at the door and hit it with my fists.
“You left.”
He was the best hugger, my dad. He was an encompassing safe hugger, like a giant teddy bear, only warmer.
“Just let me in, Zara.” He sounds angry now, the way he sounded when I talked back to my mom. He sounds just like my dad.
One step forward, another. Nick’s wolf voice lets out a low rumbling growl. I hold my finger to my lips, trying to tell him to be quiet.
My fingers tremble but they still unlock the door.
“Open the door for me, Zara,” he says.
Nick nudges me away from the door and I let him.
“No,” I say. “If you were really my father you could open it yourself.”
There is no answer.
I knew that. I knew there would be no answer.
Nick nuzzles my hand. My fingers plunge into the fur.
“Why don’t you open the door then?” I ask. “It’s unlocked.”
Something shrieks inside of me, something violent and desperate and real.
“Go ahead!” I scream, wild and lost, alone but not alone. Nick pushes his side in front of me, blocking me from the door and whatever is beyond it. “Why aren’t you, huh? Why aren’t you opening the goddamn door?”
I stare at the doorknob. It doesn’t move. He knows he can’t fool me.
Nick was right. Pixies can only go into homes and places they’ve been invited into or places they’ve been in before.
My stepdad has been in this room a million times. If it were him he would have just walked right in the moment I unlocked the door.
But it isn’t him. He isn’t magically back from the dead.
It’s someone else. Or something else, something that has been in the house but not in the room. It’s something that sounds just like my dad.
“Just come to me, Zara. I need you to come to me.”
“What?”
“My need . . . I can’t hold it back any longer . . . it’s huge.”
“What are you?” I ask, staggering backward, still staring at the doorknob. “What the hell are you?”
Whatever he is roars with rage. He storms up and down the stairs and it sounds as if he has summoned a tornado to trash Grammy Betty’s house. Books crash. Glass breaks. I close my eyes and cover my ears. Nick growls.
I crumple on my bed. For a second, I believed that what I wanted more than anything in the world had come true. For a second, I believed that my dad was back. But he isn’t. He’s gone again. He’s really, truly gone and I know it. I know I’ll never see him again no matter how much I want to.
The candle in me has blown out and I’m afraid, really, really afraid, because my biggest fear is true. I have to live my life without my dad, my running partner, the guy who taught me about Amnesty and sang John Lennon songs really off-key.
I sob and clutch my stuffed bunny. Nick leaps up on my bed and squashes his body against mine, nuzzling my face with his muzzle until I lift it enough for him to lick away my tears.
While the pixie rages downstairs, I wrap my arms around Nick’s furry body and cry into him. My shoulders quake from the effort of it. He whimpers once or twice and tries to lick my face some more, but mostly he watches the door, and eventually I stop with the pathetic sobbing stuff and just keep crying. And eventually the crying stops too because I am hugging myself against Nick, hoping that everything isn’t real, that it is somehow a dream, but if that were true, it means that I would lose Nick, too. It would mean he isn’t real, and I really, really want him to be real. I want that even though I know that I’ll probably lose him, like I lost my dad and my mom, like I lost myself.