Outside the Lines Read online

  FEATURING A WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS READERS CLUB GUIDE

  A WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

  “Like a gorgeous dark jewel, Hatvany’s novel explores the tragedy

  of a mind gone awry, a tangled bond of father and daughter, and the

  way hope and love sustain us. It does what the best fiction does: it makes

  us see and experience the world differently.” —CAROLINE LEAVITT,

  New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You

  When Eden was ten years old she found her father, David, bleeding out on the bathroom floor. The suicide attempt led to her parents’ divorce, and David all but vanished from Eden’s life. Since childhood, she has heard from him only rarely, just enough to know he’s been living on the streets and struggling with mental illness. But lately, there has been no word at all.

  Now in her thirties, Eden decides to go look for her father, so she can forgive him at last, and finally move forward. When her search uncovers other painful truths—not only the secrets her mother has kept from her, but also the agonizing question of whether David, after all these years, even wants to be found—Eden is forced to decide just how far she’ll go in the name of love.

  “Compelling . . . a fascinating look at mental

  illness—the exuberance and self-loathing, creativity

  and destruction that then reverberate against

  the lives of family and loved ones.”

  —JULIETTE FAY, author of Shelter Me

  AMY HATVANY is the author of three other novels, including Best Kept Secret. She lives in Seattle with her family.

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  COVER DESIGN BY JANET PERR • PHOTOGRAPH OF MAN AND CHILD: CLAUDIA DEWALD/VETTA/GETTY IMAGES PHOTOGRAPH OF PAINTINGS: THE AGENCY COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

  More Advance Praise forOutside the Lines

  “Extraordinary. With her trademark insight and compassion for her characters, Amy Hatvany has written a beautiful and moving book.”

  —Melissa Senate, author of The Love Goddess’ Cooking School

  “Outside the Lines is a sad, funny, heartbreaking and heartwarming novel that explores the boundaries of love and how we break those boundaries in its name. You’ll want to read this book slowly. When you’re finished, you’ll want to read it again.”

  —Rebecca Rasmussen, author of The Bird Sisters

  Praise for Best Kept Secret

  “I’m telling everyone about Best Kept Secret. It’s the realistic and ultimately hopeful story of Cadence, whose glass of wine at the end of the day becomes two . . . then . . . three . . . then a bottle. I love that Cadence feels so familiar, she could be my neighbor, my friend, or even my sister.”

  —Jennifer Weiner, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “I was transfixed by Cadence and her heart-wrenching dilemma. The writing is visceral, the problems are real, and there are no clear solutions. You won’t want to put it down.”

  —Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author of Something Borrowed

  “Touching, hopeful, and so real . . . Amy Hatvany writes with depth and compassion about a secret many have kept as she offers the miracle chance of starting over. I loved these characters and this novel.”

  —Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Boat

  “Rarely do I find a book that stays with me long after I’ve finished it, but this is definitely one. The writing is warm, witty, thoughtful, and that ending—I’m still thinking about it.”

  —Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay

  “One of the most compelling books I’ve read in years. This heartfelt, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting novel will start an important dialogue about the secrets we keep . . . and it could even save lives.”

  —Sarah Pekkanen, author of Skipping a Beat

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  Also by Amy Hatvany

  Best Kept Secret

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

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  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

  is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Amy Hatvany

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

  thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

  Washington Square Press Subsidiary Rights Department,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition February 2012

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Meredith Ray

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hatvany, Amy.

  Outside the lines : a novel / Amy Hatvany.—1st Washington Square Press trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Mentally ill parents—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.

  3. Adult children—Family relationships—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.A8658O97 2012

  813'.6—dc22

  2011018727

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4054-0

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4055-7 (eBook)

  For Stephan

  Contents

  Chapter 1: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 2: January 1989 Eden

  Chapter 3: January 1989 David

  Chapter 4: January 1989 Eden

  Chapter 5: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 6: February 1989 David

  Chapter 7: February 1989 Eden

  Chapter 8: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 9: February 1989 David

  Chapter 10: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 11: March 1989 Eden

  Chapter 12: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 13: March 1989 David

  Chapter 14: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 15: March 1989 Eden

  Chapter 16: April 1989 David

  Chapter 17: October 2010 Eden

  Chapter 18: April 1989 Eden

  Chapter 19: April 1989 David

  Chapter 20: November 2010 Eden

  Chapter 21: May 1989 Eden

  Chapter 22: May 1989 David

  Chapter 23: November 2010 Eden

  Chapter 24: May 1989 Eden

  Chapter 25: May 1989 David

  Chapter 26: November 2010 Eden

  Chapter 27: January 1990 Eden

  Chapter 28: January 1990 David

  Chapter 29: November 2010 Eden

  Chapter 30: September 1994 Eden

  Chapter 31: August 1999 David

  Chapter 32: December 2010 Eden

  Chapter 33: Jul
y 2007 David

  Chapter 34: December 2010 Eden

  Chapter 35: December 2010 David

  Chapter 36: December 2010 Eden

  Chapter 37: December 2010 David

  Chapter 38: December 2010 Eden

  Chapter 39: December 2010 David

  Chapter 40: December 2010 Eden

  Chapter 41: December 2010/January 2011 Eden

  Chapter 42: May 2011 David

  Acknowledgments

  A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.

  —Nikos Kazantzakis

  outside

  the lines

  October 2010

  Eden

  The call came at three thirty in the morning, a time slot predestined for the arrival of bad news. No one calls to tell you you’ve won the lottery in the middle of the night. Your boyfriend doesn’t call you to propose.

  The shrill of my cell phone dug into my dreams and wrenched me from sleep. This is it, I thought. He’s dead. Six months ago, I’d given the morgue at Seattle General my number along with a copy of a twenty-year-old picture of my father. “I don’t care what time it is,” I told the hospital administrator. “If he turns up, I’ll come right away.”

  The picture was the last one I had of him. In it, his blue eyes were bright and his smile was wide. My father was a tall man, whip thin but sinewy and strong. He had wavy black hair like mine and wore it parted down the middle and to his shoulders, like Jesus. His expression in the photo gave no clue of the chemical anarchy wreaking havoc in his brain. It was invisible, this enemy that attacked his moods. “This is not an illness,” he said insistently. “This is who I am.” He pounded his chest with his fist in emphasis, in case my mother and I were confused as to whom he referred. The medications changed him, he said. They brought on such terrible mental inertia that every one of his thoughts became an unwieldy, leaden task. He preferred the wild highs and intolerable lows to a life of not giving a damn. At first, as a child, I didn’t blame him. After he disappeared, blaming him was all I did.

  I dressed hurriedly in the dark of my tiny bedroom. Jasper lifted his head, wagged his tail two times, then promptly put his head on my pillow and let loose a guttural sigh. He was ten—an old man of a dog. His brindle coat was wisped through with silver; he slept pretty much twenty hours of the day. I happened upon him in the alley of one of my first restaurant jobs, luring him toward me with bits of pancetta. He wiggled his fat little puppy butt in response and I was a goner. I took him home that night.

  Before leaving the house, I walked to the kitchen to put food in his bowl, then returned to my room and scratched his head. “Be a good boy, Jasper,” I told him. “Make sure to bite any robbers.” His tail gave one solid thump against my mattress in response to my voice but otherwise, he didn’t move. He wouldn’t venture to the kitchen until after six, our normal waking time. I joked with my friends that Jasper was the best and most predictable man I knew. With him, I’d shared my longest and most successful relationship.

  It was early October and the chill in the air had taken on a crisp, palpable bite. I sat in my car for a few minutes with my hands tucked between my thighs, waiting for the engine to warm up. My thoughts seesawed between the hope that the man lying on a slab in the morgue was my father and the prayer that he wasn’t. I was ten years old the last time I saw him, numbly watching from our front porch as the medics took him away. This was not how I wanted our story to end—my father dead before I had a chance to heal the hurt between us. But at least it would be an ending. At least I could finally let him go.

  After backing out of the bumpy gravel driveway on the side of my house, I maneuvered through my quiet Green Lake neighborhood and headed south. The streetlights glowed eerily amber in the early morning fog as I drove toward downtown. The Columbia Center tower loomed in the distance, about ten blocks from my destination. I’d spent enough time on the streets of downtown Seattle to have its geography stitched into the grooves of my mind. Off the Union Street exit, the hospital was to the east, a well-known homeless shelter fourteen blocks west, an illegal tent city three blocks from there. I pictured the cobblestones of Pioneer Square and the railroad tracks beneath the viaduct where so many of Seattle’s homeless population dwelled. I wondered where they had found him. I wondered if he had thought of me before he died.

  This last question repeated in my mind as I parked in the hospital garage. I quickly found my way to the basement and was escorted into an icy room barely lit by bluish fluorescent bulbs. On my left was a wall that looked like a stainless steel refrigerator with multiple square floor-to-ceiling doors. The air hinted of something black and fungal beneath an intense antiseptic overlay of cleaning products. I imagined that scent was death.

  The technician who accompanied me into the room was the antithesis of what I expected a morgue worker to be—all blond hair and surfer-boy good looks instead of brooding, pale-skin goth. He stood next to me, smelling of spearmint gum. I heard the gentle pop in his mouth before he spoke.

  “Are you ready, Ms. West?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was more than ready.

  A dark-haired girl dressed in light blue scrubs stood by the refrigerator wall and opened one of the doors, pulling out a body beneath a white sheet. She stood back with her hands linked behind her in an at-ease stance. The blond technician reached and pulled back the sheet, folding it neatly across the dead man’s chest. I kept my eyes on the substantial rise of the man’s stomach. This is a mistake, I thought. My father isn’t fat. He could have gained weight, sure, but that was another one of the side effects that made him forgo his medications.

  The technician stepped back from the gurney and turned his head to look at me. “Is it him?”

  I forced my gaze upward to the man’s swollen, puffy face. His skin possessed a dusty pallor, as though someone had pulled gray cotton batting over every inch of his flesh. He had scraggly black eyebrows and a beard; his long hair was wet and brushed back from his face, falling in a spidery fan beneath the back of his skull. His eyes were closed.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It might be. Maybe. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.” My heart fluttered in my chest as I spoke. I didn’t expect not to know. I thought I’d recognize him right away. Had my mind erased so much of him? “Can I see his wrists?”

  “His wrists?” said the technician. The girl didn’t speak.

  “Yes.”

  The technician reached under the sheet and pulled out the man’s limp, beefy arm, hairy side up.

  I swallowed hard. “Can you turn it over, please?”

  The tech gave me a sidelong look but he did as I asked. I looked at the underside of the man’s wrist, poised and prepared for the sight of angry red and thickly knotted scars. I blinked a few times to make sure I wasn’t just seeing what I wanted to see. But the gray flesh was smooth and bare. If the man was my father, it wouldn’t have been. That much I knew for sure.

  Relief collided messily with disappointment in the back of my throat. “No,” I said, releasing a breath it felt like I’d been holding since my cell phone woke me. “It’s not him.” A few errant tears edged their way down my cheeks.

  “Are you sure? He fits the description. Except for the extra weight, but we figured maybe he’d gained it and you wouldn’t know.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “It isn’t him. But I can understand why you’d think it was.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “How did he die?” I asked, gesturing to the man on the gurney. The man who was not my father. I repeated this phrase silently in my mind to make sure I actually registered it. It wasn’t him. My father wasn’t dead. There was still a chance I could find him.

  “Cardiac arrest,” the dark-haired girl said. “The medics brought him in from Pioneer Square. He was dead before they got to the ER.”

  “Well, I hope you find out who he is,” I said. He’s somebody’s son. Maybe even another person’s father.

  “It’s not likely,” said
the technician. He snapped his gum, then looked guilty. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” Death was normal to him; he was accustomed to treating it casually. He spent more time with it than life.

  “Let me walk you out,” the girl said.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I said.

  “I’m due for a smoke break anyway,” she said, walking over to the door leading to the outside hallway and opening it for me. “It can get a little tricky down here with all the weird turns to get to the outside world. I think they make it that way so no one accidentally ends up down here if they don’t really need to come.”

  “Okay.” I looked one more time upon the man who was not my father. “Good luck,” I whispered to him, and both of the technicians looked at me strangely. Let them look. The poor man obviously had a rough life; he deserved a few well wishes for wherever he ended up.

  Moving along the dimly lit corridor with the girl, I noticed our footsteps quickly fell into the same pattern, her white hospital clogs squeaking along the linoleum. We didn’t speak.

  “Can I ask you something?” she finally said when we turned a corner and arrived at the door to the hospital parking garage.

  “Sure,” I said, holding the door open for her to step through. We walked a little farther, stopping twenty feet or so from the door. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her scrubs. She shook one out of the pack and held it, regarding it thoughtfully before she spoke.

  “So, I’m curious.” Her voice echoed a bit in the almost empty garage. “Why are you trying to find your dad if he’s been out of your life so long? I never knew mine and I couldn’t give a shit where he is. I mean, it’s cool and all that you want to, but don’t you think maybe he likes it better this way? Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”