Arena Three

“It was my fault we left,” I stammer. “I thought you would never come back for us.”

Dad squeezes my shoulder. “You did the right thing, Brooke,” he tells me. “When I got back, the place was bombed. The whole street. If you’d stayed, you would have died.” His voice becomes quieter. “I thought that maybe you had.”

I shake my head. “We were in the mountains all that time. For four years. We only left about six or seven months ago.”

“I’m impressed with how well you coped,” he says.

I shrug. “I didn’t have much choice.”

Dad falls silent. I hadn’t meant the comment to be pointed, but my anger at him abandoning us is evident in my tone.

“Here’s the house,” Dad says, gesturing to a brick bungalow. “Let’s get inside. You can wash while I make something to eat.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You cook?”

It sounds so domestic. So unlike my father.

“Badly,” he replies. “But yes, I cook.”

He opens up the door to the bungalow and we all go inside. When we’d entered Neena’s house back at Fort Noix, I’d been overwhelmed by the smallest of things—the real pillow and duvet, the chest of drawers, clean clothes. But entering Dad’s house is even more surreal. It looks like a completely normal house, like the ones that existed before the war blew them to smithereens. He shows us the living room, the bathroom, the bedrooms, each one furnished and decorated.

“I can’t believe this place,” I say, awestruck by the fact that this will actually get to be our home, that we can live in this place together as a family.

We follow Dad into the kitchen.

“Do you girls like bread?” he says. “Jam?”

“I love jam!” Bree exclaims. “Brooke once found a house in the mountains full of provisions. She brought me back a jar of jam. It was delicious.”

Dad smiles. He seems proud of me, of my resourcefulness and the way I took care of my sister. It’s the best feeling in the world.

We sit down and tuck into the jam sandwiches, relaying stories about the time I managed to get sap from the tree, how I drove his old motorbike and sidecar down the mountainside at 100 miles an hour without crashing, and how I hunted a deer. But the more we speak, the harder it becomes for me to ignore the dark cloud hanging over us. The unspoken words seem to be swelling around us, crushing down on us. None of us wants to talk about it, to rip the scab off that old wound. But I can’t help myself. I need answers. I need to know why he abandoned us all those years ago.

“Why did you leave us, Dad?” I finally blurt out.

Bree stiffens, immediately awkward. Dad sits silently for a long, long time, his hands laced together on the table. He looks so much older than I remember. Not only is his face more lined and his hair completely gray, but there’s a stoop in his posture that was never there when I was younger. It’s a vulnerability he would once have never allowed me to see.

“I was barely fourteen,” I continue. “Bree was seven. How could you abandon us like that? Why did you choose the war over us?”

Dad doesn’t look at me when he finally speaks. “It’s complicated, Brooke. I know you think I chose the war, but I didn’t. I chose you two, I always did. I chose to give you a future, and that meant leaving you in the present and fighting in the war.”

“But it hadn’t even begun yet,” I shoot back, anger making the volume of my voice rise. “You volunteered. You left before you even needed to.”

“I had to put myself in the best strategic position,” he says, sighing heavily. “I don’t expect you to understand. But know that I’m sorry for the hurt I caused you two—”

“And Mom,” I interrupt. “Or did you forget about how you slapped her the night before you left?”

He looks away, ashamed. “I haven’t forgotten. And I’ve regretted it every day that’s passed.”

“You know she waited for you,” I say, and I can hear the bitterness in my voice. “Even after the mushroom cloud. She said we couldn’t leave, in case you came back. You hit her and she still died for you.”

Bree begins to weep softly beside me. I know she wants me to stop but I can’t help myself. All the rage and anger I’ve felt over the last few years is spilling out of me. There’s no amount of apologies Dad can say to atone for the death of our mom, or make up for the fact that I had to leave her to her certain death and look after Bree alone. Because of him I had to grow up overnight, make adult decisions, and live with the consequences. I was just a kid and his actions robbed me of my childhood.

“I understand if you never forgive me,” Dad says. “But I had to be right in the thick of it in order to fight it from the inside out.”

I pause and frown. I’m confused, not able to comprehend what he’s saying.

“What do you mean, ‘fight it from the inside out’?” I say.