True, her father was always there, inside Pen’s mind, sometimes standing squarely in its center, everything else sidestepping or flowing around him, other times as a reassuring but nearly anonymous presence, like the lit windows of the apartment building across from Jamie’s that Pen would look at, parting the curtains of the window next to her bed for a quick glimpse, when she couldn’t sleep. Anything—a windbreaker, a bicycle helmet, a man with his hair parted a certain way, the joke the weatherman on Channel 10 made about fog—could send him flaring like a torch into a three-dimensional, walking, talking memory. But if these moments were vivid and if they bruised and embraced Pen at the same time, they were memories all the same, she knew, incorporeal, evanescent. Actually seeing her father or hearing his voice or feeling his hand on her shoulder, even sensing his physical nearness had never happened, no matter how patient she had tried to be, no matter how much she had longed for him to come back to her, even for a second.
