You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

did Daddy get killed?” Karin had asked at the time, but she was younger then. Mom had told her, “Sweetheart, people get killed in wars. Hundreds of thousands of people have died there. Almost half a million. Your father was just one of them. He was unlucky, but it was not his fault.” The most important thing for the two of them to do, her mom had said, was to remember her father the way he had been when they knew him, and to try to hold on to all the good things he had brought to their lives. And that was how Karin wanted to think about him. But it was annoying how many different things there were now in her head. People could really mess with your brain.

Like Martijn. When they were alone, when Mom wasn’t there, he would say such strange things about her father. Like things that didn’t make any sense. Like that he was a risk-taker. And that he was an “adventurer,” and the way he said those things didn’t sound like he meant them as compliments. And when Karin asked him how Martijn could know anything about her father, he claimed that he “knew him pretty well.” She didn’t even know what that was supposed to mean. Martijn didn’t know her father. She knew her father. Her mom knew her father. Martijn was nobody to them.

Then Martijn would ask her all kinds of questions about her father that she couldn’t answer. And even if she could answer, why would she tell him? Maybe her mom trusted him, but that didn’t mean she had to. She didn’t have to. He wasn’t her dad. She didn’t even want him to be her stepdad, but her mom kept telling her it would be better for them. That was so totally untrue.

Karin remembered only her father’s best parts most of the time—except sometimes when she let a little bit of the rest of it seep through, get into her brain, make her confused. Why did the whole world think they could say anything they wanted to about him now? Why didn’t they realize that he had been her dad and that meant something?

The weekend when they camped here, Karin remembered, she had just unzipped the door to their tent when the mouflons came onto that hillside. First she saw one ewe and then another, and her breath caught. She held it and inched slowly back into the tent to wake her father, who was still asleep. “They’re here,” she said softly. “They’re just outside.” He propped himself up on his elbows inside his sleeping bag, suddenly alert. “Get your camera,” she whispered.

He reached over and pulled his camera bag toward him, then spun around with the whole sleeping bag, without getting out of it. Then he walked on his elbows toward the opening of the tent, and the two of them peered out together. It was a foggy morning, and a soft light shimmered through the mist that hovered over the damp ground.

The mouflons came, one after another, and then another and another until there were at least two dozen of them, and then four dozen of them, and then nearly—it must have been—a hundred. They were standing on the hill and looking out over the landscape, like, just checking out the view. How gentle they were, and how peaceful. And this was their park, their home. It certainly didn’t belong to Karin and her father. For them to be okay out here, they needed supplies, sleeping bags and tents and food and equipment. They were trespassers. The mouflons, these wild sheep with their strange, helmet-like ram horns, were the owners.

After he took the pictures, her father just went back to sleep, which was odd. Normally he was a real early riser and loved to get out and go hiking for the whole morning, before lunch. Karin got up and went for a walk, gathering kindling. No one passed by, and the mouflons were gone.

Feeling bored being all alone, she came back to the campsite. She found him still sleeping. So she decided to wake him up. When she whispered in his ear, “Dad…Dad? It’s time to get up,” he swatted at her like she was a mosquito buzzing around him. It was very strange—very unlike him.

Finally, he rolled over and looked at her, his eyes bloodshot and his hair wild, as if he was waking from a manic dream. “Sweetheart, it’s you,” he said, like he was surprised she was on the trip with him. “What time is it?”

She told him that it was already after 11 a.m. “Is it?” he said, bolting up. “Oh wow. I was really out of it. I had no idea that it was already that late. I’m sorry.”

He was still in his sleeping bag, and he looked like he’d taken a bath in there. His shirt was soaked. Karin said he didn’t have to say sorry. But she wondered if maybe he was sick or something.

He got up and got dressed, and they ate cold muesli next to the dead embers of the fire from the night before. He didn’t bother making a new fire with the kindling she’d collected, as they sometimes did in the early morning to cook oatmeal and brew hot coffee and warm milk. Her father just said, “Let’s go to the museum,” where he could buy some coffee, forgetting about their plan to go hiking. He just wasn’t in the mood to work anymore, he said; he had too much on his mind.

They’d packed up the whole camping trip and biked to the museum. Karin remembered that they had seen Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, lots of dark images of awkwardly shaped figures with kind of bulgy eyes sitting in dreary rooms in tiny houses or working huge looms. She liked the ones of people in the fields, holding big sacks of whatever it was they were picking. Her favorite, though, was a picture of a yellow