Page 230 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

“You mean, like your father?”

She frowned a little. “My father was a stranger she met on her way to
Amsterdam. At a train station during a rainstorm. They spent one afternoon
together. I have no idea who he is. And neither does she.”
“Oh. I remember she said something about her first husband. She said he
drank. I just assumed …”
“Well, that would be Dorian,” Thalia said. “He was something too.” She
moved another checker onto her home board. “He used to beat her. He could go
from nice and pleasant to furious in a blink. Like the weather, how it can change
suddenly? He was like that. He drank most of the day, didn’t do much but lie

around the house. He got real forgetful when he drank. He’d leave the water
running, for instance, and flood the house. I remember he forgot to turn off the
stove once and almost burned everything down.”
She made a little tower with a stack of chips. Worked quietly for a while
straightening it.
“The only thing Dorian really loved was Apollo. All the neighborhood kids
were scared of him—of Apollo, I mean. And hardly any of them had even seen

him; they’d only heard his bark. That was enough for them. Dorian kept him
chained in the back of the yard. Fed him big slabs of lamb.”
Thalia didn’t tell me any more. I pictured it easily enough, though. Dorian
passed out, the dog forgotten, roaming the yard unchained. An open screen door.
“How old were you?” I asked in a low voice.
“Five.”

Then I asked the question that had been on my mind since the beginning of
summer. “Isn’t there something that … I mean, can’t they do—”
Thalia snagged her gaze away. “Please don’t ask,” she said heavily with what
I sensed to be a deep ache. “It tires me out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’ll tell you someday.”
And she did tell me, later. The botched surgery, the catastrophic post-op
wound infection that turned septic, shut down her kidneys, threw her into liver
failure, ate through the new surgical flap and forced the surgeons to slice off not
only the flap but yet more of what remained of her left cheek and part of her
jawbone as well. The complications had kept her in the hospital for nearly three
months. She’d almost died, should have died. After that, she wouldn’t let them
touch her again.
“Thalia,” I said, “I’m sorry too for what happened when we met.”