by Cara Bastone
He glanced to the side. The space where Via had been sitting was shockingly small. He’d felt that she’d been some sort of impenetrable forcefield between him and oblivion, but really, that forcefield had only been about eighteen inches wide.
Tyler couldn’t help but look up. Fin’s light, ruthless eyes were on him. To his surprise, she glanced away immediately, sitting up straighter and clearing her throat.
He busied himself with writing a quick note about an accidental assist—the kid had obviously been aiming for the hoop but had arced the ball into his teammate’s hands instead.
“How was your summer?” Smoke and cloves and all spice, no sugar.
He looked up at Fin, his brow furrowed. She was small-talking him? He hadn’t thought her capable of so pedestrian an act. “Fine. You?”
“Fine.”
They both looked back at the game. He took more notes, frowning when the hairs on the back of his neck rose up. Even though his brain and heart were done with Fin, apparently his epidermis had yet to get the message. Sitting next to her was like sitting next to a hot fire on a cold day: too hot to touch, but he couldn’t resist turning toward it anyhow. He realized his knees had started pointing in her direction and quickly corrected. He faced the game. Ignored Fin.
“What kind of coffee did Christi make for you today?”
He stiffened and turned to stare at her, his mouth dropped open. “How the hell did you know the name of my barista?”
She smirked and nodded toward his coffee cup. Apparently today was the day that Christi had worked up the gumption to leave her name and number on the side of his cup.
“Ah.” He hated when Fin did that. Used some sleight-of-hand trick to make it seem like she was all-knowing. “My usual,” he answered her, for some reason not wanting to tell her his coffee order. He’d rather it remained a mystery to her, if she hadn’t already deduced it simply from the faint fumes of steamed milk and cinnamon on the air. Or whatever.
Luckily, whoever had planned out this game was well aware of the stamina of children and they were already almost to halftime. The score was four to two. Matty’s team was down.
Tyler made a few notes and prayed for Via to come back.
“Listen, Tyler,” Fin started in a tone of voice he’d rarely heard her use before. It was so...normal. Nothing spooky about it. She sounded almost contrite.
He turned to her. “Yeah?”
“I wanted to tell you something.”
For some reason his pulse kicked up about ten notches. He waited, dimly aware that he was holding his breath.
But she said nothing. Instead, her eyes dropped to his trouser pocket.
“Your phone is buzzing.”
“Right.” Extremely aware that he was answering his phone in the middle of a very strange conversation, he reached into his pocket and frowned at the unknown number. He almost rejected the call but he saw that it had a Columbus, Ohio, area code.
His blood sped up in his veins. He hadn’t somehow screwed that up too, had he? No. He’d kept up his Thursday-night phone calls no matter what. Besides, she never called him. He always called her, and he had her number programmed into his phone. If she was calling it would be from her own phone. Unless it was an emergency...
“I have to take this.”
“Sure.”
“Hello?” he answered the call.
“Is this Tyler Leshuski?” a woman’s voice asked him. She sounded firm and exasperated, as if he’d already pushed all her buttons.
“It is.”
“This is Myra King. I’m calling from Franklin County Social Services on behalf of your sister, Kylie Leshuski.”
Tyler stopped breathing altogether. “Okay.”
He was suddenly aware of a hand on his shoulder. Via was back. But Tyler saw nothing, whirling needles pricking his vision as he listened to a woman he’d never met completely change his life.
CHAPTER FOUR
TYLER STARED UP at the same pure white ceiling he’d woken up to stare at for the last month and a half. Out of sheer habit, he inwardly chanted the mantra that had become his best friend since he’d come to Columbus. You’ve got the all-clear to take her back to New York. You’ve got the all-clear to take her back to New York. You’ve got the all-clear to take her back to New York.
But he stopped and scrubbed a hand over his face. Because the universe had answered that mantra. And the day was here. This evening’s plane tickets were burning a hole in his email inbox. After a month of court appearances and suit coats and meetings with lawyers and social workers, he actually did have the legal all-clear to take his little sister, Kylie, back to Brooklyn with him. As her legal guardian.
And that was good news, he reminded himself. And terrifying news. And pretty much everything in between.
The call that Tyler had gotten at Matty’s basketball game had picked up Tyler by the scruff of his neck and kerplunked him directly into an active missing-person case. Apparently his little sister’s mother had up and disappeared completely.
Their father had passed a few years ago, and Kylie had no aunts or uncles. Which left Ty. Here. To figure everything out, or whatever it was that adults did in situations like this.
The cops were almost entirely certain, from the note she’d left behind, and from activity on her bank account, that Lorraine was alive. Alive but currently abandoning her daughter. Who was not a child, but was still kid-like enough to wear a matching reindeer pajama set that Tyler had put through the laundry the other day.
Kylie herself seemed completely unworried about her mother’s welfare, which led Tyler to believe that she might even know where Lorraine was. Not to mention the fact that she’d had several months to get used to her absence already.
Either way, Tyler had been stuck in midwestern limbo while the state of Ohio had figured out what the heck to do with Kylie. Apparently, the heck they’d figured was legally tying her to Tyler. And now, here he was, staring up at the ceiling, as of yesterday Kylie’s temporary guardian. Guardian. Heh. The word sounded foreign and clunky even in his own mind.
Childish, too-smooth commitmentphobe. No interest in anything beyond seeking your own comfort.
HA. He hoped the universe was laughing so loud it woke Fin up from a dead sleep every night for a year. Two years.
This childish commitmentphobe had slapped on his best suit and practically danced the Charleston to get the judge to saddle him with the biggest commitment there was. A small, almost adult. Goodbye, normal life. It had been good while it lasted.
He imagined dateless Saturday nights. A beerless fridge. Finding a—good God—babysitter for the nights he had to be out late at Nets games.
When he’d first come to Columbus, his mantra had been Please let Lorraine walk through that door. Please let Lorraine walk through that door. Please let Lorraine walk through that door. It hadn’t taken more than a week for him to realize that he couldn’t possibly wish that on Kylie. Lorraine had willingly abandoned her. And even if their father had still been alive, Tyler wouldn’t have wished his brand of passive inattention on any kid. Miraculously, Tyler had somehow become this kid’s best bet. The mantra had morphed into Gimme the all-clear to take her back to Brooklyn.
After five weeks in Ohio, Tyler was pretty much ready to walk back to Brooklyn. Hell, he’d tape a skateboard to his shoes and grab the tailpipe of a semi if it got him back to his borough. He missed home.
He missed the women in sky-high heels on the subway. He missed the symphony of garbage truck–lumbering, neighborhood-hollering, horn-honking life that had been his constant soundtrack.
Columbus had its charms. He genuinely liked the college town. He liked the grand architecture on campus, the borderline maniacal sports fandom that one encountered in almost every citizen.
He hated, however, the plastic suburban neighborhood his stepmother’s house sat f
irmly in the middle of. He hated the rental Toyota he’d been forced to white-knuckle all over the city. And he really, really hated the suspicious, pitying, judgmental looks of every neighbor who rubbernecked past their driveway.
They all but stopped to stare because behind this beige front door was the little girl whose mother had abandoned her. The little girl who’d hidden it for damn near four months, living alone, taking herself to school, eating Easy Mac she bought at the grocery store she took the public bus to. On her own. The little girl who slammed doors and all but refused to speak to her older brother. The little girl who’d made it completely clear that she did not want to go to Brooklyn with him.
The little girl in question was apparently awake because he could hear the heaviness of her footsteps upstairs, which reminded Tyler that she really wasn’t so little anymore. Though he still thought of her as eleven—the age she’d been when they’d first met—Kylie was, in fact, fourteen. A difference he’d thought was negligible until he’d stepped off the plane and realized that he was not going to be dealing with a little kid, but a teenager.
Tyler roused himself from “bed,” immediately forcing the pull-out couch back into its folded form and tossing the cushions back on. As uncomfortable as the accommodations were, he preferred them to sleeping in Lorraine’s bed. He yanked on a sweatshirt, shoved his feet into slippers and headed to the bathroom to wash up. When he emerged, his little sister was sitting on top of the kitchen counter, her legs crisscrossed and a frown on her face, as usual.
Tyler looked much more like their father. Navy blue eyes, blondish hair and a long, handsome face. Kylie favored her mother. She had reddish hair, curly at the temples, freckles and sharp features.
“Save some for me,” he requested as she poured herself a bowl of Mini-Wheats.
Holding his eye contact with a ruthless smirk, she poured the rest of the cereal into her own bowl, creating a mountain she couldn’t eat by herself in a million years.
Tyler swallowed down the irritation that threatened to erupt from him like fire from a dragon’s mouth. Kylie had done everything she could over the last five weeks to prove, in no uncertain terms, that she did not want or need him around. He should have known better than to go for that cereal alley-oop. She’d just stuffed the ball back down his throat right at the hoop. And she looked royally satisfied about it.
For once, Tyler was unable to restrain his sigh of disappointment. He’d really wanted some Mini-Wheats. But he said nothing as he opened up the cabinet for an instant oatmeal packet.
“Well, if you’re gonna be a baby about it,” he heard Kylie grumble from behind him. He turned to see her shoveling half the cereal from her bowl into his. She jumped off the counter, grabbed a spoon and was out of the kitchen before he could say “thank you.”
She was eating in her room. Again.
Tyler’s phone rang in his pocket and he very nearly bobbled his bowl of cereal in the mad rush to get it.
“Seb.”
“Hey, man. Getting ready for the move?”
Tyler glanced at the ceiling. “Maybe? Who knows? Who knows how much it’ll cost me to get her to the airport. With school, some days she’d go willingly and some days I paid her fifty bucks.”
“If you were anyone else, I’d think you were kidding.”
“The kid is cleaning me out.”
Besides the cash bribes it took to get her to do almost anything, Tyler had taken a brief sabbatical from work in order to give this matter his entire attention. Tyler’s father had left a considerable sum of money to both Tyler and Kylie, but a few more weeks in Columbus and Ty would be officially dipping into his savings to pay the mortgage on his condo. Not to mention the fact that he’d just won his petition to the state of Ohio for the legal right to start paying for everything Kylie-related. He didn’t even know what that meant. What did fourteen-year-old girls need? Beanie Babies? Posters of hot guys? Those fancy desks where princesses in movies sat and brushed their hair at night? Some kind of mirror that opened up a direct line to Satan? How much did those cost?
Whose life was this again? Oh, yeah. It was supposed to be his freaking stepmother’s life.
“Today’s the big day.”
“Yap.” Tyler attempted to get excited for the right reasons. It was an incredible relief to be headed back to BK. And it should also feel like an incredible relief to take Kylie with him, simply to pluck her from this soupy mess of abandonment. But the taking-Kylie aspect of returning to Brooklyn was kind of scaring Tyler shitless. “We get off the plane at nineish tonight.”
“Cool. You’ve got everything you need to put her up for at least the night?”
“Shit.” The blood drained out of Tyler’s face. “No. I’ve got a fridge full of rotten food from a month and a half ago and sheets for a pull-out couch.”
“Okay. No worries. Look, let me and Via take care of it. We have twelve hours to put something together. We’ll put food in your fridge and get some furniture for her.”
“Furniture. Right. She’ll need a room at my place.”
“Your office will be perfect for that.”
“Yeah.”
He’d spent years tweaking his home office into a writer’s haven. The armchair tilted just enough so that he could have his feet in the sun in the morning. The desk was tidy so that any afternoon writing he did would remain clear and concise. The blue on the walls was somehow both serious and whimsical, his best articles framed and lining the far wall. He loved that office.
“Do you know what kind of decorations Kylie would want?”
Tyler laughed humorlessly. “Slayer posters? My Little Pony bedspread? Orange shag carpet and a disco ball?”
“Well, let’s just leave it up to Via, shall we?” Sebastian said, laughing. “It won’t take long to get the room set up. Concentrate on getting back to BK. We’ll take care of her bedroom.”
“Right. God. Thanks, man. I don’t know how I’d do this without you.”
“It’s not a problem, dude. We’ve got you.”
We’ve got you. Via and Seb and Matty. Their little family.
They were a we. Just like Tyler was now. He wouldn’t be returning to Brooklyn as a one and only. He was returning as a guardian. Tyler glanced at the clock over the stove. “Look, I gotta get a move on.”
“Okay, buddy. See you soon.”
* * *
“I’M SORRY. WHAT?”
“The California PD. They found her. Lorraine. She was at a...friend’s house just outside of LA.”
When Tyler had been summoned to Myra King’s office after his phone call with Seb, he’d expected her to have some residual paperwork for him to sign. Maybe a few pamphlets on how to cart a kid back to Brooklyn. He genuinely hadn’t thought about Lorraine.
He sure was thinking about her now.
“Where is she?”
“En route, back to Columbus, where she’ll be in police custody until she can make bail.”
“Make bail? She can’t come back to the house tonight!”
“Of course not,” Myra said, eyeing him over her almost comically thick glasses. She had the voice of a much younger woman but the face and hair of a sixty-year-old. “Lorraine’s not legally allowed to see Kylie right now. They’re going to charge her with neglect, child abandonment, a dozen other things to boot.”
Tyler’s mind felt both sluggishly slow and dizzyingly fast. There were seven thousand questions rotating in his head, and he had no idea which to ask first. “Jail time?” he choked out.
“Probably,” Myra said, pushing her glasses up onto her forehead and pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes for a moment. “What she did is criminal. But her lawyer is good. I know him. He’ll push for court-ordered rehab and probation. And there’s a good chance he’ll get it.”
“She won’t get Kylie back.”
Myra’s glasses dropp
ed and her eyebrows lifted. “Are you asking or telling?”
“I don’t fucking know.” Tyler leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and he hung his head.
He’d never wanted problems like these. These were father problems. Tyler wanted brother problems. He could maybe deal with Full House–style hijinks. But this? It was too much.
“Why would Lorraine do this, Myra?” Tyler asked after a long pause. “Drugs? Mental illness? Who just abandons their kid like this?”
Myra, apparently taking pity on him, rose up, left the office and came back a minute later with a glass of ice water. “Sorry it’s not bottled. Not a lot of money running through these halls.”
Tyler gulped half of it in one go, coughed and set the rest of it aside.
“It could be both, either,” Myra said gently, finally answering his question. “Honestly, we might never know. Kylie might never know. It’s possible that Lorraine doesn’t even know.”
He leaned forward again, even more vehement than before. “She won’t get Kylie back.”
“You’re right,” Myra said, sitting back in her seat with a barely muffled groan. “Lorraine is most likely not going to get Kylie back anytime soon. But, if she aces rehab, doesn’t make trouble on her probation or jail time, gets a job, holds down a nice clean house, there’s always the chance she could get her back in a year or two. She’s the girl’s mother, and the system likes to see mothers with their children.”
Tyler wasn’t sure what made his stomach clamp down harder: the thought of him being Kylie’s sole guardian for an entire year or two, or the idea of Kylie eventually going back to Lorraine.
“A year or two.” He tried the words out.
“In the meantime, we proceed as we have been. She won’t be allowed to see Kylie for a few months anyhow, most likely. And once she is, it’ll just mean you cart Kylie back and forth between Ohio and New York. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. You’re going to go ahead with the original plan. Taking her back to New York.”
Tyler felt that disorienting lightness associated with relief. His mind might be completely bamboozled, but his body was telling him that he was relieved that Kylie would be coming home with him still. Immensely relieved.