by Susan Wiggs
“I guess we are,” Daisy agreed.
Her grandmother gave her hand a squeeze. “You seem happy. That makes me happy.”
Daisy was learning, day by day, to redefine happiness for herself. It was no longer an effortless embrace of each day but a concerted choice. She tried to pay attention to the game. The plays were being called by a semi-celebrity, Kim Crutcher, a sports commentator whose husband pitched for the Yankees. But Daisy’s focus kept coming back to Logan. She observed how naturally he fit in with her family, as though he was already one of them. He leaned toward her dad, saying something that made him laugh.
A vendor passed with a tray of cold beers for sale. Probably only Daisy could read the wistful yearning in Logan’s face. He had his demons but kept them in check. She knew it wasn’t easy, and hadn’t been all through the college years, when the next party was only a dorm room away.
His chief motivation sat by his side, swinging his feet and eating popcorn. Charlie idolized his dad. As Daisy watched, they each sipped their root beer in unison and belched at the same time, celebrating their success with a fist bump.
“They’re quite a pair,” her grandmother observed.
“They sure are.” She gave a little laugh. “Whoever thought Logan and I would date?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“We’ve done everything out of order—first the baby, then coparenting, and…now this.” She and Logan were hard to define. The little family they’d made brought her a feeling of security, and after everything that had happened, she knew this was something to cherish.
Her grandmother smiled. “Life happens to us in as many ways as there are people. The important thing is that it happens.”
“Charlie’s so nuts about his dad. I love how the two of them are together.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“How do you feel about Charlie’s dad?”
“I…” It was the first time anyone had directly asked her that question. “He’s been wonderful. He makes me feel lucky we’re together. I’m pretty sure that this is meant to be.”
Olivia, seated on her other side, leaned over and said, “Does that mean what I think it means?”
Daisy flushed. “Maybe it does.” It did feel good to finally push away the heavy burden of grief, storing it in some shadowy corner where she wasn’t compelled to feel it all the time. Heartache was not a good way to go through life. She was grateful to Logan for pulling her out of the darkness.
Sometimes, she reflected, love simply happened on its own, like a rainbow…or an accident. Or like Julian. Other times, she was learning, it was up to her to make love happen, to build it layer by layer. Watching Logan with her family, she knew she owed it to him—and to Charlie and herself—to try.
By August, they were talking about moving in together. Daisy wasn’t sure who broached the topic first. Perhaps it had been Logan, jokingly referring to his house as a glorified place to check his email and pick up his laundry delivery, because he was never there anymore. Or it might have been Daisy, looking in her fridge one day and realizing the contents had changed entirely.
“It’s full of man-food,” she said one morning, rummaging around for the grapefruit juice.
“What do you mean, man-food?” Logan asked, glancing up from his iPhone.
“Just, you know, food guys eat.”
“Like what?”
“Bacon, for one thing.”
“Who doesn’t like bacon?”
“That’s not the point. I like bacon myself, but I never buy the stuff unless it’s turkey bacon.”
“Turkey bacon.” He shuddered. “If you like bacon, you should buy bacon.”
“And this,” she said. “Five varieties of cold cuts. Flavors of mustard not found in nature. Whole milk. It’s guy food.”
“Okay, guilty as charged. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing. I was making an observation.”
“So what did you use to keep in your fridge?”
“Yogurt. Veggies. Soy milk.”
“Girl food. No wonder Charlie wants me to live here.”
Oh, God. “Did you bring it up with him?” she demanded, ready to panic.
“Come on, Daisy. What do you take me for? When we tell him, we’ll tell him together.”
“Of course,” she said. “Sorry. I know you’d never do something like that.”
“Good. So, about Charlie…when do you want to have that talk with him?”
“First we have to figure out what to tell him.” The prospect made her stomach flutter, and she realized this talk was really more for her and Logan, not Charlie. She wished she could borrow some of Logan’s ease with the whole situation.
“That’s a no-brainer,” he said. “We tell the kid we love him and each other, and we want to be together all the time. He’ll be down with that. You know he will.”
Logan was right. Their son loved nothing better than having the three of them together. Truth be told, Daisy felt the same way. When she was with Logan and Charlie, she was in her right place in the world.
“He’ll want specifics,” she pointed out. “Like whose house we’ll live in, and where he’s going to put his stuff.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Logan said. “My place would work best. This is a rental, and it’s pretty small. We’ll all move to my house on Caliburn Ave.”
Logan’s house was in a gentrified neighborhood of older homes, with shade trees and sidewalks on both sides of the street. Daisy’s rental was in a slightly funky, bohemian little area of town, filled with nice people who had more imagination than money. Logan’s neighborhood was a haven for the upwardly mobile, which she found slightly ironic. He had been born to the O’Donnell shipping fortune. Had he stuck with his family’s plan, he could live anywhere he wanted, but he had something to prove. He wanted to make it on his own.
She related to that entirely. Both her parents had been supportive of her from the moment she told them she was going to have a baby and would be a single mother by age nineteen. Either one of them would have gladly helped her in any way, providing whatever she needed.
She had opted for independence, getting her own place, balancing school and work and Charlie. It had been harder that way but ultimately the rewards were greater. Being a good mom to Charlie meant making a life on her own.
And now here was this new opportunity. To be a traditional family with Logan.
What a concept.
“All right. Let’s figure out how and when to tell him.”
He laughed and pulled her into a bear hug, picking her up until her feet left the floor. “Sweetheart, that’s the easy part. And I have a great idea.”
She shut her eyes and let his laughter fill her up, knowing she was ready at last to go forward toward a future she’d never imagined.
Nineteen
Night pressed in around him, and his head was too heavy to lift. His arms and legs, also too heavy. Even his eyelids—glued shut. He tried to move his jaw. No success. Holy shit. Was he in a coma, then? He’d read of cases in which a person appeared to be in a coma, yet had enough cognitive function to be aware on some level.
No way, he thought. No freaking way would he let that be his fate.
A sound came from his throat. He was pretty sure the sound came from him. He couldn’t form words but emitted a throaty rumble. Then he managed to open his eyes to slits, blurred by his lashes. The wheelchair that had been his home—his hell for the past year—slowly came into focus.
He tried his best to shake off the vestiges of the dream. The nightmare. But really, it was neither; it was the memory that haunted him, waking or sleeping. The dream, which looped over and over in his head, tortured him with a reminder that he had escaped death, only to find himself in hell.
His mind played through the events that had brought him here. He hadn’t made it out of Colombia. He’d been blasted out of the chopper, he’d fallen from the sky.
&nb
sp; He had been so disoriented in those early hours after the incident. Lights had flashed in his eyes; a strange feeling of numbness claimed his body. He remembered trying to figure out where the hell he was. What about the unit? Were they looking for him?
When he’d first come to, he’d found himself in a white room. Whitewashed ceiling and walls, white blinds covering a single window. White sheets covering his unmoving legs. A white door swinging open, a guy in a white coat.
Yes, Julian had thought. He was in Medical.
“Move your feet for me,” said the bored-looking doctor.
Why would the doctor talk to him in Spanish?
“Try, please. Move your feet,” a voice had repeated, still in Spanish.
A guy in olive-drab fatigues had come into the room. He wore a flat cap and had a full beard, and was armed with a semiautomatic pistol and a belt heavy with clips. The stenciled webbing on his chest identified him as Palacio. A deputy of some sort. “He’s awake, I see. Lucky dog, surviving a fall into the ocean like that. We’ll see if his luck holds with Don Benito.”
Slowly it had dawned on Julian that he wasn’t with the good guys anymore. He was a prisoner, and the hospital was part of the drug lord’s empire. Benito Gamboa was served by a private militia that was better funded than the state’s military. Apparently Palacio was part of Gamboa’s security force, and the doctor was probably on the payroll, too. Or maybe he wasn’t a doctor at all. The white coat might mean he was a lab tech for the cocaine production operation. Or a torture specialist, maybe.
In those first hours of captivity, Julian had willed his feet to move, but they weren’t there. He could see his bare legs and feet, livid with cuts and bruises, but they didn’t even seem attached to him. “I cannot,” he’d said.
“Try again.”
His legs were useless. Not even numb. Just…gone. “I cannot.”
The doctor took out a long-needled syringe. And then another. The mysterious injections went in. Then the doc had jabbed the needle into first one toe, then another. Then into Julian’s ankle in its most tender spot; no sensation came through. He set his jaw, but his mind was screaming in wordless denial. He remembered his late father’s ordeal, becoming paralyzed in a single second. It was a kind of death.
Somehow, he had managed to detach, going away in his head to a different place. To Willow Lake, its surface as still as glass. As still as Julian, who took himself away from the shock of waking up a prisoner, paralyzed. He was that lake water, unmoving, unruffled by the slightest breeze.
“Well?” asked the deputy.
“No function or feeling in the lower extremities.”
“I’ll make a note for the interrogators.”
The statement had been chilling in its very matter-of-fact nature. Julian understood then that he would be tortured.
The doctor had cleared his throat, seeming uncomfortable. “The standard protocol is a course of physical therapy to restore whatever functionality we can.”
“This is not a service offered to a prisoner. Maybe he is not as lucky as I thought. Don Benito will decide whether or not to keep him alive.”
The doctor had said nothing. A week later, Julian had been manhandled into a wheelchair, blindfolded and transferred. In the ensuing months, he’d been moved repeatedly, treated in ways he couldn’t even conjure up in his worst nightmares.
Long ago, he’d lost all hope of rescue or release. They were keeping his existence a secret, fearful of reprisals from U.S. or multinational forces. He wasn’t sure why he was still alive, for what purpose. They were killing him slowly, with indifference and neglect, punctuated by torture sessions that left him breathless.
Julian closed his eyes again, praying the nightmares and memories would give way to the only thing that was keeping him alive—a dream of Daisy, and home.
Twenty
“One more time on Pirates of the Caribbean,” Charlie begged, his face alight with enthusiasm. “Please.”
The Technicolor chaos that was Disneyland swirled around Daisy’s small son. She traded a glance with Logan, knowing they would both be in agreement. A trip to Disneyland didn’t come around every day, and they were determined to make the most of it.
“Tell you what,” she suggested. “You guys go together, and I’ll take your picture.”
“Cool,” said Charlie. “Come on, Dad.”
These were not the kind of pictures she usually took, but the wild activity, with its color and light and frenetic movement, inspired her. She captured both father and son laughing, their heads thrown back, the two of them completely overtaken by surprise and delight.
“Good call, Logan,” she murmured under her breath, “this is a perfect way to celebrate Charlie’s fifth birthday.”
Logan had never been one for half measures. When Daisy agreed they should tell Charlie they were going to live together, Logan had suggested they deliver the news right after his birthday. They didn’t want to tell him on his birthday. That might send the wrong message.
In his usual larger-than-life way, Logan had organized a three-day adventure. He insisted it had to be Disneyland, not Disney World, because nothing was ever as good as the original. While they were away, a local moving company would bring Daisy’s belongings to Logan’s house. Not all of them, she corrected herself. There was a box of things Julian had given her—mementos, pictures, little gifts, her engagement ring—she had stored at her mother’s house. She couldn’t let go of them, but neither could she bring them into her new life with Logan.
The comparisons had to stop. The loss of Julian would forever be an ache in her heart, and she would never replicate what they’d had. In a tiny corner of her heart, she recognized that she and Logan didn’t share the grand and breathless passion she’d found with Julian. Theirs had been a once-in-a-lifetime love, and she knew better than to search for it with someone else. Her relationship with Logan was quiet and secure, a bond forged by their mutual love for Charlie. She had to stop thinking about what she’d lost and focus on what she could have. When they arrived home, they would all be living under the same roof. A family.
At last.
The prospect filled her with a sense of purpose. She had not agreed to this blindly or impulsively. She’d committed to it, and so had Logan, and they were both determined not only to make it work, but to find a new kind of happiness together, the three of them. Logan offered comfort, security, stability, safety. And relief—Lord, sweet relief from the dating. She’d known him all her life, and his friendship had helped her through her grief.
She could see a future with him. Logan would never break her heart…because he’d never owned her heart, not the way Julian had.
She and Logan were going into this with eyes wide open. Neither of them assumed it would be a cakewalk. Starting a serious relationship felt a bit like moving to a foreign country. She had to learn a new language, a new culture. She was ready, though.
While waiting for them to finish being pirates, she photographed some of the details of Disneyland. The August day in Anaheim was blindingly hot, and the park was crowded with excited kids and families. There was a peculiar beauty in all the artifice—the pristine, geometrically laid-out gardens, the pinwheels of coordinated color everywhere she turned. Unsightly features were camouflaged by clever plantings and facades, rocks made of resin, and glossy, giant-headed characters.
There was one section of fence where the sprinkler system had apparently failed. The hedge there had died, leaving only the skeletal remains of a few shrubberies. Beyond that, she could see a chain-link fence and a parking lot crammed with touring coaches and marigold-colored school buses. As she watched, a bus pulled to the curb and disgorged a tumble of excited kids, mostly black-or brown-skinned, all of them wearing school T-shirts.
She zoomed in on a little girl who was so excited, she spun in pirouettes on the sidewalk, her multiple braids flying outward.
Then Daisy noticed the lettering on the side of the bus—Chino Valley Unified School Di
strict.
That was where Julian had gone to high school. He’d never had much to say about Chino, California, only that he’d gotten in trouble there, and it was nobody’s fault but his own. He’d said this with a smile on his face, long ago, adding, “If I hadn’t been a juvenile delinquent, I never would have been packed off to Camp Kioga that one summer. Never would have met you.”
Thoughts of him often sneaked up on her like this, despite her resolve to focus on the future. Many times since he’d died, she been told by well-meaning friends, “At least you have your memories to cherish.”
She did have memories, and she definitely cherished them, but they offered small comfort when she contemplated all that was lost at the bottom of the ocean. She and Julian simply hadn’t had enough time together. They’d had shared dreams, fantasies, aspirations. Not enough time. Never enough time.
“Yo, Daisy-Mama,” Logan yelled at her, using a pet name she wasn’t completely in love with. He was carrying Charlie on his shoulders and grinning from ear to ear. “You wandered away. I thought we’d lost you.”
She lifted the camera to her face and snapped their picture. “I’m right here,” she said.
The airport in Anaheim didn’t have a direct flight home, so they had a long layover in Las Vegas. To make matters worse, mechanical difficulties grounded the aircraft, and passengers were offered generous premiums for giving up their seats on subsequent overbooked flights.
“Let’s do it,” Logan said suddenly. “Let’s give up our seats and have a night in Vegas.”
“Yeah! Vegas, baby,” Charlie said, though he clearly had no idea what the city was about.
Daisy hesitated. “But—”
“Please,” they both said in unison.
She laughed at their pleading expressions. Then she called and left a message with Olivia, who was taking care of Blake. Afterward, she caught Zach at the studio.