How long had she been by herself?
Clearly, long enough to scar, and my pain for her, for this family fell upon me in waves, for this man and his guilt he felt so deeply.
After squeezing his eyes, he revealed them to be red, tears he was clearly holding back but doing a bad job to manage.
“Who does something like that,” barely managed to be discerned from his lips, his deep voice thick. “Who—”
“Takes care of his daughter,” I corrected, having a feeling he needed to be corrected. From the start of this conversation, the direction of it needed to be changed, a conclusion he came up with and managed to believe so hard in had a need to be dissolved with the truth. He may have had a hand in what happened to Laura, but something he hadn’t done was what her mom did. He didn’t abandon her and showed her a love and care I personally had the honor of seeing every day. I cherished it.
Cradling his head, I brought him down to me, made him travel down to where I was and see the truth.
Our brows touched.
“You love that child… You care and protect that little girl in ways I have never seen, Gray. Never seen and don’t you ever devalue that for mistakes you made in the past. It’s not your present and what you’re doing moving forward means everything, everything now.”
He looked up at me, his eyes rimmed in red. All that disappeared from my vision when I kissed him this time, the hum off his body I felt throughout mine. The buzz warmed of a release, something he’d needed to let go of for a while and I guess finally found the strength to.
He kissed me back, heaven in the way his warm lips opened and closed over mine. Cradling the back of my neck, he tilted my head, taking over when he brought his other arm around me. Ava’s music continued to play in the background, but even if it wasn’t I didn’t think we would have stopped. Like I said, we just did.
Eventually, we came away with no breaths and I lost myself in his lovely blue eyes.
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” I admitted to him, but I lied. I lied so hard. I was already very much in love and had been probably since the moment he pissed me off in my aunt’s bathroom. He challenged me and I’d always been a girl to love one of those.
My eyes closed when his thumb massaged my cheek, opening them to see his smile. He leaned in pressing his lips to mine again.
“I know I am with you,” he said against my mouth, braver than I was. His arms going around me, he brought me in close, expressing that love with every kiss and every touch he so passionately gave me. It’d been a ring, which rang into the air that ultimately stopped him and a fear I think we both experienced. I didn’t even need to confirm that by looking into his eyes. Gray’s phone virtually never rang.
Least of all on the very day Laura started school.
Chapter Seventeen
Gray
The double doors to the school would have busted off their hinges had I put any more force behind them and by the time Alicia and I located Laura’s former tutor Jolene Berry, I already found myself in a place which I easily couldn’t come out of. I was in a tailspin. My mind was fucked beyond belief and I just wanted answers.
I wanted to see my daughter.
“Her instructor turned her back for two seconds, Gray,” Jolene said, sprinting down the hall with Alicia and myself. We met her in the principal’s office, the former tutor the one to call me today.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think as everything rushed around me and Jolene guided me toward the location of my daughter. She kept saying Laura’s instructor had been with her. She’d been with her all day and she had been doing so well.
The touch on my hand broke through the words and on the other side I found Alicia, her arm wrapped around mine and her fingers laced through the spaces of my own in a way that allowed me to fight through the haze in my head long enough to find speech, her eyes telling me everything was going to be okay with just a single glance in our hurried steps. I hoped everything would be okay. I needed everything to be.
My “what the hell happened?” left my lips not moments before I spotted her, my daughter ahead of me.
My daughter tucked away in a closet.
The images behind my eyes blasted away like flashes in a turbulent storm, errant and horrifying memories I fought so hard to keep away. They used to keep me up at night and did for literally months after that fateful day.
The day my daughter had become mine.
Stepping into the room now, drawing closer to my kid who cowered heavily in the tiniest ball she could make herself at the bottom of a broom closet, I saw her again that day.
I saw her neglected.
She’d been dirty that day I found her, covered in I didn’t know what and the smell saying so much as an indicator. She’d wetted herself. The room reeking of piss and other things she’d obviously projected at some point on the bedspread. That’s where I found her, locked in a room and all by herself. She’d been alone for hours, maybe even many days.
She had no voice to tell me.
Even after finding her like that, in that disturbing state that told so much of what happened even still I didn’t have all the details, the unknown I wanted to know at the time…
But hadn’t been brave enough to handle.
“She turned her back for a second,” Jolene continued in this moment now, shaking her head at the sight. But she didn’t see what I saw. She saw a scared little girl having another one of her spells. She didn’t see what I saw, the product of nightmares from Laura’s and my past.
Swallowing, she looked up at me. “It was an accident. I promise you. Her instructor turned her back for only a second.”
And yet a second was all it took, a second to find this, my kid and…
I stepped toward her, Jolene beside me as well as Alicia, Alicia who never let go.
She squeezed my hand now as I took in my kid, lowering. Jolene lowered too.
“She must have been curious,” Jolene let on. She frowned, her hands folding. “Curious about the other children. There was a music class going on next door. It must have been the sounds that made her wander in—”
My hand let go, empty.
Music…
It’d been that word to take me to another place, a place my daughter should have been as well as me. I think I lost sight of that for a while. I lost sight of a lot of things. I believed I was something I wasn’t and somewhere I shouldn’t be.
And I think I’d known that for a while now.
I couldn’t look at Alicia as I eased my way toward the closet in which my daughter cradled herself. I only had her in my sight at the present, the way it always should have been.
“Laura?”
She arose after my voice, her shoulders relaxing at a sight ahead of her. It hadn’t been me at first and I was aware of that, Alicia beside me. Even still, Laura eventually made her way over to me and once she had her expression nearly tore my damn heart out. It’d been the same expression she held when she knew she was safe back when I finally found her, when she knew she was loved and always would be loved. I never let her forget every day that she meant something to both the world and especially to me.
She crawled out of the closet and over to me and once she had it was over.
Picking her up, I saw sight of no one after that. I left.
I left.
Chapter Eighteen
Alicia
He’d been quiet after we came from the school and left so quickly I worried if I’d even make it outside in time to go back with him. Something happened back there at the school and more than the obvious. I saw it in the way he let go of my hand and wouldn’t look at me.
I saw it in the way he wouldn’t look at me now.
Gray’s hand squeezed his leather steering wheel, his right arm slack but only because Laura had it. She sat between us, her arms laced around Gray’s like an intricately woven strand. In her few bouts of fear I’d experienced around her I had fortunately never seen her come to the point of tears
. This wasn’t the case now as the tears ran down her puffy cheeks.
Her face hidden, she pressed her cheek against her dad’s arm, out of the worst of it now and I wondered in my heart how much her tears had resulted from actual fear versus the result of what her fear had caused, an uproar in her dad coming to console her once again. She’d been doing so well.
I obviously couldn’t answer that for her, keeping to myself in the close-sitting cabin. Bumping along that silence remained but somewhere between the school and wherever Gray was taking us I suddenly wasn’t alone.
A hand came out, a small one on the seat. Laura didn’t look at me, but she didn’t need to.
I took her hand without reprieve, watching it fold in mine and somewhere along the way her breathing evened even more than when she’d been resting against her dad. I brought her peace I guessed, my hand coming down and rubbing hers.
It’s going to be all right, girlie.
It would be all right. She would get through this, but my stomach still turned by everything that happened.
Especially, when Gray noticed my handhold with his daughter.
He actually closed his eyes to it. Like it displeased him for whatever reason before opening his eyes on the road. I didn’t understand it.
What had I done?
I wondered if he’d even tell me, but then, we were suddenly parked outside of my aunt’s home, but no one was making any moves to get out.
I sat there, watching Gray continue his gaze at the open road despite the truck not moving. I wanted to say his name, something.
He spoke first.
“I need to take Laura home,” he said and I noticed quite quickly his statement had nothing to do with me. It didn’t include me at all.
I shook my head. “Gray?”
It was like my very voice caused him pain and I almost regretted speaking, my hand loosening from Laura’s. Rising up slightly, she looked at me, confused too. I supposed I got some satisfaction in the fact I wasn’t the only one.
I brought my hands into my lap, obviously realizing he wanted me to leave for some reason but not understanding why. I didn’t do anything wrong. At least, I didn’t think I had.
I said his name again and this time he actually granted me the honor of his eyes. This man had looked at me in many ways since meeting me, not all of them joyous and uplifted, but all of them at least fair which this didn’t feel like, his eyes narrowed at me in the ways of an enemy.
Not someone he’d just held less than an hour ago.
“I think you should go, Alicia,” he said, my heart squeezing with every word. “I think you should let me figure this out with my daughter.”
She panned from me to him, then back and sitting up, this conversation had her full attention now. She actually let go of Gray’s arm in the transition, looking full on at me then him.
He swallowed like he knew.
“You push,” he said, panning my way. “You always push so this time... This time try not to.”
He said the words so seriously and their message for me crystal clear. He blamed me for today.
He blamed me for everything.
I tried not to let them affect me, his words. I tried not to feel anything about someone I just admitted my heart to, like I said, less than an hour ago. I thought he felt the same way too. He told me as much.
In all this, I could be strong. I could show no feeling and be about my way, but then there was Laura, the little thing so smart, intelligent like her teacher said. Her big, brown eyes told me she understood all about what her father said, his rejection right in front of both of us.
She moved on the seat when I vacated mine and pressed her hands on the glass window after I closed the truck door. I tried to steel my emotions like I had in the truck, but as I watched her turn in her seat and press her hands to the back window of the truck I couldn’t help the burn in my eyes and throat.
I guess that made me human.
Chapter Nineteen
Gray
The shadows danced on the walls later that day, the images produced earlier in the day unable to dissipate behind the lids of my eyes. They intermixed with the twigs and brush that blew outside, the heavy storm as if reflecting my headspace.
As if reflecting the heaviness of my heart.
I cradled my head in the living room of my trailer, our life piled around me in the form of a few bags. We could fit our entire lives in merely five and only one to two if the urgency was dire.
What am I doing?
Squeezing my eyes, I attempted to come to terms with what I was about to do again.
I was going to run. I was going to go when things got tough and things became tense. Upon coming home, I believed I did need to leave, a clear danger in staying but as it turned out the danger may have been less for the well-being of my family and more of something else.
She had my heart.
The images of deep-brown eyes and warm skin the tone of honey and amber killed my insides. Especially as I watched her go away. I pushed her away, blamed her and now I was putting myself in a position to never see her again.
And all because I was scared.
I was terrified of Alicia. I feared what she could do, her potential to open me up and expose me in ways I didn’t want to be exposed. I had already told her so much, too much.
What if she finds out the truth?
I’d have to lie to her every day. Every day would be a continued lie between us. She wouldn’t accept the whole truth behind us coming here to Mayfield and her judgment, the potential lack of her love…
I couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t strong enough to see myself changing in her eyes so Laura and I had to go.
So why was I still sitting on the couch?
I sat for what felt like a short millennia and, eventually, I wasn’t alone anymore. Perhaps, my daughter knew I needed her just like she needed me earlier that day, my little girl so brave.
She came into the room in her shorts-coveralls, the way she’d been since we had arrived home today. Going right into her room to take a nap, calm down, I sat with her until she closed her eyes, rubbing her back and telling her everything was going to be okay. I wanted her to get one good sleep in, one more before I made sure our lives changed again.
Her arrival in the living room put me off at first as I’d just laid her down what felt like not too terribly long ago and I confirmed that when I looked at my cellphone. Even still I welcomed her, smiling at her. Like I said, I needed her.
“Hey, kiddo,” I said guiding her to me. She leaned against my knee, a red to her eyes that let me know she’d been crying again. She didn’t cry a lot but when she did it destroyed me in the worst way.
I should have listened to my instinct. She wasn’t ready.
My kid was so brave but it was all too much too soon. I should have known that. I should have trusted myself.
You trusted her.
And I still did despite myself. I couldn’t help trusting Alicia. I couldn’t help loving her even more.
The ache in my chest suffocated like a cellophane bag over my head. Even small breaths weren’t easily managed. I asked Laura if she wanted some peanut brittle as when she did have these rare times of unease she enjoyed sharing a box with me. It was one of my favorite things to eat and our shared love of the snack let me know we did share DNA. She was mine, a product of me and who I was.
After cupping her face, I got up, heading over into the kitchen. The food was all still in there because in my panic I felt it best to just rush out and start from scratch after Laura woke up. I didn’t want any more baggage than needed I supposed.
I heard steps behind me when I reached up and grabbed the brittle, but I dropped the box to the floor as I heard a sound.
A voice.
“Daddy…?”
The word repeated, the word that didn’t exist and I turned around, the only one in the room my kid.
And the tears had returned to her eyes.
“Dad?”
I crossed the room to my daughter, on my knees as the afternoon storm crashed and descended on our small trailer like we truly were in that fairy tale, Dorothy in Kansas.
The shake hit my hand like a tremor, my reach to Laura unstable.
“Laura?”
Her tears moved down my fingers, her face cringing as if she was in pain, but she’d said my name. I heard her.
She broke down.
“Daddy, please don’t be mad,” she retched, the words straining from her lips. “Please, Alicia did nothing wrong.”
The words shocked me as much as their existence, but so happy…
My other hand came to her face, looking in awe at my daughter, my kid.
Her voice…
It took me so long to realize this was happening, maybe too long to establish this wasn’t a dream or some cruel trick someone was trying to play on me. It took me a moment to realize this was real but once I had I couldn’t let go.
“Alicia, honey?” I questioned, my heart, my soul so damn happy. I wanted to wipe my eyes, hard to see clearly all of a sudden, but like I said, I couldn’t let go, only getting closer.
Laura shook her head in my hands, her tears dripping down to the kitchen titles.
Her face scrunched up.
“Alicia… You’re mad at her. Please, don’t be mad at her. It isn’t her fault. I wanted to go to school.”
She was… defending Alicia. My little girl, my child who hadn’t spoke in so long opened up her mouth, her voice to go out to someone else. Alicia had brought this out of her.
Alicia had brought her back to life.
Dampening my lips, I swallowed down hard.
“You weren’t ready, Laura,” I said, this moment so surreal. “She overstepped and had Dad not listened to her—”
Laura’s head shook with vigor, her eyes red and nose puffy.
“But I was,” she challenged and so, so adamant. She was so brave and stronger than I ever knew. Her arms came around me and like earlier I’d been surprised. She’d never been one to hug. She’d never been one to do anything.
His Sweetest Song Page 14