by Piper Lennox
His hand lifts from the console. This time, I’m right to expect it to land on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Ry,” he says. He pulls his hand back to the wheel and swallows hard. When he raises his eyebrows, the sign he’s about to say something encouraging, I perk up—but he just exhales, muttering, “Fuck,” under his breath.
I press my face back to the window. Fuck, indeed.
“Whoa. Looks like another drug bust.” Walt swings the car into his usual spot in front of our unit, then twists in his seat to study the cruisers. “Hope it’s that asshole in G Building.”
My nod is automatic; I’m not listening. All I want right now is to slip back between Colby’s sheets and Groundhog Day our date until I forget this morning ever happened.
Being nosey as hell, Walt stays by the car to scope out the cops, maybe catch a takedown in action. I start for Colby’s unit and rehearse the story I’m going to deliver. The car ahead of me just slammed on its brakes out of nowhere! What a dick.
I fell asleep at the wheel. Last time I’m getting you breakfast that early. Ha, ha.
No. They’re all flimsy. Not to mention just thinking them puts the taste of dirt in my mouth.
Colby’s always told me the truth, even when I didn’t want to hear it. Even when she didn’t want to say it. The least I can do is return the favor.
“Orion!”
One of the Hurley twins runs to me from the other end of the lot. At a slower pace, but still tight-legged with urgency, a policeman follows.
“Hey.” I still have no idea which sister she is, but the pale wash of panic on her face tells me the topic’s light-years away. Over her shoulder, I see the cop talk into a radio.
My stomach rises into my chest.
“What’s going on?”
She holds up her finger to finish catching her breath. “Colby,” she starts.
“Colby? Is she okay?” I scan the lot and the field beyond, where two more officers comb the shrubs along its edge. “Where’s London?”
“That’s....” The twin draws a longer breath. Her eyes squeeze shut. That’s when it clicks: she wasn’t catching her breath. She was trying to find the words to tell me what I already know, down in the standstill marrow of my bones.
“Mr. Walker?”
I slide past the girl and accept the policeman’s handshake, my eyes still on the field. “Yes. What’s going on?”
“Seems your daughter’s run off.” He holds his hand up like I’ve interrupted. Maybe I did. The static that peals through my head makes it hard to tell. “We’ve called for some more units in the area to come help with the search and spread it to a mile, and we’ve got a local alert going. The babysitter gave us some info about her—mind if I verify it with you, real quick?”
“Babysitter,” I repeat, as my hands drag through my hair. Babysitter?
“Colby Harlowe.” He waits for me to nod before the questions start. While he talks, he and the Hurley twin start for the field. I follow and fight the urge to sprint ahead, screaming London’s name. “She said London’s five?”
“Six.” My throat’s sealing itself off.
The policeman relays the correction into his radio. “And she was last seen wearing pink pajamas and rainboots?”
“I...I don’t know,” I confess. I wasn’t there last night, or this morning. I wasn’t the one to put her to bed or wake her up.
I was in the babysitter’s bed, when I should have been at home with my daughter.
Walt materializes behind me. Maybe he was there all along. “We’ll find her, man. Don’t panic. Georgia and one of the cops are going across the street to check the middle school, just in case she went that way, and I sent Colby to that back unit so she could get a kind of aerial view.”
Colby. I can’t even remember how I looked at her last night. All I can think about is whether or not I gave London a kiss goodbye before I left. The fact I can’t remember just about guts me.
“Fuck,” I spit, when a tree root in the thin woods between our complex and the neighboring one trips me. The dizziness is back, but mild. More likely from this surge of stress than anything else.
At least, that’s what I tell myself, when I have to lean on the tree until it passes.
“Do you want—”
“No,” I bark, pushing through the branches and back onto the path. I don’t want to rest. I don’t want to play lookout while a bunch of strangers actually have boots on the ground, looking for my kid.
Walt jabs my shoulder with a bottle of water, hot from his car. “Just offering you a drink.” He watches while I reluctantly take it, unscrew the top, and sip. “She’ll be okay, Ry.”
I nod but have to close my eyes, envisioning all at once the many ways London might not be okay.
Walt’s phone rings. “Colby,” he says. We both stop, barely over the property edge, while he answers and puts it on speaker. “Hey, any news?”
Colby’s voice hops and breaks, like she’s running. “I saw her—she’s sitting by the drainage pipe.”
“Drainage pipe?” I ask, but Walt talks over me.
“Got it. We’re on our way.” He hangs up and does a one-eighty. I skid through the mud to turn myself and follow.
“Drainage pipe! Other side!” Walt shouts when we break through the trees and back into the field. The police searching the perimeter tail us through the parking lot, past the buildings, all the way to the other side of the property where a drainage ditch runs perpendicular to the road.
“There she is,” he sighs, hand over his heart, when we crest the small hill and spot London, wrapped inside Colby’s bear hug.
There she is, I repeat, the words silent but ringing through my head. There she is.
We slide down the bank and into the trickle of murky water from the pipe. Walt slips. I basically use him as a springboard to propel myself toward her.
London has her face buried in Colby’s shoulder; Colby’s sobbing but laughing as she hugs her tighter and stands, spinning her in a circle.
“See, sweetie?” she says. “There’s Daddy! Look, I told you. There’s—”
“Give her to me.”
Colby’s face falls, but she slides London’s arms down from around her neck and leans her into my arms. Then she steps back. Far.
“London,” I whisper. At least two-hundred promises wait to spill out. I’m never losing her again. I’m never leaving her again.
But none of them surface. Nothing but her name, the last word I get out before I unhinge.
Twenty-One
Colby
I’ve discovered a new Worst Thing about panic attacks: there’s literally no way to get through one without looking like a self-centered asshole.
“Water,” I rasp, when the police have left and I follow Orion, London, and Walt into their unit.
In my head, it wasn’t a selfish thought. It wasn’t even much of a thought at all, but instinct—or that panic-attack thing where anything that might be a remote comfort feels like instinct, but still.
Orion turns and gives me this look like he can’t even believe I’m here in his hallway, much less daring to request a drink.
“I’m going to bandage my daughter’s knee,” he says evenly, but I know better. The grit of his teeth. That flash in his eyes.
“Which she cut—” He slams the medicine cabinet in the half-bath as punctuation to every word. “—when she ran away—” Slam. “—under your—” Slam. “—fucking watch.”
A pill bottle tumbles into the sink. The contents explode and scatter. Nobody dares to move.
Except me, because, hey—self-centered asshole. Most of my brain is still rational and wants to talk him down, maybe help him clean up London...if he’d even let me. Unfortunately, the tiny sliver of my reptilian brain is in charge now, and it’s all I can do to brace my back against the door and slide to the welcome mat, forehead on my knees.
Breathe. Happy place.
“You okay?” Walt mumbles. He’s picking the pills from
the sink one by one and dropping them into the bottle, his singular foot in the hallway the only proof I’ve got he’s even talking to me. In the living room, I hear London whimpering over the peroxide while Orion, who usually tells her something along the lines of, “Suck it up; this is the only way to get it clean,” lets her cry.
“Fine.” I don’t know if he hears me. I keep my answer close, afraid that releasing it too far into the space will set Orion off all over again.
Walt gets me a glass of water, wordless. I don’t remember to thank him.
“No! I want the pink Band-Aid!”
Here, on a normal day, Orion would chide, “All Band-Aids are Band-Aids, London,” and slap it on anyway, ignoring her.
But today has been anything but normal, from the very first moment.
“Okay, bug,” he soothes. “Hold on, I’ll find one.”
While Walt distracts her so she won’t pick at the scrape, Orion ducks into his bedroom on the bandage hunt. I decide now’s my chance. Stupidly, I follow him.
“Hey.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Orion—”
“I think you should go.” With his back to me as he digs through a First Aid box in the closet, he takes a deep breath, like he’s holding back a much worse reaction than this.
“I’m sorry.” My breath is still coming in sips. The attack started from real panic—needing to find London—but now feels like a guest overstaying their welcome.
Like me, I guess.
“Okay, uh....” He turns, eyes shut, and runs his hand through his hair. The high sun of the afternoon catches the blondest pieces. Through the mud puddle that is my brain, I feel that familiar swoon and scold myself. Not the time. “Seriously. I’m asking you nicely to go, and...and I need you to do it.”
“I don’t want to leave with things like this.” I sit on the edge of his bed. If he wants me out, he’ll have to physically remove me. “You’re obviously pissed, and I get that, but I want to talk things out.”
“Colby.” His chest heaves. The way he says my name sounds nothing like it did last night.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat. Finally, I’m getting some clarity. The tightness spidering out of my chest and down to my arms starts to fade. “I promise, it wasn’t like I slacked off watching her. I went to the bathroom. I was gone, like, four minutes.”
“That’s all it takes.”
“I know that, Orion. I’m not stupid. It was a mistake, and it won’t happen again.”
“Yeah. It won’t.”
I turn my head, observing him carefully while he focuses all his energy on the contents of a bandage box. No pink ones, I’m guessing, because he tosses it back into the First Aid kit and looks for another.
The sharpness in his answer clues me in.
“You don’t want me to watch her anymore?”
He chews the inside of his mouth and turns back to the closet. “Why did you tell her about Emily?”
“What? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Why,” he repeats, tilting his head to the ceiling, jaw clenched again, “did you tell her?”
I should have seen this coming. Out in the parking lot, when the cops took a knee and asked London why she ran off, the answer to the riddle blubbered forth: “Colby said my Mommy died.” She’d turned her eyes, huge as snow globes and glittering twice as much, on Orion, waiting for him to verify it.
And the face he’d given me...it was exactly like the day we met, when I told him not to replace the cat. Like he hated my opinion, my voice for saying it, and my brain itself for being stupid enough to think it was any of my business.
“She asked.” My anger’s bubbling up, now. It propels me to my feet, directly behind him. He won’t even give me the courtesy of eye contact. “The better question is, why did you not tell her about Emily?”
“You had no right to tell her.” Around his shoulder, I see the bandage box he’s pretending to look through bend and squash inside his hand.
“I didn’t know. I already told you downstairs: I thought it was that thing she does, asking dumb stuff just to ask it. Now answer my question: why didn’t you tell her?”
“I was going to. When she was old enough.”
“She’s six, Orion.”
The box goes flying back into the closet, the only thing I notice before he’s spun around, face right over mine. It literally steals the air right out of my lungs. And not in a good way.
“Let’s get something straight here—I’m her parent. Not you.”
The good news: my panic attack is gone.
The bad: it’s been melted in a lava rush. My feet plant themselves into his carpet. I fold my arms.
“Believe me. I know.”
His eye roll might as well be gasoline.
“I’m not saying I’ve been around long enough to deserve that title.” Even in my building rage, I know enough to watch my words closer than usual. The topic of parenting London is his dormant volcano. “The problem is that, no matter how close she and I get...I don’t think you’d ever give it to me.”
“Doesn’t stop you from offering your opinion on every parenting choice I make, so.”
“Don’t do that—don’t turn things around on me so you don’t have to address my arguments.” No one knows deflection better than me. Living with Eden taught me well.
“Fine,” he spits, sidling by me to pretend to check his bureau drawers. “You’re right. I would never give you that title.”
I knew it already—but hearing him say it runs a razor right down the inside of my chest, dead-center, just the same.
“It was a mistake,” I say again. My arms drop to my sides. “I apologized. What else do you want?”
“Nothing.” He’s quieter now, too. “I shouldn’t have gotten involved with you. That was my fault. I knew you weren’t....”
“Weren’t what? Good enough to be a stepmom?”
He hesitates. “It’s not a matter of being ‘good enough.’ It’s just...being or not being. Some people aren’t ready to be parents. That’s not an insult. It’s just fact.”
I stare at his back while he moves from drawer to drawer on his aimless mission. I think of the scar there, under the fabric. How running my finger across the stone-smooth skin felt like learning ten times more about him than I already knew. One engulfing crash.
“Were you ready?”
He looks at me. I force myself to keep my stance open. No folded arms, no rising guard.
“When London was born,” I clarify. “Were you ready to be a dad?”
“Colby,” he sighs, running his hand across his face.
I step closer. He’s not interrupting me this time. He’s not going to discard my words based on some social etiquette breach or technicality, just because he doesn’t like what I have to say.
“You were seventeen,” I remind him. “Are you really going to stand there and tell me you were completely ready to be a dad? Being a teenager, being on dialysis, not having your own parents there to help? And right after your girlfriend died from the same thing you had?”
I can see his heartbeat in the vein under his sideburn. His chest rises and falls rapidly again.
“You made mistakes. I know you did, because every parent does. You didn’t just wake up the day she was born and become a dad, Orion—you had to learn. Just like no woman is going to suddenly appear on your doorstep, ready to be a mom the second you meet her. She’ll have to figure it out with time. She’ll make mistakes. Just like you did, and just like Emily would have done, if she’d lived.”
I don’t realize the tears I felt gathering at the back of my throat have reached my eyes until the breeze, spilling from the overhead fan, chills my face. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going to stop me from telling him exactly what I think.
When he looks at me again, I spread my hands—offering him nothing and everything, the flaws in me and the shining spots underneath, asking him to look at himself and realize he has them, too.
> “That’s all I want,” I whisper. “A chance to learn.”
Twenty-Two
Orion
In another universe, I wouldn’t be fighting with Colby. I’d be fighting for her.
Maybe in a world where I didn’t have a child, or where I didn’t cringe at every word Colby’s just said, spitting them like daggers.
You made mistakes.
If she’d lived.
In a universe where I’d never been sick and wasn’t sick again, I might not care so much about finding the best mother for London. If I knew, without any doubt, I’d still be here in the years it might take Colby to learn how to be a parent...I’d give her the chance she’s asking for.
I want to give her the chance.
But in this universe, I do have a child. My life, my everything. The rhythm of this drum in my chest.
In this universe, I have no idea how many tomorrows I’ll get.
“Orion,” she prompts, sniffing. “Please, talk to me.”
“I did. I asked you to leave.”
“You can’t do this.” She steels herself with a breath. “You can’t just shut down because you don’t want to hear what I have to say, or because you hate the way I say it. Yeah, I say things with...with a rougher edge than I probably should. Sometimes I give my opinion when nobody asked. Sometimes I have zero tact.” Colby throws her hands in the air, then lets them slap against her legs. “I know all that, okay? But I’m not the only one with a problem to work on. You’ve got your own shit going on, too.”
Believe me, I think bitterly, I know.
“Remember the afternoon of the party?” she asks. “Back in Kona?”
Of course I remember. I’ll remember every detail of that afternoon for the rest of my life.
I don’t answer.
“You said people want to hear what they want to hear—they’d rather believe bullshit, no matter how much they say or think they want honesty.” Colby steps between me and the bureau. The tips of her shoes touch mine. Both are caked in mud from the drainage pipe. “That’s exactly what you’re doing to me, right now. I’m giving you honesty. You don’t have to like it. But you do have to acknowledge that it’s true.”