by Holly Rayner
A numb sensation creeps over me, and I smooth my palm over Kal’s comforter. His scent comes off the fabric and wraps around me. Closing my eyes, I can almost believe he’s right here.
This is his home. He wouldn’t leave it.
Opening my eyes, I stand. There’s one more room I haven’t checked.
Kal’s art studio is different, as well. Several paintings are gone, along with the paints. He didn’t take everything, though. The paintings of the beach and castle he showed me are still here.
Tears burn my eyes. I didn’t know it when he showed me these paintings, but they’re of Kalista. His homeland.
They’re painted with such love and reverence of the land. That’s the confusing part. Kal doesn’t want anyone to know about his association with Kalista, and yet he clearly can’t let it go. He even alluded to it in his assumed name, for goodness’ sake.
Is that where he and Maya went? Back across the ocean? So far away that I’ll certainly never see them again?
If he were able to return to Kalista, judging from his reverence of the place, wouldn’t he have done so years ago? Why wait until someone discovers his true identity?
No, they couldn’t have gone back there. For some reason I’ll probably never be privy to, Prince Nikos is hiding from his own country.
More reasonable is the theory that they headed for another random, small town. Maybe one in Ohio. Maybe one further away. South Carolina. New Mexico. There certainly are enough of them to flee to.
Kal could move around every six months for the rest of his life and get away with it. He could be a Richard in one place and an Eddie in another.
There’s probably one thing he’ll never do, though: get close to someone.
It makes sense now that he said he hardly ever went out and that he was never seen dating. He made sure he never got close to anyone.
Why break that rule for me?
It would be nice to believe I’m something special to him, but standing here surrounded by a life that he’s abandoned, I feel anything but special. I was just another thing for him to keep at a distance.
Maybe he thought he could do things differently with me, say let me in partially. Have a good time while keeping me in the dark.
Yeah. Like that lasted long.
Stepping up to one of the canvasses, I run my fingertips over the bumps of raised paint that create the sea. This is how it’s going to be. Kal is gone. Maya is gone.
They were only brief flickers of light in my life.
I’m left more with impressions and feelings than any concrete knowledge about them.
And that, like much else, is just something I will need to learn to live with.
Chapter 18
Nikos
The gas station is quiet, no customers at it.
Which means it is perfect.
No one here should know who I am, but right now that doesn’t matter. The need to disappear, to get as far away as possible from everything I know, is what drives me.
Signaling, I cut across the highway and pull up to a pump.
“Where are we going?” Maya asks from the back seat.
My chest squeezes tight. “On a trip. Remember? I told you that.”
“Oh. Yeah. But where, Dad? You didn’t say.”
“Because it’s a surprise.”
It’s impossible to bring myself to look at my daughter. Hands tight on the steering wheel, I gaze into the brush across the parking lot. I see the greenery, and yet I do not.
The whole day has been this way. I am present… but not.
“Can I get out?” Maya asks as I open the driver’s door.
I hesitate. It feels better to have her in the back seat, in a contained space where there are sure to be no surprises.
“I want to get out,” she moans. “My legs are sore.”
“Yes. You can get out. Do you need to use the bathroom?”
She climbs from the car and glances at the convenience store’s front door. “Yeah.”
She’s probably thinking that if she “uses the bathroom” there’s the chance of scoring a candy bar while she’s in there. Which is fine. Like I told her, we’re on a trip. This is supposed to be fun.
“Let’s go inside,” I say, taking her hand in mine.
Maya wants to go into the bathroom on her own, so I wait near the door. Drawing my phone from the pocket, I check to see if I have any messages.
There’s a missed call from Julia.
The sight of her name is a punch to the gut.
I had thought that telling her it might be best if we never see each other again would push her away for good. The intention was to hurt her, even though that was the last thing I wanted.
She’s so persistent. It’s crazy that she will never know how much I admire that about her.
There is plenty she’ll never know. Like how, the moment I saw her struggling with those boxes in Shay’s driveway, a wall I’d built around my heart crumbled.
When Maya’s mother died, I didn’t make a conscious decision to change, to become withdrawn, perhaps even cold and callous. It was merely the natural progression of things. Right on the heels of leaving the only life I’d ever known, I suddenly found myself both a grieving widower and a single father to an infant.
Thinking about my life’s circumstances was a luxury I did not have. There was too much to do, a new life depending on me to pull myself together and get through the tortuous days and nights any way I could.
If I made the decision to never open up to another woman, it was a subconscious one.
In the years that followed, there were girls who caught my interest, but it was never more than that. The fancies were passing; once they reciprocated any sort of desire I shut down. My feelings went rigid, and the only desire I suddenly had was to flee.
Until Julia.
With her, it was different. And the more we came to know each other, the stronger my feelings grew. I was a new man with her, one who focused on possibilities instead of fears.
Until the letter.
The door of the bathroom jiggles, and Maya emerges, wiping her hands on her pants.
“You washed those hands, yes?” I ask.
“Yeah, Dad.” Her attention is on the nearby slushie machine.
“You can get one,” I tell her. “But only halfway full. It’s a lot of sugar and we don’t want to have to take another bathroom break right away.”
She bounces from joy. “I want cherry. Do they have cherry?”
“I bet they do.”
I help her get her slushie and then pay for gas. Outside, Maya leans against the car and watches me pump. For a few minutes, it’s easier to think about nothing but what’s happening right now.
This is easy. Taking care of my daughter is what I know how to do. Since the last seven and a half years have been all about her, what’s to question? I work to make money to support her. I keep my social life to a limit in order to spend more quality time with her. I sleep to have the energy to keep up with her.
It’s one foot in front of the other.
The pump clicks, and I seal up the gas tank’s cap.
“In the car,” I say. “Time to go.”
Maya obediently gets into her seat and buckles up, but she’s got that look in her sky-blue eyes that tells me questions are coming.
“Where are we, Dad?”
“In a state called Kentucky.” Checking for traffic, I pull into the road.
“But where? How far are we from Sterling?”
Tension grips my neck and shoulders. “A few hours.”
“Are we going to the water park?”
“Perhaps we will make that stop eventually.”
“But we’re going on a long trip, right?” she asks. “That’s why we took all our clothes.”
My throat’s thick. I’ve been working on explaining what’s really happening since I packed our belongings in the night then shook her awake before the sun was up. I’m no closer to formulating a story now than
I was then.
We’re leaving, that’s what’s happening. There is no “trip,” unless you count the one we’re taking to a new home.
It’s a move I’ve been planning for years, but one that I always hoped would never happen. Each time I put a stack of cash in the safe or took my car in for an early tune-up just in case we might need to depart in the middle of the night, I held my breath and told myself it wouldn’t be necessary.
Except now it is.
Someone knows who I am. While I want to believe that Julia will keep my secret quiet, how do I know that will be the case? It’s possible she doesn’t even fully understand the repercussions of revealing my past.
Maya has no idea who I was before she came into my life, and I intend to keep it that way. She is a normal child with none of the worries or expectations that I grew up with.
If we were to stay in Sterling and my past life as Prince Nikos were to be revealed, reporters would be on my doorstep within a day. Everything would change. Maya’s face would be plastered across the internet and in newspapers, and the upheaval that would bring to our lives would be terrible.
I can’t allow something like that to happen.
“When are we stopping?” Maya asks in that verging-on-whining voice that reveals she is tired.
“We just stopped.”
“Yeah, but I’m bored, and you won’t tell me where we’re going.”
A glance in the mirror reveals her bottom lip jutting out.
“Maya…”
What can I say? I’m frustrated with myself for getting into this situation at all, and that makes me frustrated with her.
She might be only seven, but I have to tell her the truth. The reality of the change will hit her sooner or later, anyway. It is best to prepare her.
“How would you like to live somewhere new?” I ask.
The car is dead silent. Maya blinks and looks out the window.
After another quiet moment, she asks, “Why?”
“Because moving around is an adventure.”
Her brow knits, and my heart clenches. I had dreamed of raising my daughter in one place, believing such a move would help make up for the lack of a mother and extended family.
“Where would we live?” she asks.
“There are lots of choices. Do you like the city or country best?”
“I like Sterling,” she answers right away.
Of course.
“But,” I answer, “if we did move, where would you like to go?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to go home.”
My hands tighten around the steering wheel. The painful nature of this situation is exacerbating my annoyance at her. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world when you are attempting to do what is best for your child and yet they stand in the way.
“Moving somewhere is fun,” I tell her. “You only don’t know that because you haven’t done it yet.”
There’s no response. Maya’s quiet hurts even more than her protests.
“We will be staying in a hotel tonight,” I say. “Won’t you like that? Remember how much fun you had when we went to the mountains and we stayed in the hotel with a pool?”
“Yes,” she grumbles.
We pass a sign for an upcoming town.
“Perhaps we could stop early,” I say. “That way you can have some extra time to swim.”
Although not too early. Of prime importance is putting a considerable number of miles between us and Sterling.
The few friends I have will call, surely. As might Maya’s friends’ parents.
I still haven’t decided what I will say to them. Completely vanishing does not seem like the best idea. If those in Sterling suspect Maya and I have gone missing, they will call the police, and that is certainly a move I do not need.
Telling everyone that we had to move with short notice is the best choice. Something about an ill relative needing my immediate help seems good.
As for our home, this condition is the very reason I never bought. It would be too sticky to leave while owning a house. Since we only had two months left in the lease, I dropped the rent for those two months off at my landlord’s office on the way out of town.
Being that prepared is something I should probably take pride in, but that’s not the case. When you are constantly stuck trying to survive, it is hard to feel even a semblance of that kind of emotion.
“Yeah,” Maya mumbles. “I like hotels.”
“Good.”
She’s got her pillow propped between her head and the door, and her eyelids are getting heavy. It’s only the afternoon, but she must be exhausted from waking up early and then spending the whole day in the car.
It might not be a good idea to let her nap, since that means she could be awake half the night. Then again, fifteen minutes can’t hurt, and I could use some time to myself.
I turn the radio on to a classical station and put the volume down low. It was a trick that always helped when Maya was little and sleeping fitfully.
Within a few minutes, she’s out, and it’s only me and my thoughts.
My gaze drifts to my phone lying on the passenger’s set. There’s a hollow sensation in my core. Try as hard as I can, it’s impossible to get Julia off my mind.
If only she had let sleeping dogs lie and never opened that letter.
Wishful thinking.
I could blame this all on her, but in the end what we are going through is my doing. Leaving my home country and assuming a new identity did not come without its price.
Still…
What could have been plays on repeat in my head.
Perhaps we could have gotten closer, and Julia would have chosen to relocate to Ohio. Perhaps she would have moved in with us and become the missing piece I never realized I desperately needed.
My eyes burn. It has been so long since I cried; I can’t believe I’m doing it now.
I wipe a tear away and blink against the threat of fresh ones.
“Dad? Why are you crying?”
Maya’s voice makes me tense. My focus stays on the road.
“I got something in my eye,” I say.
“And it made you cry?”
She knows I’m lying.
That’s all I’ve been doing to her today.
Guilt rumbles in my soul. This isn’t the kind of man I want to be, nor the kind of father.
“You’re sad.”
The truth can be held back no longer.
“Yes,” I say. “I am, but it is nothing to worry about. Grown-ups, like children, get sad sometimes. As long as I am with you, I will be happy.”
“I’m happy with you too, Dad.”
“Try to stay awake, sweetie. We will find a hotel soon and then have some fun.”
“I dreamed about Julia,” Maya says softly.
My hands tremble. As does my voice.
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. I dreamed that we were playing in the yard with her. It was Christmas, and there was snow everywhere, and we were making a snowman. You, me, and her. Do you think that will happen?”
“Maya…” Licking my dry lips does no good. I’m still stuck for an answer.
“I hope it does happen,” Maya sighs. “Even if we are moving. Hey, Dad. We didn’t say goodbye to Julia. Don’t you think she’ll miss us?”
“I will talk to her,” I lie. “She’ll understand.”
“But shouldn’t we have said goodbye in person?”
Words fail me. It could be Maya’s dream that’s done it, or her insistence that we say a proper goodbye to Julia. Whatever the cause, I’m completely shaken.
Julia isn’t my enemy. She came to my house multiple times asking me to open up to her. She not only wanted the truth, she wanted my heart as well.
And what did I do? Slam the door in her face and demand she never return.
I’ve spent years thinking the rest of the world is against me. It’s a mindset I adopted out of a need to protect Maya, but that doesn’t me
an it’s appropriate.
Julia wants to know the true me. On top of that, she’s a caring person who would never hurt Maya.
If only, instead of being reactive, I had stopped and considered all of this. But no, I freaked and fled.
And perhaps made the greatest mistake of my life.
There’s a chain grocery store up ahead. Signaling, I enter into it and turn the car around.
“What are we doing?” Maya asks. “Did we pass the hotel?”
“Maya, honey, we’re going home.”
“Really?” she asks with the kind of excitement she hasn’t had all day.
“Yes. I think that now is not the time to take a trip, after all.”
“You mean move,” she points out.
I cringe. “Yes.”
My actions today are not at all indicative of the stability Maya needs. It’s important for her to have a life she can count on.
As for the problem of my true identity getting out…
That will be dealt with in time. No matter what, Maya will be buffered from the attention that comes with the truth, should it come at all.
The tires eat up the miles of road. A lightness enters my being. Driving in the direction of Julia creates a completely opposite state than driving away from her does.
It brings hope.
Chapter 19
Julia
The whisper of wind comes in through the open front windows, followed by the patter of rain. The presence of the storm brings a drop in temperature, and a shiver goes through me.
Laying on the couch, I stare up at the ceiling.
How long can a person go without sleep?
It might be something to look up online, but I’ve had enough with asking the internet for answers.
And yet… my tablet, sitting on the coffee table, calls to me. It looks lonely.
“Screw it,” I mutter.
Turning on the screen, I find that I left the browser on a picture of Kal.
No: Nikos.
It was one taken of him about ten years ago. He sports a beard and smiles, but that last part is probably because he hasn’t noticed someone is taking a picture of him.
My fingers stretch out for the screen, but I stop just shy of touching it.