Lost (19 page)

Something rattled behind me, and I jumped. An aluminum can scurried down the street, pushed by the gusting wind. My hair whipped around me, and I pulled my thin jacket tighter around my chest.

A few steps later, I heard another noise but didn’t turn around.

 
“It’s the can, Christine,” I told myself.

The can rattled again, followed by a different sound.
A softer one.
Not a can. It sounded like feet. I wondered if Drake had tweeted or made a status about me that Kamon had seen again.

I sped my steps. Panic eventually made me run towards the streetlight. When the steps behind me sped too, I scrambled to find my phone to call Mom.

My touchscreen was too sensitive to my nervous fingers.

“Don’t be afraid,” the voice said, like the hunter had in the bookstore. “Leah or … Christine. Whatever name
you’re
going by.” This voice was not threatening. It was gentle, familiar. “I – I – I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to talk.” I stopped running, my shoes splashing in a puddle of water. I panted as he came closer. My dad held both of his hands up. “I don’t have any weapons. And I’m not stalking you. Okay?”

 
“Okay.”

“W-w-which name is it?” he asked, still creeping towards me.

“Christine.”

He was breathing harder than I was, and his thoughts were a distant jumble, like faint white noise. “I watched you on the news. I’ve been thinking about you since then.” He smacked his forehead. “That made me s-s-sound like a stalker, but I’m not. I swear.”

 
If he weren’t
the
Gavin from Mom’s memories, this had all the makings of being my death scene, or hers – alone with a tattooed stranger on a dark street in an unfamiliar city. But he was
the
Gavin, so I said, “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Good. I have a few questions for you. Is that okay?” I nodded. “My car is … right there.” He pointed at a deep green truck parked at the end of the street, too nice to be an off-road vehicle but shaped like one. “That’s not – uh – very safe, but I have a feeling you live a … sort of secret life. Am I right?”

I didn’t really know how to answer, so I shrugged my shoulders.

We walked to the busier street where the city lights drove away the haunting shadows. I tried to push my brain to decipher why he wanted to talk to me, but nothing happened. It felt sluggish, weighed down by the potion like a soggy towel.

He opened the door for me and ran back to the other side. He slammed his door and locked us in. His eyes were on his
dashboard,
his thoughts still a jumble of soft words. He reached over me and opened the glove compartment. My heart jumped at the sight of a pistol amidst scattered papers and napkins. “There’s my gun. That’s yours to use if you feel unsafe. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I took the car in as I waited for him to speak. Hints of tobacco clung to the seats without any visible evidence of actual cigarettes or ashes. I had the feeling that it only smelled like smoke because he spent his time singing in bars and clubs.

“The first time I watched the news report about you, they were calling you Leah.”

“Yeah.”

“Then … the next time I watched
,
they were calling you Christine.”

“It’s … my real name.”

“
Wh
-” He huffed and paused, like he was struggling through a stutter. “What – um – brings you h-h-here tonight?” I hunched my shoulders. I didn’t want to lie to my dad, and I couldn’t tell him the truth. “When I saw you in that booth, I almost … f-f-fainted.”

“I didn’t know I was
that
famous.”

“It’s not that … it’s…”

He paused again and I stared out of the windshield. The glow on the slick asphalt reflected the changing colors of the streetlight. It went from green to yellow as he struggled to find his words. The whispers around him halted too. They cranked on and off again in a moment, like a radio with a short. Like something was wrong with him.

The street glowed red, and my brain slowed with the cars passing us. Everything seemed to move in slow motion as it dawned on me that something could be wrong with him. That he said
uh
a lot, and paused a lot, and stuttered.

“
Uh…,”
he continued to struggle.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. I just – uh – get a little lost sometimes. Especially when I’m nervous.”

“Why are you nervous?”

He hunched his shoulders. A bus rumbled down the street and stopped a few feet away from us. Passengers shuffled out and dispersed into the windy night.

“B-b-because it’s just weird that you’re here.
In Chicago.
In this bar of all p-p-places … when I’ve wanted to ask you something for months.
I even looked you up, but you don’t have a page on anything like most kids do.” His thoughts muted again and he gripped the steering wheel, his shoulders curling so violently I would’ve thought he was about to shift if I didn’t know he was human. He took a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you if you knew the woman who was looking for you.”

His question was all there was to the world for a moment. There were no lights, or sounds. No words. My silence seemed to answer for me. The moisture in his eyes said all there was to say about him, too. It explained why he stuttered and frequently lost his words.

He’d hurt himself, likely to recover memories of her.

“I was watching the news and thought …” He coughed and took a moment to catch his breath after. “I thought … if I had a kid, I’d bet she’d look like that. Then … they f-f-f-lashed your picture, then her, then
you
again. I was drinking, so I thought I was just fabricating the resemblance. I thought it was the beer. A few days later, they said it was your birthday. And I counted nine months from that day. It’s possible.
But …
impossible
.
I didn’t think she had a reason to hate me enough to do this, so … I let it go. But you came here tonight. The odds of it b-b-being nothing now are slim.”

He sighed loudly and leaned his head back on the seat, trembling now. Thick tears dropped from his eyes, and he paused. I wasn’t sure if he’d lost his words again or if he just couldn’t speak through the tears.

“How do you remember her?” I asked.

“I found pictures of a random girl in my house when I was moving out. This feeling of knowing her kept bothering me. It took years, a stroke, and permanent damage, but I finally remembered.” He took my face in his hands and rubbed his thumbs under the eyes we shared. “Humor me. Who am I to you?”

His eyes were burning despite the tears cascading from them. There was no sense in lying. He already knew. “You’re my father.” He closed his eyes and nodded, yanking his head up and down several times, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “She doesn’t know that you know her,” I said.

“She knows everything before most people know anything. If she wanted to talk to me, she would have. I’ve stayed out of her way to give her what she wanted, but she’s been hiding my kid!”

“I know. I’m sorry, Dad. She is too.” Something broke him then.
My apology, or hers, or calling him
dad
.
He pulled me out of my seat and trapped me against his chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I didn’t mean to do any of this. I just wanted to hear you play.”

He whispered things too teary to understand for a minute, soaking my hair and squeezing the life out of me. The first comprehensible thing he said was, “Call her. Right now, please.”

I pulled out my phone, my heart close to giving out.

“Is everything okay?” Mom said after the first ring.

“Sort of.
Okay
… not really.”

“What’s wrong?”

It took me a few seconds to get it out, but I finally forced the words, “I’m in Chicago,” to my lips. Then I said, “Dad knows.” She didn’t say anything for a minute. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, baby. I’m not mad. I’m just confused. What do you mean, he knows?”

I tried to work through the story – the bar, the pictures, the news. It must’ve frustrated Dad because he snatched my phone out of my hand.

“I’m not in the mood for you to play dumb. I’m taking her to my house. I assume you know where it is and can get there faster than I can.”

He stepped out of the truck and stormed away with the phone. No amount of distance would’ve silenced the filthy words coming out of his mouth. He spat hateful names I didn’t think Kamon would call her. Some of the insults baffled me, too foreign and adult for me to comprehend, but I knew they were killing her to hear. And it was apparently killing him to say. He ripped the phone from his ear and screamed at the wind after their call ended.

After he’d stopped, he stood outside by his door for a minute before getting in, probably trying to calm down from his rage.

He cried the entire drive to his house, apologizing and calling himself a
dead-beat-dad
. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I told him I wasn’t upset. Especially when he asked me to tell him about my life before today – that I really was an orphan, that I met Mom three months ago for the first time, and that she’d tampered with my memories too.

He gripped his steering wheel hard enough to rip it off.

It was silent until he pulled into his driveway and came around to open my door.

Mom was sitting on the deck that overlooked the dark lake. A gentle breeze caught her hair, making her look enchanted and gorgeous under the stars. She was sobbing.

“Gavin, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t call me that. You don’t know me, remember?”

“Okay …
Christopher
. I’m sorry. But it’s more complicated than you probably think it is.”

Dad clenched his jaw, and with a strange calm, unlocked his door and walked inside. The patio opened into a kitchen. The stainless steel appliances gave it a masculine feel. It was clean but lived in. Opened envelopes and newspapers littered the counters, and there were pots on the stove. If I had to make a more than educated guess, I’d say he’d made beef stew earlier today.

Mom pulled me to her side, covering my face with kisses and apologies, as we followed closely behind Dad. He obviously loved the guitar. They crowded his living room. A few glistening ones were mounted on the wall, looking down on the peasant guitars on the floor. Apparently, this was his idea of home décor. He didn’t have art or photographs, just guitars and scattered sheet music on the sofa and coffee table.

“Christine, make yourself at home. We’ll be back,” he said.

He clicked on the television, cranked the volume as loud as it would go, and stormed past Mom down a dark hall. "I'm so sorry," I said. She shook her head, rejecting my apology, and followed Dad.
 

The TV wasn’t loud enough to muffle the slamming door.

Of course I wasn’t about to let them have a private conversation. I wasn’t a baby.

I stayed as close to the door as I could to hear their fight. Mom tried to tell him about Julian. He didn’t care. She tried to tell him about Kamon. He cared even less. She told him about her soul and the danger we were currently in. He didn’t reply. He was silent while she cried and told him she wouldn’t have left him if she’d had a choice. He waited until she ran out of words and screamed at her nonstop for half an hour, stuttering through curse words. That seemed to piss him off more.

“I should have you arrested for kidnapping. I can’t believe you have the nerve to play this victim role, crying and all this bullshit. I hate you,” was the last thing I heard Dad say.

So much for a sweet reunion for the crazy couple from the diary.

Someone touched the doorknob, and I ran back to the sofa. Mom came out first, face red and puffy.

She kneeled in front of me, grabbed my hands, and rested her head against my leg. “Should I even bother saying …
I didn’t know
? It’s such a lame excuse, especially for me.”

“I get it, Mom. You don’t watch him. It’s probably too hard to.”

“Stop! Stop excusing all the bad things I do to you. Your powers, the orphanage, giving you enemies, now this.”

I wasn’t excusing those things; I was well aware of them. I’d decided to forgive her for the bad decisions she’d made and the things she’d missed, including the monumental oversight of not knowing her husband remembered her. I’d lumped everything together and wrapped them up in one wave of forgiveness. If I analyzed her mistakes one by one, I was afraid I wouldn’t feel the same way about her.
 
I knew I couldn’t do it, kill her, but I didn’t want to give myself a reason to be angry with her. Because my anger tended to fester and swell into something poisonous I couldn’t control. And July 4
^th
was far too close for that.

“We can get through this, Mom. I think we’ve been through worse.”

She huffed. “I’m having a hard time imagining something worse than this, sweetie.” Her lips twitched, nearly smiling, before her face turned to stone. “I bet you want to hang out here for a while.” I nodded. “I’ll come back for you later … if you still want me around.”

“Mom, of course I do.” She stood and straightened her dress. “I’m worried about you. Are you sure you can go back to work right now?”