Something crawled up Madeline’s spine. Yes, she remembered. She’d been ten years old then. She’d sit at the scarred Formica table in her grandmother’s house with scissors and magazines, and cut out pictures of houses behind white picket fences, of families with cars and dogs and beach balls. There were always beach balls in those pictures. She’d cut out pictures of women with babies, of children on Slip ’N Slides, of happy, smiling people. She’d made up the life that she’d wanted so desperately and had saved those pictures in a shoebox under her bed.
“How in God’s name to do you remember stuff like that?” Madeline asked.
“How could I forget something like that? So here’s the thing—I remember that skinny kid with the freckles and the blue eyes and those horrible tie-dyed Keds, and I think she deserves to know why her stupid-ass dad wasn’t around. Mad, you have to go. For that ten year-old kid.”
Her ten-year-old self was a compelling argument, but it still didn’t change Madeline’s mind. But what did change her mind a few days later was soccer practice with a wiggling group of five-year-olds.
At the end of their practice—which consisted of a lot of running around and giggling about bouncing soccer balls—eight girls sat in a circle under a tree with Madeline and Teresa, the other volunteer coach. Teresa’s husband generally attended, too, but that afternoon he’d been one of the volunteers dispatched to take two girls home.
The girls were drinking CapriSuns and eating apple slices that Madeline had brought. This was Madeline’s favorite part of her day, her week, her month. She had been one of these girls once; she had sat under this tree, had wished that any of the coaches would be her new mom or dad. Madeline could not forget the yearning she’d felt then.
As a coach, she’d made up a game to play with the girls. They called it the Wishing Game, and they took turns announcing what they wished for. Madeline started the game that afternoon. “I wish, I wish, I wish,” she said, pausing for dramatic effect, “that I had a pet unicorn!”
The girls squealed with delight, and around they went. Mostly, the girls wished for things: a Wii, a television. One wished her mom had a car. Another wished she lived in a castle with lots of cats. Another wished to be a princess with a Barbie car.
But Kenya had a different sort of wish. “I wish, I wish, I wish I was a boy.”
Madeline and Teresa looked at each other. “A boy?” Madeline asked, smiling.
“Yep. If I’m a boy, my daddy will come home.”
“Why do you have to be a boy for your daddy to come home, honey?” Teresa asked.
“I don’t know,” Kenya said. “Mommy said if I was a boy, he’d come home.” She said it as if it were perfectly natural for a mother to tell her young daughter that she was the wrong sex, that her gender was the reason her father was missing from her life.
Two girls sitting next to Kenya dissolved into giggles. “Your daddy ain’t coming home.”
“Yes he is,” Kenya said with the full confidence of a five-year-old. “He can’t come home right now because he’s a superhero. He’s fighting bad guys.”
The girls giggled, and Kenya looked to Madeline for support. “He’s friends with Batman,” she said, and the girls laughed again.
How could Madeline deny that child? How many times had she wished for a superhero dad? “I know,” she said, smiling at Kenya. “I saw him.”
Kenya’s eyes rounded. “You saw my daddy?”
“With Batman,” Madeline said. She could feel Teresa’s frown of disapproval, could see the other girls staring at her with excitement. But that all faded in the light of Kenya’s big grin.
So in the end, in a roundabout way, it was Kenya who made Trudi’s argument for Trudi. Kenya deserved a better explanation of why her father was missing from her life. So did Madeline.
Later that night, when Stephen called, Madeline settled on the perfect excuse to end things with him: She told him she couldn’t date him right now, because she was going to take care of some personal business.
“What kind of personal business?” he asked.
“My father died and left me some property in Colorado,” she said. “Shared with siblings I haven’t met.” She gave him a brief explanation of what she knew.
“Wow,” Stephen said. “You know, I have a friend in Denver who handles property cases. I could get in touch.”
Madeline agreed to it if for no other reason than to end the call. She guessed a lawyer in Denver would probably tell her what Jackson Crane had already told her.
Over the next two days, she arranged everything at work. She made color-coded files with all her listings, prepared task charts for the realtor’s assistant, Bree, to follow in case something should come up in the few days she was gone. She even prepared some automated e-mail reminders on the slim chance that her plane went down. She’d left explicit instructions for when and how the office was to contact her, and, please God, if she got an offer on the DiNapoli property, how they were to text her immediately.
Madeline had everything covered.