“She’s yours, Carey. That makes her ours. If you’ll let her.”
I cry silently, my shoulders heaving, and he lets me. It’s like he knows that sometimes we’re in it alone. I zone out to the trees rushing by, thinning out as we travel farther into civilization. I’m straddling two worlds again. It’s so exhausting.
“You have questions, Carey? Ask them.”
I’ve been waiting my entire life. I would’ve thought the words would be hard, once faced with the actual, real-life chance. But the words fly out sharp as bee stings, my voice warped and ugly.
“Why didn’t you come lookin’ for me? Why did you let her take me?” I can’t control it once I start. “If you didn’t want me then, why are you even bothering now?”
My shoulder smacks into the door panel as he swerves down an off-ramp and into a spacious parking lot. A red neon sign blinks H WAY DINER TRUCK STOP. Under that,: FO D AND FUEL.
“What are you talking about?”
“I know what you did! You beat Mama and me. She had to save us! You threw us out! Mama told me!”
He punches the dashboard, then flings open the door and climbs out, slamming it behind him. I curl into a ball in my seat, sneaking peeks through the rearview mirror as he paces the asphalt behind the truck. I jump when he comes around and knocks on my window.
But the anger has smoldered into something stronger. Tougher. Sadder. I roll down the glass.
“It’s time you heard the truth,” he says.
He opens my door and turns me toward him, so I’m sitting with my boots dangling out the opening.
“You really have no idea, do you?”
I think of the cold, the rain . . . the steel I couldn’t always be. I refuse to make this easy for him.
“About what, exactly?”
We wait while an eighteen-wheeler pulls out of a parking space and ambles toward the on-ramp.
“I never hurt you or your mother.”
I shake my head, disbelieving. “Mama said!”
“Well, your mama lied to you! That’s your mama. C’mon, a smart girl like you? Think! You know what she did to you. My whole world fell apart when she took you!”
I want to believe him. I ache to. But I can’t hurt like that again. I just can’t.
“She took us to save us from you!” I spit the words, sounding more like Mama. Less like him.
“She took you because I filed for sole custody. Your mama was sick. I tried to get her help, but she refused. One night, she left you in the car and couldn’t remember where she’d left it. It took a day and a half to find you. You were three years old and hysterical. You don’t remember?”
I shake my head against the words, screaming inside, not knowing what to believe.
Saint Joseph!
“I moved out of the house, hired a lawyer, and the court awarded me sole custody. Your mom must’ve found out. She stole you that afternoon.”
My father’s voice cracks.
“When I went to your baby-sitter’s house, you were already gone.”
“Clarey,” I whisper.
“You remember her? Clare Shipley. A friend of your mama’s. She had no idea Joelle was going to run. It was the worst day of my life.”
I look at my father, really look, and see the broken part of him, broken by Mama, like she’d broken all of us. I remember what Mrs. Haskell said. She had no reason to lie.
Kidnapped.
Ryan’s flyer, making paper noises in the wind.
“Everyone was looking for you.” His eyes are slanted at the tips, just like the girl’s in the flyer. “I registered you with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and put up posters for years. I even went on the news a bunch of times.”
We didn’t have a television in the woods. Would I have seen him if we had?
“That day we found you, it finally made sense. She’d hidden you away in the middle of nowhere, in an eight-and-a-half-thousand-acre forest. Even if someone had seen you, who’d be suspicious of a family gone camping?”
I think of how many people we’d seen when we lived in the Hundred Acre Wood.
A few hikers. Drug dealers. Men who liked kids. No one who could help.
No one, in all those years.
My father turns my face to his, forcing me to look him in the eye.
“Aren’t you happy at the farm? Haven’t we been good to you?”
His question is like the seed to a planet-size ache. He wants to give me back all that I’ve lost. I don’t know how to let him.
“Life isn’t like this! It’s not real!”
“What do you mean?”
“No one gets hugs and new clothes and all this good stuff for nothing.” I mimic Mama’s voice. “ ‘Everythin’ gets paid for in one way or another, girl, and flesh is more plentiful around here. Young flesh pays more. So git goin’!’ ”
Now he knows that, too. But he doesn’t flinch.
“This isn’t what life is like.” My voice breaks. My words aren’t saying what I mean, but I don’t know how to explain it clearer. I think of Jenessa the way she is now, like a pink-cheeked crocus pushing up through the snow. I want to be wrong more than anything in the world.