I shake my head. “Holder, you didn’t do anything. You just walked away.”
“Exactly,” he says. “I walked to my front yard even though I knew I should have sat back down in the grass beside you. I stood in my front yard and I watched you cry into your arms, when you should have been crying into mine. I just stood there…and I watched the car pull up to the curb. I watched the passenger window roll down and I heard someone call your name. I watched you look up at the car and wipe your eyes. You stood up and you dusted off your shorts, then you walked to the car. I watched you climb inside and I knew whatever was happening I shouldn’t have just been standing there. But all I did was watch, when I should have been with you. It never would have happened if I would have stayed right there with you.”
The fear and regret in his voice is causing my heart to race against my chest. I somehow find strength to speak, despite the fear consuming me. “What never would have happened?”
He kisses me on the forehead again and his thumbs brush delicately over my cheekbones. He looks at me like he’s scared he’s about to break my heart.
“They took you. Whoever was in that car, they took you from your dad, from me, from Les. You’ve been missing for thirteen years, Hope.”
One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a characters life into chapters. It’s intriguing, because you can’t do this with real life. You can’t just end a chapter, then skip the things you don’t want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can’t be divided into chapters...only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.
I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how.
“Say something,” he says. I’m still sitting in his lap, wrapped around him. My head is pressed against his shoulder and my eyes are shut. He places his hand on the back of my head and lowers his mouth to my ear, holding me tighter. “Please. Say something.”
I don’t know what he wants me to say. Does he want me to act surprised? Shocked? Does he want me to cry? Does he want me to scream? I can’t do any of those things because I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what he’s saying.
“You’ve been missing for thirteen years, Hope.”
His words repeat over and over in my mind like a broken record.
“Missing.”
I’m hoping he means missing in a figurative sense, like maybe he’s just missed me all these years. I doubt that’s the case, though. I could see the look in his eyes when he said those words, and he didn’t want to say them at all. He knew what it would do to me.
Maybe he really does mean missing in the literal sense, but he’s just confused. We were both so young; he probably doesn’t remember the sequence of events correctly. But the last two months flash before my eyes, and everything about him…all of his personalities and mood swings and cryptic words come into clear focus. Like the night he was standing in my doorway and said he’d been looking for me his whole damn life. He was being literal about that.
Or our first night sitting right here on this runway when he asked if I’d had a good life. He’s worried for thirteen years about what happened to me. He was being very literal then, wanting to know if I was happy with where I ended up.
Or the day he refused to apologize for the way he acted in the cafeteria, explaining that he knew why it upset him but he just couldn’t tell me yet. I didn’t question it then, because he seemed sincere that he wanted to explain himself one day. Never in a million years could I have guessed why it upset him so much to see that bracelet on me. He didn’t want me to be Hope because he knew the truth would break my heart.
He was right.
“You’ve been missing for thirteen years, Hope.”
The last word of his sentence sends a shiver down my spine. I slowly lift my face away from his shoulder and look at him. “You called me Hope. Don’t call me that. It’s not my name.”
He nods. “I’m sorry, Sky.”
The last word of that sentence sends a shiver down my spine as well. I slide off of him and stand up. “Don’t call me that, either,” I say resolutely. I don’t want to be called Hope or Sky or Princess or anything else that separates me from any other part of myself. I’m suddenly feeling like I’m completely different people, wrapped up into one. Someone who doesn’t know who she is or where she belongs and it’s disturbing. I’ve never felt so isolated in my life; like there isn’t a single person in this entire world I can trust. Not even myself. I can’t even trust my own memories.
Holder stands up and takes my hands, looking down at me. He’s watching me, waiting for me to react. He’ll be disappointed because I’m not going to react. Not right here. Not right now. Part of me wants to cry while he wraps his arms around me and whispers, “Don’t worry,” into my ear. Part of me wants to scream and yell and hit him for deceiving me. Part of me wants to allow him to continue to blame himself for not stopping what he says happened thirteen years ago. Most of me just wants it all to go away, though. I want to go back to feeling nothing again. I miss the numbness.