“I suppose so. This is all new—this meeting new people. It’s never had to share me before, not really. I’ve never brought up wanting to leave. I guess House isn’t sure how to deal with it yet.”
Delilah ran her finger along the glossy keys, applying just enough pressure to feel the smoothness against her fingertip, not hard enough to play a note. “Don’t you ever wonder what happened to your parents? It’s weird, after what happened yesterday, that we never talk about why it’s just you and that house.”
Gavin plucked at a few keys, absently, the F and G in six slow beats, then the E and G. The subject just sort of made him. . . tired. Delilah couldn’t know how many hours, how many days or weeks or even months of his life he’d spent thinking about parents, about a mother to wrap her arms around him when he was sick or a father to help him build his airplanes, play music, just. . . talk to. “I used to think of them all the time. I went through an obsessive find everything stage when I was about seven, but I only have one picture. She had brown hair. That’s literally the extent of my knowledge.”
Delilah slid her hand over his knee and midway up this thigh. “Maybe you look like her.”
It was only the solid weight of Delilah’s hand on his leg that anchored Gavin to the room and kept him from slipping into that place he rarely let himself go, where he thought—really thought—about his mom. Gavin did have her hair. He had her pale skin and wide, dark eyes. He had the same nose he’d seen mirrored in a faded and crumpled photograph. She had a heart-shaped face—he remembered that much—and a guarded, wary smile. Gavin thought he shared that with her too.
“I found a picture in the bathroom a few years ago,” he said. “The wood in there swells sometimes from the humidity, and I pulled out one of the drawers that had been getting stuck. The photo was taped to the bottom.”
Delilah didn’t comment on how odd it was to find a photograph purposely affixed that way, like someone had deliberately hidden it—a thought Gavin had had enough times for the both of them—instead asking, “But how did you know it was her?”
“There was a baby carriage in the background,” he explained, “this rickety old thing that had to have come from an antique store or a flea market or something. I think she was—well, from the pictures I’ve seen—a little strange? Eccentric maybe? She had this long wavy hair and wore all these drapey things. She was beautiful but sort of a hippie, or something. Anyway, the stroller. It had these things hanging from the hood. An arrowhead, a feather, a wooden bear, some coins, and a few things I couldn’t make out. I recognized some of them. I’ve had the arrowhead as long as I can remember. I’m pretty sure the carriage was mine.”
Gavin wondered if Delilah would think this was too little to draw a conclusion from, but she was already bursting with more questions. Turning to face him, Delilah bent her leg and brought it up to rest on the bench between them, her knee pressed into his hip. And in what seemed like a completely natural move, she reached for his hand, holding it in both of her own.
“Have you ever asked anyone about your parents?”
“I don’t honestly know where to start without making people realize that I’m alone there,” he said, and then swallowed heavily. “I’m cared for. I’m loved. If Social Services or whoever knew that I didn’t have parents, they’d take me away. They’d put me in foster care and take House apart. When I was old enough to realize that. . . I knew enough to know how bad it could be.”
“So where did she go?” she said to herself, looking down at his fingers. “That’s what we have to figure out.”
This is where Gavin usually stopped thinking. It was just too much to imagine she had been in an accident, leaving House to care for him or—worse—that she’d purposefully left him there alone.
But in true Delilah fashion, she would not be deterred.