CHAPTER 54
Josh
When I get to Sunday dinner I’m hoping she’ll be there. With everything that happened last weekend, she skipped it and I don’t blame her. I would have skipped it, too, if I wasn’t desperate for even the slightest chance of seeing her.
My house is too quiet and my garage is too empty so I came over here early.
Dinner isn’t ready, so Drew and I end up in his room because I don’t feel like standing around being polite and making small talk. But I have nothing to talk to Drew about, either, and we just end up sitting here in stupid silence.
Maybe I should have stayed home.
Sunshine never came back after we talked on Wednesday. I thought it was a turning point but maybe I was just deluding myself again.
“Tell me what the hell happened between you two,” Drew finally demands.
“And don’t say nothing. And don’t say you don’t know. I’ve gotten every evasive answer there is from both of you and I’m calling bullshit.”
“I don’t know.” I look up at Drew and stop him before he can interrupt. “That’s the absolute truth, whether you like it or not. I have no f*cking idea. Everything was fine. Everything was good. And then it wasn’t. All I know is that, for like five minutes, I think I was happy.”
“Something had to have happened, Josh.”
Something most definitely did happen.
I wage an internal battle over whether to ask him the question that’s in my head. I’ve always wondered how much she talks to Drew, how much goes on between them that I don’t know about.
“Did she tell you she was a virgin?
“What? No way.” He looks at me incredulously. “Seriously?”
I nod. He clearly didn’t know any more than I did. I feel like I’m betraying her by telling him. But I have to tell someone. I have to try to understand. I feel like I’m drowning.
“How is that even possible? She’s a virgin?”
“Not anymore,” I answer.
“And that’s what happened.” He sobers. It’s not even a question.
“That’s what happened.”
“Why would that break you up?” he asks, confused.
“I don’t know. I don’t get any of it.
She said she was ruined and she was using me to ruin what was left.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I just shake my head. I have no answers. I asked her the same thing and she never gave me any.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Nothing about her has made sense since the day she got here. She just wanted to pretend it didn’t matter. I did, too.” It’s the most I’ve ever said to anyone about her and when I hear it come out of my mouth I know how it sounds.
“You know she loves you, right?”
“She told you that?” I hate the hope in my voice.
“No, but—”
“I didn’t think so.” I don’t want him taking pity on me with false hope. She either said it or she didn’t. And she didn’t.
Then again, neither did I.
“Josh—”
Drew doesn’t get a chance to finish because his mom calls us in for dinner, and I walk out before he can say anything else.
When we get to the kitchen, Mrs.
Leighton hugs me and Drew walks away to pull a playlist up on the computer because it’s his turn tonight. Everything is like normal.
And Sunshine isn’t anywhere.
We’re just about to bring the food to the table when Mr. Leighton calls out from the family room where he always watches the news before dinner. Mrs. Leighton yells back that it’s time to eat and he needs to shut the TV off, but he calls her in again, and she must recognize something in his tone because she doesn’t question it this time. She just goes, and we all follow.
And this is the moment before. The moment when everything is still familiar and understandable. The moment before everything shifts. I’ve had a few of these moments in my life. The moment I walk from the kitchen to the family room is one of them; the moment before I see the face on the television in the Leighton living room at Sunday dinner.
I don’t even know why he called us in here until I follow everyone’s eyes to the television screen. And then I know everything. I can’t even hear what they’re saying because the picture is screaming at me so loudly that it drowns out everything else. Mr. Leighton rewinds the DVR and turns it up, but I still barely process the words.
High school student Aidan Richter was
arrested
this
afternoon
after
confessing to the brutal 2009 beating and attempted murder of, then fifteen year-old, Emilia Ward, affectionately referred to by locals as the Brighton Piano Girl.
The crime had gone unsolved for nearly three years until Richter, himself only sixteen at the time of the attack, arrived with his parents and attorney and surrendered himself into police custody earlier today. No other details have been released and so far no comment has been made by either family. A press conference is scheduled to take place at 9:30
tomorrow morning.
“It’s uncanny,” Mr. Leighton says. But it’s not and he knows it. There’s nothing uncanny about it. It’s like tumblers in a lock falling into place. Everything clicks.
brutal…
beating…
attempted
murder… Emilia… Piano Girl
He pauses the TV on a split-screen of a picture of the girl I have been looking at across my garage for months. Younger. No make-up. No black clothes. Smiling. Even with the dark hair and dark eyes, there is nothing dark about her. She’s all light. Like sunshine.
“I remember seeing that on the news when it happened. It was a terrible story. It looks just like her,” Mrs. Leighton says, and I wonder if she can’t make herself believe it, or if she honestly doesn’t.
“It is her.”
We all turn, and standing in the entrance to the room is Sunshine’s brother.
“I knocked, but no one answered the door,” he says, but he’s not really talking to us. He’s staring at the TV. “Where is she?”
The Leightons look at him like he’s a crazy person who just barged into their house. Their faces are carved in disbelief, but there’s already so much shock in the room right now that it’s hard to figure out the source of it.
“Asher, Nastya’s brother,” I say, answering a question no one asked and hearing how wrong that name sounds coming out of my mouth.
“Emilia’s brother,” he corrects.
“Where is she? I need to bring her home.” I know the home he’s talking about isn’t Margot’s. He’s taking her home to Brighton. He doesn’t sound angry. Just tired. Like he’s been living under all of this for such a long time and he just wants it to be over.
“She isn’t here.”
“Margot said she would be here. She said to try your house first,” he looks at me, “and if she wasn’t there she’d be here for dinner.” There’s an uneasiness in his voice that matches his expression.
“She didn’t come tonight,” Mrs.
Leighton says gently, and then turns her eyes, full of sympathy and questions, on me.
“Why don’t you just track her phone?” I ask bitterly. Mostly because I can tell he’s edgy and nervous and worried and he’s making me all of those things, too.
“She left her phone on her bed,” he answers, like he’s starting to understand that she didn’t just forget it. She doesn’t want to be found.
Asher tells us what’s happened since this afternoon in Brighton. As soon as her parents got the call from the police, he got in the car to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to drive alone. In the meantime, they kept calling, trying to get hold of her, figuring they could get to her before it hit the news here. But no one’s been able to reach her.
Within minutes we’re all on our phones as if we actually believe it will do any good. There really isn’t anybody to call, but it makes us feel like we’re doing something, even if it is useless. If she left, and she didn’t bring her phone, she did it for a reason, and that reason is that she doesn’t want us knowing where she is.
The story on the news has changed, but we all keep looking at the television like there’s something there. Like suddenly it’s going to give us an answer. Maybe we just don’t want to look at each other and see our own confusion reflected on someone else’s face. I’m not confused. I actually feel like I understand something for the first time in months. Maybe I understand everything.
Asher walks out of the room to make a phone call and once he does, Drew looks at me. I can tell it’s been killing him to wait. “Did she tell you?” he asks.
I should be able to say yes to that question. I should have made sure of that. I should have cared enough to make her tell me. Her secrets were an open secret between us and I allowed it. There was never a question that she wasn’t telling me things. Things. How f*cked up is that?
Things. All things. Everything. But I knew that once she told me, I could never unhear it, and I was happier being ignorant.
I shake my head and everyone’s eyes are on me.
“How could she tell him? She doesn’t talk,” Sarah says.
Drew and I look at each other; and I don’t know what’s secret and what isn’t anymore.
***
My phone rings and I grab it without looking at the caller ID, hoping it’s her.
“Did you know this?” Clay asks, without even saying hello.
“No, I didn’t,” I say, but I don’t have the energy to snap at him. Everyone assumes I should have known about this. I should have. But I didn’t know anything.
“It is her, isn’t it?” he asks, waiting for confirmation he doesn’t need.
“It’s her.”
“I saw her with him yesterday.”
“With who?”
“Aidan Richter. On the news. The kid who confessed.”
“You saw her with him?” How is that possible?
“At the art competition. He was one of the finalists. When I got out of my interview, she was in the room with him.”
“What were they doing?”
“I don’t know. Standing there staring at each other. It was weird, but I just thought maybe he tried to talk to her and she didn’t answer and it freaked him out.”
“Is she okay?” The concern in his voice is genuine.
“I don’t know. No one knows where she is.” I don’t even know how I get the words out without my voice breaking.
Asher walks back in while I’m still on the phone. “My parents called the credit card company.”
I tell Clay to get over here and I hang up so I can hear what Asher is saying.
He tells us she used the card at a gas station on the northbound side of the turnpike just outside of Brighton earlier today. He’s going over to pick up some things from Margot’s and then he’s heading back there. It’s beyond me what’s so important that he has to pick it up before he goes looking for his sister but I’m not in a position to put down people who love her.
I said I loved her and look what I’ve done.
I haven’t been able to interrupt him, because I’m trying to formulate my own thoughts before I dropkick her brother with them.
“She was with him yesterday.” My stomach twists when I say it. I’m afraid there are answers there I don’t want to think about yet.
“What?” I don’t know who says it.
Maybe everybody.
“Aidan
Richter.
The
kid
who
confessed. Clay said he saw them together at the art gallery. He was there.” I force it out in one pained breath.
“Who the hell is Clay?” That wouldn’t have been my first question if I was Asher, but I answer it, just now realizing how little her family really knows about her life here.
“He draws pictures of her. She went with him to a state competition yesterday.
He said he found them in a room together, and when he saw the news today, he remembered him.”
“Does he know anything else?” Asher asks, anxiously.
“I don’t know. I told him to get over here.”
Clay pulls up and he’s barely in the door before we bombard him with questions. He tells us what he knows, which isn’t much. He was meeting with the judges while she looked around at the exhibits. When he found her after his interview, she was in a room with the Richter kid and they were staring at each other. He didn’t hear anything so he has no idea if they were speaking or not. Then Richter got called in for his interview and they didn’t see him again. Clay drove her home at the end of the day and that was it.
“She was fine on the way home. She seemed fine. Not like she talks. She was upset in the morning on the way there, but in the afternoon, nothing unusual.”
“Why was she upset? I ask, because it’s the first time he’s mentioned it.
“I don’t know. She looked out the window the whole time and when we got there she was crying. She’s been a mess ever since whatever happened between you two.” He looks at me but it’s almost apologetic, like he didn’t want to call either of us out, but he had to. “I wouldn’t have said anything if this didn’t happen.”
“She was crying?” Asher looks like he doesn’t understand. I guess she doesn’t cry in front of him, either.
“Not like sobbing,” Clay clarifies.
“Just tears. I didn’t even know until I looked at her. I wasn’t going to call her on it. Who knows what goes on in her head?”
“Nobody,” Asher says, and if it’s possible, he looks more devastated than before.
“I thought you knew your sister.” I say, throwing his words back at him because now I’m getting scared and it’s making me a dick.
“Nobody knows my sister,” he says.
And there isn’t any argument for that.
We work out what we do and don’t know at this point. We know a lot of things, just not the one thing we want to know. Where she is.
Basically what it comes down to is that no one has seen her since nine o’clock this morning and there’s been no trace of her since she used her credit card at a gas station just after eleven right outside Brighton. There’s nothing after that. But she’s eighteen and she hasn’t even been missing for twelve hours so no one’s going to look for her except us.
Asher has his parents on the phone the second we’ve sorted out Clay’s story.
While Asher talks to his mother, his father is calling the police station to let them know what happened between Sunshine and Aidan Richter yesterday. We’re all wondering the same thing. The thing that no one is saying. If she went to Brighton, she went looking for him before he ever confessed. And if she was in Brighton at eleven o’clock and he turned himself in at three-thirty—what happened in between?
Asher leaves, planning to stop at Margot’s to pick up whatever it was he promised to bring his parents from his sister’s room. Then he’s heading straight back to Brighton. Margot’s staying at her place on the off chance that Sunshine heads back this way.
Everyone knows I’m going, and Drew says he is, too. Asher gives us the address and the phone number to his parents’ house and tells us he’ll let them know we’re coming. We decide to take our own cars in case we need to separate when we get there.
A few minutes later, I climb into my truck alone and head to Brighton. I spend the entire drive bargaining with everything I will ever have. I don’t know how many times I say please. Please give her back to me. Please not again. Just please. My phone doesn’t ring. It’s the longest two hours of my life.
***
The room is full of controlled chaos.
It reminds me of the day my mother and sister died. Phones ringing off the hook.
Frantic calm. Poorly concealed fear.
They’re like zombie people. Empty.
Haunted
and
endlessly
waiting
for
something. I know what it looks like.
These people were probably normal once.
I think about how easily this could be the Leightons if it had been Sarah. How every normal family is one tragedy away from complete implosion.
There are photographs all over the room of a girl I should know, but don’t. A girl in pastel dresses, with ribbons in her hair, smiling and playing the piano in more pictures than I can count. I feel like I’m mourning all over again, but this time it’s for a girl I’ve never met.
Her parents are both on cell phones.
The land line keeps ringing, but nobody answers it because the reporters keep calling. Finally, her father rips the cord out of the wall and then it’s quiet. But not really.
Drew and I sit on the far side of the room.
Separated
physically
and
emotionally from the rest of the family. The rest of the family. Whether or not they acknowledge me, I am in that category, also. She made sure of it, no matter how much I’d like to say otherwise. She’s gone now, too. It fits.
Asher walks in not long after we arrive. He’s carrying a stack of black and white composition books; the kind Ms.
McAllister makes us use for creative writing. He puts them on the coffee table in the middle of the room. It’s a hideous coffee table. I could make a better one. I think about offering.
I can only see the front of the book on the top of the pile. Chemistry is written in red marker on the cover. It’s Sunshine’s handwriting and seeing it breaks me a little.
Her mother steps toward the stack of books like it’s a bomb. “Is this them?” Asher nods. He’s pale and looks older than he did the first time I met him.
Everyone here looks older than they should. Like they’ve seen too many horrible things and now they’re just tired. I wonder if I look like that, too.
Nastya/Emilia/Sunshine. I don’t know what to call her. Her mother picks up the book on top and opens it, flipping through the first few pages. “It’s just chemistry notes,” she says, relieved, but confused.
“Keep going, Mom.” Asher sounds like he’s delivering a death blow.
A moment later her face contorts in the most wretched expression and her hand goes to her mouth and I look away because just seeing it feels like an invasion. She looks exactly like Sunshine. Drew doesn’t look away. He just stares at her. He looks older, too. I think it might have happened, just now, when he saw the look on this woman’s face.
“It took her all of these to write this?” she asks to no one in particular. Her husband, Sunshine’s father, the man who’s been standing behind her the whole time takes the book out of her hands and she shakes her head at him. Not like she doesn’t understand something, but like she’s telling him no. She doesn’t want him to look. It’s like someone telling you not to look at a dead body, because if you look at it, you won’t ever be able to not see it again. It will always be in your head and you won’t ever close your eyes without the image being there. That’s how she looks when she shakes her head at him. Like she’s seen the body and she doesn’t want him seeing it, too.
“No,” Asher says. “It’s all the same thing. In all of them. It just repeats like it’s on a loop. Over and over and over again.” His voice breaks on the third over and he starts to cry but no one consoles him. They don’t have any comfort to offer.
There’s a knock at the door and a girl walks in. She doesn’t say anything. She just walks straight over to Asher who doesn’t move until she reaches him. Then he wraps his arms around her and folds her up until she’s almost gone and I miss Sunshine.
The mood in this room is so familiar.
No one feels anything but everyone keeps moving because there are so many things to do. But right now no one seems to know what they are.
The police said Aidan Richter is admitting to seeing her yesterday, but continues to deny having any contact with her today. No one knows whether or not it’s true. There’s nothing to go on. No place to even begin.
Finally they decide that Asher and Addison and Mr. Ward will take separate cars and go looking for her, even though they have no idea where to start. Asher was right. Nobody knows his sister, at least not the sister he has now.
Her mother is staying here to man the phone. They don’t know what to tell Drew and me to do. We don’t really know the area and we have no idea where she would go. We’re just useless and waiting.
“You can wait in Emilia’s room if you want,” her mother offers. Everyone in this house calls her Emilia and it sounds more right than Nastya ever did.
***
Her room is insane and I feel like I’ve walked into her mind. There are no walls.
You can’t see them. Every inch of space is covered
with
newspaper
clippings,
computer printouts, and handwritten notes on scraps of paper. They almost seem to move, to shimmer; swimming in and out of my vision like an optical illusion. Like her.
I want to close my eyes but I can’t. I just turn in a circle waiting for it to stop, but it goes on forever. I think I might run from the room but now this is in my head, too. Like whatever dead body is hiding downstairs in those books.
We step in and get closer because you can’t read any of it unless you’re almost on top of them. Names. They’re all names and origins and meanings. Some of them are from the newspaper, like the ones I’ve seen her cutting out at my house. Some were obviously printed off of the internet.
Others she’s written herself.
I don’t know how long we stare at the walls before Drew speaks. “Where’s Nastya?”
I look at him. I don’t know. How would I know? But he’s looking at the walls, not me. He’s searching for her name. I start looking, too, but it’s impossible.
“Your name means salvation,” he says at one point, looking at a handwritten scrap of paper taped up next to the window.
Salvation. Such a load of shit.
“Did she tell you that?” he asks.
“No.” I never asked. I never asked a lot of things. “This is pointless. We could look it up faster,” I say, needing to look away.
Drew pulls out his phone and finds a baby name site on the internet. He types Nastya in, and a second later, we have our answer.
“Rebirth,” he says. “Resurrection.
Russian origin.”
“I think that’s why she picked it. The resurrection part. I guess the Russian, too.” Her mother is standing in the doorway.
She’s pulled her hair back and it makes the dark circles under her eyes more noticeable.
“Why resurrection?” Drew asks.
“Because she died,” her mother says, looking so much like Sunshine that it unnerves me. “And she came back.”
***
Her mother tells us what happened that day. I don’t know if we want to hear it, but she needs to tell it, so we listen. She talks about the things we didn’t hear on the news and the little they know of Aidan Richter. She tells us about the part that came after. The not remembering. Then, later, the not talking. The surgeries and the physical therapy. Wanting to go back to school where no one would know who she was. The Russian name her mother didn’t understand until now.
Then she talks about before. We hear story after story about a girl and a piano and a whole community who took ownership of her. Her eyes light up at the memory of it. But that’s what it is—a memory. Like Sunshine said. I know what she’s seeing. A dead girl.
And as I listen to these stories, in this shrine of a house, I start to understand why she left.
I feel like I learn more in one evening about the girl who has practically lived at my house for months than I have since the moment I met her. And I don’t want to know any of it.
Her mother thanks us but I don’t know why and then she leaves to make more phone calls. I think she just needs something to do.
Drew lies back in Sunshine’s bed, staring at the ceiling. I sit on the floor and lean against the wall. Every time I move I can hear paper crinkling against my back.
“I don’t understand,” he says, eventually.
“Don’t understand what?” I ask.
There are so many possible answers to that question.
“I don’t get why he didn’t rape her.”
“What the f*ck kind of a question is that?” I practically growl at him.
“I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m serious,” he says, and I can tell he is being serious and it’s uncomfortable for him. All of this is uncomfortable for him. In the last few weeks, Drew has had to handle more emotionally-charged, disturbing situations than he has in his whole life and he’s not equipped for it.
“Sorry,” I apologize to him, because I am, for more than just biting his head off.
He was going to have to start growing up at some point, but I feel bad that it had to be like this.
“I just don’t get it. Gorgeous girl, alone, why doesn’t he rape her? Why does he just beat the shit out of her and leave her there. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Would it make sense if he had raped her?” I ask, because nothing about what happened to her makes sense.
“No. I guess I just want to understand why he did it. I want there to be a reason.”
“Too much pain, rage, grief. Too much reality.” There are so many things that can break you if there’s nothing to hold you together.
“That’s not an excuse,” he says.
“No, it’s not an excuse,” I reply.
“You asked for a reason. It’s a reason. Just not a good one.”
I can tell he’s still struggling to understand, to make this fit into his view of the world; but it never will. And it shouldn’t. It has no place in the world, no matter how often it happens.
***
I feel the clock cursing me with every minute that passes and I force myself not to look at it because I don’t want to count them. I don’t even know how long the silence persists before I have to say what’s in my head because I don’t want it in there anymore.
“I wasn’t supposed to have to do this again… I can’t do this again. It was done.
It was everybody. All of them… gone…
and then her. Why? What did I do that was so wrong? Why even give her to me, just to take her away?” I know Drew wants to tell me not to let my mind go there, but he can’t even make himself say the words. It’s the only place left for my mind to go. “It’s my fault. I never should have thought it was okay to love her.”
He sighs, staring up at the ceiling. “It is okay, Josh. She’s okay.” He wants to believe it, but he doesn’t, and it’s worse than if he’d said nothing.
“No one is ever okay.”
***
It’s well after midnight, but no one is sleeping. We’re on our third pot of coffee.
I’ve made the last two, which is only right, since I’ve been the one drinking most of it.
Asher and Addison and Mr. Ward got back an hour ago. None of them said a word, but they didn’t need to. If they had found anything, it would have spoken for itself. The quiet in this room is like a vise that just keeps tightening on us, little by little, until we’re all suffocating from it.
The piano hovers in the corner like a ghost and I can’t look at it, because now I know what it means, and it’s haunting me, too.
Drew and I are at the dining room table. Mr. and Mrs. Ward are on one couch far enough away from each other that there’s no danger of them touching.
Addison is stretched out on the other couch with her head resting on Asher’s lap, his hand mindlessly running through her hair.
The back door opens and it’s a bomb detonating into the room. Everyone turns at once. And she’s there.
No one moves. No one jumps up and runs to her or shrieks with joy. Everyone just stares, like we’re all trying to make sure she’s really here. She looks at all of us, her eyes passing over every battered face in the room, until she reaches mine.
And then there’s nothing else. I can’t move, but she does. And then she’s right in front of me and all at once her mother says Emilia and Asher says Em and her father says Milly and Drew says Nastya and I say Sunshine and then she shatters.
All the pieces of all the girls go flying and I’m holding the one who’s left.
My arms are wrapped around her, but I don’t say anything. I don’t think anything.
I don’t even know if I breathe. I’m so afraid that I am not going to be able to hold her together. I’ve seen her cry once before but it was nothing like this. She is gone, disappeared
into
some
otherworldly
oblivion of pain. The sound. It’s raw and primal and horrifying and I don’t want to hear it. Her hand is pressed between my chest and her mouth, trying to stifle it, but it’s not working. She won’t stop shaking, always the shaking, and I’m begging in my head for her to stop. I can feel everyone in the room watching, but I can’t think about them right now.
She’s still standing, but she’s not. All of her weight is on me. All of it. The weight of her body and her secrets and her tears and her pain and her regret and her loss and I feel like I’m going to break, too, because it’s too much. I don’t want to know any of this. Now I understand why she spent so much time running. I want to run away, too. I want to drop her and fling the door open and not look back, because I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough, not brave enough, not comforting enough. I’m not enough. I’m no one’s salvation. Not even my own.
But I’m here and so is she and I can’t let go. Maybe I don’t need to save her forever. Maybe I can just save her right now, in this moment, and if I can do that, maybe it will save me and maybe that can be enough. I tighten my arms as if I can still the shaking with that alone. The crying has turned silent. Her face is buried against my chest. I’m watching the light reflect off her hair on top of her head and I focus on that, because I can’t look around me and see all of those faces asking me for answers I don’t have.
Gradually, she calms. Her breathing slows and her body settles into mine and it steadies. Then I feel her take her own weight back, for just a moment, before she pulls away from me.
I loosen my arms and let her go, but my eyes stay on her. Her face goes blank, the way it was the first time I saw her and I see every emotion being put away. It’s like watching a video of an explosion played backwards, every piece of debris being sucked back into place, like nothing ever happened.
I’m afraid to look away. Afraid she’ll fall apart again. Afraid she’ll disappear.
Afraid. I never should have left my garage.
I never should have let her in it.
Then she sees the pile of notebooks on the table and everything about her goes still. Her eyes won’t leave them. They are a question and an answer all at once.
“How?” her mother asks, finally.
Confused. Betrayed. Relieved. “You didn’t remember.”
I look at the faces of the people who love her, who haven’t heard her voice in nearly two years. No one expects a response. But they get one.
“I
remember
everything,”
she
whispers, and it’s a confession and a curse.
The only other noise in the room is the sharp intake of her mother’s breath at the sound of Sunshine’s voice.
“Since when?” her father asks.
She pulls her eyes away from the notebooks to face him when she answers.
“Since the day I stopped talking.”
***
Somehow,
everyone
eventually
sleeps; scattered across the house on beds and floors and sofas. I end up on the twin bed in Sunshine’s room, with her body curled up against mine, and I don’t care how small the bed is, because she will never be close enough.
No one made any attempt to stop me when I climbed in with her. I think they all knew they couldn’t prevent it. There was nothing in this house or on this earth that was going to keep me from being next to her.
Drew is on a makeshift bed on the floor because I don’t think he wanted to be far away from her, either.
I listen to her breathing; the soft intake of air reminding me that she’s here, her body pressed against mine, the way we’ve slept so many nights that I’ve lost count.
Sometime during the night, her mother comes in and looks at us on the bed together. Her expression is one of acceptance, if not understanding.
“What did you call her?” she asks, but I don’t think it’s her real question.
“Sunshine,” I say, and she smiles like she believes it’s perfect and she may be the only person other than me who would think so.
“What is she to you?” she whispers.
The real question and I know the answer even if don’t know how to say it.
Drew’s muffled voice rises up from the floor before I can respond.
“Family,” he says.
And he’s right.