I feel like the breath was just pulled right out of my lungs.
“At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal, and it wasn’t like I knew he’d lost his daughter, but for some reason, that night, I just knew it was him.” When he exhales, his breath fogs the air. It’s summer—it shouldn’t be cold enough to steam the air with a breath. “I called the cops, told them what I remembered, and that’s how they found you.”
My eyes close, the eyelids too heavy to hold open anymore. I feel a tear slide down my face. Only one. But I know there are more. They never dry up.
“You’re the reason I was found,” I whisper.
Torrin’s shoulders stiffen right before they fall. “No, I’m the reason you weren’t found sooner. If I had just remembered that earlier . . . before . . .”
He leaves the words unsaid, but his face tells me the rest when it turns over his shoulder. I see it because my head’s tipped over mine.
“Our lives could have been different?” My eyes stay on his as my palm presses deeper into his. “This could be more?”
He looks at our hands before his eyes sweep over my back facing him. “Yes.”
I have to look away. It hurts too much. Seeing what my future could have been only to realize it never will be makes everything inside me feel like it’s atrophying. Withering. Dying slowly.
I can’t look at Torrin, so I look at the only place I have left. “I miss him, Torrin.” I choke on the words, but they keep coming. “I’m not supposed to miss him. I can’t tell anyone I miss him either . . . but I do. How fucked up am I?”
I have to break away from his hold because I need my hands to cover my face. I don’t like crying like this. Like I’m too weak to control my emotions—too weak to control my body. If I cover my face, no one has to see just how weak I really am.
“I miss the man who kidnapped me for ten goddamn years. What in the hell am I supposed to do with that?” My body’s convulsing in rhythm to my sobs. I’m such a mess—the sobs only scrape the surface of that mess.
I feel the warmth of his body huddle close before his arms rope around me, holding me. Keeping me together. He’s holding onto me so tightly I couldn’t fall apart if I wanted to. His face lowers to my ear.
“Whatever you need to,” he says in the voice I remember. “It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. And it’s okay to miss and mourn whoever you choose.” His arms tighten again when a tremor slides down my back. “No one has the manual for a situation like this, so don’t let anyone tell you how to feel. No one.” He tucks his head into my neck and sighs. I can’t tell if it’s a sigh of frustration or contentedness.
With the way my vision is blurred from the tears, the bouquet looks more weed than flower now. “He was a good man, Torrin. Sick . . . but good.”
His fingers curl deeper into my arms. “It’s your right to believe what you think about him, and it’s mine to believe how I feel about him.”
“How do you feel about him?”
Torrin inhales against my neck, then he rises. He finally looks at the gravestone in front of me. His eyes narrow at it, and I see things flash in them I hadn’t known existed inside of Torrin Costigan. I see things I hadn’t known existed in any man.
“That hell has no inner circle bad enough for a man like Earl Rae Jackson.”
Then Torrin turns his back on the grave, but before he walks away, he holds out his hand and waits. He’s not going to let me fall behind.
FROM MY BEDROOM, I hear Mom arguing on the phone with someone. It has to be Dad because she only uses that tone on him. I don’t have to listen in to wonder what they’re arguing about. It’s me.
I’m the source of tension in the house—the source of tension in the whole world it feels like sometimes.
I’m the houseguest who just won’t go away. They’ll never say anything, but the air is so thick with strain I think I’ve died of suffocation a hundred times. I keep being resurrected though. Back into the same life I don’t belong in and have to be expelled from a few hours later again.
Mom’s in the kitchen, trying to keep quiet, so I wander into the living room when I come downstairs. I haven’t gotten used to the skinny jeans Mom picked up for me yet—they feel like they’re cutting off the circulation to my ankles—but that’s the only style she bought. I guess bootleg isn’t as popular anymore.
Dad keeps the daily paper tucked into the middle drawer of the antique desk pushed up against the window facing the front door, and I find myself being pulled in that direction. Call it morbid curiosity, but I can’t help it. I think part of me’s still hoping “The Childs Child Abduction” will pass eventually. The only way to know for sure is to check the headlines.