“Well, Joya’s a bitch. I don’t want to hear her name again,” I say, too loud. To my surprise, I start to cry again. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear her name.” I am crying so hard now that I’m not sure Candace understands me.
She must though, because she says, “Well, you ain’t got no one, then, huh?”
I don’t answer, and Candace’s mouth turns downward, thoughtful. After another minute, she squirms over closer and wraps her weirdly spongy arms around me.
“There, now,” she says, patting at me awkwardly, like I’m a tiny baby. “There, now, don’t be sad. There, now.”
I spin in place, turning my wet face to the wall, and I can’t imagine I will ever stop. I will lie here and weep for my mother—my best, first love—until I am a husk, as dry and light as dandelion fluff. The wind will lift me up and blow me away, and Candace can make a wish on me.
She scoots in even closer, spooning, her knees tucked into my knees, her belly pressed against my back. She rocks and coos and squeezes me, saying it over and over. There, now. There, now. We stay like that until at last, the crying stops. I stare at the wall, hitching and gulping until I catch my breath. As soon as I am quiet, Candace falls into a boneless sleep, untroubled. Eventually I sleep, too, uneasy. In my dreams, I run down bare and endless hallways, seeking something lost. There are no hiding spots, and none of the empty hallways brings me to it.
I was still looking. Sometimes the lost thing was Kai, sometimes a little girl with a cloud of dark curls and crescent-moon eyes. Sometimes I didn’t know what it was. I only knew I had to find it. I ran, my footsteps echoing off the bare walls. Then I thought that it might be above me, in the world that was awake. I found myself rising toward the surface of my sleep. I felt another body, soothing me with breath, easing me with heartbeat. A living warmth, a proof against the darkness. I tried to ask, Is that you? and my own voice woke me up.
I jerked my gummy eyes open, disoriented. I smelled ripe dog, and my throat was sour and dry from remembered, ancient crying. It took me a moment to orient. I recognized the ugly wall of plaid in front of me; my face was crammed up against the back of Birdwine’s wide sofa. The body pressed against my back was Looper’s. I glared at him over my shoulder. He thumped his tail at me, and his giant mouth gaped open in a stretch just inches from my face.
“Ugh, your yawn smells terrible,” I told him, and struggled to get myself around him and up. He stretched and rolled onto his back into my warm space. I said, “Honestly, dogs,” and gave his belly a scratch.
I was creased and rumpled, covered in golden-brown Looper hair that showed on both my black skirt and my white shell. Great. Julian was dead asleep in the baggy leather Barcalounger. I offered to drive him back to his car last night, but he wouldn’t go. He knew I’d drive straight back here.
So we’d both stayed. I’d booted up my own laptop and gone into my cloud account. I cross-referenced my personal files with Birdwine’s paper one, drawing new routes, taking notes, cussing at Birdwine’s poky Internet connection. Julian alternated between checking my progress and cleaning up. He’d swept up the plaster and other debris and put Birdwine’s furniture back in order. He’d even done the dishes. Now he slept like happy babies do, on his back in the Barcalounger with his arms thrown up around his head.
I edged closer and ruffled his hair, softer than I’d scratched at Looper, but the same in spirit. He leaned into the touch in his sleep, the way a flower turns its face unthinking to the sunlight. I stopped before he woke up, marveling at the way Julian, even unconscious Julian, assumed that any hand on him reached out in kindness. His eyes moved behind his closed lids, dreaming easy. I let him sleep on.
I had no more gentleness inside me, not this morning. I’d woken full of thunderstorms, with a strong desire to aim them all at Birdwine. I could hear water running in the bathroom down the hall, so he was up. And bathing, which indicated a certain readiness to come back to the sober world.
He wasn’t ready for me, though. I wanted to barge in while he was vulnerable, wet and naked, and ask him, What the hell? He’d never so much as hinted that he had a boy, even back when we were lovers. The only clue had been how invested he’d been in the hunt for Hana. He’d been alarmed and overanxious from the first. In my office, when I told him Kai had reinvented herself as a person with no daughter, he had been so cryptic and emphatic, saying, A parent can’t just do that.
Well, he had. So how complicated could it be?