Chapter 13 #3
“What else were you going to do to the basement if I hadn’t come down?”
“Who knows? Maybe I would have taken out the kitchen, too. I’m glad I didn’t so that we still have a stove.”
“Me too. And I meant what I said—I wasn’t just placating you so that you’d stop tearing the house apart,” I told him. “I’m very impressed by what you’ve done for Lyra. Not everybody steps up when a kid needs someone. It doesn’t matter whether you’re blood relatives or not.”
“Do you have any blood relatives left?” he asked.
“I do. Several,” I answered. “My parents both had siblings, so I have aunts, uncles, and cousins. I had grandparents, too, but I guess that none of them are very close with each other. Or with me, obviously.”
I waited, but he didn’t ask anything else and I realized why.
“This doesn’t upset me,” I said, and I tried to feel calm and steady so that statement would be true.
“I told Lyra a little about my childhood. I wanted her to know that we have similar backgrounds, that she’s not the only one without birth parents around.
In case she was feeling abandoned,” I explained further.
Silas sat straight up. “Damn, does she feel that way?”
“I really don’t think so,” I assured him. “It was just in case.”
“Ok. Ok, good.” He slowly leaned back but then turned to look at me. “Did you feel abandoned?”
“Um, no. Well, maybe.”
“Were you actually abandoned? Is that how you ended up with…I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to answer any of that.”
“No, I really don’t mind,” I said, and again, I tried not to. “My parents died when I was a baby. They were really young, just teenagers, and they went out to party one night and hit a tree on their way home.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It was tragic because they were so much in love. Their life was like a movie.”
He looked slightly doubtful. “A movie.”
“A good one, a romance like what I tried to make you watch with me before Christmas and you said that you needed to go to the back yard and dig a big hole instead.”
“That was not strictly true,” he admitted, and I nodded.
“I know, the ground was frozen. My parents were next-door neighbors and they went to kindergarten together and every grade after that. But they were only friends until their senior year of high school when they realized that they were in love. Right after they graduated, they got married and then they were so happy together.”
“How do you know this? I thought you weren’t close to your relatives.”
“I did a little research,” I said, but then admitted, “I relentlessly attacked the past. I found their old profiles and posts, I hunted down all their old friends and classmates, and I went to their hometown to interview people.”
“Really?”
“I wanted to know,” I stated. “I felt like I had a right to know about them but not everyone agreed with my approach. Their family—my family members got upset about it and wanted to be left alone, so I haven’t been back.”
“Why didn’t you live with any of them?”
“I did, at first,” I said. “I don’t remember everything but I got all the records of my journey through the CPS system.
Right after the car accident, I was placed in the care of my paternal grandmother, but they removed me after a while because she had a bad drug habit.
I had just turned two. After that, I moved around to different relatives but there were problems at each place. ”
“Like what?”
“Well, I was living with my other grandmother and some cousins, but then her boyfriend got arrested for child abuse. They took me out of there. Eventually, I ended up with one of my aunts and that’s the house I remember the best, because I was with her for several years.
But then she didn’t want me anymore, so I moved in with foster parents.
It’s much harder to adopt out as an older kid.
It would have been better if they’d let me go when I was a baby or a toddler but it was too late.
” I shrugged. “I was with a few different foster families before I met my mom. She used to volunteer at an after-school program at the church because she loved kids so much, and she and my dad weren’t able to have any of their own.
It took a long time for them to get me but they did and I was so happy that I couldn’t believe it.
I literally didn’t believe it, and I thought it was a trick or just…
just that someone was going to pull the rug out and I’d end up moving again.
I used to leave my classroom to go to the school office to call them, to make sure that they hadn’t run off somewhere. I couldn’t trust that they were real.”
“Yeah.” He picked up the edge of the comforter and dabbed off my cheeks, where a few stray tears had dripped down. “They’re great. I’m glad they did that.”
“It’s so lucky to get people to love you,” I explained. “Lyra will see that when she’s older, too.” But I paused as I considered my statement. “Actually, no, I hope that she doesn’t. I hope that she just thinks that it’s normal to have people feel that way about her.”
“I hope so, too. I hope she never thinks back and wishes that she’d had her jackoff father or her immature mother around. Do you think she will?”
I did my best “serious and honest” expression. “No,” I answered.
“Ok.” He was looking back at me, but I couldn’t tell from his own expression whether he believed me or not. There was something in his face, some emotion, that I couldn’t really define.
“Silas?”
He turned away and I sat up when we heard Lyra’s voice. “What’s up?” he asked her, but she was staring at me.
“What are you doing there?”
“We were talking about today,” I said, and she nodded, accepting it.
“I can’t go back to sleep,” she told us. “I had a bad dream about the cemetery.”
“You did? Come up here,” Silas said, and she jumped onto the bed and scrunched herself between us. “Want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “It was just scary.”
“Should I tell you a story?” he suggested, and now she nodded. “Ok, let’s see. Let me think.”
“You could read a book,” she said.
“I could do that.” He got up and as I was tucking the comforter around her, he returned carrying a volume that I hoped wasn’t one of her mysteries. “Remember this?” He showed her the cover, and it didn’t look scary at all.
“Yeah, the book about the tollbooth!” she answered, and we both got to hear it read aloud in his deep voice, which was pretty gravelly and also extremely soothing. That was why we both fell asleep, all of us together.