Chapter 24
Normally I spend the third of July huddled in a closet with Houdini, being his emotional support human during the fireworks.
This year, Nick invited me to Red, White & Boom!
in Genoa Park with Kira and him, so I put the ThunderShirt calming wrap on Houdini so I can actually see—rather than just hear—them this year.
I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to insert myself into this family on a holiday. Aren’t holidays spelled out in custody agreements? Are we communicating something to Kira that’s premature? Overpromising? Leading her to infer a particular kind of relationship?
Am I inferring something that’s not there?
“Neighbors and friends go to local events together,” Nick replies when I ask if he’s sure it’s okay that the three of us do this together. “And Nora and I always go to the smaller fireworks with her family in Dublin on the Fourth.”
That nugget of information is probably intended to be reassuring, but it only adds question marks. Or maybe an interrobang.
“I haven’t told Kira anything about us,” Nick says. “So don’t worry about that. Just try not to make out with me.”
This seems right, but it also shifts my brain into overdrive—now I’m wondering when he will tell Kira about our relationship status. When he’ll tell Kira’s mom.
When I’ll tell my mom.
When Nick, Kira, and I get to the parking garage and Nick’s car, I panic and feign unfamiliarity with the vehicle. I think I even say, “Cool car,” under my breath. It’s incredible how a person who’s so good at deluding herself can also be so bad at petty lies.
I don’t like the visual implication of Nick in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger’s seat, and Kira in the back. Nope, nope.
I call an audible.
“You know what? I don’t want to sit in the passenger seat,” I say.
“No offense,” Nick says. “But I’m not letting you drive.”
“Can I sit in the back with you?” I ask Kira, even though this will turn Nick into our Lyft driver.
She contemplates it for a few seconds, eyeing me.
“If you play DragonWing with me. You can be”—she pauses, surveying the options—“Fire Breath.”
“Great.” I’m not reading into that. I am not reading into that.
Luckily, Kira is talkative today and easily fills the entire drive with dragon role play.
Although I’m only called upon to portray one insignificant dragon and Kira feeds me all my lines, I’m working harder at being a Cool Older Friend to Kira than I’ve worked at anything in five years.
She will make the perfect micromanaging CEO someday.
I watch Nick deftly parallel park in a questionably legal spot and momentarily feel guilty for wishing that we were alone in the back seat again instead of attending a family-friendly holiday celebration.
We grab a couple of blankets and Nick’s cooler from the back of the van. Kira is still glued to the tablet dragons, so she doesn’t even notice our conversation as we walk close behind her through the crowds. She’s wearing an orange jacket, so at least it’s easy to keep track of her.
It’s dusk and still sticky-hot out. I’m sure I put on deodorant, but dammit if Speed Stick isn’t letting me down at a critical juncture.
“Kira, don’t play on the tablet while you’re walking,” Nick says, with absolutely no reaction from her. “You’re gonna run into someone.”
Sometimes Nick’s right hand swipes at my left and I know that if we weren’t trying to stay under his kid’s radar and we didn’t both have our hands occupied with a blanket and a cooler, we’d be holding hands, and it would probably feel a little wonderful.
But I’m too scared of Kira seeing something to take any chances with clandestine romantic gestures.
If she turned around and saw us holding hands, she’d probably karate chop them apart.
“She’s going to want me to buy some glow sticks,” Nick murmurs, just low enough so Kira can’t hear. “Don’t let me do it. I should’ve thought to get some at the dollar store.”
“No glow sticks, got it.”
We squeeze the blanket into a small unoccupied grass patch and unpack our little selection of waters and Gatorades and bags of chips.
It only takes Kira a few minutes before she announces that she’s bored.
Understandable. It’s just a mass of people waiting for something to happen.
She spots a group of kids doing gymnastics on the lawn and informs Nick that she’ll be joining them.
“Stay where I can see you,” he calls after her.
“It’s amazing how she can march into a group of kids she’s never met and start playing,” I say.
“I know I’m biased,” he says. “But she’s a great kid. I got very lucky.”
He puts his arm around me, and even though it’s a little too warm out for cuddling, we sit like that for a while. Sweating together. I like it.
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” he says, shifting to face me. “Kira read the comics you lent us. She wants to read more.”
“I can dig out a few others.”
“Or maybe she could come over sometime and look?” he asks.
Before I agree to that—the idea of sticky hands on my dad’s collection makes me break out in hives—I feel a strong shove from behind, accompanied by a BOOO! that hammers directly on my eardrum.
“Kira!” Nick yells.
I look up and she’s standing over my bent torso.
“I got you so good!”
“I’m not going to tell you again,” Nick says. “You can’t push people. Especially not adults. I want to hear an apology.”
“Sow-wy,” she says, using a baby talk voice that makes me less inclined to forgive her.
I’m still focusing on getting my heart rate back to normal levels after the jump scare.
“Can I get glow sticks?” Kira asks.
I look at Nick, and to my surprise, he hauls himself up to search for the roaming vendors selling glow sticks at wildly inflated prices. “Stay with Sam until I get back,” he says, shooting me an apologetic look.
“Can I use your phone?” Kira asks, speaking of things that trigger hives. “My tablet’s dead.”
“Why don’t you play with something that doesn’t have a screen?” I say. It’s one of the most hypocritical things I’ve ever said.
“Puh-lease? I’m bored.”
This is the most vulnerable I have ever felt. My phone is my security blanket. My lifeline. My keeper of secrets.
But the idea of saying no to Kira makes me equally uneasy.
If I can see what she’s looking at, it should be okay.
I think.
“No texting.” I hand over my device. Kira instantly clicks into YouTube and begins to scroll the Shorts—something I’ve never explored because I’m ancient and I prefer forty-five-minute makeup tutorials.
My algorithm’s about to be fucked.
And sure enough, less than a minute into her YouTube adventure, I hear my little phone speaker emitting a chain of expletives.
“What? I know the F-word,” she says, no nonsense.
I have a vision of Nick and Kira chatting about their day, digging into bowls of mac and cheese, Kira casually dropping the word fuck into the conversation and then informing him that she picked it up from me while I was playing the role of responsible adult.
“No,” I say, improvising. “You only think you know the F-word. It’s a fake. Only grown-ups know the real one.”
“That’s not true,” she says.
But I can tell that’s she’s not totally sure. I’ll take the win.
“My mom’s name is Nora,” Kira says, again demonstrating her skill at swerving between topics. She grabs for the bag of chips we haven’t opened yet.
“I know. I like that name.” I want to be super careful to have nothing but glowing things to say about her mom.
“She’s pretty. For a mom.”
“Definitely,” I say, having never seen a single photo of her.
“Did you know that she works at a bank?”
“I don’t think I knew that,” I reply. Which is true. Which makes me wonder how much I should know about her. And whether I want to know about her.
“She has a really important job. She’s, like…the boss of a lot of people and she goes around to different banks and tells everyone what they need to do.”
“That sounds fun.” I’m doing my best not to add anything substantive to this conversation that could be held against me.
“She has her own office.”
I nod, knowing that I will never in my life have my own office. Although…
“Technically I live in an office,” I say, adding a friendly little chuckle.
“What?” Kira says.
“The office in my mom’s apartment. That’s where I sleep.” As I explain this, I realize that this sounds both bad and confusing.
Kira narrows her eyes, apparently activating investigative mode. “Wait, what’s your job?”
Fuckkkk, I’m getting this from a kid now? Okay, okay, strategize.
“Well, I study art.” I scan the crowd for Nick.
Her eyes narrow even further. “Study, like…you go to school?”
“Right now, I’m trying to go back to school so I can keep studying art.”
“So you don’t have a job?”
I sigh in my head and, unfortunately, physically as well. I want to cry.
“Right now, I have a temporary job so I can make money while I do the training to study art.”
“What is it?” I picture her filtering all of this back to her mom. “Starbucks?” she asks hopefully. “Oh! Is it Sephora?”
“I work at a restaurant,” I reply, shutting down her visions of unlimited Frapps or discounted skin care products her nine-year-old face doesn’t need.
“You work with my dad?” Her face might be concerned? Angry? I can’t quite tell now that the sun has gone down. “My dad works at Chili’s. He’s the boss of everyone. But his office isn’t as nice as my mom’s.”
“Nope,” I reply. “Different restaurant.”
“Are you the boss at that restaurant?” She should be shining an interrogation lamp in my eyes while I’m handcuffed to a table, asking for a lawyer.
“I’m a bartender. Sometimes a server.”
I’m about to tell her that I train new hires sometimes when Kira looks over my shoulder and says, “Dad, Sam says fuck isn’t the real F-word.”
“Kira!” Nick drops the glow sticks onto the blanket behind me. “Let’s not use that word around other people, okay? We’ll talk about it when we get home.”
Kira nods, completely satisfied with this resolution, and immediately tells her dad that I’m actually the coolest adult she’s ever met.
Ha. No.
She harangues both of us about “the real F-word” until the fireworks start, and even for a few minutes into the show.
After our eardrums get blown out by the grand finale, Nick and I—and thousands of other Ohioans—pack up blankets. The dispersing crowd pushes toward the exits as a slow-moving mass.
“Help me keep an eye on Kira?” Nick asks as we join the herd.
The orange jacket made her easy to spot in the daylight, but night is a different story. Kira keeps trying to route around the groups in front of us and I lose her orange jacket in the sea of people for a few seconds.
“Kira!” Nick yells. “Don’t get ahead of us.”
She slows down momentarily, letting us catch up.
“So, fake F-word?” He shakes his head, laughing. “I know what you were trying to do. I don’t usually lie to her. She’s dogged. She won’t let it go.”
“I see that.”
“She’ll probably be a federal prosecutor someday.”
He gives me a kiss on the forehead, and I melt for the three seconds before we turn toward where Kira just was.
I can tell something’s wrong even before I survey the crowd in front of us for her orange jacket. I practically feel the surge of adrenaline through Nick’s skin. He drops my hand and pushes forward through the crowd, moving people out of the way.
“Kira? Kira?” Every time he shouts it, his voice gets a little more frantic.
I do my best to keep up with him, but I can’t move through the crowd as aggressively.
Instead, I focus on the periphery. Maybe she turned right or left and we’ve already passed her.
I turn around to look behind me, letting the crowd brush against my shoulders in their rush to sit in traffic for forty minutes.
Then I lose track of Nick. Dammit.
I continue scanning the crowd. She’s here somewhere.
Everyone’s moving in the same general direction, slow like a herd of lazy cattle.
No one would kidnap a girl in a bright orange jacket.
I don’t want to think about the added detail on the Dateline episode where Keith Morrison says, “The inattentive younger girlfriend then spotted a trampled orange jacket on the ground.” I push it out of my brain.
When I reach the edge of the lawn and still don’t see Kira or Nick anywhere, I call him. The reason I didn’t spot her, I reason, is that Nick already did. They must be waiting for me up ahead. Nick probably scolded her then bought her an Italian ice.
“Did you find her?” he asks, voice full of panic.
“No! You didn’t see her?”
“No, I—” The connection cuts out for a few seconds. “—double back.”
“Do you want me to turn around?”
I can hear him shouting Kira! but he doesn’t answer me.
Okay, now I’m freaking out. I think the way my mind immediately began generating Dateline scripts was a coping mechanism, but now we are approaching full waking nightmare territory.
I breathe in too much smoky air and start coughing.
The crowd is thin enough that I spot Nick in front of me, jogging, whipping his head right and left.
“Nick!” I wave my arms and we make eye contact for half a second. “Should I—”
“Kira!” He blows right past me. Like he doesn’t even see me.
I turn around, disoriented.
Which way did I come from? Am I sure the jacket was orange?
I mindlessly follow behind Nick, jogging to keep up, even though we could cover more ground if I split off.
Nick stops a security guard. I can’t hear the conversation, but I don’t need to. The whole thing plays out in an exaggerated pantomime:
Nick holds his palm flat to demonstrate Kira’s height.
The security guard shakes her head, looking utterly disinterested.
Nick erupts in a combination of frustration and anger. There’s no moment of calculation, no internal debate. No hesitation. He doesn’t bother to elaborate. He just turns and continues his own single-minded pursuit.
I’ve never seen him move so quickly. I know he can fix things and back out of a parking space with that one-handed maneuver, but he’s agile. Almost…feral?
I’m searching, too, but mostly my head is swimming. Have I ever been that desperate for something? Has my life ever depended on anything?
The next twenty seconds are some of the most stressful moments of my life. After years of low-grade, mundane anxiety, this feels like an electric shock to my nervous system.
Finally, I hear a different voice—a woman—calling out “Here!” in response to Nick’s ragged “Kira!”
I force my legs to a jerky stop. Twenty feet in front of me, Nick and Kira are hugging. Her feet are off the ground.
“It’s okay,” Nick says over and over. I can’t see his face, but I hear the tears in his voice. Kira’s face is wet.
“Thank God,” I say, walking toward them. My heart is still racing even as I let out the biggest sigh of relief. But Nick has no idea I’m right there, standing outside of their family bubble.
I take a few steps back, giving them a wide berth. It’s their moment.
Not mine.