Chapter Five
Shark Print Pajamas
Colton
Before Indi says anything more, I know something. I don’t know how, and I don’t know what she’s going to say. I just know that whatever she says is going to change my life forever.
Maybe it has to do with the little boy she ushers into Dad’s house and maybe it has to do with my sister herself. She’s always carried herself with a hint of defiance, but she seems more closed off and more vulnerable simultaneously.
Jolene, on the other hand, senses nothing. She’s just thrilled to have her aunt back. “C’mon, Aunt Indi,” she says, tugging on Indi’s free hand. “Everyone will be so excited that you’re back! But not as excited as me.” She pauses to gasp. “Do you think my dad will buy me lip liner for Uncle Graham’s wedding?”
I’m pretty sure Jordan will be thinking less about lip liner or upcoming nuptials and more about Indi’s reappearance—with a child —but I decide not to say that. Indi and I exchange a look that says she’s thinking it, though.
“Uh, we’ll have to see,” she says obligingly. “Hey, Jolene. Can you do something for me?”
My niece faces her aunt. “Of course, I can! Oh!” Her attention shifts to the Solo cups in her hand, then to me. “We gotta get the snacks and water ‘cause otherwise Grandpa won’t give me my five bucks!”
Indi looks at me questioningly.
“She’s earning money to get her ears pierced,” I explain. To Jolene, I say, “Grandpa won’t mind if it’s a little delayed.”
Jolene hesitates, but she turns back to Indi. “I guess I have three minutes to spare.”
I stifle a laugh and Indi does the same. Next to her, the boy eyes me with open curiosity. The teddy bear is clutched tighter to his chest than it was two minutes ago, but he seems like he trusts Indi wholly. I try not to think about how similarly he resembles her—or Jordan, at that age.
“Can you show Milo where Grandpa keeps his games in the living room, please?” Indi asks Jolene, setting a gentle hand on the boy’s head of curls. “I need to talk to the adults for a few minutes.”
Jolene looks at the boy like she’s just now registering his presence. She sticks her free hand out. “Hi! I’m Jolene. My grandpa says that a good handshake is the corner…” Her nose scrunches. “The corner…”
“Cornerstone,” I provide.
“Yeah, that! He says it’s the cornerstone of a good business deal.” She laughs and takes her hand back when he doesn’t shake it. “But this isn’t a business deal. C’mon. I’ll show you the games. Grandpa has a lot of them that we played over the winter ‘cause it gets so cold here. Did you know that it snowed a bunch? California never got snow. My dad was literally holding out on me.”
Milo doesn’t look like he knows what to make of Jolene. Which is fair—she’s like a little blonde hurricane. He looks up at Indi questioningly, and when she nods, he follows Jolene down the marble-floored entryway hall, only glancing back once.
I open my mouth to ask my sister what the heck is going on, but Jolene pops her head back around the archway. “By the way, Aunt Indi, it’s only eleven years till I’m an adult too!”
“Actually,” Indi counters with a grin, “you’re a resident of Nebraska now, kid. You’ve got twelve years.”
Jolene wrinkles her nose. “Eleven and a half.”
“Tell you what,” Indi says. “The day you turn nineteen, I’ll buy you lip liner.”
“Deal!” Jolene disappears back into the living room.
My shoulders relax slightly after the interaction.
“Hey, Indi?”
My sister glances up at me.
I open my arms. “Welcome home, Blue.”
She scowls, and it takes a moment for her to step into my embrace, but when she does, her body shudders. I hug her tightly and I take in the heaviness of her inhale, the relief in her long exhale. She seems to be carrying the weight of the world—or, at the very least, our world—on her young, slender shoulders. If I can ease her burden even slightly, I will.
“Probably don’t expect this from Jordan,” I tease softly.
Indi laughs quietly. “Yeah, I’m not. Is—”
“Indigo?”
We both look up to see Jordan himself standing a few paces down the hall from us, his expression a mix between relief and distrust. Sweat dampens his brows, and he lost his stained t-shirt sometime in the last ten minutes.
“Hey,” Indi says.
“You think you can just show back up out of the blue?” Jordan asks hotly. “Where the he—”
“She wants to talk to us,” I interrupt calmly, nudging Indi forward, “so let’s not jump to conclusions before we hear her out.”
Shock pulses through my body, thrumming like a livewire, and I lean back in my chair at Dad’s kitchen table.
My mom is gone.
Not gone to Switzerland or to Bali like when we were kids and she’d fly somewhere on a whim. She’s really, truly gone. The permanent kind of gone that comes with a death certificate and a carved gravestone placed in a seaside Maine cemetery.
I think maybe I should feel sadder, but I don’t really feel anything. My mother was out of my life more than she was in it, and she’s been gone to me for the last eighteen, almost nineteen, years.
But that’s not why I’m shocked, not really.
That has to do with finding out that Milo is my half-brother. My mother’s fourth son.
“She got sick shortly after Milo was born,” Indi says quietly, twisting the glass of water Gran handed her on its coaster. Her eyes are glued to the mouth of the cup. “It was a risk, having a child at her age, and she knew it, but she took it. Vincent didn’t want…”
“Vincent didn’t want what?” Jordan asks harshly.
Dad sets a hand on Jordan’s good shoulder and squeezes.
I look away from the paternal gesture with a lump in my throat that I can’t swallow.
“He didn’t want another child,” Indi says, holding Jordan’s gaze unwaveringly. “His son was as good as grown when he and Mother, uh, got together, so I wasn’t exactly welcome. But another child of his own? He loathed that she wanted to keep the baby.”
It takes effort to keep from fisting my fingers on the tabletop. Indi was tightlipped about the man our mother married before she left, but I’d still had a sick feeling about Vincent Pierre.
Not unlike how I feel about Ben Rhodes, frankly.
“It wasn’t like he had anything to do with him after he was born,” Indi continues. “When he and Mom weren’t traveling for business or pleasure, he wasn’t around Milo and me much. Which, honestly, was just fine by me.”
My jaw tightens. Of course, my free-spirited mother would marry a man who saw children as a hindrance and not as a gift. I don’t want children of my own, but I’d never treat them like that if I did.
“What happens now?” Graham asks evenly. “With the boy.”
Indi hesitates, and the premonition returns. The I-don’t-know-what-it-is-but-it’ll-change-my-life one. Indi glances toward the living room, where Jolene and Milo sit cross-legged on the blue and ivory woven rug between the coffee table and sofa, playing Go Fish. Milo hasn’t let go of his teddy bear, but he is smiling. Surely the kid can’t be too traumatized if he can play cards with a chatterbox of a girl he doesn’t know from Adam.
And then Indi turns her pale gaze directly at me.
No.
I don’t know what she’s going to say, why she’s looking at me , but I know my answer is going to be no for whatever it is.
“Mom named Colton as the custodial guardian in her will,” she says, “and Dad as the financial guardian.”
Silence .
I can’t gauge the reactions around me because I can’t comprehend my own. All I feel is an overwhelming desire to say no . I don’t know what kind of cruel joke the Universe thinks it’s playing or what my mother was smoking when she wrote her will, but it can’t be true.
I cannot be a child’s guardian.
Not even if the child belonged to my mother.
I push back from the table, my head pounding. “No.”
“Colton—”
“Let him go, Indi,” Dad says quietly.
Possibly for the first time in my adult life, I agree with my father.
I’m back in the Adirondack chair.
Now there are random dock posts at the shoreline, dusk is falling, and I know that my late mother named me as the guardian for her four-year-old son.
I’d rather be trying to convince Travis to let me do something to salvage my career. Funny how I haven’t thought about the interview or Travis’s advice to lay low for the past several hours. I guess my mental space was overtaken by Indi’s reappearance.
After Indi’s bombshell, I drove downtown. I didn’t have a destination in mind, but I found myself across the street from Lilah’s Flower Shoppe. Ninety-three percent of me wanted to jaywalk over the weathered cobblestones just to see Cheyenne. She came out of the shop behind a stooped little old lady wearing a daffodil yellow cardigan, carrying the woman’s bouquet over to an old tan Buick. Her long blonde hair had been in a messy braid down her back, she wore linen shorts with a fitted light blue t-shirt, and she’d been smiling.
That smile, and the more rational seven percent of me, kept me in my truck.
I drove out to Graham’s house, reheated the lasagna Ember’s mom had sent home with him, and ate it on his front porch. Washed the container after, wrote thank Jackie for me on a pink Post-It, and put the container with the note back in the fridge just to put a bee in my brother’s bonnet.
I watched the sunset sink halfway over the wildflower field, and I contemplated hitting the road then and there. I might not be expected or welcomed in Maryland next weekend, but if I told Travis I was going he’d be forced to talk to me. Anything would be better than this radio silence.
Instead, I’m right back where I started. Jordan and Indi were playing a game with Milo and Jolene when I walked through the house ten minutes ago. Dad was reading a contract in a manila folder open on his lap, Hazel was flipping the pages of a novel with a bright pink cover, and Gran held Ember’s newest manuscript pages in an orange binder.
No one said a word to me.
I’m not sure I’ll be so lucky when I walk back out whenever I leave. I could probably escape if I went around the outside perimeter of the house like Nash had come in earlier. At least Graham won’t try to talk to me when he gets home from dinner with Ember’s family. That’s the beauty of Grumpy Graham—we could sit in the same room for two hours, I could attempt conversations, and the most I’d get out of him is a grunt.
Unfortunately, the sliding door swooshes open behind me, and I know I’ve lost my opportunity. I begin mentally tallying reasons to give Indi when she asks me why I said no, and I add a few more for when she tries to convince me to change my no to yes .
But it’s not Indi.
Milo walks out onto the deck without closing the door, clutching his threadbare teddy bear to this chest. He wears pajamas—a blue and white striped shirt with sharks on his drawstring shorts—and his curls are damp like he just got done with a shower.
He’s four , I correct inwardly. He probably takes baths.
Reason Number 13 why I can’t be a child’s guardian; I don’t even know their bathing habits.
“Cool pjs,” I tell him, because objectively, the kid is cute.
Milo looks at me quietly for a moment, head gently tilted as if he can’t quite figure me out. At least we have that much in common. It’s too bad my mother didn’t list Graham or Jordan as his guardian. He seems like a good kid.
Just not one I can be responsible for.
“My sister got them when we left,” he says. He has a lisp. Sister sounds like thither , and left sounds like theft. He pulls at the string on his shorts. “Said we were goin’ on a adventure.”
Because your mom’s gone and your dad doesn’t want you. Emotions that I don’t want to feel tighten my chest. Of course, Indi would know how to take the most tragic event in this child’s short life and reframe it positively.
Maybe I should ask her to buy me shark print pajamas too.
“I like the sharks,” I say, grasping for conversation.
He beams at me with two rosy splotches on his round cheeks. “I was gonna get the ones with lions but then I got these. I’m glad I got these.”
“You are?”
“Uh-huh.” His head bobs in a nod. “’Cause you like them.”
The response makes it impossible to swallow, let alone reply. Milo is already that boy. The one who loves a little too easily and smiles a little too often. Who thinks every morning is a new adventure and who talks to strangers when everyone tells him not to, because he knows they won’t hurt them. Not like the people he does know.
I know this because I was that boy .
And Tripp Kolter was that stranger.
“Milo!” Indi’s voice echoes through the open sliding door. “Milo James! Where did you go?”
He has my middle name.
It’s all I register before Milo’s eyes widen and he launches himself halfway onto my lap. My hand lands on his back instinctively, but then I freeze. Milo looks up at me with a lopsided grin, and he presses a finger to his mouth in the universal shh sign.
Against all better judgment, I pull Milo fully up onto my lap. Curving my arm around him, I tuck his head below my chin when I hear Indi’s footfalls approach the doorway.
“Is Milo out there with you?” she asks.
I glance over my shoulder. “Nope. You’ll have to go fishing.”
The joke makes Milo burst out laughing, completely blowing his cover, but a smile tugs at the corners of my own mouth. Indi marches out onto the deck with her hands on her hips, her tank top wet from giving Milo his bath, and she launches into a scolding. It wobbles around the edges because he looks up at her with puppy eyes. I know she’s biting back a smile, but when she holds out a hand, Milo slips down from my lap.
I wish I didn’t miss the weight of his tiny body there. It would be a whole lot easier to explain my reasons to Indi if I wasn’t so torn up inside.
NOTE SCRIBBLED TO INDI FROM COLTON ACROSS THE brEAKFAST TABLE ON THURSDAY MORNING:
You won’t get me to change my mind. He’s a good kid, Blue, but he can’t be my responsibility.
TEXTS BETWEEN INDI & COLTON ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON:
Indi: If you say yes, I’ll let you call me Blue.
Colton: No
TEXTS BETWEEN INDI & COLTON ON FRIDAY NIGHT:
Indi: At least tell me you’ll think about it?
Colton: No
Indi: Please?
Colton: I’ll think about it
Indi: You’re not just saying that?
Colton: You asked me to tell you I would think about it so I told you I’d think about it
Indi: COLTON.
Colton: I’ll have an answer to you by tomorrow night