Chapter Two
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And here we have the stinky boy.
Wolfe
“You should just kidnap her,” my eight-year-old budding delinquent says from her seat at our dining room table.
She slides a pastel pink pony bead onto a fuzzy brown pipe cleaner so casually I wonder if I’ve imagined her words, until she continues, “Then she can live with us and there won’t be any problems.”
I blink furiously. Then, I reply, “No more sleepovers at Auntie Almond’s house.”
Amia giggles, knowing I’m full of it. “Kidnapping is romantic,” she says. “That cool beasty guy did it, and he ended up with a whole princess and happily ever after.”
“You’re talking about that fiction movie? That is fiction? Fiction being made up? Not real? Fake?”
“Yes,” she replies, nodding earnestly. “Plus when I was watching it with Auntie Al, she said she read a book about how a blindfolded guy kidnaps a pretty bird lady and puts her in a cage and then they fall in love because of it. She said it was ‘peak romance.’”
“I’m nearly positive that’s not correct.” Because surely that is not the actual plot to an actual book, and surely if it were an actual plot to an actual book, my sister would not be telling my child about it. Because again. She. Is. Eight.
“It is,” Amia assures me. “She said it was just like in the movie, except that her book guy did it better because he was saving his girl from a bad life. Do you think Miss Leora has a bad life?”
“No, I do not think Miss Leora has a bad life.” Leora has about as idyllic of a life as she possibly can as far as I can tell.
She lives in a pretty little cottage just on the edge of our small town of October, Tennessee, where she owns her own business selling crystals and geodes and other rocks and rock accoutrement.
After work, she goes home to her cottage and reads, or plays cozy video games, or sews a new dress, or cooks a five-course gourmet meal—whatever suits her fancy whenever it suits her fancy.
She spends her days doing what she loves and her evenings doing what brings her joy.
The opposite of a bad life by any measure.
In other words, she is not ripe for the kidnapping by any measure.
“That’s too bad,” Amia mutters, bending her pipe cleaner to twist the ends together. “I bet you could kidnap her even without a bad life, though, ’cause a life with us would probably be even better than hers. So in comparison, her good life could be bad, right?”
Seriously. She’s. Eight.
Eight years old.
“What are they teaching you at that school you go to?” I ask. “Or is this all Almond’s doing?”
She grins a gapped-tooth grin at me. “I think some of it was your doing, too.”
“I don’t remember teaching you the benefits of comparing lives or kidnapping,” I comment, tapping my chin. My eyes slide to the ceiling as I pretend to think about it.
Amia giggles. “Well, you’re the one who sent me to school and to Auntie Almond’s house.”
She’s… kind of right, I guess. I drop my gaze. “You’re switching to homeschool,” I declare. “And Almond is dead to us.”
More giggling ensues, and my stern facade cracks.
We both know I’d never follow through on these threats.
I haven’t the first clue how to school a child, and as a single father, I lean on my sister more than a little for help raising her niece.
I lean on my whole family, really, and Amia’s all the better for it.
If I were doing this alone? Really alone?
We’d both be toast—the burnt, inedible kind.
I think for the one millionth time as I watch my sweet, beloved girl giggle her sweet, beloved giggles, that her mother is a complete and total idiot.
Wherever she is, I hope she feels acutely what she’s missing out on, and I hope that she knows just how much better her life could have been if she weren’t such a stupid, cowardly, moronic, idiot.
But that’s a thought for another time. Thoughts for this time include—
“Can’t you just kidnap her anyway?”
That.
“No, I can’t just kidnap her anyway.” There are laws in the way.
And morals, too, probably. Even if it would be nice to have her here, with us, going nowhere anytime soon.
Stuck like glue with the love that we have for her—and her for us, hopefully.
Stockholmed love, but Stockholm love makes people stay just as surely as the organic kind does.
Maybe even more so, if you think about it.
Which I’m not. Because kidnapping is wrong and not a solution to any problem, even if it is… enticing.
“How are we ever going to meet her if you don’t make it happen?” Amia asks as she fiddles with her newly formed bracelet. She slides it on her wrist, and it slides right back off, about three wrists-worth too big. “Don’t you want her with us?”
Oof. Not the sad girl guilt tactics. She knows I can’t handle those. “We’ve talked about this, sweet girl. No guilting.”
She sniffles, the guiltiest of guilts. “I’m not trying to. I just really love her, and I thought you did, too, and she loves us, and so I don’t understand why we can’t just… go get her? Do you think she won’t be happy here? Do you think she’d leave us?”
Leave us, too, she means. Like her mother did.
My heart cracks in two, then four, then a trillion pieces.
I scoop my precious daughter into my arms and carry her across the open floor plan to the couch, where I flop and tuck her close to my chest. “We do love her,” I agree.
“And you know she loves us, too. She says so every letter, right there at the bottom. But sometimes someone can love someone else and that still means that they aren’t going to be together.
Sometimes people have their own things they have to work through.
Sometimes…” Sometimes they just aren’t brave enough to handle the messy, scary, terrifying emotion, and they run, or they shield themselves, or they hold back, perpetuating their fear until it controls them so much that the very idea that they might be able to take the reins back seems laughable.
And sometimes that’s selfish behavior that hurts the ones they love, and sometimes it’s simply self-protective.
Sometimes, people are people, and it has nothing at all to do with little girls who haven’t lived enough to truly understand what that means.
“Sometimes you just have to try even when you’re scared,” Amia finishes before I can gather enough of my own sometimes to form an answer she’ll comprehend. “That’s what you tell me, right?”
Her sometimes kind of blows mine out of the water, huh? And that’s cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. She can just take my own advice and use it against me to back up her kidnapping schemes. Absolutely no problems there.
I flounder, trying to think of a response that doesn’t invalidate past teachings and also doesn’t put abduction on the table as a viable option.
I… cannot think of a response that doesn’t invalidate past teachings or put abduction on the table as a viable option.
“I do tell you that,” I hedge, buying time.
“So then you should at least try to get Miss Leora to be with us for real, right? I like mailing her letters, but I wish she was here in person. You say that it’s important to tell the people you love that you love them as often as possible, and she only gets told once a week!
How will she remember? How will she know we really mean it? ”
Man, I sure do say a lot of things, don’t I?
“She knows that we love her,” I assure. “That is not in question.”
“Yeah,” Amia pouts. “Maybe for you. I’m just a kid, though. I need a lot of reassuring. You said so.”
Seriously. So many things flying out of my mouth all willy-nilly.
“I’m not going to kidnap her,” I say firmly, to her and to myself. “I am going to respect her wishes to be left alone. Because a ‘no’ is a ‘no’, something I also say, yes?”
Amia huffs. “Yes.”
I nod, pat myself on the back for that bout of good parenting, and hope it leads to more of the same.
I did not let my child think non-consensual kidnapping was okay today.
Tomorrow, I will continue to not let her think non-consensual kidnapping is okay.
Several more days of such a lesson, and I’m sure to win the Best Father Award by the end of the year.
Amia snuggles deeper into my chest, giving up—for now. I’m no fool. I know she’ll bring it up again, tomorrow or the next day or the next. And I know that when that happens, I need to have something to say to her. I need to find a way to convince her that Leora’s no to me is not a rejection of her.
I wrap my girl in my arms, being careful not to crush her as I sigh.
Then, I dig my phone out of my back pocket, snap a photo of the two of us together, and send it to the family group chat with the message: “This sweet little pumpkin suggested we perpetrate a kidnapping tonight. Almond, count your days.”
I ignore the incoming “awww”s and “give the girl what she wants!”s to swipe to my message thread with Sterne Donovan, local firefighter and my best friend, if you don’t count Leora.
Which I don’t… out loud. Because that would hurt Sterne’s feelings, and there’s no use doing that when Leora doesn’t even want to breathe the same air as me.
Should she change her mind, I can revisit how much I care about Sterne’s fragile ego.
Wolfe: Can you meet tonight?
Sterne: So last minute? Admit it, you’re obsessed with me.
Wolfe: Can’t get enough. 9:00 work? After Amia goes to bed?
Sterne: I’ll be there.
I stare at those three words until my screen goes black, and I let them be a balm to the angry gash three other words have dug into my skin.
He’ll be here. And I have others, too, who would be here if I asked.
Leora just isn’t one of them, and maybe she never will be.
That gash digs deep and spreads wider, making me wince.
Maybe I should leave the risk taking to other people from now on.
Maybe being passive and cowardly isn’t so bad.
Sure, my brother almost gave himself brain damage because I was unable to find the bravery to help him when I knew he wasn’t okay.
And, sure, I was also unable to find the bravery to go after Amia’s mother to at the very least get answers when she left my sweet girl at my door and bolted out of October as fast as she could.
And… okay. No. Being a coward was not actually any better than what I feel right now.
Being a coward means hurting the people I love, and teaching Amia that letting our loved ones suffer is okay.
I can’t do that. For so many reasons, I can’t do that.
A stone falls in my gut, and Leora’s letter flashes behind my eyes.
Sorry, but no.
Sorry, but no, Wolfe Blackwood is not worth meeting.
Sorry, but no, Wolfe Blackwood has never been worth meeting.
I allow myself to wallow in my self-pity for a few minutes, determined not to let it stick. I can have my moment, and then I can regroup.
When Leora’s wound threatens to overcome me, I reopen Sterne’s message to remind myself that my people are here, and they find me worth it.
I drag harsh breaths through my lungs until they don’t burn so much. Then I put Amia to bed, go downstairs, and discuss why I absolutely should not kidnap the love of my life with my (for now) best friend.