29. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
The motel is the kind you pay for in cash, off the highway, with a neon sign missing two letters and a parking lot full of other people’s worst weeks.
I’ve been here six days.
I don’t remember most of them. I remember checking in.
I remember the woman at the desk not looking at my face, which was a kindness.
I remember lying on top of the comforter in my clothes, watching the ceiling, doing the thing I swore off years ago - the math.
Not money math this time. Time math. Six years, times three hundred and sixty-five days, times every morning I didn’t wake her up and every scraped knee I didn’t kiss and every story I gave to some other child’s imagination instead of hers.
My phone is in my hand and there is no one to call.
Danny is two towns over, in remission, getting his strength back, and he doesn’t know a single piece of this, and I will not be the one who hands it to him while he’s still fighting to stay alive.
My parents are dead. My friends fell away years ago, back when I became a woman who worked doubles and buried a baby in her own head every night.
There is a little girl who would come if I called her. But she can’t drive, and she’s six, and she is the entire reason I’m lying in this room instead of in her house.
On the sixth day, someone knocks.
I know it’s him before I open the door. The weight of it, maybe. The particular stillness of a man standing on the other side, waiting.
Callum looks like I feel. Unshaven, gray, a man who hasn’t slept in a week either. He’s holding a cardboard box against his chest like it’s the only thing keeping him upright.
“I’m not coming in,” he says, before I can say anything. “I’m going to stand right here and say what I came to say, and then I’ll go. You don’t have to let me in. You don’t have to answer. You just have to let me leave this with you.”
He sets the box down on the walkway between us.
“It’s all in there. Everything I found. The file.
Corinne’s statement - she signed it, every word, it’s real, you will never have to prove any of this to a single person for the rest of your life.
” His voice is held together with wire. “The contract’s in there too.
I tore it up. I know that doesn’t mean anything now. I just couldn’t stand to look at it.”
I don’t touch the box.
“And there’s one more thing. At the bottom.
” He swallows. “It was in the bag they handed me the day I brought her home from the hospital. A little bracelet. Plastic. Three inches around. It has a date on it and no name, and I’ve kept it for six years, because I keep everything of hers.
” His voice finally breaks. “I didn’t know I was keeping yours. ”
I hit him.
I don’t decide to. My hand just comes up and catches him across the chest, open-palmed, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t block it, so I do it again.
“You never asked.” It comes out of me in pieces. “Six years, and you never asked one single question-”
“No.”
“Because asking might have meant giving her back-”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the answer.
” He stands there and takes it - my hand against his chest, my whole life against his chest. “And because I didn’t ask, a woman lost six years of her daughter’s life so that I could sleep at night.
I’m not asking you to forgive that, Nichole. I don’t. I never will.”
And then I’m not hitting him anymore. I’m holding onto the front of his shirt, and my knees are going, and six years of grief I’ve carried alone comes up all at once and takes me down with it.
I sit on the curb outside a highway motel and cry the way I cried in a hospital bed at twenty-two. Callum lowers himself onto the concrete beside me, close but not touching, and lets me.
He doesn’t tell me it’s okay. He’s learned better than that.
“She’s not eating,” he says finally, to the parking lot.
“She asks for you every hour, on the hour. She’s decided she did something wrong.
That she made you leave.” He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“I’m not telling you that to move you. I would never use her like that.
I’m telling you because you’re her mother, and you’d want to know. ”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
“Take me to her,” I say. “Not to you. To her.”
“Okay.”
“This doesn’t fix anything between us. I’m coming back for her.”
“I know. I never thought otherwise.”
I get to my feet. So does he.
“And Callum.” I make myself look at him. “Before I walk back into that house, I need to hear you say it’s done.”
“She has nothing left,” he says. “Everyone she ever cared about watched me say it out loud, and then they watched the police walk her out of a room she ruled for forty years. Her own voice did it - forty-one minutes of it. She isn’t walking away from this one.
Not socially. Not the other way either. It’s done, Nichole. Both ways. I made sure.”
I pick up the box.
And I let him drive me back to my daughter.