4. Colm
four
Colm
The log-rolling heats run cleanly. Twelve competitors, four heats, the crowd finding its rhythm over the first hour.
I should be watching the timing judges, checking the re-staging between rounds, tracking the radio for the axe range update.
I'm doing all of it. I'm also watching the viewing platform.
They're there. Macie is on the railing again, leaning as far as Mila will allow, shouting encouragement at the competitors in her own semi-coherent way. She cheers the same way for every heat regardless of outcome, which I find I cannot stop watching.
My daughter. Two years of a life I know nothing about — bedtime routines and first words and the specific way she needs to be held during a tantrum and whether she's afraid of the dark and what her laugh sounds like at six in the morning.
Gone. I wasn't there. That's not something I can make right, no matter how I try.
The attraction to Mila, well, I'd be lying if I called it anything else.
It's been there since the second I saw her this morning, which is inconvenient.
She's the woman who didn't find me, and she's the mother of my child, and she's also, undeniably, the woman I've spent three years measuring every other woman against without quite admitting that's what I was doing.
She's standing at the railing next to Macie with her arms around the kid and she looks exactly like herself and nothing like how I remembered her because memory is never as specific as the real thing.
The final heat finishes. The crowd applauds. I relay the results to the judges' table and check the axe range status and hand the next two hours off to my deputy coordinator, a capable woman who has been doing this festival since I was in grade school.
Then I walk to the back side of the main stage.
It's quieter here. Behind the stage is storage — equipment cases, cable runs, folded seating sections leaning against the structure. The vendor noise and the crowd noise are muffled. This is where the festival staff comes to eat lunch without getting stopped every thirty seconds.
I hear her before I see her.
"—she's fine, she's going to be fine, she's done this at the grocery store, she will stop in approximately four minutes—"
I come around the edge of a cable case and find her crouched next to Macie, who is sitting on the ground making a sound that is not quite a cry and not quite a protest but somewhere between — the particular tone of a toddler who has reached the end of something and needs the world to know about it.
Mila has a hand on her back and a water bottle and the focused, unflappable expression of someone who has been doing this alone for two years and knows exactly how long four minutes is.
"Hey," I say.
She looks up. "Sorry. She missed her nap window. It happens."
"Is there anything —"
"No." She looks back at Macie. "She's winding down."
I crouch down next to them. Macie looks at me through the tail end of her upset — red-faced, lip trembling, the expression of someone who knows the emergency is passing but needs to see it through to the end.
I pull the exaggerated face. Wide eyes, puffed cheeks.
She looks at me. The expression wobbles.
Then she does it back — the hiccupped, half-hearted mirror of it — and her face crumples into a laugh.
Mila looks at me over Macie's head.
"That's a skill," she said.
"Natural talent."
I sit on the ground next to them because it seems like the right thing to do.
Macie leans against me — unprompted, the way she leans against her mother, like I'm simply a surface that is close enough to lean against. The weight of her is small and warm and completely catastrophic to whatever composure I've managed to hold together since this morning.
"How was the log-rolling?" Mila asks.
"Good. Strong field this year."
"Macie cheered for everyone equally."
"I noticed."
She looks at me. "You were watching."
"Every chance I got."
The quiet between us is different than it was this morning — less held, less braced. She rests her arms on her knees and looks at the back of the stage structure, the old weathered boards of it, the way the light comes through in thin strips.
"I used to wonder if it was real," she says. "What I remembered about that night. It felt like a lot to feel about someone you barely knew."
"It was real."
She nods. She's not looking at me, and then she is, and the directness of it is the same thing I remember from three years ago.
Macie has found something on the ground that she finds interesting — a small stone, which she examines with scientific focus. I watch her.
"Can I see you tonight?"
"Macie goes down around seven-thirty," she says.
"Eight, then."
I look at the ground between us. I look at my daughter turning a river stone over in her hands with absolute concentration.
I stand up. I hold out my hand to Mila without thinking and she takes it — one quick, functional grip to help herself up — and even that, even the two-second contact of her hand in mine, is exactly like I remembered.
The heat and the specificity of it. The way certain touches land differently than others, and you don't know why.
She feels it too. I can see it in the slight change around her eyes.
Macie holds up the stone. "Rock," she tells me.
"Good rock," I say.
She puts it in her pocket with tremendous satisfaction. Then she reaches up and grabs my hand, the same way she grabbed my finger this morning — no hesitation, absolute certainty that the hand will be there.
That evening, Mila's sitting at one of the picnic tables in front of the motel. She has a baby monitor set down on the wood, making soft white noise.
She looks up when she hears me.
I sit across from her. She slides the extra coffee cup toward me without asking, which means she brought it for me, which means she already knew I'd want one.
"Macie go down okay?" I ask.
"First try." A small smile. "She was exhausted."
"I never stopped looking," I say. "I want you to know that too."
"I know."
"I mean, I stopped after a while because I didn't have anything to look with. But the first two months I asked everyone I could think of."
"I was already back in Kelowna by then."
"Yeah."
She looks at me. The light is low and her eyes are dark and three years and everything that's happened and I still want her with a clarity that I'd be embarrassed about if I had any space to be embarrassed.
"I want to be very clear about something," she says.
"All right."
"I didn't come back because I need anything from you. Help, money, whatever. I came back because she deserves a father who knows she exists. That's the only thing I wanted when I drove here."
"And now?"
She's quiet.
I lean across the table, and I kiss her.
It's the same. That's the first thing — the same, the same as three years ago, the particular weight of her mouth against mine and the way she stills for exactly one second before she comes toward me. Exactly like I remembered. And completely different because I'm not a stranger anymore.
I'm the father of her daughter. She came back. She's finally here.