6. Colm
six
Colm
Sunday morning, Mila is at the motel with Macie for the morning routine. I'm on my porch with a coffee that's gone cold, looking at the yard.
The yard needs work. I've known that for years, but I've done nothing about it because a yard is a place for other people — for kids to run in, for a garden someone tends, for a dog that belongs to a family. I live alone. The spare room is used for storage.
That's what I'm thinking about this morning: the spare room. The boxes in it. Whether there is enough floor space between the boxes for a toddler's bed, and whether Macie likes the dark or needs a nightlight.
I am going to have to trust Mila with these answers, and that is where the crack in the trust is, and I know it and I've been circling it since Friday.
She came back. She made a choice at twenty-two that was about her own survival and her own pride and her legitimate fear, and those things are real and I understand them and they also cut.
She was scared of being the woman who shows up with a consequence.
So she showed up with a consequence two years late, when the choice was hers to make on her own timeline, when she felt ready.
While I changed tires and ran competition schedules and looked at the mountains from my porch without knowing I was looking for something.
It's not that I think she's a bad person. She isn't. She's a good mother and a clear-eyed woman who made the best decision she could with what she had. I understand that.
I go back inside, and I call her.
"I want to ask you something," I say when she picks up.
"Okay."
"Not on the phone. Come to my place, tonight. Bring Macie."
There's a pause. "All right."
They come at five. Macie runs the property perimeter immediately with the systematic thoroughness of a building inspector.
She checks the porch, the yard, the edge of the tree line, the side of the house where a spigot drips.
She finds two beetles and a piece of rope that apparently belongs to her now.
Mila sits on the porch step and watches her and I sit next to her.
"Why didn't you try harder?" I ask. “To find me?”
She's quiet for a moment.
"Because I told myself I was doing the right thing," she says.
"I told myself I was protecting you from an obligation you never agreed to.
But if I'm being honest —" She pauses. "I was also protecting myself.
From what it would mean if I found you and you didn't want to know.
That would have been worse than not knowing.
So I told myself it was impossible and I almost made myself believe it. "
"You were scared."
"Yes."
"I've been scared too," I say. "Since Thursday. I'm scared I'm going to get a week with her and then watch you drive back to Kelowna."
She turns to look at me. "Colm—"
"I'm not asking you to stay," I say. "I know what that is. You have a life, a job, a place. I'm not asking you to blow all of that up for a man you've known for three days and a week three years ago."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I'm asking whether this is real for you. What we started. Or whether you came back to hand me a daughter and leave again."
She holds her breath, thinking.
I know my words sting, but there’s no other way to say it. I’m falling hard and fast all over again, and I need to know if she’s going to stay this time. For real.
In the yard, Macie has placed the piece of rope next to a rock and is apparently judging their relative merits.
"I didn't plan for it to be real," Mila says.
"I planned to find you and tell you and figure out co-parenting from opposite ends of the province.
" She looks at her hands. "And then I saw your face, I remembered why I left before morning.
Because I knew if I stayed I'd want to keep you, and at twenty-two I wasn't brave enough for that. "
"Are you brave enough now?"
She looks at me.
"I don't know," she says. "I know I want to be."