Oh, what it felt like for David to embrace his newfound daughter. He’d wanted to hold her like this, he knew it now, from the very first minute he’d known she was alive. It was a moment of wonder for him, more poignant to David because it was something he might never have known.
He felt himself when he held her.
He felt his own mother in her, and his grandmother, and the women his grandmother had known when she had been a girl, gone before. She smelled like chocolate and Atomic Fireballs and dust when she leaned close to his ear. “I was afraid,” she told him. “Do you think I should be?”
He held her out a bit, his heart aching, thinking of all she had to be afraid of in her future. “Afraid about what?” he asked.
“Afraid of having you know me. Because you might not think I’m the way you wanted me to be.” He examined her face. They just don’t make them much cuter than this, he thought. She did look like Braden.
One beat passed, two, three, before David could answer her question. He’d lost everything that was solid and stable in his life, for this. Miraculously, being with his daughter now, it seemed worth that much. “So far, you’re exactly the way I thought you’d be.”
“Yeah?”
She cocked her head sideways at him like a puppy, and he spoke with an amazing feeling of possessiveness in his chest. “When someone is your father,” he said, “he doesn’t love you because he’s gotten to know you. He loves you because he’s your father—because you belong to him, no matter who you are.”
For a long time she didn’t move. She only looked at him with quiet reverence. “You really think so?”
He nodded. “I know so. Because of you.” Then, “You’re heavy, you know that? Bigger than I had imagined.”
“I used to be even bigger. I’ve lost five pounds, because of leukemia.” If she felt his arms tighten around her at that, she pretended it made no difference.
“Let’s take care of you now,” he said. “Get you something to eat.”
That’s how they found themselves at the end of the parade route. As if, for the time being, this might be nothing more than a normal day. Samantha wanted a hot dog. David sidled down the barbecue line with her, carrying her backpack and helping her load her plate. She wanted ketchup, a wiener without any black on it, and two spoonfuls of chili.
He watched while she consumed the entire thing in less than four minutes.
When she dribbled chili down her chin, he found a napkin for her and wiped it off. When she guzzled red Kool-aid from the paper cup it made a mustache that wouldn’t wipe off no matter how hard either one of them scrubbed.
“Marked for life,” he teased her.
“Nah.” She laughed. “In one day, it always goes away.”
“Well,” he said, slapping his hands on his knees.
“Well,” she said, slapping her hands on her knees, too.
And that seemed to be the end of the conversation for a while.
Around them, horses were being unhitched and the jangle of bridles and buckles rang out like bells. The entire roster of huskies had been fastened to a truck with individual ropes. Each dog chowed down from its individual bowl, its name inscribed like royalty on the side: Smoke-Fur Luke, Maggie, Tucker, Annie, Buckie, Heidi, Red Lady, and Tom. Above them the sky shone blue and clear, a color so deep it made David’s head throb.
“I like Tom for a dog,” he said, slapping his knees again, fighting for something else to talk about. “That’s a good name.”
Silence hung between them for longer than it had before. Samantha suddenly seemed shy to him. “So, what do we do now?”
She stared at a butterfly that had landed on the grass beside his knee. He steepled his fingers in front of his lips and looked at her. “Let’s see. We ought to think about that. We really should.”
And, as he laid the list out for her, David laid it out for himself as well.
“First, we need to get to the house and phone your mother to let her know you’re here. She’s been worried sick about you. After that, we’ll call the police and tell them we’ve found you and they can stop looking, too.”
“The police were looking for me? Where?”
“People were looking for you everywhere.” He’d said enough. He knew by the way she glanced at the ground beside the cuff of her khaki shorts. He switched the subject. “You’re going to meet—” He tried to figure how best to say it. “—my wife. And your brother. Did know you have a brother?”
Her head shot up, her expression full of disbelief.
And grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, too. But that would only come if some miracle gave Samantha more time.
“Most of all,” David said, “you and I are going to spend some days together. Now, how does that sound?”
Abby stood at the bottom of the empty grandstand, her hair in disarray, chocolate footprints of pheasant running like tire tracks down the front of her jeans.
“Where is David?” she asked the empty chairs. Out of deference to the crowd on the square, they’d only brought one vehicle. He had told her crisply that he’d wait for her here.
“Good heavens,” Edna Clements commented behind her. “You look like you’ve been run over by a stampede.”
“Oh, Edna,” she said. “Have you seen David?”
“Good heavens. Seen David? Oh, yes. I’ve seen David. Everyone’s seen David. He practically marched in the parade.”
“What?”
Edna shrugged as if she was shaking off a mosquito. “When you find your husband, I want you to tell him that I’m a woman of great integrity. I want you to tell him that, even though he ran off, I cast his vote for him anyway.”
“Edna, what happened?”
“You tell him the vote was a tie between the player-piano float and the husky dogs. I told the parade committee he would have voted the huskies if he hadn’t run away. The huskies took grand prize.”
“Do you know where he is now? I need to pick him up.”
“God only knows,” John Teasley said as he passed by with a bouquet of balloons. “He went running off after somebody named Sam. He kept shouting and he pushed my chair off the side, trying to get off the stands. It was like playing king of the hill, sitting beside him.”
“He went chasing after someone in the parade?”
“A little girl. Named Sam.”
Sam? A tinder-spark of joy burned inside Abby, and then flickered out. She’d gotten here safe. Thank you. Oh, thank you.
Inside Abby there came an aching and pleasurable dissonance.
She’s here and she’s safe. But if I welcome her into my heart, then I’m welcoming what David did.
How can I do something like that?
“Thanks, Edna,” she said lightly, as if the information they’d just given her didn’t make any difference. She strolled to the Suburban that they’d left in the bank parking lot. As she headed toward the rodeo grounds where the parade had ended, she drove slowly, thinking that’s how it always was with people who drove toward something they knew was going to change their lives. Either you drove fast to find out what was wrong, or you drove slowly because you didn’t know if you wanted to get there.
She arrived at the dusty lot and parked on the farthest row away. At a smoldering charcoal grill by the swing set, a family gathered and passed a bag of marshmallows around. A little boy, much younger than Braden, stood on the pitcher’s mound. Abby watched as he wound up an invisible baseball, pretending to sail it over the plate in the red dirt of Mateosky Field.
Across the way, an anxious mongrel dog leapt on all fours to catch a spinning Frisbee in midair. And, there they were, her husband and his daughter, the child of his indiscretion some nine years before, sitting together cross-legged in the grass.
“Oh—” And, from his end of the line, David could hear Susan’s astonished silence, then a little sob, then laughing and crying all at the same time. “She’s there?”
“Yep. Weak, but fine. Every hair on her head accounted for.”
She must have sat down hard on something because he heard the breath go out of her. “Oh, David. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
“No. Not everything. If I could have done everything, I might have saved her life.”
“You’ve done so much, David. More than I ever thought you would.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
Susan’s voice came as little more than hiccups, as if joy and grief took turns jolting her. “You’ve done everything you could do. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t enough,” David said of his whole life. “It’s never enough.” For a half minute or so, they were like two sad teenagers on the telephone, listening to each other breathe.
“While she’s there,” Susan said at last, “pretend she’s normal, okay? Pretend she isn’t different at all. And watch it when she starts getting tired. It happens quickly.”
“I’ll do that.”
Then, “Thank you, David. Thank you for letting me come.”
He thought about that as he stood in silence. “When are you getting here?”
“I won’t have any luck flying,” she said. “The planes are full to Jackson in July.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll drive and then get a room at the Elk Country Inn again when I arrive. That will give you a little time with her, David. That’s everything either of us could ask.”
Braden stood on one side of the driveway with his fingers jammed in his rear pockets.
Samantha stood on the other side of the driveway with her hands clasped in a knot in front of her, each wrist resting in the saddle of a hipbone.
Neither one of them knew exactly what they should be thinking.
Neither one of them knew exactly what they should do.
Braden pulled his hands out of his pockets and began to walk in slow circles.
Samantha swayed back on her heels and surveyed the sky.
“I don’t know if I’m going to like this or not,” Braden said.
“Yeah,” she said back. “I guess I surprised you. I guess I surprised everybody.”
That thought kept them both quiet for a long time.
“I like your skateboard ramp.” Sam scrubbed the toe of her sneaker on the asphalt. “It rocks.”
“My dad made it,” Braden said proudly. Then, too late, he realized what he’d said. “Well, I mean…I guess…he’s your dad, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Weird.”
“I know.”
Silence again. Braden asked with caution, “Is the place you live different from this, or is it the same?”
A scrubbing of the toe again. “Different.”
“What do you like to do there?”
“My favorite thing to do is to chase seagulls. I go to the ocean every day.”
That was an interesting thing. Braden softened. “You do?”
“My best friend’s name is Tess and we walk to the beach from her house. She’s the one who brought me here. They came on vacation and she snuck me into their camper.”
“What’s so good about chasing seagulls?” He couldn’t help it; he still wanted her to prove her worthiness. Then, with a hint of pensiveness, “I’ve never been to the ocean.”
“We make sandcastles on the beach, too. Since you’re my brother, I’ll show you when I get the chance.”
“Will you?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it like?”
“What?”
“When they all take off like that. All those birds.”
“Oh.” Her faraway expression interested him. “When all those birds go at once, it seems like anything could happen, like there’s more wings there than just the birds’ wings, something I can’t see. I feel so small and so big all at the same time, making so many things fly. Fifty of them at least.”
“Really?”
“Or maybe even a hundred. So close I can feel bursts of air from their wings.”
“I just play baseball.”
“I’d like to learn how to play baseball.”
“Would you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll pitch a few to you, then.” He thought about it hard before he said it. “It’d be good to have a sister who could hit.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah.”
They started sauntering toward the house, toward this new odd thing between them. “The ocean’s so amazing,” she told him as they scuffled along shoulder to shoulder. “You stand right beside it and it crashes all over your feet and you try to know how big it is. Only you can’t because it’s bigger than the world. Bigger than anything you can ever understand.”
The afternoon was getting along. The shadows of the lodgepole pines had stretched to the full length of the side yard. In the distance, they could hear the Grand Teton Music Festival orchestra tuning up for the outdoor concert. “You know what happened last year on July Fourth?” Braden asked. “Mom was worried the outdoor concert would scare Brewster, so she put him in the bathroom and turned on the radio so he couldn’t hear it. Only the radio station she turned on was broadcasting that same concert she didn’t want Brewster to hear.”
For however long each of them would live, they would remember this first private conversation in the driveway. This was a moment children explained in great detail during show-and-tell or scribbled down in a diary or whispered about when they were supposed to be quiet in the school lunch line.
I have a brother.
I have a sister.
It’s the oddest thing.
“If my dad doesn’t—” Braden stopped. “I mean, our dad doesn’t have enough time for both of us, will you make sure he won’t leave me out? I’ve been thinking some about that.”
“You’re so lucky,” Samantha said. “You’re the one who gets to live with him every day.”
“Yes, but…” Braden frowned. He scuffled his feet again as they crossed the pavement, sending a rock skittering into the grass. “I don’t know. Do you think a dad can love two kids as much as he can love one?”
“Don’t know.” She kicked a rock, too. “When I came here, I wasn’t thinking about there being anybody else.”
A pause. “Well, there is.” Then, “Hey, you want to see my favorite bat? I hit two homers with it in the game against Cody.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll come see it.”
“It rocks. It’s an Easton, with Z-Core and titanium. You ought to hear the ping it makes whenever you connect up with a fastball.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Show me.”
So Braden led her to the garage where he displayed his bat to her, and his cleats (which his mom wouldn’t let him bring in the house because of their smell), and his Rawlings Heart-of-the-Hide infield glove, which Brewster had chewed and his dad—their dad—had used a leather thong to stitch and repair.