I’m not surprised to see Ethan in the parking lot when I leave the shop the next day, exactly one day after I needed him. He’d texted me that he was on his way home late last night and again this morning, hoping to see me before I left for work. I hadn’t responded.
He’s sitting on the hood of his car as I let the door close behind me and when he looks up, I wonder if he’s half expecting me to smile like I always did as a kid when he came back, ready to forget how much he’d hurt me.
But he’s stoic as he jumps down and walks toward me.
“You didn’t answer my texts.” I can’t tell if there’s an accusation in his voice.
“Did you find her?” Even as I ask I know he didn’t. If he had, a text was all I would have gotten from him.
“No.”
“I’m sorry.” I don’t reach out to touch him though. My hands have remained clamped around the push rims of my wheels since that first heart-stopping sight of him. I’m afraid that the only thing they’ll do if I let go is ball into fists.
“I really needed to talk to you, stuff about my mom, yeah, but it turned into so much more. There were things I needed to tell you.”
“I’m right where you left me,” I say, so lightly that it’s possible he doesn’t hear me. I’m not smiling though and he thinks he knows why.
“I get that you’re mad for the way I left, and I was mad at me too. I shouldn’t have taken off like I did. I just got Bauer’s text and it was like all my other thoughts, bam!” He slaps the side of his head. “You know?”
No, I don’t know. My brain is a swirling mess of thoughts and the important ones, the vital ones are always drowning out the others. The thing is, Ethan had made me believe I was one of his important thoughts, one that he couldn’t hide from even if he wanted to. I could never hide from him. Even now, questions about him crowd forward.
“Is Bauer still helping you look for her?”
As I’m sitting there trying to keep myself held as tightly as I can, he kind of explodes, spinning around to jump down from the ramp railing onto the ground several feet below. He kicks a deep spray of gravel from the edge of the otherwise smooth parking lot and the cords in his neck tense right before he lets out a yell. He kicks again after that, smaller and less focused.
“See this is why I needed to talk to you. So I’m there, meeting his new family—’cause he’s clean now, has been for years—and then yesterday he tells me all this stuff that I can’t deal with, so I leave, go to the address where she was supposed to be and I’m just wasting this whole day waiting for the phone to ring...”
I hear it, the ringing. It floods my ears drowning out the rest of his words about pancakes and little kids in Spiderman pajamas, about huge dogs and nice houses, about driving.
All I’m hearing is that he could have called me, asked about me, been there for me in even that small way when he had to know I needed him, when one single tiny thought about me should have been enough to get through to him yesterday, and it wasn’t.
Part of me expected that to be the first words out of his mouth, not just the generic sorry, but the specific one, the only one that really matters. I thought he had remembered and that shame and regret had been what kept him from calling. I think I could have dealt with that, not understood but gotten through the hurt of it.
But now? Hearing this? I’m right back to yesterday, alone when I didn’t have to be, by myself when he was supposed to be with me.
He can’t understand. I know that and I’m trying to understand that from his point of view. Because he will feel bad when he remembers. He’ll be sorry and apologize and maybe make new promises for next year. But yesterday still has such a hold on me and he won’t be able to take it back when the broken promise of his company made it all so much worse.
Because I’d let myself want him, count on him. Not just his presence, but his promises.
And he wasn’t there for me. He didn’t even think of me.
“He told me he’s my dad,” Ethan says out of nowhere.
Yesterday gives me a minuscule amount of slack. “But I thought...?”
“I just always assumed the first time he was with us was what I remembered as a kid, but he said they were together before that,” he says. “He could be wrong, and I mean what would it change either way?”
It would change a lot knowing who his father is. He’d told me a bit about Bauer. Enough to know that while it hadn’t all been good, he’d cared about Bauer. And if the guy was really clean and, from what it sounded like, interested in having a relationship with Ethan...yeah, it could change a lot.
“He paid somebody at the apartment to tell us when my mom came back, but I checked it out and it doesn’t look like anybody’s been there in days. Which means she could be anywhere.” The muscle flexes in his cheek. “She could be dead.”
“Don’t say that.” My voice comes out fast and harsh, startling him from his train of thought.
He meets my hard gaze and then nods a little. “I know, I know, but I don’t know—” his hands are free to make the fists I can’t let mine make “—anything! I’m tired of it. The worry and that sick feeling.” He drives one of those fists into his gut. “It’s always there, even when I was a kid and she was supposed to be the one taking care of me, I felt it. And it just gets bigger, you know? Not me. It.” His hand falls away. “I wish I could just be mad at her. I get close sometimes, but I can’t ever let myself get there, and then I’ve got all this anger and nowhere to put it.” His voice had gone soft but it strengthens again looking at me. “If you’d just answered my texts. Why can’t that be enough for you sometimes? Why is it always all or nothing? I needed you yesterday.”
My chin trembles, the only part to move as that final part of me breaks.