I dialed Olivia’s phone twice, getting her voice mail. “Olivia, I need you to call me back right away,” I barked. I tossed the pad of paper into a trash can and then, with the letter to Kathleen and Olivia folded in my back pocket, I took off in the direction of the motel at a breathless, clumsy run, one hand in the pocket of my sweatshirt to grip the Colt. What the hell had I been thinking? I didn’t need Kathleen here to tell me that I had managed to fuck this up, that my daughter and a near-stranger had gone completely off the grid.
“You’re in a hurry,” someone called, and I looked up to see Betha Caldwell grinning at me from beneath red, penciled-in eyebrows. She had pulled her truck to the curb and was inching along to keep pace with me.
“I’m trying to find Olivia. She’s with that Ellis boy—Sam.”
One fake eyebrow rose higher than the other. “I see.”
I leaned into the open window. “Could you— Are you going in the direction of the motel?”
“The motel is exactly where I’m going. Hop in.”
Betha waited until I fastened my seat belt, an episode made all the more difficult by my shaking hands. “She’s fine,” Betha pronounced, chuckling. “Are you always this protective?”
“She’s sixteen.” Didn’t this say everything?
Betha gave the truck a little gas, and we rolled along the main drag at an infuriatingly slow pace. I had the feeling that I could have done better on the outside, jogging along one-handedly. She reached over to pat me on the leg. “Around here, sixteen is a full-fledged adult. Hell, I was married by the time I was seventeen, had my oldest only a year later.”
“I don’t mean to sound rude, but that is exactly what I’m worried about,” I told her. “Plus, Sam is nineteen.”
Betha threw back her head and laughed. “That boy is not exactly what I’d call sophisticated.”
I didn’t wait for her truck to come to a complete stop before I started running toward our motel room. Betha parked and followed behind me, curious, as I fumbled with the room key. The door swung inward, and I saw Olivia and Sam on her bed, sitting side by side, not touching.
“Liv?” I demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Her voice was too defensive. Something was going on, even if it wasn’t the something I’d feared. She was still dressed in her black jeans, black boots and black hoodie—the Olivia uniform—and Sam was fully dressed, as well. But both of them looked guilty as hell.
I came closer. “Nothing?”
“Nothing, sir,” Sam added helpfully.
I glared at him, the hand in my pocket bumping up against the now-familiar bulge of the handgun at my waist. Thank God I hadn’t left it in the room, where one or the other of them could have stumbled across it. If not sex, what were they doing in the motel room? Drugs? I stared at Olivia, my crazy-smart, scared-of-everything, too-old-for-her-age daughter, and we both spoke at the same time.
“Olivia, I think we need—”
“Dad, I just wanted to—”
I took a deep breath. “You first.”
“I wasn’t feeling good,” Olivia said. “I thought I was going to throw up, and I wanted to come back here. Sam didn’t want to leave me alone until you got back.”
I considered this, anger seeping out of me. “You could have called, though. You should have. In fact, I called you twice, and you didn’t answer.”
“I forgot to charge my phone last night.”
I stared at her for a long moment until she blinked, looking away.
Sam cleared his throat and stood, patting Olivia on the shoulder like a younger sister. “Guess I’ll get back to it, then,” he said. He nodded at me sheepishly, and a minute later we heard the clunk-whirr of the transmission as he reversed, then accelerated out of the parking lot.
Betha Caldwell, listening from the door, asked if Olivia wanted some chicken soup.
Olivia smiled weakly. “Maybe just a few crackers?”
“A few crackers it is. Be right back,” Betha called cheerfully.
I closed the door and walked over to my bed, plopping down on it. Olivia half turned and we stared at each other again.
“I was worried,” I told her. “You said you would be right there.”
“I know. But I told you what happened.”
“Liv—”
“Your hair looks nice,” she said, giving me a little smile.
I ran a hand over the top of my head distractedly. “So, what do we do now?”
Olivia shrugged. “Maybe we can watch some crap TV for a bit, just the two of us.”
“Sounds good.” I leaned over to give her a kiss on the forehead, and she tried to wrap me in a hug that I sidestepped at the last moment. Having the Colt in my waistband was like walking around with a ticking bomb strapped to my chest. I dreaded Olivia bumping against the handle, asking, What’s that?
“I don’t need whatever bug you’ve got,” I explained, settling back onto my bed. Olivia was watching me from beneath her hoodie, her expression unreadable.
We spent the afternoon in our side-by-side beds, the top sheets tucked in too tightly, the pillows slightly too hard. Betha knocked, bringing a sleeve of Saltine crackers and a plate of breakfast leftovers: muffins, scones, little butter and jelly packets.
Olivia ran through a dismal channel selection before settling on reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“I can’t believe this show is still rerunning,” I commented, two episodes in, brushing crumbs off my sheets. “Your brother used to watch this every morning during the summer, but that was years ago now.”
Olivia shifted in bed, a complicated undertaking, considered that she was buried beneath several layers. “He did? Daniel used to watch this?”
I started, hearing his name. How long since we had mentioned him so casually, this ghost who flitted around our lives? “Sure,” I told her. “You don’t remember?”
On the screen, Will Smith was trying to impress a cashier with his over-the-top cockiness. The laugh track cackled. Everyone thought he was funny except for the cashier.
“No,” she said. “I barely remember anything.”
“That’s not true,” I said reflexively, although of course it might have been. I felt defensive on her behalf. Didn’t she remember? All our day trips around California, our family dinners, Daniel’s endless piano practicing, our lazy Saturday mornings... Was this another thing Robert Saenz had taken from us, our ability to remember happiness?
Then Olivia blurted, as if she’d been holding it all in for a long time, and the only way to let it out was in a fast gush, “I wish I knew more about Daniel. He had all these years of life when I wasn’t around, or when I was around, but too young to remember. Or when I was old enough to remember, but too self-absorbed to think it was anything important that I should pay attention to.”
“Oh, Liv.”
“I would have paid attention,” she said. “If I had known what was going to happen, I would have memorized everything, or written it down, or shot a vid—”
She stopped abruptly, and when I glanced over, she was crying. I reached for the remote and muted the television. Will Smith was still there—in his uncle’s home now, in the mansion in Bel-Air, talking to the family butler. Minus the sound, everything seemed like elaborate pantomime, the gestures too big, the facial expressions too exaggerated. Olivia’s sobs, hidden against her pillow, were tiny and pitiful as a kitten’s.
“Do you want to talk about it? We should.” I took a deep breath. “We should talk about Daniel.”
“There’s too much to say.”
“We’ve got time.”
Olivia wasn’t looking at me anymore; she was squinting at the screen, trying to puzzle out the words we couldn’t hear.
“The thing is—” I stopped, forcing down the hatred I felt right that moment, sharp and strong as a paring knife, for Robert Saenz. It was amazing how he could be free as a bird in Ohio and be here, too—a vision in my mind, sharp as a make-believe target on the wall of our motel room. But Olivia didn’t need to share these feelings; she needed something else—a long overdue apology. “I know we didn’t handle it well. Me, especially. I guess when you become a parent, you worry about all these little things—a cough, a skinned knee—but you never actually expect that any harm will come to your own child. There are parenting manuals that cover every happy moment, like first words and first steps, but there’s no manual that tells you how to handle the awful things, too.”
“No one would buy that manual,” Olivia protested, sniffling. “That would be the worst baby shower present ever.”
I chuckled despite myself.
Olivia, her voice so soft that it might have been coming from the parking lot, said, “If I were you, I would think to myself, why did it happen to the super-talented kid? Why did I get left with this one?”
“You don’t believe that, do you? I’ve never thought that for a second.” My voice came out thick with grief.
“Mom, maybe.”
I felt a rush of vehemence on Kathleen’s behalf. “Not at all, not ever.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Liv, so many things went through my mind when Daniel died. How I should have been there, how I should have insisted that he go somewhere close, like UC Davis or Sac State, where I could keep an eye on him. How I should have gone to more of his concerts—every single one, instead of begging off to finish grading—how I should have set aside my schoolwork to just spend more time with him on weeknights, how I never ever should have asked him to stop practicing when I had a headache or just needed a moment to myself. That and a million other things, all the ways I’d failed him as a father over the years. But I never, ever felt that it should have been you. And your mom felt the same.” I let the tears balance in the corners of my eyes, not wanting Olivia to see them.
She clicked the mute button again so that sound—a commercial for a shampoo that would revolutionize hair care—came flooding back into the room again, and I realized that she was crying, too, hiding her sobs underneath the announcer’s voice.
“It’s all going to be okay, Olivia,” I promised, and I could only believe it myself because I was looking past now, past the near future, past the horrible news that would come to her one way or another, to a world where Daniel’s life had meant something. “Not today, and probably not tomorrow, and maybe not for months and months, but I promise you that one day, it will be okay.”
She sniffled wetly, her nostrils clogged with gunk, and propped herself onto one elbow to look directly at me. “Dad, if anything happened to you or Mom, to either of you or both of you—I couldn’t handle it. You have to know that.”
“I know.”
Olivia turned back to the television, surrendering to the glow and comfort of a situational comedy—the canned laughter, the lessons learned, the happy resolution at the end of each half hour. She blew her nose into a napkin, then crunched a few more Saltines. When her breath became regular, I turned off the television and stared into the semidarkness of the room, lit only by weak shafts of light through the vertical blinds.
It was hard not to think that I was the worst person in the world, maybe even worse than Robert Saenz himself.