TYLER STARED UP at the same pure white ceiling he’d woken up to stare at for the last month and a half. Out of sheer habit, he inwardly chanted the mantra that had become his best friend since he’d come to Columbus. You’ve got the all-clear to take her back to New York. You’ve got the all-clear to take her back to New York. You’ve got the all-clear to take her back to New York.
But he stopped and scrubbed a hand over his face. Because the universe had answered that mantra. And the day was here. This evening’s plane tickets were burning a hole in his email inbox. After a month of court appearances and suit coats and meetings with lawyers and social workers, he actually did have the legal all-clear to take his little sister, Kylie, back to Brooklyn with him. As her legal guardian.
And that was good news, he reminded himself. And terrifying news. And pretty much everything in between.
The call that Tyler had gotten at Matty’s basketball game had picked up Tyler by the scruff of his neck and kerplunked him directly into an active missing-person case. Apparently his little sister’s mother had up and disappeared completely.
Their father had passed a few years ago, and Kylie had no aunts or uncles. Which left Ty. Here. To figure everything out, or whatever it was that adults did in situations like this.
The cops were almost entirely certain, from the note she’d left behind, and from activity on her bank account, that Lorraine was alive. Alive but currently abandoning her daughter. Who was not a child, but was still kid-like enough to wear a matching reindeer pajama set that Tyler had put through the laundry the other day.
Kylie herself seemed completely unworried about her mother’s welfare, which led Tyler to believe that she might even know where Lorraine was. Not to mention the fact that she’d had several months to get used to her absence already.
Either way, Tyler had been stuck in midwestern limbo while the state of Ohio had figured out what the heck to do with Kylie. Apparently, the heck they’d figured was legally tying her to Tyler. And now, here he was, staring up at the ceiling, as of yesterday Kylie’s temporary guardian. Guardian. Heh. The word sounded foreign and clunky even in his own mind.
Childish, too-smooth commitmentphobe. No interest in anything beyond seeking your own comfort.
HA. He hoped the universe was laughing so loud it woke Fin up from a dead sleep every night for a year. Two years.
This childish commitmentphobe had slapped on his best suit and practically danced the Charleston to get the judge to saddle him with the biggest commitment there was. A small, almost adult. Goodbye, normal life. It had been good while it lasted.
He imagined dateless Saturday nights. A beerless fridge. Finding a—good God—babysitter for the nights he had to be out late at Nets games.
When he’d first come to Columbus, his mantra had been Please let Lorraine walk through that door. Please let Lorraine walk through that door. Please let Lorraine walk through that door. It hadn’t taken more than a week for him to realize that he couldn’t possibly wish that on Kylie. Lorraine had willingly abandoned her. And even if their father had still been alive, Tyler wouldn’t have wished his brand of passive inattention on any kid. Miraculously, Tyler had somehow become this kid’s best bet. The mantra had morphed into Gimme the all-clear to take her back to Brooklyn.
After five weeks in Ohio, Tyler was pretty much ready to walk back to Brooklyn. Hell, he’d tape a skateboard to his shoes and grab the tailpipe of a semi if it got him back to his borough. He missed home.
He missed the women in sky-high heels on the subway. He missed the symphony of garbage truck–lumbering, neighborhood-hollering, horn-honking life that had been his constant soundtrack.
Columbus had its charms. He genuinely liked the college town. He liked the grand architecture on campus, the borderline maniacal sports fandom that one encountered in almost every citizen.
He hated, however, the plastic suburban neighborhood his stepmother’s house sat firmly in the middle of. He hated the rental Toyota he’d been forced to white-knuckle all over the city. And he really, really hated the suspicious, pitying, judgmental looks of every neighbor who rubbernecked past their driveway.
They all but stopped to stare because behind this beige front door was the little girl whose mother had abandoned her. The little girl who’d hidden it for damn near four months, living alone, taking herself to school, eating Easy Mac she bought at the grocery store she took the public bus to. On her own. The little girl who slammed doors and all but refused to speak to her older brother. The little girl who’d made it completely clear that she did not want to go to Brooklyn with him.
The little girl in question was apparently awake because he could hear the heaviness of her footsteps upstairs, which reminded Tyler that she really wasn’t so little anymore. Though he still thought of her as eleven—the age she’d been when they’d first met—Kylie was, in fact, fourteen. A difference he’d thought was negligible until he’d stepped off the plane and realized that he was not going to be dealing with a little kid, but a teenager.
Tyler roused himself from “bed,” immediately forcing the pull-out couch back into its folded form and tossing the cushions back on. As uncomfortable as the accommodations were, he preferred them to sleeping in Lorraine’s bed. He yanked on a sweatshirt, shoved his feet into slippers and headed to the bathroom to wash up. When he emerged, his little sister was sitting on top of the kitchen counter, her legs crisscrossed and a frown on her face, as usual.
Tyler looked much more like their father. Navy blue eyes, blondish hair and a long, handsome face. Kylie favored her mother. She had reddish hair, curly at the temples, freckles and sharp features.
“Save some for me,” he requested as she poured herself a bowl of Mini-Wheats.
Holding his eye contact with a ruthless smirk, she poured the rest of the cereal into her own bowl, creating a mountain she couldn’t eat by herself in a million years.
Tyler swallowed down the irritation that threatened to erupt from him like fire from a dragon’s mouth. Kylie had done everything she could over the last five weeks to prove, in no uncertain terms, that she did not want or need him around. He should have known better than to go for that cereal alley-oop. She’d just stuffed the ball back down his throat right at the hoop. And she looked royally satisfied about it.
For once, Tyler was unable to restrain his sigh of disappointment. He’d really wanted some Mini-Wheats. But he said nothing as he opened up the cabinet for an instant oatmeal packet.
“Well, if you’re gonna be a baby about it,” he heard Kylie grumble from behind him. He turned to see her shoveling half the cereal from her bowl into his. She jumped off the counter, grabbed a spoon and was out of the kitchen before he could say “thank you.”
She was eating in her room. Again.
Tyler’s phone rang in his pocket and he very nearly bobbled his bowl of cereal in the mad rush to get it.
“Seb.”
“Hey, man. Getting ready for the move?”
Tyler glanced at the ceiling. “Maybe? Who knows? Who knows how much it’ll cost me to get her to the airport. With school, some days she’d go willingly and some days I paid her fifty bucks.”
“If you were anyone else, I’d think you were kidding.”
“The kid is cleaning me out.”
Besides the cash bribes it took to get her to do almost anything, Tyler had taken a brief sabbatical from work in order to give this matter his entire attention. Tyler’s father had left a considerable sum of money to both Tyler and Kylie, but a few more weeks in Columbus and Ty would be officially dipping into his savings to pay the mortgage on his condo. Not to mention the fact that he’d just won his petition to the state of Ohio for the legal right to start paying for everything Kylie-related. He didn’t even know what that meant. What did fourteen-year-old girls need? Beanie Babies? Posters of hot guys? Those fancy desks where princesses in movies sat and brushed their hair at night? Some kind of mirror that opened up a direct line to Satan? How much did those cost?
Whose life was this again? Oh, yeah. It was supposed to be his freaking stepmother’s life.
“Today’s the big day.”
“Yap.” Tyler attempted to get excited for the right reasons. It was an incredible relief to be headed back to BK. And it should also feel like an incredible relief to take Kylie with him, simply to pluck her from this soupy mess of abandonment. But the taking-Kylie aspect of returning to Brooklyn was kind of scaring Tyler shitless. “We get off the plane at nineish tonight.”
“Cool. You’ve got everything you need to put her up for at least the night?”
“Shit.” The blood drained out of Tyler’s face. “No. I’ve got a fridge full of rotten food from a month and a half ago and sheets for a pull-out couch.”
“Okay. No worries. Look, let me and Via take care of it. We have twelve hours to put something together. We’ll put food in your fridge and get some furniture for her.”
“Furniture. Right. She’ll need a room at my place.”
“Your office will be perfect for that.”
“Yeah.”
He’d spent years tweaking his home office into a writer’s haven. The armchair tilted just enough so that he could have his feet in the sun in the morning. The desk was tidy so that any afternoon writing he did would remain clear and concise. The blue on the walls was somehow both serious and whimsical, his best articles framed and lining the far wall. He loved that office.
“Do you know what kind of decorations Kylie would want?”
Tyler laughed humorlessly. “Slayer posters? My Little Pony bedspread? Orange shag carpet and a disco ball?”
“Well, let’s just leave it up to Via, shall we?” Sebastian said, laughing. “It won’t take long to get the room set up. Concentrate on getting back to BK. We’ll take care of her bedroom.”
“Right. God. Thanks, man. I don’t know how I’d do this without you.”
“It’s not a problem, dude. We’ve got you.”
We’ve got you. Via and Seb and Matty. Their little family.
They were a we. Just like Tyler was now. He wouldn’t be returning to Brooklyn as a one and only. He was returning as a guardian. Tyler glanced at the clock over the stove. “Look, I gotta get a move on.”
“Okay, buddy. See you soon.”
“I’M SORRY. WHAT?”
“The California PD. They found her. Lorraine. She was at a...friend’s house just outside of LA.”
When Tyler had been summoned to Myra King’s office after his phone call with Seb, he’d expected her to have some residual paperwork for him to sign. Maybe a few pamphlets on how to cart a kid back to Brooklyn. He genuinely hadn’t thought about Lorraine.
He sure was thinking about her now.
“Where is she?”
“En route, back to Columbus, where she’ll be in police custody until she can make bail.”
“Make bail? She can’t come back to the house tonight!”
“Of course not,” Myra said, eyeing him over her almost comically thick glasses. She had the voice of a much younger woman but the face and hair of a sixty-year-old. “Lorraine’s not legally allowed to see Kylie right now. They’re going to charge her with neglect, child abandonment, a dozen other things to boot.”
Tyler’s mind felt both sluggishly slow and dizzyingly fast. There were seven thousand questions rotating in his head, and he had no idea which to ask first. “Jail time?” he choked out.
“Probably,” Myra said, pushing her glasses up onto her forehead and pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes for a moment. “What she did is criminal. But her lawyer is good. I know him. He’ll push for court-ordered rehab and probation. And there’s a good chance he’ll get it.”
“She won’t get Kylie back.”
Myra’s glasses dropped and her eyebrows lifted. “Are you asking or telling?”
“I don’t fucking know.” Tyler leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and he hung his head.
He’d never wanted problems like these. These were father problems. Tyler wanted brother problems. He could maybe deal with Full House–style hijinks. But this? It was too much.
“Why would Lorraine do this, Myra?” Tyler asked after a long pause. “Drugs? Mental illness? Who just abandons their kid like this?”
Myra, apparently taking pity on him, rose up, left the office and came back a minute later with a glass of ice water. “Sorry it’s not bottled. Not a lot of money running through these halls.”
Tyler gulped half of it in one go, coughed and set the rest of it aside.
“It could be both, either,” Myra said gently, finally answering his question. “Honestly, we might never know. Kylie might never know. It’s possible that Lorraine doesn’t even know.”
He leaned forward again, even more vehement than before. “She won’t get Kylie back.”
“You’re right,” Myra said, sitting back in her seat with a barely muffled groan. “Lorraine is most likely not going to get Kylie back anytime soon. But, if she aces rehab, doesn’t make trouble on her probation or jail time, gets a job, holds down a nice clean house, there’s always the chance she could get her back in a year or two. She’s the girl’s mother, and the system likes to see mothers with their children.”
Tyler wasn’t sure what made his stomach clamp down harder: the thought of him being Kylie’s sole guardian for an entire year or two, or the idea of Kylie eventually going back to Lorraine.
“A year or two.” He tried the words out.
“In the meantime, we proceed as we have been. She won’t be allowed to see Kylie for a few months anyhow, most likely. And once she is, it’ll just mean you cart Kylie back and forth between Ohio and New York. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. You’re going to go ahead with the original plan. Taking her back to New York.”
Tyler felt that disorienting lightness associated with relief. His mind might be completely bamboozled, but his body was telling him that he was relieved that Kylie would be coming home with him still. Immensely relieved.
“Do you want to be the one to tell Kylie?” Myra asked.
“God, no,” he answered on instinct, then grimaced. “Sorry. But maybe it would be better if you did.”
Myra nodded that weathered face of hers. “That’s fine. I’ll be in touch in the next few days when I know more. Send Kylie in on your way out.”
Tyler rose, was halfway to the door when he remembered to turn around and shake Myra’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Tyler, I know this is...confusing news at best.”
“I want what’s best for Kylie.” He meant that. Even if he had no freaking clue what it actually meant.
“I know you do. And so do I. It’s human nature. But when you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you learn that ‘best’ isn’t a destination. It’s something you have to make, over and over again.”
Tyler nodded and made his way back into the hallway where Kylie was fiddling with her phone, her feet up on the bench beside her. She was smiling down at the screen but that smile dropped cartoonishly fast the second she saw Tyler’s face.
“Myra wants to see you.”
Kylie brushed past him. And that was it. He waited in the hallway. They said nothing to one another on the car ride home.
He was just turning to say something to Kylie, anything, when she slammed into the house and up to her room, sealing herself off from him. They had about three hours until they had to leave for the airport. They’d gotten everything packed last night and all there was left to do was throw out anything that would go bad. Lock up and leave.
Tyler decided that he’d do himself a solid and take a quick run. Something to settle his nerves.
While he’d waited for the okay to take her home, the only thing that had been keeping him sane was his five a.m. jogs through Kylie’s suburb. Misty autumn runs with no one around, sleeping houses on either side, garage doors haphazardly open, occasionally an early-morning dog walker, but mostly just dawn-blue solitude.
Now, as he ran on this unusually sunny November afternoon, Tyler had to admit that there were perks to the Midwest. But that didn’t mean he wanted to live there.
He ran hard, unforgivingly, feeling like if he went fast enough, he could propel himself right back into his normal life.
Half an hour after he’d set out for his run, T-shirt sticking to him, aching for an afternoon cup of coffee, Tyler stood again on the front step of this weird, vacuous house.
It was like it sucked the essence of him right out of his chest the second he walked in. He stood on the threshold as Tyler Leshuski and then he entered and became just some primate who barely knew what to do with his two thumbs.
He’d had a similar reaction the first time he’d ever been here just a few years before. It had been a strange time in his life. Only days after their father’s funeral and a week after his unexpected death. But that hadn’t been the strangest part of it. The first time Tyler had stepped foot in this house had been less than seventy-two hours after he’d found out that Kylie even existed.
Apparently his father had had a second family, for over a decade, and had chosen not to even mention it to Tyler. He’d first heard the name Kylie Leshuski out of the lips of his father’s lawyer, in a bright office, during the reading of the will.
Less than three days after that, he’d been here. In Columbus, meeting his little sister who was almost three decades younger than he was. He hadn’t felt like himself then either. He hadn’t been able to think of a single thing to say to an eleven-year-old girl. Much less a joke to make. She’d been just as weirded out as he’d been.
The whole thing had been even worse because of Lorraine’s behavior. Seemingly unaffected by her ex-husband’s death, she’d preened for Tyler. Basically hitting on him the entire time and straight-up ignoring Kylie. He’d only visited one more time before he realized that his presence was simply painful for Kylie. She obviously hated seeing her mother press her boobs against Tyler’s arm, whispering in his ear, and it wasn’t like Kylie and Tyler had had some sort of preternatural sibling connection. They were just a forty-year-old guy and an eleven-year-old with very little to talk about. Genetics be damned. Since then their contact had mostly been limited to a weekly phone call and the occasional text message.
And now this. Shoving Kylie into a tin can in the sky and taking her to a place she’d never been before. All so that he could take a crack at figuring out guardianing her.
He had to believe that things would be better in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, where he knew the way around his kitchen. Where his best friends were only forty blocks away. Where the silence at night didn’t threaten to eat him alive.
Speaking of silence, Tyler stepped inside the house to find it eerily silent, except for the sound of quiet crying coming from the downstairs bathroom.
He proceeded with caution. “Kylie?” he called.
There were a few seconds of strained silence and then the lock on the downstairs bathroom turned and she slammed out, her arms crossed over her chest, raw anger cindered in her reddened eyes.
“Where were you?”
“A run.” He pointed to his sweaty clothes and running shoes.
She glared at him accusatorially but didn’t say anything, just let her anger singe his edges.
He almost, almost asked her what the problem was. But then it hit him. The deal with her shutting herself in a room with no windows and a lock on the door. He thought of the nest of blankets he’d found in the bathroom upstairs when he’d first arrived. She’d been sleeping up there the whole time her mother had been gone. Because she’d been afraid to be alone and wanted a lock on the door between her and the world.
He’d already loaded his bags into the car. She must have come downstairs, seen that he wasn’t there, panicked and thought he’d left. She thought he’d left her just like her mother had.
Pain, sympathy, anger, tenderness, all of it swelled within him so quickly he almost gasped against the feeling. He wouldn’t have thought there was enough room in his chest for this much emotion. His eyes zeroed in on his little sister’s face, screwed into a knot, her hair messy and making her look like she was about ten years old.
She was just a kid.
“Kylie—”
“I’m not going to New York.”
“Kylie,” he repeated, but in a very different tone this time. “Please don’t do this.”
“There’s no reason for me to go,” she said, arms still crossed.
Feeling the same way he had watching her pour the rest of the cereal into her own bowl, he gritted his teeth. It was not the time to let his ego get in the way. “Actually, there’s lots of reasons.”
“Mom is back.” Her face was stubborn but her voice quavered, just enough to have that tenderness swelling in his chest again. It was the first time that either of them were acknowledging that Myra had dropped a total bomb on them. “She left for a while, but now she’s back. This doesn’t have to be such a big deal. It’s nothing I can’t handle.”
Or haven’t handled before, Tyler finished the thought for her.
He knew that she didn’t know him from Elvis, not really. Up to now, the extent of their relationship had been ten-minute phone calls on Thursday nights in which he methodically asked her questions about school, the seasons, and then prattled on a bit about his life before he hung up. But anything had to be better than Lorraine. Couldn’t she see that? “Kylie, hate to break it to you, but you have no idea what you can or can’t handle. You’re a kid. You literally can’t comprehend it yet.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“Oh, and just because you’re an adult, you understand the entire situation? You know exactly what’s best for me, Tyler? Is that right? Just because you’re old you can magically see the future and know exactly what I should or shouldn’t do, even though you don’t even know me at all?”
He winced. Yikes. Way to find his weak spot and press a scalpel to it. “No, Kylie, I’m not saying I looked into a crystal ball and figured out that taking you to Brooklyn is the best bet. But I definitely know what the lawyer and social worker and judge all told me. Which is that it is going to be at least months, maybe a year, maybe even years, plural, before your mother gets custody of you again. And that’s if absolutely everything goes her way. That’s if she doesn’t get jail time for neglect and abandonment.”
The words jail time were a pin to a balloon. Tyler watched as her anger puffed out of her all at once. Her face went white behind her freckles, her arms fell limp at her sides.
He felt like dirt. No, worse than that. He felt like dirt after it had been run through an earthworm. He shouldn’t have said that. Even if it was true.
“Fine,” Kylie said in a low, quavering voice. “Then why can’t we wait for all of that to get sorted out here? From Columbus?”
It was a young, vulnerable question. And because of that, Tyler only gave her part of the answer. He didn’t say that the judge had thought it would be a good idea to give Kylie a clean start in a place where not everyone knew her mother had abandoned her. Where her grades weren’t skimming the bottom of a week-old garbage can. Where there weren’t people pumping the brakes in front of their McMansion just dying to get a glimpse of the kid who’d made the local news for living on her own for a few months.
Determined not to prick any more balloons, Tyler took a deep breath. “Ky, part of being charged with taking care of you is supporting you. And to support you, I have to work. My work is in Brooklyn. There’s no getting around it. Dad’s gone. I’m your next of kin. I live in Brooklyn. We have to go.”
“I have no choice?” It was a question with a web of knives sewed into its lining.
He sighed. “On this particular part of it, yeah, you have no choice. I have no choice either. I’m as much at the whim of this judge as you are.”
That much was true. Tyler had all but bowed and scraped at the feet of this judge for weeks. If the judge said, “Blow me a bubble,” Tyler would say, “What flavor bubble gum?” His pride had not mattered one whit. He’d do anything if it meant keeping Kylie out of foster care, if it meant getting her out of Columbus and to Brooklyn where he could actually figure out how to do this.
He hadn’t thought of his words as cruel, but the minute he said them, her face blanched and she gave him a look that could only be described as utterly wretched. She just...looked so miserable.
“Kylie—”
“Whatever, Tyler.”
She turned on her heel and stomped up the stairs to her room. He winced when he heard the door slam.