YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT.Cooper never showed up.
But guess who did?
My dad.
Of all people!
I was weeping with abandon, crumpled on the bottom steps—going whole hog with full-body sobs after losing all hope—when there was a knock at the door. And then I heard my dad’s voice, muffled through the metal. “JoJo? Are you in there?”
I stood up. “Dad?”
“It’s me, honey. Open up.”
“How did you find me?”
“I tracked your phone’s GPS.”
“But my phone died,” I said.
“Last known location,” my dad said.
“You can do that?”
“It’s easier than it should be,” my dad said.
“Dad,” I said, starting to cry again. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Let’s go, sweetheart,” my dad said. “We need to get back to the boat.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m stuck.”
“Define ‘stuck,’” my dad said.
“Somebody locked me in,” I said. “I might have to die in here.”
It tells you a lot about my state of mind that it did not occur to me that my dad could let me out until he did. I heard aclankand then achunkand then my dad swung the iron door wide open.
“Dad!” I shouted, so overjoyed at the sight of him standing there holding Ashley’s dress that I hurled myself over the threshold and into his arms—with so much force that my dad tumped right over, and we both hit the ground.
It was the first hug I could remember giving him since I was a kid.
And it was nothing short of a doozy.
WE MADE ITback to the boat, but just barely.
We cut it so close, my dad asked the cab driver taking us back to the dock to “step on it” three different times. We cut it so close, my mother called to say they were paging us over the ship’s loudspeaker to report to the purser’s desk and account for our whereabouts. We cut it so close, we ran—actuallyran—up the gangway, the dry-cleaner plastic of Ashley’s dress fluttering over my dad’s shoulder like a kite.
Technically, we were late. There’s an all-aboard time for a ship about to disembark, and then, forty-five minutes later, there’s an actual pulling-away-from-the-dock time.
We made it with two minutes to spare on the second one.
They were paging us again as we arrived.
Guess who else they were paging?
Cooper.
“Passenger Cooper Watts, please report to the purser’s desk to confirm your return.”
