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I’d written it in green because green was her favorite color. Our new address, so she could find us, and a note. Please come get me.
“We moved to Morris Park, but I ran away. I kept running away and going back there. If anyone stopped me I told them I was going to meet my mom.”
“How old were you now?”
“Like eight?”
The cold of the concrete seeping through the seat of my pants, chilling me as I huddled there for hours. I’d close my eyes, trying to conjure my mother’s perfume, the smell of her shampoo, the heavy silk of her soft curls. But it was just hard concrete. Just concrete and darkness and the stink of the city around me.
“First time, the people who lived there told me to leave. But I just kept coming back. Then they didn’t tell me to leave anymore so I’d sit all day. I’d make up stories. Like. My mom got married and she was coming to get me so we’d be a family. My mom won the lottery in Italy so she’d send a helicopter to pick me up and we’d live in a castle. Or whatever they have in Italy. Do they have castles in Italy?”
Rhys looked upset, and I realized I was squeezing his hand so tightly it had to hurt, so I let go. I was sweating again.
“They do,” he said.
“You were in Italy, right?”
“Yeah. Rome, Venice, and Florence. On the European tour for Big Mad Wolf about eight years ago.”
I nodded. “You might’ve walked right past her. In Rome. She could have been at one of your shows.”
“Baby,” Rhys said, like his heart was breaking.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. That was what I couldn’t stand to see. To feel. But I took a deep breath and made myself go on. I had promised.
“One day there was a snowstorm. The people who lived there told me to go home, then they told me to at least come inside. I . . . I don’t know why I wouldn’t. It had just become this . . . thing that I did? They tried to get a cab for me, but I wouldn’t get in. The cabdriver radioed the cops, I guess. They showed up and took me home. Only, my aunt. She told them I couldn’t stay with her anymore. That she wasn’t actually my mom’s sister, which I kind of already knew. And that I’d become too much to handle. Too out of control. So I had to leave. They . . . took me. And that’s . . .” I shrugged. “How I ended up in the system. It’s actually pretty undramatic, compared to a lot of people’s stories.”
I was shaky and sweating, but somehow I felt lighter. I sipped at my cold coffee so I had something to do with my hands, but it tasted awful.
I could see Rhys’s thousand questions, see his horror on my behalf. The horror of a man who’d grown up with a warm house and plenty of food and parents who loved him. I could see how badly he wanted to hold me and comfort me and make it better.
I stood up and dumped out my coffee, washing my cup vigorously as sweat trickled down my spine. My skin was crawling and my brain felt edgy. I wanted to run or scream or fuck or do something. I wanted to go to sleep.
Rhys had followed me into the kitchen, holding the pie. I’d never seen him look so unsure of himself. I hated it.
“Can we take a break?” I asked.
“Yeah. Of course. What do you need?”
“Can we just do something normal people do?”
“Like throw a Frisbee or read the newspaper?”
“Uh. Well, not those things.”
“We could . . . we should go apple picking?”
“I’ve never been apple picking.”
“You’re really lucky,” he said, cocky grin firmly back in place.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you live in a fairy-tale town with like fifteen pick-your-own-apples places nearby, and you’re married to a guy who can reach the apples really high up. Higher than most people can reach. And everyone knows the ones that are harder to reach taste better.”
He winked at me and the return of his easy teasing was such a relief I could actually feel my muscles relax. He was trying so, so hard.
You’re too much to handle.
“Well, if you can get them easily because you’re tall, then they’re not hard to reach for you, are they?”
Rhys put a hand to his heart like I’d wounded him.
“Clearly, we need to conduct a taste test. You want to go?”
When Rhys and I first started dating, he took me places all the time. Random places, silly places. Oddly specialized museums and old amusement parks, drives in the country and tours of the city, disco night at a roller-skating rink and volunteering to paint kids’ faces.
