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“It was Mitch, always Mitch and his sick little brother, Vince,” she says in a hard voice. “They took the girls and they sold them. Some they kept. What was I to do? If I told, they’d kill me too. I was all alone. No parents, no brothers, and what was left of my family on another reservation far away from here. I couldn’t say anything. But I will now. I’ll tell them everything I know now.”
The crowd seems to be settling down, but then another gut wrenching yells rents the calm.
“Aysha?” my aunt says, craning her head to look behind me. “They found her?”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. Maybe she’s lost it completely.
But the tone of the yells coming from the crowd has a different timbre now. Less vicious, happier somehow. I hope the worst is over, because she’s still clutching my arm and is showing no signs of letting me go anytime soon.
“I did what I could, got as many girls away from Mitch as I could, but it was never enough,” she is saying. “But they found one of them now. Aysha. She’s been missing for almost a year. Maybe they found the others too.”
The way I understand it, the disappearances happened over the span of decades, so that’s doubtful. But tears are streaming down her face and I don’t think she needs me to say that.
Lily comes up behind me and I know it’s her long before she wraps her arm around my waist and rests her head on my shoulder. The feeling that washes over me as she does is a lot like the feel of the life-giving river that saved me.
Ariana releases my arm to grab onto hers. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for how I treated you. I was just trying to protect you from Mitch. He was always pretending to be this do-gooder, this good Samaritan, taking care of the poor and homeless. But young pretty women from his rounds went missing too. Girls no one missed. I... didn’t know…”
“Talk to Frank now, tell him everything,” Lily says and Ariana nods, her tear-filled eyes very wide.
“Yes, yes, I’ll go do that right now,” she says, releases Lily, lets the quilt she was wrapped in fall to the ground and strides away. It’s a star quilt, a lot like the one in our trailer, which I really wish we could be lying under right now.
I turn to Lily, wrap her in my arms and give her a long, slow kiss, like I’ve been dying to do since waking up. Even despite everything else happening since, that has remained at the forefront of my mind throughout. And now it’s here.
The crowd is still making a lot of noise, but it’s muffled, blocked out by the singing and whistling in my ears that kissing Lily always somehow causes. I hear drums in the distance too, far away, yet loud, thumping in rhythm to our kiss and the love it causes to flow through my veins.
I could stand here and kiss her forever. And I think I just might.
“You two need rest,” Cross says beside us. It’s hard to stop kissing Lily, but I manage it.
“Doc says you came close to dying out there,” he tells me. “So take care of yourself now.”
That’s what I’m doing, kissing Lily. It’s all the healing I need. But it doesn’t seem like something I can say to her father, and I manage not to.
He turns to her. “You should’ve told me about the police chief and what he did to you.”
She gasps, but he chuckles. “It’s handled, he won’t be bothering you again. Or any of us. We should’ve taken care of that before he could, but it is what it is. Bottom line, you can come back home anytime you want.”
She looks at him with very soft eyes, and his are pretty much identical. “I think I’d like to stay here,” she says. “Regardless of everything…”
He nods and squeezes her shoulder. “Figured you’d say that. But come back and see us from time to time.”
“I promise,” she says.
“As for you,” Cross says, turning to me. “I think your father has been rotting away in that jail for long enough. We’ll get him out, and we could use your help.”
Lily in my arms, mine forever, and my father free. That’s all I ever wanted. The only two things I ever really wished for. And now they’re mine and I can’t find my voice.
“Yes,” I somehow manage to croak out. “Thank you.”
Cross taps me on the shoulder and grins. “Hey, you kept my daughter alive. It’s the least I can do. It will be risky though.”
“Whatever it takes,” Lily says in a breathless, awed voice. “Thank you, Dad.”
He nods, tells us we’ll talk later and walks away.
I wrap my arms around Lily and shout my happiness to the sky, her laughter tickling my chest as I hold her close.
This. This is everything. Her in my arms, my father free, and our whole life stretching out before us, bright and long. It cannot be otherwise. That would be impossible.
