Landslide (60 page)

“Relax. I’m just gonna show you something in Amelia’s shop.”

“Oh. What is it?” she asks, walking to catch up with me again.

“Well, a picture tells a thousand words, right?”

We get to my dad’s girlfriend’s quaint little shop filled with antiques, homemade crafts, books, stationary, art, souvenirs…all kinds of stuff that tourists like to pick up on their travels.
 

The bell on the door tinkles and I usher Erica inside, heading straight to the checkout counter where Mabel is tending the register by sitting in her rocking chair behind the counter. She’s, like, one hundred and forever-years-old, but spry and still sharp as a tack; she’s also on an exceedingly tight fixed income. So, when Mabel’s property taxes went up and she was looking at having to sell the house she lived in from the day she and her husband were married something like seventy-five years ago, and wanting to help her out but knowing Mabel wouldn’t accept charity, Amelia “hired” her as an excuse to pay her for continuing to sit around the shop telling people all her life’s stories.

“Morning, Mabel,” I greet her loudly and with a smile, and then indicating Erica, I introduce them, only, not how I wish I could. “This is Erica. My, uh…friend from way back.”

“Well, aren’t you a pretty little thing,” Mabel comments, looking Erica over. I glance at Erica’s face as she beams a smile at the ancient woman, feeling my lungs expand with a sense of proprietary pride. “Looks like you mighta been through a thing or two, though. Can see it in your eyes, love. Mmhm…you know hard times, I reckon. Better than you should, too.”

I nod and then clear my throat when I feel nervous tension coming from beside me as Mabel leans forward, squinting her eyes and peering more closely at Erica. “Mabel, I was wondering if I could trouble you for a cup of coffee.”

“Why, of course,” she replies happily and slowly rises from her rocker.

Once she’s in the back room, I walk around the counter and pluck a large picture frame off the wall and explain. “She’s an incredible woman…extremely insightful. Also, very nosey and chatty. She’ll talk your ear off if you give her an opening, but I think I bought us maybe five minutes or so for ourselves.”

I set the picture frame down on the counter in front of Erica and point at it.

“What’s this?” she asks and looks up at me instead of at the picture, which is sort of self-explanatory.

“The moment I came face-to-face with Lola the first time.”

Amelia had insisted on going with my dad and Lola to the airport to pick me up when I came home, and she’d brought her camera, positive the moment was of such monumental importance that we’d thank her for capturing it for us. She was right.
 

“I had no idea what I was getting into. When I found out about her, she was like an abstract idea…I felt duty-bound and some kind of far-off connection maybe, but she wasn’t
real
. Plus, I wasn’t sure how to make all the logistics work, you know? And timing was an issue too, because I was stationed in another country and was only days away from being deployed again. I reached out to my dad and explained what the situation was and asked him for help. My commanding officer and I were trying to get me home to get her at least situated, but we couldn’t get through all the military red-tape in time and I ended up having to deploy, so my dad took care of everything…and he’s the one who ended up picking her up from the foster home she’d been temporarily placed in.

“I never even got to see a picture of her… Maybe a month or so after I’d deployed is when it happened. It was a quiet day, nothing was really going on…I was resting against the side of a building with my eyes closed while a few of the guys from my outfit were laughing and watching a handful of local kids goofing around. One of the kids threw what was first thought to be a rock. It wasn’t. So, I was eventually sent home and finally got to meet Lola. And I remember getting off the plane thinking I was more terrified than I had been when I heard grenade being shouted about maybe fifty or sixty feet away from me.”

Erica’s staring at the picture…it’s a collage of sorts documenting every step of the way when my dad handed Lola over to me for the first time. You can see on my face how uncertain I was, but on hers…there was nothing but trust. She wasn’t smiling, but her eyes were round and searching mine when she reached out with one arm, and when I raised my hand to touch hers, she latched onto two of my fingers—there’s a close-up of that; it’s just her holding my fingers in her tiny grip. Then without any hesitation whatsoever, she leaned way out of my dad’s arms, wanting me. And when I took her in one arm, she immediately wrapped her hand around my dog-tags and laid her cheek down on my shoulder. That was it. It was that easy. Feeling her breath on my neck as she snuggled close, and realizing how warm and alive she was…how innocent and
perfect
… Just like that, I was a father.

“This is beautiful, Cole…” Erica whispers, her watery eyes making another trip over every picture. “Is her arm in a sling like yours is?”

“Mmhm,” I mumble, wondering yet again if that was why she trusted me as implicitly as she did right off the bat. My dad had said it took him over a week to get her to come to him even a little so, both he and Amelia were surprised it was as instant as it was with me. But, I was wounded, emotionally and physically, just like she was. I think she knew; I think she recognized something in me that told her I needed her just as much as she needed me. “She had a dislocated shoulder.”

“Oh my God…how did that happen?”

I open my mouth to explain when Mabel comes back with a steaming Styrofoam cup and at the same time she hands it to me, looking to be about wanting to chit-chat, a group of six tourists walk in and come straight to the counter, clearly wanting to inquire about something. I thank Mabel for the coffee and excuse Erica and myself so that she can do her job, and then I lead Erica back outside.

“So, you were about to tell m—”

“Yeah, I know but, how much do you wanna know? ‘Cause some of it is gonna be hard to hear, sugar.”

Erica nods her head, but taking a deep breath, I can see determination in her features fighting its way to the surface. “I know. But I want to know all of it. I think…I think I
need
to hear it all.”

Inspecting her face, I nod, hand her the coffee, and we start walking again. I tell her everything and don’t leave a single detail out. I tell her that Lola’s mom had lied to Holden about how old she was so he didn’t know she was only fifteen. He also didn’t know she was a virgin until afterwards when he pulled out and his dick was streaked with blood. That was another tidbit I got to read in his words and it made me hate him that much more. It was as if the only thing he was concerned about when he found out Cassie was a virgin was wondering if his and Erica’s first time would be as lame. I did leave that part out in my story, though. Erica never needs to know that. Ever.

I moved on and told Erica that Cassie had hated her parents because all they cared about was her younger brother who has a veritable cornucopia of health problems, and she felt invisible in his delicate shadow. She’d run away and was staying with her sister who was a hardcore party girl and wasn’t the best of influences from what I gather when Holden met her at the river. The second I put two and two together after initially hearing from DCS, I went back and read every message Cassie wrote to me on Facebook. In doing so I learned it was obvious she was crying out for help but, she never got it. If there
was
one thing I could change about the past, it would be that. I would choose to go back in time and not ignore the messages Cassie had sent me in the beginning while she was still pregnant and the ones shortly after Lola was born. I could’ve done something if I hadn’t.

In her messages, which I sort of think she ended up using as a diary like Holden had done, I found out that she’d gone back home to have her baby, but even then, she was on her own. Her parents hardly spoke to her, let alone gave her any real help outside of giving her a place to live and feeding her. Her friends were excited, as I imagine teenage girls would be before reality sinks in, and they even had a shower for her, but unsurprisingly, they abandoned her after Lola was born and Cassie had to drop out of school. And, Cassie’s sister didn’t want her living with her again with a baby, and without a job or money for her own place, she was stuck.

Then, as calmly as I could, I told Erica the
really
ugly truth…

Lola cried almost constantly and not only was Cassie exhausted, but it also sounded like she had a wicked case of postpartum that wouldn’t let up; the two issues inevitably collided to cause a catastrophic shock wave. Cassie was seen at the park one day screaming at her then two-year-old to get off the teeter-totter because it was time to go and they were going to miss the bus. Lola didn’t move fast enough. Because she was two. In a fit of rage, Cassie yanked her off it by the arm. Lola fell the rest of the way, and not even realizing she’d dislocated her baby’s shoulder, Cassie began to spank Lola for screaming they way she did. DCS was called and Lola was immediately taken away from her mother. In Cassie’s final message to me, she wrote that she didn’t mean to hurt her and didn’t want to lose her either, but she was
so
tired and “the kid” wouldn’t stop crying. She told
me
—a stranger she’d spent almost three years spilling her heart out to without ever receiving a response. And she told me that she was done trying. She swallowed almost a full month’s worth of her little brother’s heart medication, and finally found rest—peaceful I can’t imagine it’s been though.

I finish the story and stop walking to look at Erica, to see how she’s handled this history lesson. She’s crying and completely stricken by what Cassie endured, which ultimately left her feeling as if she had no other option at the end, and unable to remain silent any longer, she gasps, “That poor,
poor
girl…she was just a baby herself!”
 

I nod and swallow the painful lump in my throat. “So, that’s partly why I didn’t even blink at owning up to being Lola’s biological father. Her grandparents won’t have anything to do with her, and my dad and I stopped looking for Holden’s parents last year. I remembered you told me that they wanted to travel the world, but I swear to Christ, Erica, they fell off the face of the Earth in doing it.”

Honestly, we looked everywhere; my dad even went through two private detectives and thousands of his own money looking for Mr. And Mrs. St. James. The only lead we ever got led to a graveyard in Poland. And the woman’s first name on the headstone wasn’t Holden’s mother’s.

“Maybe it’s better that you didn’t find them…maybe she was meant to be yours, Cole.” I focus on Erica’s somber smile and can’t find it in me to return it. She notices, and probably guessing at the reasons why I can’t, she changes the subject. “So…she’s almost seven?”

I nod. “Yeah, her birthday is January fourth.”

“Well, wait. She would be in, what? First grade then? Why hasn’t she been in school all month?”

“Ah. Well, it all goes back to why she cried all the time. You’re a nurse…ever hear of kidney reflux?”

“Oh my God, yes. She had to have been sick, though. No one ever noticed?”

“Nope. Not until I had her for about two weeks and she spiked a fever of one hundred-four. My dad drove us to the hospital, they did a spinal tap in the ER, she was admitted with a severe kidney infection, they did more tests and ultrasounds, and two days later, there I was, talking to a urologist and learning about kidney reflux. Even though she’s been on antibiotics every day since then, she still had breakthrough infections all the time, and in the middle of September when her quarterly ultrasound showed more scarring on her right kidney, her urologist felt we shouldn’t wait any longer to see if she’d grow out of it.

“So, I pulled her out of school just for the semester and put her on home study so she could have surgery and not fall behind. Then my dad and I had this great idea to surprise her with the house for Christmas but we needed to get her out of town for a while because we were living literally right down the street and she would see everything being moved and stuff. Amelia mentioned her family in Florida, so enter Disney World and all the other crap a six-year-old would flip her lid about getting to do.”
 

We round the corner back into the park area where I’d left Lola with my dad, waiting for Santa Claus. He’d evidently finally shown up and I look over the long line of anxious kids, trying to catch sight of blonde curls in wild disarray.
 

“How do you not hate either of them for putting her and you both through all of that?” Erica asks me, the sound of her voice unquestionably defensive.

I drop my eyes to hers for a moment and smile. “I did, Erica. Him especially. Then one day I realized he doesn’t deserve my hatred. I pity him,” I tell her and then with my chin, I indicate the little girl climbing up onto Santa’s lap, my eyes glued to Lola while I keep talking, “Because he doesn’t get to be a part of this. He doesn’t get to watch her tell Santa Claus what she wants with all her heart, full of faith that he’ll find a way to deliver it. He doesn’t get to be woken up by her on Christmas morning and see her face light with innocent wonder when she first sees her stocking overflowing. He doesn’t get to be her dad.
I
do.”

When the palm of Santa’s hand makes contact with his face as he shakes his head before setting Lola down, my eyes fall to stare at my feet and I heave a sigh. She did it again. Asked Santa for something he can’t even hope to give her. I look up again and scan the crowd for my dad, easily finding him with a sour look on his face as he takes one of Lola’s hands and leads her towards us. He looks up and for a split second, he stills, recognizing Erica standing next to me. I glance at her out of the corner of my eyes and realize she’s turned white.

“You gonna be able to handle this? You look like you’re about to hurl.”

She runs a shaky hand over her forehead and nods. “Yeah, no, I’m alright. I just…um, I got a little dizzy. It happened in the drug store too. And I feel sorta feverish,” she tells me and loosens her scarf.