Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(4)

The next day, when Antsy got home, Tyler wasn’t there, but her mother was there, waiting for her. She took Antsy by the hand and led her to the couch, and then she talked to her the way adults talked to children when they wanted them to agree to something that wasn’t ever a question, not really. She said words like “lonely” and “difficult” and “without your father,” and Antsy listened in frozen silence that felt too big to break, and when her mother finished on a question, she didn’t hear it at first. It was too much: it was too big. She couldn’t force it down.

Her mother frowned and squeezed her hand. “Sweetheart, did you hear me? Were you listening?”

The woman at Target had called her “sweetheart,” too, called her “sweetheart” while standing to block the shape of Antsy’s father’s body, and that word felt like poison in her ears. She flinched away, suddenly scowling.

“I was listening,” she said. “I’m sorry. Can I go to my room?”

“I need you to answer me, please, and then you can go and play.”

Antsy didn’t want to go and play, and she didn’t know what her mother had asked. The ringing in her ears was back, taking all the sound in the world away. So she just looked at her mother, trying to understand the movement of her lips as she looked Antsy gravely in the eye and repeated her question:

“Tyler has asked me to marry him, and I told him I can’t unless you say it’s all right. So is it all right, Antoinette? May I marry the man who loves me?”

This time the words got through, despite the veil of static. Antsy swallowed hard, forcing fear and revulsion away, and looked her mother dead in the eye as she said, “I don’t like him.”

“He’s not trying to replace your father, baby girl. No one’s ever going to do that. But it’s hard to be a parent all by myself, and I’m lonely. He’ll be your friend, if you’ll let him.”

Antsy still didn’t know why she didn’t like the man who seemed to make her mother so happy—happy enough that she’d do this, happy enough that she’d change the shape of their family this way. So she bit her lip, and held her silence long enough that her mother started to look anxious and unhappy, and finally said, “If you want to marry him, I guess it’s okay.”

Her mother laughed and smiled and put her arms around her, gathering her into a hug. “Thank you, baby. Thank you so much. You’re not going be sorry about this, you’re not.”

But Antsy, who was already sorry about her answer, said nothing.





2

EVERYTHING CHANGES




LATER, WHEN ANTSY WAS far enough removed from the moment to look at the timeline, she would realize Tyler had asked her mother to marry him six months after her father’s funeral, almost to the day, and the wedding was set for three months after that. It was a brief courtship by any reasonable standard, brief enough to raise more than a few eyebrows. Not that it stopped them: by the time she was due to start first grade, Antsy had a new last name, a new stepfather, and a new permanent resident in her home.

She had been the flower girl at their wedding, dressed in a white-and-pink confection of a dress with a skirt that swirled around her calves and capped sleeves that ringed her upper arms in lace and a basket full of pink and white rose petals, and everyone who’d come to see her mother married had made happy noises of contentment when they saw her, like her participation in the ceremony was somehow the proof that it hadn’t been too quick, that her father would have wanted the love of his life to move on and be happy in his absence, like everything was okay.

After the wedding, she had gone to stay with her grandparents for a week while her mother and her new husband spent some adult time at a nice local hotel. Antsy had spent the entire time running wild in the backyard or the park or the living room or the grocery store, whatever fields she was offered for her feral thrashings, and she had never allowed herself to give voice to the fact that she didn’t like her new stepfather, had never told anyone but her mother, who had been entirely unwilling to hear her.

That was the fourth thing she lost: the belief that if something made her unhappy or uncomfortable, she could tell an adult who loved her and they would make everything better. Her mother hadn’t listened, and now they were married. Married was forever, unless you got divorced, and from the way most of the kids she knew talked about divorced, that was one of the worst things in the whole world. She didn’t want to wish something bad on her mother, not after everything she’d been through already, and so even though she didn’t like the man who was now her stepfather, she wasn’t going to hope her mother divorced him.

At least, she wasn’t going to do it where anyone could hear her.

So she ran and ran and ran, like she could run fast enough to run all the way back to the afternoon in Target where her father fell down and didn’t get back up again, and when the week ended without time reversing itself, she went home, to the bedroom that had always been her sanctuary, to a new toothbrush on the bathroom sink and a new body at the dinner table.

Tyler had been around a lot in the months leading up to the wedding, but after, it seemed like he was never gone, like every time she turned around he was there. He ate dinner with them. When they went to the park, he drove the car, and when they went to the movies, he sat on her mother’s other side, holding her hand, stealing her popcorn. He was there, whether or not she wanted him to be. In her home, all the time, whenever she turned around.