When the Lights Go Out(69)

I’d be remiss to say that a series of thoughts didn’t move swiftly through my mind.

How would I hide her?

Where would we go?

What would I call her? Because surely if she was a missing child, she couldn’t parade around town as Olivia still. She’d have to be something else.

I leaned forward from the bench to lift the leaf from the concrete and asked if she ever collected leaves and pressed them between the pages of a heavy book. The sound of my voice, the sight of her leaf in my hand, gave her pause. Her eyes rose from the earth and landed on my smile, and for a moment there was a cessation of tears as I extended the leaf toward her and she took it from me with a shaky hand.

I rationalized in my mind that it would be Aaron’s fault if I took the child—not mine, no, not ever mine—because that was the name of the game these days: blame.

If only he had shown up at the fertility clinic...

If only he hadn’t walked out of my life...

He and I still would have a chance at our own child.

I wouldn’t have had to take one that wasn’t mine.

“Why are you crying?” I asked, though of course I knew the reason why. I remained seated, not wanting to scare her by standing tall and towering over her small frame. Outside, the temperatures were dropping again, fall drawing near. Soon the tourists would leave. On her arms there were goose bumps as loose strands of dishwater hair clung to the puddles of tears.

“Where’s Mommy?” she asked, eyes searching the street. But only I heard it in the distance: the sound of girls’ laughter over the sound of the wind. Olivia didn’t hear.

Through the trees I could barely make out the red sleeve of a cardigan, the pink of a tutu, a length of brown hair.

“You lost your mommy?” I asked and, extending my own hand to hers, said, “Would you like for me to help you find her? Would you like for me to help you find your mother?

“It’s okay,” I said when she hesitated. “I won’t hurt you.”

It would be a lie to say she took my hand with ease, that she didn’t stare at it for a minute, overthinking, some disquisition about not talking to strangers coursing through her mind.

But then she did take my hand, slipping it inside. It was a great shock to my system to feel this small, soft hand within mine, and it was all I could do not to squeeze tight with instinct, knowing that might make her scream. I didn’t want Olivia to scream. I didn’t want to scare her, but more so, I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. For all intents and purposes, this was how it should be. I was hers and she was mine.

And then I began to lead her in the opposite direction of where her mother had disappeared. The direction of my car.

Olivia stopped, peering the other way over her shoulder—even a young girl could remember which way her mother had last been walking—but I said to her not to worry, that if we took the car we might find her mother more quickly than if we walked.

I pointed to my car in the distance. “It’s right there,” I said.

She thought about this a moment, standing frozen on the pavement, hemming and hawing, eyes moving back and forth from me to the car. A band of clouds had rolled in, blocking the earth from the sun, and as it did, the wind picked up its speed, chasing the warm day away. Outside, the temperature dropped by as many as five degrees and the day turned gray.

Fall was coming; fall was here.

“Well, that’s okay,” I said then, letting go of her hand. “If you don’t want to find your mother, we don’t need to,” and it was reverse psychology, of course, making her believe that if she didn’t get in the car with me, I might just leave her behind.

I didn’t want to scare her, and yet there was no other way.

I was only doing what I needed to do.

I reasoned that we would only drive to the next town and then stop for ice cream. That I’d have her just long enough to teach her mother a lesson. Then I’d return her. Certainly I wasn’t planning to steal the child, because that’s not the type of person that I am. A kidnapper and a thief. I only wanted to borrow her for a while, like a library book on loan. To satisfy my craving for the time.

I had taken no more than two steps away when I heard Olivia’s tiny feet scurrying quickly on the concrete, running after me. It worked.

Her hand reached up, and she grabbed a hold of mine, squeezing tightly, careful not to let go. I smiled at her and she smiled back, the tears evaporating quickly from her cheeks.

“Your mother must be here somewhere,” I said then, and we walked that way, hand in hand, for a good ten feet or more. We moved slowly—at Olivia’s pace, though I wanted to tug on her hand and run—and still, it took twenty seconds or less to traverse those ten feet. But in those twenty seconds I convinced myself that in some minute, negligible way, we looked alike, Olivia and me, though in reality we didn’t. We looked nothing alike.

I wondered if, once she and I were sitting across from one another at a local diner, eating strawberry sundaes with whipped cream on top, I’d ever be able to return her to her mother.

And then a new thought crossed my mind. I could drive farther south, south of Sturgeon Bay, south of Sheboygan, south of Milwaukee. We could live somewhere else, far away from here, where people might believe that we were mother and child.

They would have no reason not to believe.

I’d rename her. I’d call her something other than Olivia.