You Have a Match(62)

twenty-five




I’m not even sure, in the end, what gets said. Mostly it’s a lot of yelling. Pietra yelling at my mom, Savvy yelling at Pietra, my dad yelling at me, Dale yelling at Rufus to stop barking his head off, which is mostly why we are having to yell to be heard in the first place. Once Finn and Mickey come sprinting around the corner, we go quiet at once, six people clearly unfamiliar with making a scene.

Mickey yanks Finn by the elbow, and he lets himself get led away, and then we’re all panting in the parking lot like we were in an hour-long battle royale instead of a minute of slightly raising our voices.

Pietra’s hand is firmly wrapped around Savvy’s arm. “We’re contacting our lawyer the minute we get off this island.”

Savvy and I both blink at her. “Lawyer?” we ask in unison.

I’m surprised how firm my mom’s voice is, how much resolve is back since yesterday. “That won’t be necessary. The girls won’t be—”

“I’ll decide what’s necessary. Especially when I see you blatantly breaking the terms of our settlement by coming anywhere near my daughter, let alone coercing her somewhere without other witnesses present.”

The words lawyer and settlement rattle loud in my ears. It’s not that I didn’t believe my parents when they said it was bigger than we were. I just didn’t think it was bad enough to say things like that.

“Oh please,” says Savvy, too fired up to notice. “You all know that Abby and I did this.”

I try not to shrink. My parents’ eyes snap to me, and even though I avoid them, I can feel the heat of them coming at me like a flamethrower.

Dale sucks in a breath, and I think, dumbly, that he is saying something to de-escalate the situation. Instead, he says, “We can’t take legal action. Savvy is eighteen. She’d have to put a restraining order on them herself.”

Pietra firms her resolve. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

“In what universe do you think I’d agree to that?”

“Nobody has to take any legal action,” says my mom. “The girls won’t be allowed to see each other anymore. That should settle the matter.”

The words jolt me back into my body in an instant. “You can’t do that.”

My dad’s voice is quiet and grim. “We can for the next year.”

“This is—are you shitting me?” I exclaim. “She practically lives down the block. You can’t just lock me up in a tower, like some kind of prisoner—”

“Maybe it’s time we have more rules for you anyway,” says my mom, in that “quit while you’re ahead” voice I usually only ever hear her use when my brothers are at one another’s throats.

The rage is white-hot and entirely inconvenient, given I am supposed to be focusing on the very urgent, Abby-made disaster at hand, but I can’t help myself. “More rules?” I demand. “You have me scheduled within an inch of my life and you want more rules?”

My dad’s lips are a thin line. “Pack your bags, Abby. We’re leaving in the morning, and you’re coming with us.”

I am not a person who lets herself cry in public, but the idea of them taking this place away is gutting. This place where I can learn and still have enough room to breathe, so I actually enjoy it. This place where I have friends on all sides—old ones, new ones, ones who I happen to be related to and didn’t know about for sixteen years. This place where I can stumble into a new corner of the universe every day and take photos of things I’ve never seen, drink up the world and feel like a part of it, instead of like it’s passing me by.

I’ve been waiting for this feeling ever since Poppy died. Now it’s gone, too.

Savvy sees that she’s going to have to rein me in, and jumps in before I can spiral further. “Or the four of you can get over yourselves, and whatever happened, so we can all see each other. Like normal people.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why? What’s so unforgivable that—”

“Savannah,” my mom starts, “it’s not—”

“No. Tell her,” says Pietra.

My mom takes a step back as if Pietra has slapped her. “Pet,” she says. A nickname. A white flag. It hovers between them for a second, but Pietra lets it go with the breeze.

“Tell her what you did,” says Pietra. Her face is splotched with tears, but her voice is eerily firm. “Tell her how you gave her to us, and then you changed your mind. Handed her to us, then scooped her up from the nursery and left the goddamn hospital with her.”

My mom isn’t crying this time. “I … Pietra, you know I—”

“Tell her how you said it was a mistake. Just ‘postpartum brain.’ Tell her how you told me everything was fine, and let us take her home, and how a week later we were served papers from some lawyer, trying to take our baby back, because after everything we’d been through, you’d changed your fucking mind.”

“If we could go back,” says my dad. “If we’d known—”

Pietra shakes her head, unwilling to hear it. “I knew I couldn’t have kids. I waited my whole life for her. And she was mine—the moment you asked me to take her. Before she was born. She was mine.” Pietra is sobbing now. Dale is tearing up too, his hands on her shoulders, like they are used to absorbing this specific pain from each other. “The terror of losing her. That you would win, and get her back. You can’t imagine what it was like.”