Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(128)
Now, sitting quietly in her booster seat, she stared back at Lilli’s reflection in the rearview. “You okay, cara?”
Gia simply stared.
oOo
Lilli kept her phone with her, just in case, but she ignored every call that was Shannon, or Cory, or Shannon again, or Badger, or even Tasha. The only call she took was Show, letting her know that they’d been taken in. It had been a short call; neither of them needed, wanted, or were able to say more.
She’d told everybody else to leave her alone. And yet, her phone rang so often throughout the day, she contemplated turning it off. But no. She would never turn it off, not until he was home again. Fully aware that he would not be able to call home so soon, still she would not turn it off. If something happened to him, they would need to reach her.
And something very well could happen to him. It was known that Isaac and the Horde had killed Santaveria and led the attack that had broken a drug cartel. If someone wasn’t coming for him right now, maybe lying in wait for him on this very first day, then it was only a matter of time. Whether he could protect himself, whether Len could protect him—there were too many variables in play even to begin to predict.
If she let her head have these thoughts to play with, she’d go f*cking mad before he was gone a month.
So she muscled them to the side as much as she could, trying to ignore the persistent way they overran the edges, and focused on her kids. Their kids. She made the most normal day she could with them.
It wasn’t unusual for Isaac to be gone for a day or a few. They had routines for those days that didn’t include him. Refusing to allow herself to confront the reality that those days would be all their days now, she played with her children. She fed them lunch. She read to them. In the late afternoon, she took down the Christmas decorations and packed them back in the storage shed, letting the kids ‘help.’ They took Kodi on a short walk in the cold, and Bo collected his customary pail of rocks and twigs.
Gia was quiet and compliant all day, and it made Lilli worried. She was by nature a talkative, opinionated kid, and she spent most of her days instructing her little brother on the right way to do just about everything. Devoted to his sister and much quieter than she, Bo was happy to be instructed. Today, with Gia so quiet, and Lilli, too, Bo was a little lost. At three, he knew his father wasn’t home right then, but he had no concept of how long he’d be gone. Lilli figured that he only knew things weren’t as they should be.
After dinner, Gia ‘helped’ her wash dishes and tidy the kitchen while Bo lay on Kodi on the living room floor and watched a Bob the Builder DVD. Then Lilli gave each child a bath and set them up for their normal ritual of stories and bed. Also sensing that all was not right with his family, Kodi followed them all around more diligently than usual, parking himself in the threshold to Gia’s room, facing outward, when it was time for bedtime stories.
Pip, being a cat, and an independent one at that, was unaffected by Isaac’s absence. He was still sulking about the addition of a dog. and spent most of his day curled in his basket on top of the gun cabinet in the master bedroom, where he was sure to be undisturbed.
They always did stories in Gia’s room. Isaac had made her a beautiful canopy bed, and Lilli had dressed it in yellow bedding—yellow was a color that Gia had naturally been drawn to. On this night, as every night that she did story time—and that would now be all the nights—Lilli sat propped up in the middle of the bed. Bo, wearing red fleece footie pajamas, climbed up and tucked himself in the crook of an arm, planting his thumb in his mouth.
Gia, though, was still seated at her little desk, one bare leg swinging under her flannel nightie, the foot of the other caught by the toes over the balcony of the gargantuan Victorian dollhouse Isaac had built for her and filled with handmade furniture. He’d begun to build that as soon as he’d learned they were having a little girl.
“You coming, G? I thought you wanted Stellaluna tonight.”
“Just a minute, Mamma.” She was writing something down in her little, padded pink planner—part of a desk set that had been Show and Shannon’s Christmas gift to her. Only last week. She closed her marker and then the book, but brought them both with her as she climbed up and curled in the crook of Lilli’s other arm.
“What do you have there?”
Gia opened the planner, the red marker tight in one fist. She pointed to the date—this date. In her young, careful scrawl, she’d written Daddy left. Then she’d marked an ‘X’ over the date. “That’s today, right?”
All of the muscles in her body had suddenly petrified, and Lilli couldn’t answer right away. When Gia looked up at her, her sweet brow furrowed, though, she found some balance. “Yeah, cara. That’s today.
Good job.”
Gia held the planner up. “I want to mark when he’ll come home, but I don’t know where it is in here.”
It was a yearly planner.
Dragging up more strength, Lilli kept her voice calm and easy. “That day isn’t in here, Gia. The book is only for kindergarten and part of first grade. Do you remember when Daddy said he’d be home?”
Gia nodded, her brow still creased. “Sixth grade.”
“Right.” Middle school. Jesus.
“I want a book that has sixth grade in it, too.”
Lilli didn’t think they made planners that went out as far as that. And she didn’t want to contemplate the vast, bloody sea of red ‘Xs’ between this date and that one, even if they did. But she smiled down at her daughter’s lovely face, her eyes exactly like her father’s, and she smiled. “Maybe we can make one.”