Counting by 7s(33)

But I’m okay with that.

I have brought nothing positive into his life. Now he has to wait longer to use the bathroom, and the hot water in the shower runs out more quickly.

I try to do everything last, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

I don’t want to cause trouble, so I haven’t said anything about being a vegetarian. I just push the chicken or the pork pieces off to the side and then later transfer them to a napkin, and then at the end of the meal I sneak them into the trash.

I know that I’m eating meat bits that escape this tragically simple procedure, but the principle of my decision is intact, even if the reality is compromised.

All reality, I decide, is a blender where hopes and dreams are mixed with fear and despair.

Only in cartoons and fairy tales and greeting cards do endings have glitter.



I somehow make it through the first month.

I dress and brush my teeth when they tell me to.

And I experience the hollow feeling of complete loss, which is emptiness.

Meaning has been drained from my life.

I force myself to think of anything but the one thing that I’m actually always thinking about.

And that is so exhausting that I sleep more than I ever have.

I am a shadow.

I no longer dream in color.

I don’t count by 7s.

Because in this new world I don’t count.





Chapter 30





It was dark nowadays when Dell got home to the Gardens of Glenwood.

The only greenery in the apartment complex was in the courtyard.

And that was in a circular patch of red volcanic chips that hurt Dell’s feet, even when he wore thick-soled shoes and was just trying to take a shortcut to the always-strange-smelling stairwell.

The pumice rock minefield was dotted with stubborn weeds armed with sharp thistles, which poked up through the cheap layer of thin black plastic under the brick-colored lava bits. The thorns caught Dell’s exposed, fleshy ankles and drew dots of blood.

There were no natural glens in all of Bakersfield. It was a flat, dry place made green only by sprinkler systems.

Maybe that was why so many apartment complexes around town were named for ferns and wet, wooded sanctuaries.

It was “an expression of the yearning of a moisture-challenged climate”—at least that’s what Willow had told him when she had first asked where he lived and he responded, he had to admit, with puffy pride: “The Gardens of Glenwood.”

Now he took the stairs to his second-floor unit, because the elevator, which was required by law, never worked.

Dell tried, in desperation, to add up the events of the long and challenging month.

A week after the accident (as he had predicted) his supervisor asked to see his file on Willow Chance.

Dell may have found the missing kid on the day she left Mercy Hospital, but he wasn’t a hero for very long.

Now, weeks later, he was afraid. He could admit that, at least to himself.

He had given Willow practice exams in everything from the required three-hour test for application to medical school to fourteen of the SAT Subject II’s.

And she had aced them all.

But he made the decision not to hand those materials over.

What he sent to his boss was a simple electronic form that revealed next to nothing about the girl.

Somehow, he’d been caught up in so many layers of deception:

Willow Chance wasn’t a cheater.

Pattie Nguyen wasn’t an old family friend.

The Nguyens didn’t live in the Gardens of Glenwood. (Why couldn’t they use their own address?) He didn’t homeschool her (like he was supposed to do).

And he had never been committed to being any kind of a counselor.



Willow walked from the nail salon to the district offices on Tuesdays.

She was always on time.

Instead of taking tests or analyzing the stock market, the two now sat in silence.

Dell tried to think of things to motivate her, or at the very least ease her distress, but so far, he had been a failure.

Yesterday Willow had come in and for fifty-five minutes (which seemed like fifty-five hours) Dell worked on a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of bowls of jelly beans.

Willow didn’t place a single piece.

But he knew she wasn’t trying.

And he was really bad at puzzles, so it was a struggle in all ways.

After she had gone, Dell opened his computer and wrote up a report.

He knew now that he was being observed. And if there was one thing Dell Duke understood, it was that he didn’t do well under scrutiny.

He had made a mistake by ever getting involved with the genius kid.

Because it was a lot easier to do his job and not care about anything.

And now he cared about everything.



Pattie Nguyen hadn’t enrolled in any of the necessary classes for foster parenting, and she didn’t go to the one group session that had been offered.

She intended to.

But somehow, more than four weeks had passed and she had yet to do more than check in with Lenore Cole, who was Willow’s social worker.

As the darkness of an autumn sky pressed in through the glass of the salon, Pattie looked down at her calendar.

A hearing had been set in family court and a judge would make a determination about Willow in the next two months.