Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(11)

“Yes,” parroted Antsy. “Wonderful.”





PART II

WHERE THE LOST THINGS GO





4

SOMETIMES THINGS MISPLACE THEMSELVES




THE NEW HOUSE WAS bigger, and filled with light, with windows in every room, and Antsy hated it and loved it at the same time, because more space meant more opportunities for Tyler to catch her alone, away from her mother, and more light meant fewer shadows for him to hide in.

It was almost a year after Abby’s birth when Antsy heard her bedroom door swing open in what felt like the middle of the night and sat up with a gasp, clutching her blankets to her chest as she saw the man in the doorway. He was a shadow against shadows; all the windows in the world couldn’t stop the sun from setting. He walked toward the bed. Antsy watched him come, eyes very wide, barely even daring to breathe.

He stopped only a few feet away, watching her. Taking her measure for something she didn’t understand and didn’t want to, and her vague discomfort and dislike finally solidified, becoming a hatred so thick it choked her, making it difficult to breathe. He had never done anything, apart from occasional attempts to make her fight with her mother; always little things, like the plates, or like swearing he’d told her they were leaving soon when she knew full well that he hadn’t. Always his word against hers. And what she had learned, again and again, was that her mother would believe him every time. He was the adult, he was her husband, and Antsy was just a little girl who had never been fully accepting of his place in her life. She was the unreliable one, not him. Not Tyler.

But she was the one safe in her bed while Tyler was the one standing silently where he had no business being and staring at her like he expected something. Antsy finally shrank away.

“You can’t be in here,” she said. “You can’t … you can’t be in here. This is my room.”

“And this is my house,” he said. “I paid for it; I own it. So is this really your room, or is this the room I let you borrow as long as it’s convenient for me?”

Antsy had never considered that her room might not actually belong to her, that it might be in some way conditional. She glared at Tyler. “It’s mine,” she said. “I chose the paint for the walls, and my father bought me this bed. This is my room.”

“You know your mother will believe me if I tell her something and you tell her something else,” said Tyler, and moved closer still, finally sitting on the edge of the bed. “You know I could make things a lot harder for you than they are right now.”

Antsy did know those things. She continued to watch him, wound up and wary, almost too afraid to blink.

“I can also make them easier,” he said. “I know you asked your mother for a bike. I could convince her it would be a good idea to let you have one. If I said I thought you’d make more friends in our new neighborhood if you could get around more easily, you know she’d listen to me. You and I don’t have to be enemies.”

“We don’t?” whispered Antsy. She felt like it was important that this hadn’t happened in their old house, in her old room, where her mother had been right across the hall, close enough to hear her if she yelled. Here, her mother was on a different floor of the house. She’d still come running if she heard Antsy scream, but she’d have to come up the stairs, and the noise would wake the baby, and her mother was still so tired all the time …

Suddenly, the extra size of the new house didn’t feel like a way to avoid Tyler. It felt like the trap she’d seen that long-ago night at the dinner table, finally snapping shut around her.

“We could be friends,” said Tyler, and reached over, and unfastened the top button of her nightgown. That was all. Just one button, just one little twist of his fingers, and then he was standing, the smile on his face visible even through the dimness of the room around him. “Think about it, and remember: if you tell your mother anything, I’ll tell her you’re a liar, and she’ll believe me. Not you. Me. Goodnight, Antoinette.”

Those words were the final crack in the wall between her and the crying she had lost when her father died. Tyler let himself out of the room as the first fat, slow tears began to roll down her cheeks and her shoulders began to shake, and she finally understood why she’d never liked him, why the way he looked at her had always felt like a hand running along her spine, why having him in her house was an endless offense to the way the world was supposed to work.

But she also knew her mother wouldn’t listen if she tried to tell her what she was afraid of, knew it with the bone-deep conviction that children can sometimes bring to things that are entirely untrue. She knew Santa Claus wasn’t real; his handwriting had changed when her father died, and that had been the last piece of a puzzle she’d been unwillingly assembling for over a year. She still believed in the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, and the mystical power of cracks to snap the spines of mothers. She believed so many things that weren’t true that one more would have made no real difference if it hadn’t been for the nature of this final, brutal, unendurable thing.

Tyler had been careful to demonstrate, over and over again, that when it was her word against his, he was the trustworthy adult and she was the child making up stories to get attention or avoid getting into trouble for whatever reason. He’d given her a lesson to learn, and she had learned it well. Too well to see how false and cruel it was, to understand that had she gone to her mother, her mother, who had a better understanding of the world and all its dangers, would have taken her side.