Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(2)

She loved both her parents, and she loved her life, and she didn’t want to lose any of it. She had the vague feeling that sometimes good things were only as good as they were because all the pieces had managed to line up just so, and if you took any of them away, it wouldn’t be good anymore. Maybe not good at all.

So she stood frozen a few feet from the end of the aisle, staring at her father’s shoes and trying to fight back the panic that threatened to rise up and overwhelm her. Something was wrong.

The feeling that something was wrong only grew when an unfamiliar adult voice asked, sharp and interrogative, “Sir? Sir, are you all right? Do you need me to call for—oh my God. Someone call 911!”

Not entirely sure what was happening, only that she was scared and alone and wanted her father, Antsy finally rushed forward the last few steps, until she could see, and stopped again, eyes going so wide that it hurt. She couldn’t close them. She couldn’t look away.

There were her father’s shoes, toes pointed at the ceiling because they were still on her father’s feet, and there was her father, flat on his back on the cold linoleum, staring up at the ceiling the way he always said she shouldn’t do, because the lights would hurt her eyes. There was a woman she didn’t know kneeling next to him and yelling, her fingers pressed against the side of his neck. Antsy’s stomach seized up like a fist. She didn’t think it was okay for this lady to be touching her father.

But he wasn’t smacking the lady’s hand away or telling her it was rude to touch people without permission. He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t even blinking.

People needed to blink. Blinking was important. Antsy sniffled.

The woman hadn’t noticed her yet. She was looking over her shoulder and shouting something Antsy couldn’t quite hear. There was a weird ringing sound in her ears, getting louder and louder the longer she looked at her father, still and silent and staring at the lights, unmoving on the Target floor.

She didn’t even notice when her own throat hitched and she started keening, the sound high and horrible and inhuman. The woman’s head snapped back around, taking in the crying child and the fact that her hair matched the dead man’s in an instant, before she got to her feet and moved to put herself between the little girl and the body. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “Don’t look at that. No, no, don’t look at that. Sweetheart, look at me.”

Antsy tried to duck around the woman, who grabbed her by the shoulders and stopped her before she could complete the motion. “My name isn’t sweetheart I don’t know you you’re not allowed to touch me I want my daddy!” Her voice peaked in a wail so high and sharp that it made the people in earshot wince.

And there were more of them than there had been only a few seconds before. People were pouring into their location, other shoppers and staffers in their familiar red Target vests. Antsy recognized one of them, the nice man who always restocked the Barbies when they’d been picked over. She’d asked him before if he knew where a specific toy was, and he had always been willing to help her find what she needed.

Wrenching herself away from the woman, she flung herself at the man and wrapped her arms around his leg, holding on tightly as she wailed. The man looked around helplessly, holding his hands up and well away from her.

“I didn’t touch her,” he said, voice gone defensive. “She grabbed on to me.”

“Make Daddy wake up!” demanded Antsy, as if being an employee of Target gave him some sort of secret superpower.

“I can’t, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” he said. “I just stock the toys, I don’t raise the—I’m sorry.”

Antsy sniffled and wiped her face on the leg of his pants. He patted her on the head like she was a puppy, tentative and still clearly half-afraid to touch her.

“’M Antsy,” she said.

“David,” he replied. “Is my name.”

The woman who’d originally found her father was now talking earnestly to two men dressed as store security, gesturing alternately to the body and the child. Things got very hectic after that.

Someone pried Antsy off the man’s leg. She started wailing again, and only wailed louder as EMTs and police officers arrived and loaded her father onto a gurney, wheeling him away. She tried to run after them, and a policewoman in a blue uniform stepped in front of her, kneeling down to look her in the eye.

“Where is your mother?” asked the policewoman.

Antsy sniffled, surprised enough to momentarily stop wailing and focus on the woman in front of her. “She says Target is daddy-daughter time,” she said, voice thick with tears and snot, sounding younger than her five years. “Where are they taking my daddy?”

The policewoman’s expression didn’t change, remaining placid and a little sad. “Do you know your mother’s phone number?” she asked. “We can call her together, if you know.”

Antsy was still too young for a phone of her own, and so had been drilled on both her parents’ numbers, in case they were ever separated. She sniffled, nodded, and recited the number she had never had cause to use like this before, even after all her mother’s dire warnings.

The rest of that day was a blur, bright and terrible and unbearable, and the only mercy it held was that so little of it would stay in her memory, which seemed to have been blasted into shards by the image of her father’s open eyes staring at the lights.