Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(3)
After that, whenever it was time for shopping, if shopping meant Target, Antsy would refuse to go inside. She would throw tantrums a toddler would be proud of, would scream and bite and kick and, once, even wet herself rather than be dragged through the doors. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t go inside, couldn’t go under those lights, couldn’t enter the air-conditioned aisles. It wasn’t possible.
That was the day she lost her father. It would be years before she realized losing him had taken something less tangible and less provably important away at the same time: the feeling of safety and security in the world, like it was a kind place.
Memory came back in time for the funeral. They lowered him into the ground, and she stood next to her mother in a black dress—she’d never been allowed to have a black dress before, not even when she asked for it, black dresses were for sad people and she was supposed to be a happy little girl, and she couldn’t even feel special and pretty, because her father wasn’t there, he wasn’t there, he was never going to be there again—and she didn’t cry. All her tears had been spilled first in the toy aisles of Target and then the lobby of the police station where she’d been taken to wait for her mother, and as she got older, she would come to think that the ability to cry was the third thing she’d lost in a single day.
One thing could happen to anyone. Two things was a tragedy. Three things felt like carelessness. And for the rest of her life, she would remember that black dress and that solemn graveside, and going home after to put on jeans and a T-shirt and run around the backyard trying to pretend her father would be there when she went back inside the house, and her mother wouldn’t look so sad, and her grandmother wouldn’t be sitting on the couch crying like she had to make up for every tear Antsy herself couldn’t shed.
After a week had passed, Antsy went back to school, finding herself suddenly a member of a small, involuntarily exclusive club for children with dead parents. People who had always been friendly toward her treated her like she had something contagious, like she had become an entirely different person over the span of a week and a half. Like a father having a massive heart attack in the toy section of Target was somehow catching.
Life went back to normal. Bit by bit, the color came back into the world, and Antoinette resumed living up to her nickname, always in motion, a little moving missile of red curls and laughter, full of fuss and bother. They called her “Antsy” not just because it was shorter than her given name, and not just because there was a girl in her class named “Anne” but because she was never still for more than a few seconds. Her tendency to squirm during class had gotten her into trouble more than once, and her teacher felt bad for having appreciated her stillness during the days right after her father’s funeral.
Life not only went back to normal: life went on. New things happened, things her father had never been a part of, and shortly after Antsy’s sixth birthday, the new thing that happened was a man in her living room, a man named Tyler who held her mother’s hand and watched Antsy with heavy-lidded eyes, studying her in a way that made her feel like she was something he was thinking about buying from the store and not a little girl in her own home, with a mother who loved her and a father who was lost, but not on purpose.
Antsy didn’t like him. She didn’t like to be alone with him, but she couldn’t say the right reasons why, couldn’t find them in her lists of good reasons not to like or want or enjoy a thing. It wasn’t that he was a man who wasn’t related to her—only the fact that she liked David from the toy aisle as much as she did had let her try going back to Target with her mother the first time, and that was the only time she’d been able to make it past the doors before she fled to the parking lot in tears, pursued by her worried, mortified mother. And it wasn’t that the man was in her house. Lots of people had been in her house since her father died, relatives she didn’t really know and neighbors with casseroles and condolences. She couldn’t say why she didn’t like him, only that she didn’t, not one little bit, and it didn’t matter, because her mother didn’t seem to see it. He came around more and more often, first every other weekend and then every single one, and then during the week, too, so that sometimes she’d come home from school and he’d be there already.
Then one day she came home and he was there and her mother wasn’t, and they were alone together for the very first time. Antsy froze, going still in a way her teachers would never have believed she was capable of, and stared at him in solemn-eyed silence until he frowned and left the living room for the kitchen, leaving her alone. She fled for her bedroom immediately, shutting the door as hard as she could and throwing herself onto the bottom bunk of her bed, not sure why she was so upset, only that she was.
There was so much she didn’t seem to know. It was like her father had taken all the answers with him when he left, and now she had to live in a world that didn’t have any answers in it at all.
She lay on her bed and shivered until she heard her mother’s car in the driveway. Only then did she relax enough to fall asleep, and when her mother woke her for dinner, Tyler was still there. He sat at their table in the place where her father was supposed to be, and he put the potatoes on her plate like they were a gift, like the meal her mother had cooked in their very own kitchen was something he had the power and authority to bestow. Antsy ate in silence, and if her mother thought that was strange at all, she didn’t say so.