Page 85 of Head Over Heels

I’m going to be okay.

I shut down my iPad, clean up my cup and wrapper, and tuck myself into bed. The white-noise whir of the air-conditioning is soothing, and I know I’ll fall asleep quickly.

I get out of bed. I need—something. Something important. Not candy. Not ice. I walk down the hotel corridor, but it’s longer than I was expecting, and the doors of the rooms are open. Each room, a child. Each child, vaguely familiar. But the children shouldn’t be here, in the Comfort Inn; that makes no sense. And the hallways don’t lead where I think they should lead. I wander. It gets darker. I hear sirens. The police will come and take me away and I’ll never find the thing that’s missing. I hurry, hurry, hurry, but I hear the door downstairs fly open, I hear the sound of voices, footsteps on the stairs; they appear at the top of the stairs, uniformed and faceless. I turn to run but they grab me…

I wake up and turn in the dark, reaching for Chase.

That’s when I realize that there’s a whole other gear of heartache that I’ve been holding at bay. The kind that comes in the middle of the night, when you reach for someone who’s not there. When you know that there is a little girl in a house eight hours away who might wake up reaching foryou,and who won’t understand why you’re far away.

When you understand that in trying to avoid the big mistake, you’ve made the biggest mistake of all.

I cry, and cry, and cry. I cry until I can’t cry anymore, until my whole body hurts.

Chapter 48

Chase

“Daddy, play with me!”

“In a little bit, sweetheart. I’m working on something.”

It’s Friday night and I’m being slack about getting Katie to bed. I know I’ll miss Liv the most when the house is quiet.

I look up from my laptop and meet the sweetest, bluest eyes you can imagine. Her face has slimmed down but there’s still a childish softness to her cheeks, and her blond hair is a messy cloud. My heart squeezes.

I close the laptop. “Let’s play, baby.”

Katie is an adventurous princess, riding out on her trusty steed to map the kingdom and bring back news from its farthest-flung corners.

She wears her Elsa costume, as well as a piece of silver fabric that Liv got for her at Goodwill, and a crown that she and Gillian made from tinfoil.

Needless to say, I am the horse. I’m a lazy, good-for-nothing horse that frequently loses control of its limbs, unseating its rider and causing lots of hilarity. Even when I am upright, I require lots of prodding and kicking and plying with various forms of horse feed, like magic roses.

I trot all around the living room—er, kingdom—with Katie—er, the princess—on my back, and the princess stops here and there to note something on her map (printer paper, marked up with colored pencil), or to interact with some of her (imaginary) loyal subjects.

Sometimes, if necessary, I fill in for the loyal subjects. Like at one cottage on the very edge of the kingdom, the whole family is sick with Ploogaciriosis, and they’re all throwing up a lot. That seems to need dramatization, so I supply it until Katie laughs so hard she runs out of the living room to the bathroom, narrowly averting an accident.

I wish Liv were here. She would be rolling on the floor. I love making her laugh.

Katie has stopped to kiss a whole pond full of frogs, so I take a picture of my princess girl crouched down with her lips pursed, bestowing her favors everywhere. I stand there with my phone in my hand.

There’s no point, right? Liv was here with us, we loved her the best we could, and that wasn’t enough to convince her to stay. What good will a goofy photo do?

I shove my phone back in my pocket, the photo unsent.

“There are turtles, too, Daddy. Frogs and turtles.” Katie bends down to kiss the turtles.

Turtles.

I remember Liv and me, sitting on her bed, in the room she’d transformed.It’s something I learned from one of my foster sisters. She called it carrying her shell on her back.

She’s not, though. She’s not a turtle. She’s a horseshoe crab. She takes a new place and makes it her own.

And then she leaves.

She leaves because—

The only hard part was, I never got to stay. I’d start to feel like I’d settled in, and then something would happen…So that’s why I loved the idea so much of carrying my house around with me like a shell.

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