Page 11 of Hold on Tight

She began with Joint Base Lewis-McChord and fanned outward. She visited JBLM and Yakima, called the others.

“Hello? I need to find a guy named Jake Taylor. Or Jacob Taylor, maybe.”

“Infantry?”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s not Special Forces, is he?”

“I don’t think so.”

Sometimes she got laughed at. Sometimes people made genuine efforts to assist her but came up empty. Sometimes she got to talk to soldiers named Jake Taylor, but none of them were her Jake—although every once in a while, one offered to stand in for him. Once a base operator said, “Honey. Before you waste the JAG’s time making him hunt down this guy—do you really think that’s even his name? ‘Jake Taylor’ is like ‘Mike Smith.’ A name you tell a woman when you want to disappear.”

She’d hung up.

If she had reached him, she would have told him about Sam; she would have asked him to be her baby’s father. She would have consulted him about his wishes for how Sam should be raised. She would have encouraged him to visit. She would have negotiated with him about the terms of their strange new engagement. Money might or might not have been exchanged. He could be only a name on the birth certificate or a parenting partner. They could get married and be the kind of husband and wife whose vows were paper, not flesh and blood or heart and soul.

Except in many of her fantasies, he played that role, too. He kissed away her tears and smoothed her hair back from her brow and relieved her from childcare duties so she could get a massage or have a drink with a friend or take a shower. And when Sam had been tucked back in, Jake had lain beside her in the big empty bed, slipping wordlessly and without effort into her, moving inside her, whispering her name.

She had let go of the idea of Jake little by little, but he never went away entirely. He reappeared at odd intervals, at pivotal moments. When Sam smiled for the first time, when he laughed for the first time, when he reached out and grabbed her nose, when he rolled over. No matter how much her parents celebrated with her, Jake was there, a presence, an absence.

Only notJake. Some guy she’d made up. A hopeful, naive dream.

She got out of bed, sat at the desk she’d set up in her bedroom, and checked her email. She’d emailed work the night before to beg for another week to find childcare. There was a new message from her boss. It said only, “We need you Monday.”

Her stomach started to hurt. Bad.

“Mommy, is it Saturday?”

Sam was in the doorway, so skinny, his face eager.

“Hey, bud. Yeah, it’s Saturday.”

“Can we call Grammy and Grampy?”

It was their Saturday morning tradition for Sam to call her parents. Early morning was the best time to talk to her stepmother, Lani, who lived in Fort Myers, Florida, where Mira had moved with her parents when Sam was a year old. That was one of the things she couldn’t get used to about living in Seattle again—having three time zones between herself and her father and stepmother. By the time she got Sam settled in bed, her parents were sound asleep.

She wasn’t eager to call them this morning. She knew they’d hear her troubles in her voice and want to help. And she’d moved clear across the country to get away from her father’s brand of well-meaning but suffocating help.

“Maybe later, Sam.”

“But they’ll go out and get busy, and then it will be too late.”

He was echoing words she’d said on many other occasions.

“You’re right,” she said.

She let Sam dial and talk to them, hoping they wouldn’t ask to talk to her, but Sam handed her the phone after only a few minutes. “Grammy wants to talk to you. Can I play on your iPad?”

“Go ahead, bud,” she said, and he trotted off.

“Hey, baby. I miss you so much!” Lani said, distant but clear.

The sound of her stepmother’s voice made Mira’s throat tight. “Hi, Lani. Miss you, too.”

Mira’s stepmother was the only mother she’d ever known, the best mother she could have imagined. Mira’s biological mother had ditched her infant daughter and joined a commune—or, as Mira’s father usually said, with some bitterness, a cult. She’d visited infrequently after that—sometimes less than once a year. She had breezed in, bestowed gifts, then disappeared. She’d died ten years ago in a skiing accident.

Mira hadn’t mourned. Her life had always been her dad and Lani.

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