Page 2 of Lost in the Moment and Found

“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 blastedinto shards by the image of her father’s open eyes staring at the lights.

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 hermother 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 findthem 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 saywhyshe 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 surewhyshe 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 wasstill 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.

The next day, when Antsy got home, Tyler wasn’t there, but her mother was there, waiting for her. She took Antsy by the hand and led her to the couch, and then she talked to her the way adults talked to children when they wanted them to agree to something that wasn’t ever a question, not really. She said words like “lonely” and “difficult” and “without your father,” and Antsy listened in frozen silence that felt too big to break, and when her mother finished on a question, she didn’t hear it at first. It was too much: it was too big. She couldn’t force it down.

Her mother frowned and squeezed her hand. “Sweetheart, did you hear me? Were you listening?”

The woman at Target had called her “sweetheart,” too, called her “sweetheart” while standing to block the shape of Antsy’s father’s body, and that word felt like poison in her ears. She flinched away, suddenly scowling.

“I was listening,” she said. “I’m sorry. Can I go to my room?”

“I need you to answer me, please, and then you can go and play.”

Antsy didn’t want to go and play, and she didn’t know what her mother had asked. The ringing in her ears was back, taking all the sound in the world away. So she just looked at her mother, trying to understand the movement of her lips as she looked Antsy gravely in the eye and repeated her question:

“Tyler has asked me to marry him, and I told him I can’t unless you say it’s all right. So is it all right, Antoinette? May I marry the man who loves me?”

This time the words got through, despite the veil of static. Antsy swallowed hard, forcing fear and revulsion away, and looked her mother dead in the eye as she said, “I don’t like him.”

“He’s not trying to replace your father, baby girl. No one’s ever going to do that. But it’s hard to be a parent all by myself, and I’m lonely. He’ll be your friend, if you’ll let him.”

Antsy still didn’t know why she didn’t like the man who seemed to make her mother so happy—happy enough that she’d do this, happy enough that she’d change the shape of their family this way. So she bit her lip, and held her silence long enough that her mother started to look anxious and unhappy, and finally said, “If you want to marry him, I guess it’s okay.”

Her mother laughed and smiled and put her arms around her, gathering her into a hug. “Thank you, baby. Thank you so much. You’re not going be sorry about this, you’re not.”

But Antsy, who was already sorry about her answer, said nothing.

2EVERYTHING CHANGES

LATER, WHEN ANTSY WASfar enough removed from the moment to look at the timeline, she would realize Tyler had asked her mother to marry him six months after her father’s funeral, almost to the day, and the wedding was set for three months after that. It was a brief courtship by any reasonable standard, brief enough to raise more than a few eyebrows. Not that it stopped them: by the time she was due to start first grade, Antsy had a new last name, a new stepfather, and a new permanent resident in her home.

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