Page 3 of Lost in the Moment and Found

She had been the flower girl at their wedding, dressed in a white-and-pink confection of a dress with a skirt that swirled around her calves and capped sleeves that ringed her upper arms in lace and a basket full of pink and white rose petals, and everyone who’d come to see her mother married had made happy noises of contentment when they saw her, like her participation in the ceremony was somehow the proof that it hadn’t been too quick, that her father would have wanted the love of his life to move on and be happy in his absence, like everything was okay.

After the wedding, she had gone to stay with her grandparents for a week while her mother and her new husband spent some adult time at a nice local hotel. Antsy had spent the entire time running wild in the backyard or the park or the living room or the grocery store, whatever fields she was offered for her feral thrashings, and she had never allowed herself to give voice to the fact that she didn’t like her new stepfather,had never told anyone but her mother, who had been entirely unwilling to hear her.

That was the fourth thing she lost: the belief that if something made her unhappy or uncomfortable, she could tell an adult who loved her and they would make everything better. Her mother hadn’t listened, and now they were married. Married was forever, unless you got divorced, and from the way most of the kids she knew talked about divorced, that was one of the worst things in the whole world. She didn’t want to wish something bad on her mother, not after everything she’d been through already, and so even though she didn’t like the man who was now her stepfather, she wasn’t going to hope her mother divorced him.

At least, she wasn’t going to do it where anyone could hear her.

So she ran and ran and ran, like she could run fast enough to run all the way back to the afternoon in Target where her father fell down and didn’t get back up again, and when the week ended without time reversing itself, she went home, to the bedroom that had always been her sanctuary, to a new toothbrush on the bathroom sink and a new body at the dinner table.

Tyler had been around a lot in the months leading up to the wedding, but after, it seemed like he was never gone, like every time she turned around he wasthere.He ate dinner with them. When they went to the park, he drove the car, and when they went to the movies, he sat on her mother’s other side, holding her hand, stealing her popcorn. He wasthere,whether or not she wanted him to be. In her home, all the time, whenever she turned around.

And she still didn’t like him, and she still didn’t know why. At Christmas, when they did their school talent show andshe looked out to see him sitting with her mother in the audience, another kid from her class said, “There’s your new daddy, Antsy,” and the wave of rage she felt was almost a relief. She didn’t like him because he was trying to take her father’s place. That was all. That was a completely reasonable and understandable reason not to like someone she barely knew, and if her mother asked again why she didn’t like Tyler, she’d have an answer.

She sang beautifully that night and went home smiling. She still didn’t like Tyler, not one bit, but now she felt like she understoodwhy,and understanding a thing was the first step toward conquering it.

She could learn to like him, if she knew why she didn’t. She ate dinner and she kissed her mother on the cheek and she nodded to Tyler and she went to bed, and everything was going to be fine.

Two things happened that weekend. Her mother sat down with her on the couch, the same way she’d done on the day she said she wanted to marry Tyler, but this time she was smiling like the sunrise, like she had the best secret in the whole world. So her mother wasn’t going to ask for her permission to get divorced, then, if that was the sort of thing that mothers asked for permission to do. Antsy didn’t know. She hadn’t known mothers asked permission to get married in the first place, sowouldher mother ask for permission to stop being married?

Instead, her mother took her hands and said, that sunrise smile melting into a look of profound seriousness, “Sweetie, you’re going to be a big sister. Tyler and I are going to have a baby.”

Antsy frowned. Antsy tilted her head. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“Well, honey, I’m pregnant.”

“But why would that make me a big sister?” she asked. “Tyler’s not my daddy.”

Her mother frowned, the sort of frown that started with her eyes and made a furrow between her brows, so she looked sad and disappointed all at once, like she didn’t know how to swallow the rock she’d just been handed. “Tyler is your stepfather,” she said. “He’s never going to replace your father, but he’s not going anywhere. You’ll have time to learn how to love him. Maybe he’ll be your daddy someday, and since I’m your mommy now, and this baby is going to be my baby, too, that means they’re going to be your family just as soon as they’re born. They’re already your family.”

Antsy had never been particularly interested in being a big sister. The kids in her class who had little brothers and sisters mostly seemed to view them as unwanted complications rather than the guaranteed friends the adults in their lives always tried to paint them as. Little kids grew into bigger kids, and bigger kids could be fun to play with, but little ones were sticky and loud and unpredictable in ways that didn’t make any sense, because making sense wasn’t a thing they knew how to care about yet.

At six, Antsy was old enough that the wild illogic of infancy and toddlerhood was starting to fade into hazy memory. She wouldn’t be able to understand a baby. She wouldn’t be able to reason with them. “No, thank you,” she said politely.

Her mother squeezed her hands tighter. “I don’t think you understand,” she said. “I’m having a baby. It’s not something you get to agree or disagree with, it’s something that’s happening, right here and right now.”

Antsy’s eyes grew wide and alarmed. “You’re having a babynow?” she squeaked. She had seen pregnant women before. They had hard, round bellies, not soft and squishy like herteacher, Mrs. Baker, who she absolutely and entirely adored, and who had laughed and said, “No, honey, I’m just fat,” the one time a student had asked her if she was going to have a baby. Pregnant women were so full of baby that they looked like they had swallowed a whole watermelon the way her class corn snake swallowed mice, putting the entire thing inside themselves, rind and all. Her mother didn’t look like that, didn’t look pregnant in any way that she could recognize.

To her relief, her mother shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m having a baby in about six months. I just wanted you to know before I told anyone else.”

“Not even Tyler?”

“Except for Tyler. He’s my husband now, sweetheart. When I learn something important, he’s the first person I tell.”

Hearing it said—not just implied butsaid—that Tyler was more important than she was made Antsy’s stomach sink all the way down to the bottom of her toes. She nodded slowly, tugging her hands away. “Can I go to my room now?”

“Of course, darling. Thank you for letting me tell you my big news. It’s not for public yet, so please don’t tell your grandparents.”

Antsy had never kept a secret from her grandparents before. Oh, there were things she didn’t tell them—they didn’t know about all the games she played at school, or all the things she did with her Barbies, or every time she used the bathroom—but she’d never been told something and then asked specifically not to share it. She blinked, trying to incorporate this new piece of information into her ideas of the way the world worked. Adults could ask her to keep things from other adults.

Antsy frowned, uneasy. “All right,” she said. “I won’t tell them. I’m going to my room.”

Her mother nodded and let her go, and she didn’t realizethat by telling Antsy to keep a secret from two of the people she trusted most in the world, she had just broken something small, and fragile, and irreparable. When Antsy made the lists of things she’d lost, to justify being Lost herself, she didn’t include her belief that adults could be trusted. That thing, out of everything, had been so small and fundamental that she couldn’t even see that it was gone.

But ah, narrative can be confusing at times. It carries forward, regardless of the reader, action creating consequence, consequence creating story, and you may have forgotten that two things happened this weekend. You can’t be blamed if you did. Some things are better to forget.

That night, after dinner had been eaten and the dishes washed and put away, snug in their clean, closed cupboards, Antsy went to her room to sit on the floor and play Barbies, as she so often did in the evenings. But unlike most nights, she had been in there for less than an hour before there was a knock at her bedroom door. She looked up, curious, and called, “Come in, Mom!”

But when the door opened, it wasn’t her mother on the other side. Instead, Tyler slipped into her room, which had previously been a sort of sacred space for her, the one place in the house not yet impacted by his implacable presence. Antsy recoiled before she could stop herself, every muscle in her body tensing and remaining tense as he closed the door behind himself and walked over to the bed, settling on the edge of the mattress.

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