Untethered (9 page)

Lindy spoke before her daughter had a chance. Kissing the girl again, she said, “And I'm sorry if I upset you by mentioning the tutoring thing. We can discuss it later. Let's not worry about it for now.”

“But Mom,” Allie said, “I need to know. I need to give them some warning if there's a chance I might have to—”

Lindy straightened and reached a hand inside the car to stroke the girl's hair. “Shhhh. I just told you, there's no need to worry about it for now. We'll put a pin in it, and talk about it later.”

“No, but—”

Lindy waved to Char, blew a kiss to Allie, and turned toward the hotel.

Allie let out a long breath and pushed the button to raise her window.

They drove in silence for a few blocks. Allie leaned against the passenger door, her head on her arm, her mouth turned down. Char couldn't decide if patting the teenager on her knee would help or set her off. To be safe, she kept her hands on the wheel.

It was the right decision. Seconds later, Allie turned narrowed eyes toward Char. “I don't know why you had to tell her I'm not getting credit for it anymore.”

“I didn't just come out with it. I responded to a question. What was I supposed to do? Lie?”

“Right,” Allie scoffed. “Because the better choice is to get me in trouble.”

“I didn't—”

“I mean, what business is it of hers anyway?” Allie said.

“She
is
your mother.” It sounded lame to Char when she heard herself say it.

Evidently, it sounded equally lame to her passenger, who tsked and turned to the window, her back to Char. “So, you're just going to tell her anything she asks about me, I guess. Never mind that you know how she is, how she gets these ideas in her head and won't let go, like tutoring is going to completely destroy my chances of
getting into college. You're going to feed her the information anyway, so she can get carried away and start telling me to quit this and stop that and start this other thing, when she really has no clue at all about any of it.”

“I don't love the attitude, Allie,” Char said. “You need to cut me some slack. I'm on your side, but it's not like I have a choice here. If I refuse to answer her questions, how do you think that's going to go over?”

“My dad knew what to tell her and what to hold back,” Allie muttered.

“I don't have the same freedom he had to make those decisions.”

Allie puffed air out her nose. “Right. So, good luck to me, then. She's going to ask, and you're going to tell. And I'm going to be screwed.”

L
ater that night, after Allie went to bed, Char crept down the stairs and into Bradley's office. She eased herself into his chair and put her hands on the gleaming surface of his desk. She had given Will all of the work papers, and now she wished she had made copies and sent those instead, so she wouldn't have to look at the empty spaces where the stacks of presentations had been. She lifted a paperweight from a pile of professional journals and redistributed them, filling the vacant spots.

She was about to return the paperweight to its rightful location but changed her mind and held on to it, enjoying the weight of it in her hand, the coldness of its smooth glass. Lifting it to eye level, she squinted to peer inside the glass dome and the exploded dandelion seedpod suspended within.

“Einstein trapped in crystal,” Bradley had said when he saw it. She had brought it for him the second time she made the trip from D.C. to Michigan.

On her first visit, about eight months after they met, she had
seen his house, toured his hometown, visited his office. Met his daughter.

They drove together to Doozie's, an ice cream place near the CMU campus, and a young Allie ran off to investigate a large puddle that had formed on a nearby field while Bradley and Char took a seat at one of the picnic tables in front of the ice cream stand.

“It's beautiful here,” she told him. “I love it. And I adore her.” She gestured to his daughter, squatting now and tossing bits of her cone to two ducks wading in the puddle. “She has the best heart of any kid I've met.”

“Have you met many kids?”

“No. But if I had, she'd have the best heart of any of them.”

He laughed, and she asked him if that was a terrible answer. He told her it was the best answer he could think of. Anyone could believe in something they had tested and verified. People did that all the time. It was a rarer thing to believe in something—or someone—on faith. Allie would be lucky to have a person in her life who believed in her that strongly.

Char had reddened, nervous suddenly about the direction the conversation had taken. She didn't know what to say, so dumbly, she repeated that she loved it there, and loved the girl feeding the ducks.

“Do you love it, and her, and me, enough to stay?”

“I . . .” she stammered.

“Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “Don't answer that. Yet. Take some time to think about it. It's a lot. We”—he indicated his daughter—“are a lot. A package deal. In a tiny town. In the Midwest.

“I don't want you to answer fast, without thinking it all through, and then give an answer you don't really mean. And I'm not sure I should be asking this way. In this place”—he swept an arm to
include Doozie's and the graffiti-and-bird-poop-covered picnic table at which they sat—“with nothing but this to give you.” He gestured to his ice cream cone.

She nodded, grateful to be released from speaking. The heat that had reddened her cheeks was moving down her neck and inside her throat, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to squeeze out an answer, even if she knew what answer to give. She was overwhelmed. By the proposal, or the allusion to a proposal, anyway, and by what it would mean for her if she said yes.

A husband hadn't been a central blip on her radar lately. And when the idea of a spouse did flit across her consciousness, he certainly didn't come with early retirement from her career and a nine-year-old daughter.

But mostly, she was overwhelmed by what she felt for this man, and for his little girl, after an absurdly brief time knowing both of them. In the prior eight months, she had seen him sixteen times, for two days each—his mother was still living then, and could take Allie for weekends while Bradley traveled to D.C. That was only thirty-two days together, not counting that first night. Only two days with Allie. Wasn't it far too soon for her to be feeling this way?

She had flown back to D.C. that Sunday night, after telling him she would return to Mount Pleasant in three weeks. But she returned the following Friday instead, and arrived at his doorstep with Einstein trapped in crystal.

She held it out to him as he opened the door. “I saw this and thought of you.”

He lifted his hands to his head and smoothed down his hair. “Do I always look that bad?”

She laughed. “You always look wonderful. It made me think of you because I find it fascinating. And it made me think of Allie
because of all those seedpods she was so enthralled with on our hike in the state land.”

He pulled her inside and kissed her. “You're back early.”

“I'm back forever,” she said.

Now Char set the dome in the middle of the desk.

“I miss him,” she said to the cherry surface. “I miss him so much.”

She drew a circle around the dome with an index finger. Moved the dome aside and drew a heart in its place. She drew a second heart, a smaller one, using the tear that had landed. A third one, larger, using the next tears that fell.

After a while, she stopped making hearts and watched her tears as they splattered on the wood below. She lay her cheek on the desk and breathed in the scent of the wood.

Earlier, Will had produced a can of lemon spray and offered to polish the surface. Char wouldn't let him. She didn't want the scent of fruit to mask the wood, or Bradley.

“You can smell Bradley in the wood?” Will asked. But immediately after, he said, “Never mind. Sorry. The switch on my smartass setting isn't used to being in the ‘off' position. I need to start holding it in place.”

If she had the energy right now, Char thought, or knew where her cell phone was, she would text her brother:
Actually, it turns out I can't smell him in the wood. So, no harm/no foul.

She smiled at the thought until it hit her: she couldn't smell Bradley in the wood. She lifted her head from the desk and watched as her tears dropped faster. She could no longer see the hearts.

A cough from the doorway made her snap her head up. Allie.

“Oh!” Char reached for a tissue but there were none in her usual
spots: the cuffs of her sleeves, the waistband of her pants. She had changed into pajamas before coming downstairs, and had forgotten to resupply. Ducking her head so Allie couldn't see her face, she swiveled in the chair, away from the door, away from the girl, and wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her shirt. “I was . . . um . . . I was . . .”

Allie made a noise, somewhere between a tsk and a grunt. “How stupid do you think I am?”

Char froze. “What?”

“I'm fifteen years old! Do you think if you don't cry in front of me, it'll make me think he didn't actually die? Or is it just that you're more embarrassed to be seen crying than you are upset that
my father
is dead
?”

“No! That's not—” Char swiveled around to face Allie.

But the doorway was empty. Seconds later, she heard thumping up the stairs, and after that, a slamming door.

She stared at the empty space where Allie had been standing and told herself she should follow the girl upstairs. Knock on her door and ask to be let in. Barge in, if that's what it took. But when she tried to picture herself rising from the desk and walking all the way to the second floor, she couldn't see it.

That was something bio parents did—running after the kid, rapping on the door, saying they weren't going to go away until they had been let in and the two of them talked it all out. Insisting that nothing go unsaid between them, that every misunderstanding be cleared up. That every night end with a hug and a kiss and a “Good night, I love you.” It wasn't a stepparent thing. It certainly wasn't a formerly-stepparent-and-now-no-role-at-all thing.

Plus, Allie's room was so far away, and Char's bones felt so heavy. So she tipped forward and lay her arms on the desk, resting her
head on a forearm. She could see Einstein peering at her from several inches away, and she reached out and pulled him into the small space between her head and her folded arms.

When she woke, it was morning, and Allie was gone. There was a note on the counter:
Dinner w/ my mom after tutoring. Back by 9.

•   •   •

A
t nine that night, Allie let herself in the front door. Char was on the couch in the living room, waiting. When Allie reached the top of the steps from the front hall, she gave a slight nod and continued toward the stairs to her room.

“Did you have a nice time with your mom?” Char called after her.

“Unh,” Allie grunted.

“How was tutoring? How's Morgan?”

Allie gave the same response and kept walking. She reached the stairs and started up them.

“Look,” Char said, rising and walking to the bottom of the staircase. “I don't know what's going on, but do you want to talk about it? I feel like at some point—probably on the drive home from dropping your mom off at the hotel—things between you and me really nosedived, and suddenly, you're ticked at me for everything. I know it's been hard for you. With your dad gone, and then seeing your mom—”

“So in other words, you forgive me?” Allie scoffed. She stood still on the stairs, but she didn't turn around. “Is that what you're saying? That it was all my fault, but since ‘it's been so hard for me,' you'll cut me a break?” She resumed her climb up the steps.

Char glared at the teenage back moving away from her. What the hell? The kid had gone from sweet to sour in less than twenty-four hours. She was tempted to close the distance between them, grab the girl's shirt, drag her down to the living room, push her onto the couch, and set her straight:
We are both grieving here. This is not The Allie Show. You don't get to just dump on me when you hit an emotional nadir.

She made herself inhale, count to three, and exhale.
She's
fifteen
, she told herself.
She's the child. I'm the
adult.
She cleared her throat, and in a voice that sounded calmer than she felt, she said, “Well, if you have a different version of why things went down the way they did yesterday afternoon, and then again last night, I'm happy to hear about it. Why don't you come back down and we can talk about it?”

Allie paused on the next step, and Char backed up to leave room for the girl to descend the stairs. But Allie only breathed, “Never mind,” and continued her ascent. In a moment, she was stepping into her bedroom. “Night,” she called, and before Char could respond, the door closed.

Char regarded the stairs in front of her. It was fewer steps up to Allie's room than to Bradley's office at the back of the house. But she turned away from the staircase and headed to the office instead. To the big wooden desk, and Einstein.