“Oh, you’re going down,” I said, racing to catch up to him. It wasn’t too difficult—his arms were longer and stronger, but I had three years’ worth of experience—and we rode in together, almost like we were moving as the same person.
Afterward, we sat on the beach together, our wet suits drying on a rock next to us as we huddled together underneath a blanket that we found in the back of the minivan. “Your car needs a name,” Oliver said. “Something with personality.”
“Stealth Fighter,” I offered. “Secret Mission.”
“Barely Running,” Oliver said, and I laughed and pretended to choke him.
“Get your own car if you don’t like mine!” I cried.
“Oh, Emmy, I would if I could,” he said, and the sadness I had seen in the water was back now, clouding his eyes like a storm.
“What is it?” I asked. “What happened?”
Oliver shrugged and picked up some sand to run through his fingers. “I guess some national crime show called yesterday. They want to do a feature on my dad and . . . you know, everything.” Oliver brushed the sand away, then waved his hand, the kidnapping just a pesky fly that could be swatted away. “My mom thinks they could find my dad that way. ‘National exposure,’ that’s what she said.”
“And you don’t want to,” I guessed.
“It’s, like, I can move on or I can stay stuck here. I can’t do both. She wants me to adjust to school, to her new family, to be normal—whatever the hell that even means—but then she wants me to go on camera and talk about how my dad kidnapped me ten years ago? I just want to let it go.”
“You don’t want to find your dad, though?”
Oliver looked down at me, his face as sad as I had ever seen it. “I want that more than anything in the world. But not like this.”
He trailed off. “I just can’t hate my dad the way everyone wants me to.”
“Ollie, no,” I said. I reached for his arm but he pulled away. “We don’t want you to hate him.”
“You know what I mean,” he replied. “I had a life with him. He taught me how to do things, how to ride a bike and catch a pop fly. We went to movies, museums. He showed me the constellations.” Oliver laughed a little. “One time, he even used a flashlight and a grapefruit to explain the phases of the moon. It wasn’t awful. Except for the fact that my mom wasn’t there, I mean. That part sucked.”
I sat quietly, realizing that I had never asked him about his dad, about their life together. “I’m sorry we never talked about him,” I said quietly. “I just thought it would upset you, that’s all.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Oliver corrected himself, then put his hand over mine, pressing it into the sand. “But everyone acts like I stopped growing up at seven years old. They act like the past ten years didn’t happen to me, too.”
“It was just so terrible here,” I said. “It was scary, not knowing where you were for so long. Your dad just took you, Oliver. We didn’t know what happened.”
“I didn’t know what happened, either!” Oliver said. “Everyone has spent the past ten years thinking that my dad’s the monster, but I’ve spent the last ten years thinking that my mom left me. I spent all that time being mad at her, and I can’t just flip that. I don’t work that way, Emmy. My brain, it doesn’t . . .”
I tangled my fingers through his, feeling the sand rub between our skin.
“My mom and Rick and the twins, they have this perfect family, you know? And I just came in and fucked everything up. They’re fighting all the time and I know it’s because of me. And I can’t go back to where I was, and this town is just so fucking . . .” Oliver shook his head at me. “I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. We should go.”
“No, we should stay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“Even you and Drew and Caro, you have all these in-jokes and you talk the same and know all the places and people that I don’t know anymore. But I had places and people and in-jokes, too.”
“People?” I asked.
“A few friends,” he clarified. “I even had a girlfriend when I was fifteen.” He glanced down at me. “Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” I said, then thought, I’ll kill her if she hurt him. The jealousy passed after a second, though.
“I’m not. I just mean that I had a life before I came back. And no one ever wants to hear about it. I feel like if I talk to my mom, she’ll just use it against my dad.”
“Like on a TV news show,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I tightened the blanket around my shoulder, pulling Oliver and me closer together. It was freezing now, but I didn’t dare move. “Maybe we should talk about it more,” I said. “About both of us during the past ten years.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked after a few more minutes of silence, and I nodded against his shoulder. “What happened after I left? I mean, after my dad and I . . . ? Maybe we can start there.”
I sat up a little, trying to organize my thoughts. “Um, there were police. A lot of them, in your house talking to your mom, in my house talking to me and my parents, Caro and Drew. They took your clothes, your shoes, your toothbrush—anything that would help try to find you. But your dad, he already had a three-day start, you know? You can go anywhere in the world in three days.”