“Chicago,” Oliver murmured. “You can go to Chicago.”
I looked at him. “Really?”
He nodded, splaying his hand over mine so that his fingers reached all the way past my fingertips. “We were there for the first six months. He said we were having a vacation, that we needed some father-and-son-bonding time.” Oliver’s voice was as soft as his touch and he traced my fingers as he spoke. “But I wanted to go home after a while. Chicago is loud and we were in this tourist area and it wasn’t like here at all. And he said that we couldn’t go home because my mom had left, that she didn’t want to be with us anymore.”
Hearing him say the words so matter-of-factly made me wince, but he didn’t notice. “And I cried and I cried because I just wanted to see my mom, you know? And I didn’t understand why she would just leave like that because we were supposed to make cookies for Halloween. That’s what I kept telling my dad, that we had to make cookies, and I couldn’t stop crying. And he just held me and he just kept saying how sorry he was, that he was so, so sorry.” Oliver huffed out a laugh that didn’t sound funny. “And now I know what he was really apologizing for. But all I really remember was missing my mom.
“And then he said we needed a ‘fresh start.’ That’s what he said, a fresh start. And that he had always wanted to call me Colin so we should change our names.” Oliver shrugged. “I guess I was afraid of pissing him off, not because he was mean or abusive or anything like that, but just . . . I was already down a mom, you know? I didn’t want to lose my dad, too.”
“You should tell your mom this,” I whispered. “Oliver, you need to tell her.”
“What kind of kid doesn’t call his mom, though?” he murmured, looking down at the ground so that his hair fell down around his face, hiding him. “Why didn’t I just call her?”
“You were seven,” I whispered, brushing his hair back behind his ear with my free hand. “You were a little kid, Ollie, and you thought she didn’t want you. No one could ever blame you.”
He glanced up at me, and I suspected that he didn’t quite believe me. “I’m serious,” I told him. “No one has ever or will ever blame you. Your mom never has. She never did.”
“Yeah, but now . . .” Oliver’s jaw tensed before he said the rest of his sentence. “The problem is that now I miss my dad just like I used to miss my mom.” He glanced back at me, waiting for judgment.
“I would miss my dad, too,” I admitted.
“Even if he lied to you for ten years about everything?”
“Even then,” I said, because it was true. “I’d hate him and miss him at the same time.”
“That’s . . . pretty much what it is. And it sucks.” Oliver took another deep breath, then looked toward the purpled sky and exhaled. “Fuck. I am so tired of paying the price for something I never did and didn’t even want in the first place!”
I sat and I thought of surfing, of college, of ten years spent in a gilded cage. “I understand,” I said, then curled back up against him. “I really, really think I do.”
He wrapped his arm around my knees so that we were huddled together, and I tucked my hands into his hoodie pocket. We sat in silence for a long time, listening to the waves and seagulls and distant traffic. The world continues to spin even when we want it to stop, I thought. Especially then.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
After that, we talked.
He told me about his dad, how he had once organized an at-home movie festival just for Oliver so that he could learn about the great directors and count it toward homeschooling. (“The movies were kind of boring,” he admitted, “but the popcorn was good.”) He talked about how they went fishing in Illinois, hiking in Vermont, and once even to Disney World, when Oliver was eight. “It was the greatest day of my life,” Oliver said, still smiling at the memory, and I smiled, too, wondering where the day he finally came home ranked on that list. I almost didn’t want to know.
He also mentioned different things, like the fact that he was lucky that his adult teeth grew in straight because his dad would never have let him go to an orthodontist, and that he never was allowed to have sugar or candy because they never went to a dentist. It didn’t make sense at first, but then it hit me. “Dental records,” I said, and Oliver tapped his nose as if to say, Bingo.
“I mean, I don’t know if anything would have happened,” Oliver clarified. “But I didn’t care. I was just excited that I didn’t have to go to the dentist. And of course, it was one of the first places my mom took me.”
“Did you have any cavities?”
He grinned at me, and yeah, he was lucky his teeth grew in so nice and straight. “Not a one,” he said.
In return, I told him about what it was like growing up here, me and Caro and Drew becoming our little triangle of friends. I told him about the police, the yearly updates on the news, how the interest had been so big for a month or so and then tapered away. “That’s when things really got bad,” I told him one night, when we were driving around in the car. “I think when everyone was focused on the kidnapping, it was more helpful to your mom. But when interest waned . . .” I shrugged. “It’s hard when everyone else moves on, but you can’t.”
“Did she ever have to . . . ?” Oliver trailed off, but I knew what he was asking. No one could ever ask that question directly.