Night Road

Grace flinched at the harshness of the command. Her little shoulders hunched forward and she shuffled away, her head hung low.

“You have no right to be here,” Jude said.

As Lexi looked up, Jude noticed several things at once: Lexi was hard looking, almost stringy, but she was still very young. And when she noticed the girl’s frizzy, curly, untamed hair, she thought of Mia saying, she’s like me Madre, is that coolio or what? Jude stumbled back at the memory. She shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have approached Lexi. She wasn’t strong enough. “Go,” Jude said weakly. “Please…”

“I needed to see her. ”

“And you have. ” Jude felt frail enough to drop to her knees. It took concentration just to keep standing.

“She’s lonely,” Lexi said, looking toward Grace, who stood apart from the other kids and stared back at them.

“What do you expect?” Jude said bitterly. “She’s grown up in a broken family. ”

“I told myself I’d see that she was happy and I’d leave. But she’s not happy. ”

Jude opened her purse, reached in for her wallet with shaking hands. “I’ll pay you to go. How much? Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty? Just tell me how much you want. ” Lexi’s face changed at that, but Jude was shaking too hard to focus clearly. A dull thudding squeezed her chest and she had the terrible thought that she might pass out. “A hundred thousand. How about that?”

“I gave her to Zach,” Lexi said. “Gave her. Do you know how hard that was? Can you imagine?”

“Losing a child?” Jude said. “Yes, Lexi. I know how it feels. ”

“I did it because I loved her. And because I trusted you and Zach and Miles to be her family. ”

Jude saw the censure in Lexi’s eyes, and she knew it was warranted, and that only made it hurt more. “We are her family. ”

“No. She’s afraid of you, did you know that? She says you never hold her or kiss her. She wonders why you don’t love her. ”

Jude felt exposed suddenly; fear bled up inside her, bubbled out until she was shaking so hard she dropped her purse. “How dare you?” But the words had no bite, no venom.

“I trusted all of you. ” Lexi’s voice broke. It was the first evidence of real emotion, and Jude seized it.

“Zach has given up everything for Grace. Everything. ”

“You mean USC, don’t you? Your Holy Grail. You never cared that he was happy, just that he did what you wanted him to. ”

“That’s not true. ”

“He loved me. But that meant nothing to you. ”

“You killed his sister,” Jude said.

“Yes,” Lexi said, her mouth trembling. “And I have to live with that every day of my life. I did everything I could to make it up to you and Zach and Grace, but there is no making it up. I gave you my freedom and my daughter—and still you want more. Well, fuck you, Jude. You don’t get any more. Grace is my daughter. My Mia. And I want her back. My lawyer filed the petition today. ”

As Lexi walked away, Jude just stood there, eyes stinging, throat tight, hearing Lexi’s voice say over and over again, my Mia.

* * *

Once Lexi started walking down the beach, she couldn’t stop. She was going in the wrong direction; her bike was parked in the public area at the end of the dead-end road. But she couldn’t turn around, couldn’t watch Jude bundle Grace up and take her away, as if it were dangerous for Grace to know her own mother.

A cool summer breeze plucked at her hair. Her eyes watered in the wind. Still, she put her hands in her pockets and kept walking. She turned and looked back down the beach. Jude was still there.

Lexi wanted to be tough and hard, to feel that she was justified in coming here and wanting her daughter back, and she did feel it—justified, for all the reasons she’d given Jude. Mostly because the Farradays had had a chance to make Grace happy and they’d failed.

But Lexi’s guilt and remorse, alway

s floating inside of her, were rising now. She had destroyed the Farradays. In the beginning, she’d hoped that her years in prison would heal them somehow, but she knew better than anyone that time and distance didn’t heal you. It had been naïve to assume that Grace could be raised as Mia and Zach had, in the bosom of love and happiness. So in a way, it was Lexi’s fault that her daughter was unhappy now.

All of that was true, and all of it weighed heavily on Lexi, but there was something else too, a lightness that she hadn’t felt in years. It was hope—a bright beam in the blackness of her guilt.