The Simple Wild (Wild 1)

“How do you think that makes me feel!” I snap, tears threatening.

Simon remains calm and collected. He’s used to being yelled at for his prodding questions—by my mom and me, and by his patients. “Do you want to fly to Alaska to meet your father?”

“No.”

He raises an eyebrow.

I sigh with exasperation. “I don’t know!”

What am I supposed to do with this information? How am I supposed to feel about possibly losing a person who has only ever hurt me?

We sit quietly and watch as Tim and Sid venture out from beneath the car, their humps bobbing with their steps as they head for the bins at the end of our driveway, standing on their hind legs to paw at the blue one, attempting to knock it over with their weight. They chatter back and forth to each other, only bothering with an occasional glance at their audience.

I sigh. “He’s never made an effort to get to know me. Why should I bother making the effort now?”

“Would there be a better time?”

That’s Simon. Always answering a question with another question.

“Let me ask you this: Do you think you could gain someth

ing from going to Alaska?”

“Besides a picture with my mom’s sperm donor?”

Simon grimaces his disapproval at my poor attempt at humor.

“Sorry,” I mumble. “I guess I just have low expectations for a man who hasn’t cared enough to meet his daughter once in twenty-­four years.” He was supposed to come to Toronto. He called me four months before my eighth-grade graduation, to say that he was coming for it. I started crying the moment I hung up. All the anger and resentment that’d been building up over the years, for all the birthdays and holidays he’d missed, disintegrated instantly. And I truly believed that he’d be there, that he’d be sitting in the audience with a proud grin on his face. I believed it, right up until he called, two days before the ceremony, to say that “something” came up. An emergency at work. He wouldn’t elaborate.

My mother called him back. I heard her seething voice through the walls. I heard the ultimatum she delivered through tears—that either he sort his priorities out and finally show up for his daughter or get out of our lives for good, monthly child support checks and all.

He never showed up.

And when I stood on the stage, accepting my academic award, it was with puffy eyes and a forced smile, and a silent promise to myself that I would never trust him again.

Simon hesitates, his wise gaze peering out into the darkness. “Did you know that your mother was still in love with Wren when we got married?”

“What? No, she wasn’t.”

“She was. Very much so.”

I frown. “But she was married to you.”

“That doesn’t mean she didn’t still love him.” A pensive look fills his face. “Do you remember when your mother went through that phase, when she changed her hair and started working out almost every day? She was highly irritable with me.”

“It’s fuzzy, but yeah.” She dyed her hair platinum blonde, and started going to yoga obsessively, reversing the softening effects of middle age and turning her body hard again. She was throwing petty jabs at Simon between sips of morning coffee, picking at his personal faults over lunch, sparking colossal fights over everything he wasn’t by dinner.

I remember thinking it was odd, that I’d never seen them fight at all, let alone that frequently.

“That all began after Wren called to say he was coming.”

“No, it didn’t,” I begin to argue, before stopping myself. Simon would have a much better grasp of that timeline than I would.

“When your mother left Wren, she did it hoping that he would change his mind about staying in Alaska. He never did, but she never stopped loving him, despite it. Eventually she knew she had to move on. She met me, and we married. And then all of a sudden he was coming here, back into her life. She didn’t know how to deal with seeing him again, after so many years. She was . . . conflicted about her feelings for the both of us.” If Simon is bitter about admitting this, he doesn’t show it.

“That must have been hard for you.” My heart pangs for the man I’ve come to know and love as a more than suitable replacement for my birth father.

Simon smiles sadly. “It was. But I noticed a change in her after your graduation. She was less anxious. And she stopped crying.”