“I watched you go into it, dummy. It was one door shy of three doors down and Jo said ‘She just went into a closet.’ So you don’t need to lecture me about playing it cool.”
She could be embarrassed or affronted, but honestly, it was only funny. She tipped her head back and laughed.
“Wow,” Jonah said. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard that sound.”
It had been a while since she’d felt this way. Happy and alive. “Give Bea a hug and tell her I’ll be home in two hours.”
“You know she doesn’t understand time.”
“I know,” she said. “We gotta get on that.”
She got back in the car and Micah was sleeping, slumped against the door, his hat pulled down low. The sun gilded him in a strange way, part spotlight, part Instagram filter, and the blond of his beard glowed gold.
“Stop staring at me,” he muttered, the edge of his lush lip curling up.
“Stop being so damn pretty.”
He laughed and tucked his hat down a little further. And they drove off, both of them still smiling.
Chapter Twenty-One
Micah
Except for their arrival at Haven House when he was a kid, he didn’t have crystal-clear memories of the place. He didn’t remember what they did all day or what they ate. Where they slept.
He remembered being worried.
But now, as they pulled off the small highway onto smaller and smaller roads, he felt as if more stuff was coming back to him. If not memory then…something else. Something slightly more primordial.
“You okay?” Helen asked, looking over at him. Her eyes so serious.
“Sure.”
“You’re just…you’re, like, super still.”
The trees were so tall the bright green canopies met over the road and sunlight filtered down in patches. A deer stood at the edge of the road, nose twitching.
“Was there a guy here, a big burly guy? Real quiet but he was always building something—”
“That would be Uncle Max.”
“I liked him. He didn’t ask me questions and he let me tag along when he was building a fence.”
“Uncle Max was always building something. He had a really awful thing happen to him when he was a police officer and he came up here to hide out and heal.”
“Building fences worked?”
“Well, it didn’t hurt. Then Aunt Delia came along with her daughter, Josie, and did the rest of the hard work.” She smiled and then sobered. “He’s here. If that means anything to you. You’ll see him again.”
He felt his heart kind of leap in his chest.
“He won’t remember me. I doubt I said two words to him.”
They drove past a wooden sign that said Haven House and pulled into the driveway. There was a big yellow farmhouse to his right, and to the left was a series of buildings. The biggest one had a waterslide coming out the top of it, twisting around only to go back into the building at the bottom.
“The water slide sure as shit wasn’t here when I was here!”
“It’s grown a lot,” she said. “We have a kitchen and dorms. We have an art studio and a school building. Fundraising this year is going towards a bigger rec center and, yes, another water slide.”
“It’s impressive,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. She was obviously proud of herself and she should be.
“You want a tour?”
“Is your daughter here?” he asked.
“Yeah, of course. Do you want to meet her?”
“Of course.” And as if he’d summoned them, the door to the farmhouse opened and two adults walked out, trying to be cool.
Jonah he recognized. The woman looked just like Helen.
“Here we go,” she said and threw open her car door just as a little girl pushed through all those grown ups’ legs and came running down the stairs in pink tennis shoes with her black curls bouncing.
Helen’s daughter.
Helen
“Bea!” she shouted and ran to scoop up her little girl, who wrapped her arms and legs around Helen’s body and squeezed tight. Helen had been busy the last 48 hours, and somehow completely outside of her life, so the way she would usually miss her daughter had taken a back seat to bailing a rock star out of jail and then making out with him at a cabin in northern New York. But now that she had her little girl back in her arms she was sick with missing her. Weak with it.
“How are you sweetie?” she asked, kissing and kissing and kissing her. “I missed you so much.”
“Do you want to hear what I did?” Bea asked and Helen nodded, even though she knew what she was in for. The rambling three-year-old monologue that would be half a story about her day and half a story about a dream she’d had interspersed with a play-by-play of Paw Patrol.
She let her family handle Micah and she soaked her little girl up through her skin.
“Mama,” Bea said, finally taking a breath. “Who is that?”