Lovely Wild Read online

  Ethan wandered into the dining room. “When’s Grandma coming back? I’m hungry.”

  “Make yourself a peanut butter sandwich.”

  “I don’t want a peanut butter sandwich. Grandma only has soynut butter, anyway, and I don’t like it.” He kicked at the carpet. “When can we go home?”

  “Not until the end of the summer, monkeybrat. Dad said.”

  “I mean back home to Mama.”

  “I don’t know.” Kendra put away the album and pulled out another. Unlike the others, this one didn’t have a label or a date on it. She flipped it open about halfway through.

  Her grandfather had died before she was born, but she’d seen enough pictures of him to recognize his face. She didn’t know the little girl in the pictures with him. The little girl wore a baggy dress, her hair in two messy pigtails. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but at something far off in the distance. She clutched a book of fairy tales.

  “What’s Mama doing in that picture with Grandpa?” Ethan hung over Kendra’s shoulder.

  She shook him off. “Get off, dork. That’s not Mom.”

  “Sure it is. Doesn’t it look like her?” Ethan pointed at another picture of the same little girl, brow furrowed in concentration, hunched over a tray of food on what looked like a cafeteria table. “That’s how she looks when she’s hungry.”

  Kendra took another look. Then another. The little girl in the picture did have dark hair like their mom. And the same dark eyes. But...

  “Grandpa didn’t adopt Mom until she was fifteen. Before that she lived with her grandma in the Pine Grove house.”

  Ethan pulled up a chair next to hers and propped his elbows on the table to study the album. “It looks like Mama to me. C’mon, Kiki, look at her.”

  They didn’t have pictures of their mother from when she was a child. Kendra had never thought to ask why. It was just one more of those weird things in their family that they didn’t really talk about. She flipped a page. Looked closer. The other album she’d looked at, the one with her dad as a kid, had not only been labeled but also captioned.

  “Ryan’s First Birthday!”

  “Ryan’s First Bike!”

  Lots of firsts for Ryan, Kendra thought. But this album had only photo after photo, neatly placed in the plastic sleeves but without any notations at all. She slid one of the pictures, this time of the same girl in front of a chalkboard scribbled with a bunch of different markings that didn’t make sense to Kendra at all. Written on the back of the picture in faded, smudged pencil, was a single word.

  Mariposa.

  “See?” Ethan said with a shrug. “Mama.”

  FORTY-NINE

  ONCE MARI COULD’VE said anything with her fingers and a grunt or two, but back then she never had as much to say. She can’t quite manage now. This question seems too impertinent to ask aloud, but she has to find the words.

  “How did you know I’d be back?”

  Andrew shrugs. “I didn’t.”

  “But...you were waiting?”

  His smile quirks. “I thought you’d be back. I hoped. I wanted to know what happened to you.”

  “You could’ve looked me up.”

  His brows rise. “How? They took you away.”

  There’s no point in false modesty. “Apparently, I’m a case study. You could’ve looked me up online.”

  “And done what?” He gestures at his tiny room. “Called you up? Dropped by to visit? What could I have said or done? Would you have been glad to see me, Mariposa?”

  “Yes. Yes, yes and yes.” She reaches for his hands, but Andrew steps back.

  There’s only enough room for him to take one step before he bumps against the row of cupboards. This feels like a rejection, and Mari stops with her hands still outstretched. He turns his face, not looking at her.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “Because...you saved me, Andrew. I might’ve died without you.”

  “But you didn’t.” He sounds a little angry, and now he looks at her. “You moved away. You grew up.”

  “Of course I grew up. So did you. It’s what happens.”

  “You got married,” he says accusingly. “You have children. A family. A house in Philadelphia. You have a life.”

  “You have a life,” she points out. “You built this house.”

  He doesn’t really need to point out that it’s not the same. The life she’s made came to her from circumstance and fate, not necessarily by choice, but it did come to her and she’s made it her own. Mari looks around this small dwelling, this tiny space, then into Andrew’s face. He has kind eyes, lines around them. If she looked in the mirror, she might see lines around her own. It’s what happens when time passes.

  “When I was a little girl, you seemed so much older than me. But you’re not, are you?”

  “Not so much. No. Six years.”

  “My husband is eight years older than I am.” She laughs softly.

  “Your husband.” Andrew sounds disgusted.

  Mari can’t quite blame him. She’s somewhat disgusted with Ryan herself. But she’s not sure if Andrew’s curled lip is meant for Ryan...or for her.

  “You were there for me, Andrew. You were the prince from a fairy story. And later, when I met Ryan—” Mari shrugs, making no excuses but somehow understanding more about her life than she ever has before “—he became my prince, too.”

  “And you forgot me.” Andrew’s accusation is gentle but an accusation just the same.

  “I was a child. They took me away. I’d spent so long hiding from anyone who came—” She pauses, her turn to accuse. “You told me to hide. You told me they’d hurt me. I spent the first eight years of my life living in squalor when, at any time, any of those people could’ve—”

  “Taken you away. Which is what they did.”

  She stands suddenly, like being shot from a gun. There’s no room for her to advance on him, not without getting right up in his face, but after what they did together in the field, is it any more intimate to be nose to nose with him now?

  Her voice is too loud. Startling. “And would that have been a bad thing? Would it have been so awful, Andrew, for someone to have taken me away?”

  “Yes!” His cry echoes. He grips her arms so tight he will leave bruises. He shakes her and bares his teeth like a dog. “It was my job to take care of you. Protect you. It was my job to make sure you were all right.”

  “Why?” she cries. “Why?”

  “Because,” Andrew says, “I loved you.”

  Tears well in his blue eyes. She cannot stand to see him cry. Somehow, she is cradling him against her and they have sunk onto the cramped floor of his kitchen so she can rock him. When her children were small, scraped knees or bumped heads brought them running to her, and she cradled them this way. It wasn’t something she was taught how to do from experience.

  Motherhood, despite her fears, had come to her as naturally as it had been difficult for her to return to speaking with her voice. She’s never had to do anything else. Being a wife and mother has been her career. Comforting Andrew this way is not like mothering, and nor is it quite like comforting a lover, but just like all of this has been, something else entirely.

  His eyes open and stare. “Stay with me.”

  The idea is simultaneously so ludicrous and desirable she’s not sure whether to laugh or cry. “Here?”

  “Here?” he echoes. “There. In your house. It is yours, now. Isn’t it?”

  “It was always mine, even when other people were living in it.”

  He finds a smile. “So. Is there room for me there?”

  Mari smiles, too, thinking he must be joking. “With me and my family? My husband? He wouldn’t be a fan of that.”

  “Do you care?” Andrew shifts to sit up, no longer cradled but sitting across from her, knees folded because there’s no room for him to sit any other way. “I thought you told him to go.”

  Her head tilts, eyes narrowing. Did she tell him about that, or did he somehow assume?