His Secret Heart (Crown Creek) Page 2

  I’ve been saving the news about my costume much longer than I thought I’d have to. Daddy hasn’t been home since the end of September, which is longer than he’s usually away. But you always save the best for last, right? He’s definitely the best. And I forgive him for being away so long.

  Just like I forgive him missing my first day of second grade at Reckless Falls Elementary.

  Just like I forgive him for saying he’ll take me camping over the long, boring summer break and then forgetting.

  Missed visits from the Tooth Fairy. Birthday presents weeks after my actual birthday. The class play where the only thing I could see when I looked out into the audience what his empty seat.

  I always forgive my Daddy.

  Even when he’s away for this long, I know, with rock-solid certainty, that he’ll always come back for me.

  I know he can’t wait to come home to his Princess.

  And he’s coming home today.

  Ever since I got home from school, I’ve been right here by the window, watching. I can feel Janet’s disapproving glares every time she moves around behind me. I know she wants me to turn around and see her watching me.

  So I don’t. I face the window and I don’t even turn when she drops a plate in the kitchen and swears to herself. It sounds like she’s crying, though why would she cry over something so silly? Just get a broom and sweep it up, and stop making so much noise. Grown-ups are so weird. I huff and roll my eyes, blowing out a puff of breath that sends my wispy, too-long bangs skyward.

  Janet’s the housekeeper. She’s not my mom, not my aunt, not my grammy, not that any of those people matter either. She might be the one who gets me off to school every morning and tucks me into bed every night. But she isn’t my Daddy.

  I know she thinks I should move away from the window. I know she thinks I shouldn't get excited every time I hear the rumble of a semi. But I don’t care what she thinks. She’s not important.

  “You and me, Princess,” my father likes to say as he pulls me into his lap and tickles my cheek with his whiskers. “We’re a team. You and me.”

  I always smile and agree. “We’re a team,” I echo, smiling my gap-toothed smile because I know it makes him happy to see how cute I am. I never ask why, if we’re a team, he doesn’t stay around more. It's hard being part of a team that’s always down one man.

  But I don’t say that. I know better. I know that his job as a trucker keeps him on the road for weeks at a time. And I also know that I’m his little lady, the only woman that matters to him now that my mom's run off.

  She wasn’t part of the team. She tired him out, always asking too many questions. Wanting to know what took him so long. Badgering him late at night when he just wants to bask in the sweetness of coming home. Making his life harder instead of easier.

  I’ve got blonde hair just like her, which makes me feel a little bit like a traitor. But I know I’ve got his eyes and that’s the important thing. I’ve got eyes the same color as my name, he always says. “Sky with eyes like the sky.” Then he tugs my braid and I feel proud and special. And I don’t even cry when he leaves again. I just stand with my back straight, shrugging off Janet’s hand as she tries to comfort me. And I wave until his truck disappears over the hill

  To me, that’s what love is. Something fleeting that you cling to as you lie awake at night, running over your memories. When he leaves, I go over them one by one, the same way I play with the jewelry in the box my mother left behind. I lie in bed and open the box in my mind marked “Daddy,” and select one perfect moment. I play with it, lifting it up to the light and admiring its gleaming shine.

  There aren’t enough of them to last me the time it takes to fall asleep, so some I take out more than others. I relive those memories again and again, polishing them until they shine with impossible radiance.

  But I never let myself stay with them for long. I know I need to put them back in the box, and close it tight. Somehow I know that if I polish something too often, it’ll get dull.

  And love is a shining, precious, rare thing. It’s not the boring, constant, nagging presence of Janet. It's not my teachers hugging me and brightly asking when my dad could make it to a parent teacher conference. Love is not my friends asking me if they can come over to play and then wanting to know why I aways say no.

  Those are my constants. They’re boring and familiar and that’s what I resent most about them. I lose interest in things that are the same every day.

  My Daddy, though. He's not boring. He not constant or familiar.

  One time in school, my teacher read us a book about the dinosaurs. There was one illustration at the end that I could not tear my eyes away from. It showed two brontosauruses staring up at the sky in alarm as a bright streak tore across it. Seconds away from obliterating them forever.

  My father’s love was a meteor strike, just like in that book. He streaked in out of nowhere, lighting up my life in a blaze of incandescent fury that lasted only second. He left me scorched and cratered. He hollowed me out and left me waiting for the next time he'd cross my path.

  And like the dinosaurs, I was helpless to do anything but watch and wait.

  But right now my waiting is over. “That’s him!” I shout, recognizing the sound of his truck, its bass rumble vibrating me from far away. It brings me to life, that sound. I leap up, shaking off the malaise, the boredom, the sameness of my life between his homecomings. “That’s him!”

  Now I am the meteor, streaking out of the house and onto the front porch. With my heart pounding, I watch as my Daddy rolls in. He swing his big red rig into the gravel apron of our drive, and then I am moving.

  I fly across the lawn and yank the door open before he even cuts the engine. Then I leap straight into his arms.

  He roars with laughter, leaping down to swing me in a circle and then up to the sky. “There’s my Princess!” I whoop and laugh, and am convinced I could fly. Like a parched, wilted flower coming to life after a spring rain, I guzzle him up. I soak up his smile, cling to his neck and refuse to let him put me down even when he complains about how I’ve gotten heavier. “What are you feeding this child?” he calls out to Janet.

  “Whatever I can scrape together on the little bit you give me for a food budget, Bill,” Janet says darkly. “Since I never know when you’re gonna be back, I have to make things that are cheap and filling.”

  “Is she always this grumpy?” my Daddy asks me with a wink, and I giggle and nod because we're a team. We're united against Janet, against my mother, against my teachers. It's us against the whole entire world.

  “Sorry I had to leave you with Grouchypants Magoo over there,” he whispers.

  "What was that, Bill?" Janet calls, and I fall out laughing.

  My Daddy nods his approval. He likes when I show him how loyal I am. “What do you say we get out of here, Princess?”

  “Yeah?” I hold my tongue and don't ask questions. He might change his mind if I do.

  “You and me on a camping trip? How does that sound?”

  I squeal and fling my arms around him again. I don't love camping as much as he thinks I do. What I love is being the very center of his attention. Just him and me in the woods, with nothing to distract him. Nowhere to run off to. "It sounds good, Daddy," I say, picturing him in his hammock and feeling happy and relaxed. I’ll fetch him his beers so he’ll call me his good girl and tug my braid. And at night when he folds me into my sleeping bag, he’ll sing to me. I’ll fall asleep to the night noises and the sound of his breathing. And once or twice in the night I’ll reach out and poke him just to reassure myself that he is still there.

  That's what I love about camping, and his suggestion has me weak with wanting. But I still don't move or get my hopes up about it. “I have school,” I remind him, because he most likely forgot. I give him one more chance to take it away from me.

  “Fuck it,” he says.

  I hide a scandalized giggle behind my hands. My Daddy’s language is always sa
lty when he comes home from being on the road. My Mom used to get on him about it, but I never will.

  He can swear all he like so long as he stays longer than a day.

  "Are we going right now?" I don't dare hope.

  He tugs my braid. "Yep, right now. Go get your things. Run, Princess."

  I run, flying past Janet like she’s nothing but a shadow cast by my father's bright light. I can hear her sigh as I pass though. She’s always sighing. It’s just one more thing that Janet does. Like her grim smiles and syrupy nicknames, her sighs wash right over me. I barely notice them at all.

  I rush upstairs, practiced hands grabbing only the essentials. I know I need to be fast, before something else can catch his attention. Before Janet starts lighting into him, the way my mom used to do, and puts him in a bad mood. Before he can say "why do I even bother then?" and hop back into his rig. Before he heads back out on the road without me.

  I know he doesn't mean to hurt me when he does this. I know it's just the rest of the world weighing him down. Nobody understands him. But I do.

  So I hurry, mentally running down the checklist. And then whirling around laughing because I almost forgot my sleeping bag.

  Janet is murmuring at him in a low voice when I get back down to the driveway. It sounds like she's trying to press a point, make my father see her point of view. She’s not yelling at him. Yet.

  But the second I appear, he turns his attention away from her and claps his hand in glee. "There she is, my little lightning bolt!" I grin, proud of how fast I am, and then laugh when he takes my duffel and sleeping bag with a chivalrous bow.

  I don't even say goodbye to Janet as we climb back into his rig. I put her behind me. Just like I do with everything else. There is always a future to hope for. And there is always the now to contend with. I am at tabula rasa, a blank slate, ready for my story to be written by who ever appears in it next. My father impermanence has made a permanent mark on me in ways I’m too young to understand.

  But high up in his rig, as proud as a queen on her throne, I don’t think about that. Because I’m heading out to camp with my Daddy.

  Chapter Two

  Sky

  Now

  I threaded my tent poles through the guides. It was a good thing I’d done this so often that my hands moved without thought.

  Because the last thing I wanted to do was start thinking.

  Once my tent was set up, I paused and looked up. The blaze of bright orange oak leaves stood out vibrant against the darkening sky. Today had been beautiful. And all I wanted to was pretend it never happened.

  The smell of charcoal and campfires hit me with a jaw-cracking punch of nostalgia. “Here’s how you build a fire, Princess,” my dad had said on one of those camping trips long ago. One of those treasured snatches of a childhood spent in concentrated form. “Let me show you how to do this. I used to build the fires, back when I was in Scouts —.”

  The fires were real, I knew because I’d built one right here at my campsite. Just the way he’d shown me. But those stories he’d tell about his boyhood and the adventures he had. Were those true?

  Had he ever told me the truth about anything? Or was my entire life built - from the ground up - on a lie?

  Shit. I was thinking again.

  I shook my head and looked around, searching for something to capture my attention and take me out of my head.

  And then, blessedly, I heard it.

  "Fuck."

  It was a low voice. A male voice. And he sounded frustrated.

  I turned in a slow circle, searching for the source of the voice. Driven more by the need to stay out of my head than by any kind of curiosity.

  There, across the road from my corner site, there was the silhouette of a man crouched over a fire pit.

  He struck his matches again and again, but all he was managing to do was create a lot of smoke.

  An echo of my father sounded in my head. Look at this joker. What the hell is he doing?

  The man stood back up. Then kicked at the pile of logs, stomping his big boots so hard that I felt the vibration where I stood. My dad’s echo was chuckling now. Come on, Princess. Let’s go show him how it’s done.

  “Stop!”

  I was talking to my father. I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until the silhouette shifted and turned my way. His face was masked in shadow, but I could sense he was watching me. And I was too grateful for the distraction to feel embarrassed that he'd caught me talking to the voices in my head.

  Putting one foot in front of the other would carry me away from thoughts I did not want to think. So I started walking towards him. “Hey, you need a hand?” I called into the gloom.

  He was building a fire - or trying to anyway - in the shadow of a huge, boxy trailer, the biggest one I'd ever seen. It stood out as the height of luxury, even in a luxe campground like this one. The curved front almost made it look like a bus. Specifically a rock star's tour bus.

  Odd accommodations and piss-poor fire-building skill. This guy was not your usual camper.

  “No. I got it,” he grumbled. Growled was more like it. His voice was a deep bass note that went straight to my toes. And it held an air of menace. Of danger. The kind of danger a woman camping alone is usually very much in tune with. If I had been in my right mind, I would have ducked back into my tent and checked that my pepper spray was nearby.

  I was not in my right mind. At all.

  “Fuck it.” I said that aloud too. I was talking to myself now. Or maybe I was talking to my Dad. After all, he could probably hear me, wherever he was. Above me. Or below.

  “Let me do that,” I called again, and didn’t give the stranger any time to be all rumbly and threatening. If he couldn’t make a fucking fire, how much of a threat could he be? “You’re smothering it.”

  He chuckled darkly and rumbled something else. But as I approached him - alone and in the dark - he stepped back instead of stepping forward. And gestured for me to go ahead.

  I crouched down and rearranged the crowded logs in the fire pit. I stacked them up in a neat teepee the way my dad had taught me. “Where’s your kindling?” I asked.

  "Don't have any."

  "How do you figure this'll catch?"

  “Lighter fluid.”

  “Pussy,” I challenged. Did I have a death wish? All I knew was nothing seemed to matter. If my Dad was dead… and if what I’d learned today was the truth, then what was the point of being safe? “Lighter fluid? You obviously weren’t a Boy Scout.”

  “Nope.” There was that rumble again, but this time it vibrated up my spine.

  “You’ve got a deep voice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever sing?”

  A pause. Then. “Yeah.”

  I nodded as I struck the match and held it to the neat pile of kindling I’d mounded under the logs. “You’d be a good bass guy in a barbershop quartet.”

  This brought that dark chuckle again, but I didn’t get to think on what it might mean because the kindling had caught. “Ha!” I crowed as the little tongue of flame curled upward and licked at the underside of a log. “See? Now it has room to breathe.”

  I heard him inhale and then let out a frustrated exhale. “I know how it feels.”

  A note in his voice made me look up. He was still mostly in shadow. But in the flickering light of the newly built fire, I caught quick little flashes to piece together. He had the high, jutting cheekbones of a model. But his strong jaw disappeared into a beard worthy of scary hermit-axe-murderer. It was wild and ungroomed, but his hair hung in a stylish undercut that had been recently trimmed.

  The flames flickered higher, giving me a glimpse of the ironic glint in his eyes. But I couldn’t discern the color. Brown? Hazel?

  What did it matter? Other than a description to give to the police if he did turn out to be an axe murderer, I supposed.

  Strangely, just from those glimpses, I had a picture in my head of what the rest of his face would look like. Like
he was someone I knew. “Do I know you?”

  “Do you?”

  “I asked you.”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “You’re a surly bastard, aren’t you?”

  That dark chuckle. “So they tell me.”

  This caught me off guard and I started to laugh. “Who? The woodland creatures that live in your beard?”

  “You ask a lot of question.”

  “You’re answering them,” I pointed out.

  He fell silent and turned away. For a second I thought I’d offended him. Grief was making me run my mouth. All the things I couldn’t say, all the questions I couldn’t ask. The poisonous anger eating at my insides had me bitchy and itching for a fight.