Later that day, with Victor tucked quietly in his room, Lila poured herself a glass of water and padded into the dining room, settled herself at the computer. She hesitated before typing in www.findDelilahBlue.com. What came up on the screen made her gasp. She pushed her chair back and tried to focus on her breath.
The banner across the top was black with
FIND DELILAH BLUE LOVETT
in tall, thin brushstrokes. Beside the words, scattered on the left side, were childhood photos of a dirty-blond Delilah. Of Delilah with a teacher. Delilah with sawed-off bangs on Elisabeth’s lap. Yes, even Delilah with sparkly lavender fairy wings. Photos so unfamiliar to Lila it made her sick just looking at them. As if she’d been followed, tracked. As if she’d left impressions behind she never knew about.
Red buttons in the shape of maple leaves marched
across the page, as if identifying Lila as a Canadian might shrink the vastness of the planet, given that she could have been anywhere on it. Each red leaf was clickable. One said
ABOUT DELILAH BLUE
. Another said
HELP FIND
, another said
NEWS AND UPDATES
. She clicked on this last one and up popped a new screen with a list of imagined sightings. One in North Carolina at a gas station. Several in Toronto. One in Bayfield, Ontario, in front of a yellow bookstore, another in Wales, England, getting onto a bus. But these were old listings, some from ten years back. They ended on November 14, 2003, with a sighting of a teenage girl leaving a museum in San Francisco. So close. She clicked on the
ABOUT DELILAH BLUE BUTTON
, shifting her chair forward, sitting up taller, as if improved oxygenation would make this easier. A huge photo came up. Her face took up the entire frame, with wisps of long, stringy hair blowing across her eyes—huge from this close up. This Delilah wasn’t looking at the camera. Her small pointed chin had tipped her face to one side. It appeared as if she was speaking with someone, in a playground perhaps, someplace so exciting that the child hadn’t noticed the windblown hair in her eyes.
It wasn’t a photo she remembered any more than it was a day she remembered. But that wasn’t what had her stomach in cramps. Something about the photo—maybe the feeling of movement long stilled, maybe the look of sureness in her eyes—had the faraway, lost-hope quality of a memorial photo in the local paper. When a child has suffered the most terrible fate of all. The type of picture that would be accompanied by a second photo showing a group of weeping schoolchildren placing flowers, notes, and teddy bears on the sidewalk in front of the mourning family’s home.
A hot, gravylike haze enveloped her, moved in close,
pressed on her from every which way. As if the world had evaporated and nothing solid was left underfoot. Pinpricks of light marched in from her periphery, and she realized she was holding her breath. She should breathe, she knew that. Any idiot would. But she refused, feeling her consciousness ebb and shudder and loom large enough to see too far, beyond where time begins and time ends. It was too far a journey for such a broken passenger. She wasn’t up for it. The room in front of her melted into a soup of swirling colors, sounds, matter.
She closed her eyes. Instead of losing consciousness, Lila turned to her left and vomited for the third time that day.
L
ATER
, V
ICTOR SAT
at the kitchen table nudging corn
niblets onto his fork. “Where did you get this corn?”
“Green Giant.”
He pushed the forkful into his mouth and raised his brows. “I hope you bought more. It’s delicious.”
The light was too bright in the kitchen. The entire house had been growing ever brighter over recent months. When they first moved in, Victor used only pink-tinted lightbulbs, claiming it made for a cozy ambiance. But his aging eyes had other ideas about mood lighting, prompting him to seek out stronger and stronger bulbs until the rooms kicked you in the retina when you entered. They were now living in a 7-Eleven.
In the nine hours since she’d left her mother, her father had been restless. He’d paced the length of the house repeatedly, tried without success to nap twice, insisted on watching the airing of the original black-and-white Audrey Hepburn film
Sabrina
, and made a half dozen phone calls about getting some kind of fence installed. When she asked
why, he’d refused to elaborate. Thankfully, the evening air seemed to have stilled him.
Her stomach was empty, free of convulsions. It was as good a time as any to confront Victor. She dropped into the vinyl chair across the table and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Dad.”
No response.
“Dad.”
Victor looked up. “Have you seen a box of powdered donuts? Said
GENEVIEVE
on the lid?”
“It said nothing on the lid, and I threw them out weeks ago.”
“They did not say nothing. They said
GEN
.”
“Who is this Gen anyway?”
“She’s the one who likes the powdered jellies.”
Lila sighed. She wasn’t prepared to get into drama about donuts. “I need to talk to you about something else. Do you know who I was with today?”
Victor pierced a series of niblets with the tines of his fork and slid them off with his teeth. “I do not.”
“I was with Mum.”
He stopped chewing. “Your mother?”
“Yes. You remember her. Reddish-brown hair, about five-foot-six. Big smile. Gave birth to me.”
“She’s here? In L.A.?”
“Yes.”
Pushing his chair back from the table with a scrape, he leaned forward, eyes darting from the window to his daughter’s face. From the way his chest rose and fell it was clear his breath was coming fast and furious. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. Her apartment, I guess. She came to find me yesterday.”
“Where? Where did she come find you?”
Not at art school where I had just finished begging to pose nude
. “Nearby.”
He jumped up, went to the window, and looked out into the dusk light. Once assured she wasn’t lurking in the bushes, he spun around. “I don’t feel right. I can’t breathe. Or swallow.” His hand went to his chest and he allowed his daughter to lead him back to his chair. “I need a drink maybe.”
She grabbed his empty juice glass and filled it with tap water. When she set it in front of him, he waved it away. “Something stronger. There’s a new bottle of Balvenie. In the cupboard.”
“What is it? Your heart?” She glanced at him, worried, as she uncorked the bottle and sloshed dark amber liquid into a shot glass, spilling it all over the table.
“Careful.” He mopped the scotch with his napkin.
Okay. The man wasn’t dying. In the history of heart attacks, there couldn’t be one person who, in the throes of cardiac arrest, contemplated sucking scotch out of the corner of a paper napkin to ensure he got his money’s worth. “You’re panicking. Just take a few breaths and calm yourself.”
He tossed back the drink and tapped his glass on the table. When she poured him a refill it vanished just as quickly.
“Feeling better?”
He didn’t answer. Just stared at his shot glass and breathed in, breathed out.
“Fucking hell.
Fucking
hell. It had to happen. I knew it had to happen.”
“She says she’s been looking for me, Dad. All these years. And that’s not all.”
He got up again and crossed the room, dropped his bearded jaw into one hand.
“She says you took me. Just like that. Just ran away with me and disappeared.”
The dog started braying outside and Victor looked through the window. “Damn neighbors.”
“Is it true?”
Yip yip yip.
“Dad.”
Silence.
She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Tell me what happened.”
He looked at his daughter, blinking. When soft strands of hair fell in front of his eyes, he nudged them to the side and shrugged, his shoulders limp, his expression that of someone who’d accidentally set the toaster on fire. He sucked in a deep breath and said nothing.
S
EPTEMBER
12, 1996
Graham Trent was Victor’s oldest friend. Though these days, not much remained of the overweight jokester with a distaste for school and an appetite for the stage. After wasted years spent lining up for auditions alongside his starry-eyed mother, and never securing much more than a back-to-school flyer for a national drug store, Graham grew serious about his studies. He secured a job selling vinyl windows and doors, and eventually put himself
through law school at the prestigious and historic University of Toronto.Now, at forty-one, sitting behind a polished wooden desk with leather inlays, his graying hair still long enough to graze his collar, Graham reeked of success. Framed degrees and certificates lined his walls; photos of his young wife and partner, Kelly, decorated bookshelves packed with family law journals; and industrious assistants and articling students buzzed in with files needing his immediate attention.
“You’re right,” said Graham, unwrapping a stick of Doublemint and popping it in his mouth before tossing one onto the desk in front of Victor. Graham grinned. “The courts have favored Elisabeth. The woman knows how to work those dimples. Just like she sweet-talked you back in the day, she charms these judges. Maybe you should work on your girlish smile.”
Victor ignored his friend’s attempt at humor. “I walk around every day now terrified for my child’s safety. I’m up half the night. I’m seeing a therapist. I have shortness of breath. I’m telling you, I can’t take this. I even asked Elisabeth if I could move back in—at least then I’d be able to control what’s happening in the house.”
“Come on. You may not like your custody arrangement, but things aren’t as bad as that.”
“You know she left Delilah with some stranger the other week? Another one of these weirdo artsy losers she drags home. She meets him the day before at some art soiree and leaves her eight-year-old alone with him while she goes out to pick up Thai food. The guy answers the phone—I could hear him sucking on a joint—and actually questions me before letting me speak to my own daughter. You believe that? The guy could have done anything to her.”
“Seriously?”
“And you know how she justifies it? She met this jerk at the AGO and assures me he’s okay
because he’s a patron
. He tells her his family made some whopping donation to the gallery and she invites him back to her place for dinner.”“Always looking for her prince,” said Graham, shaking his head. “Clearly she thought you were her ticket at one point.”
“Turns out all I did was make her hunger for more. Pharmaceutical sales didn’t cut it. My bonus checks stopped looking good once she discovered trust-fund boys. Nice padded bank accounts remove all the risk, not to mention the waiting.”
“Well, she is single now. She has every right to look for moneyed men.”
“You’re missing the point. She gave this guy full access to her child and she’d known him a few hours.”
Graham winced as he processed this information.
“So the next day Delilah starts yapping about how cool he is because he paints all night and drives a Porsche Carrera. Then she tells me she saw him naked in her mother’s studio when she came downstairs for a glass of milk. Turns out Elisabeth was sketching him.”
Graham groaned.
“And she let Delilah walk home from a friend’s house alone last week. It was after dark. ‘You have to let kids be kids,’ she tells me. ‘Give them freedom.’ Said the world is full of loving people and that I was the lousy parent for not trusting the human race!”
“The human race? Man, tell her to spend a day at the courthouse. That’ll set her head straight.”
“The child doesn’t even have a bedtime. Apparently setting a schedule for a child is something akin to corporal abuse. And Delilah’s sleeping bag smells like cigarette smoke.” Victor pulled a tiny bottle of aspirin from his suit jacket and popped two pills without water.
“Sure, but—”
“This is a woman who left her toddler alone in a wading pool in the backyard while she ran inside to ‘adjust’ a painting. Remember? You’ve got to get me a better deal. Get me full custody and she has visitation.”
“It won’t happen.” Graham’s phone buzzed. He held up a finger to Victor and answered his assistant’s question, then leaned back in his chair and stared at his friend. “These are definitely examples of poor parental judgment, I won’t argue that. I wouldn’t want her watching my kids—should Kelly agree to have any—but it’s damned near impossible to take custody away from a mother unless she’s flat-out abusive. Or addicted to crystal meth.”
“Yeah? How about last June? How about when she almost…Jesus, I can’t even say it. I get heart palpitations just thinking about it.”
“We’ve discussed that to death. I’m prepared for Elisabeth and her potential accusations.”
“False accusations.”
“False accusations.”
Victor felt a flush rise up his neck and into his cheeks. “It’s just like every other time Elisabeth has messed up. Never her fault.”
“What about Delilah? Is she ready yet to talk about what happened?”
“Doesn’t remember a thing. Doctors said that was the brain’s way of protecting the psyche and it’s probably best for us not to say anything.”
“How long has it been?”
“It was June.”
Graham twisted his mouth to one side, lost in thought. He stared at Victor. “If we had a witness, we could undermine
the judge’s confidence in Elisabeth. Tilt the favor toward you.”“It’s her word against mine and that scares me to death. The woman’s as smooth as they come. Just tell me I’m not going to get my access reduced if she piles on the lies.”
“Won’t happen.
”“And if it does, what’s my worst-case scenario?
”“Vic, it won’t happen.
”“Just give me the what if. Please.
”Grant let out a long breath. “You could lose unsupervised access.”
“Which means?”
“You’d see Delilah in a government-regulated supervised access center for visits of an hour or two at a time.”
Victor rubbed his forehead. “No sleepovers? No outings? No holidays, even?”
“Stop doing this to yourself. That’s not going to happen. It’s not even a consideration.”
Victor’s stared at the wall and whispered, “I couldn’t live that way. I swear to God, I couldn’t.”
“Victor, I’ve known you forever. You tend to…” Graham crossed his legs. “How do I say this nicely? You tend to get a bit paranoid when it comes to Delilah. Remember when she was a baby? You took her to the emergency room the first time she spit up.”
“Screw you, Graham.”
Graham laughed. “I’m sorry, buddy. But you need more in your life than your kid and your work. You need a distraction. Try golf. Might help you sleep.”
“Full custody and my daughter living to see her twenty-first birthday would help me sleep. I can’t take the stress. It’s impossible to fight Elisabeth. I’m telling you, I might do something crazy.”
Graham’s assistant poked her head in. “Sorry, Mr. Trent. But it’s nearly noon. You have to be in court…”
“Right.” Graham stood up and reached for his valise. Shooting his friend an apologetic look, he began packing his case with legal pads and files. “I have to go. But call me tomorrow. We’ll talk some more. Nothing rash in the meantime, okay? Things are going to work out fine—you’ll see.”
Victor nodded, waving his thanks as he rose and headed toward the door.
Graham called out, “Hey.” Victor turned around. “I know it’s tough. But if we get the right judge on Tuesday—believe me, a hard-nosed judge like Judith Lewicki would not succumb to Elisabeth’s charms—we’ll get you a lot more face time with your daughter.”
“And if we get any other judge?”
Graham pulled on his trench coat. “The very worst that will happen is things stay as they are now.”