His cheek rests on top of my head and my face is pressed into the warm, clean smell of his T-shirt, but I’m stiff inside the circle of his embrace because everything about this screams wrong wrong wrong. All these years I’ve believed my father didn’t love me, that the only reason he wanted me was so that Mom couldn’t have me. I need that to be true because if it’s not, it means she didn’t just lie to everyone else. She lied to me, too.
“I’m sorry.” He pulls away. “I didn’t mean to overwhelm you. I mean, you don’t even—” He reaches out as if he’s going to stroke my cheek, and when I flinch the sadness in his eyes fills the whole room. His hands slide into his pockets. “You don’t even know me.” He looks up at the ceiling and exhales, and when he looks at me again, his eyes are shiny. “But I’m really, really happy to see you.”
I have no idea what to say, so I pull my lower lip between my teeth and let the saliva burn.
“May I—?” He reaches for my suitcase and guitar, but I tighten my grip on both and shake my head.
“You take care now, honey.” Ancilla comes to my rescue one more time, handing me a business card with her name printed on it. “If you need anything at all, you give me a holler, okay?” I nod and she pats my back. “Have a safe trip home.”
Home.
The word makes my eyes sting, but I don’t want to wipe tears on my new red shirt and I don’t have a tissue. I’m blinking to keep them at bay when my father pulls a crumpled Kleenex from his jeans pocket.
“It’s clean,” he says, and I let him take my guitar for a moment so I can blot my eyes. “Well, mostly. I, um—I’ve been kind of a mess ever since I got the call. I came as fast as I could.”
A hurricane of anger swirls inside me, and I have to fight to keep from hurling my suitcase across the room and screaming until my throat is raw. How could she do this? How could she take me away from someone who talks to me with a voice thick with tears and offers me a ratty tissue when I’m crying? How could she? How could she?
A hate so intense I think it could burn me alive flares in my chest, followed by a wave of sorrow that snuffs the hate. Mom has been my entire world for twelve years. I love her.
“So I don’t know what, if anything, your mom has told you about me,” he says, opening the trunk of a silver rental car parked outside the sheriff’s office. I put in my guitar and suitcase. “My name is Greg. You can call me that if it makes you more comfortable.” I’m relieved I don’t have to call him Dad. “I, um—I’m remarried, and my wife, Phoebe, and I have two little boys, Tucker and Joe.”
He flips open his wallet to show me a family portrait. Phoebe is girl-next-door pretty with hair the color of a wheat field. The older of the boys shares her coloring, while the other is a miniature version of Greg. He resembles me, too, which is just … weird. Their family is perfect and happy, and I wonder if there is room in the picture for a seventeen-year-old girl. Do I want to be in that picture? Do I have a choice?
“The boys aren’t really old enough to understand what’s going on,” Greg says. “But they’re excited to have a big sister.”
Even though they’re right there, captured in the moment with perpetual smiles and matching shirts, I can’t wrap my mind around the concept. I have brothers. Greg closes the trunk and smiles at me. He looks so much younger than my mom, even though they must be close in age. His face is unlined and he doesn’t have a single strand of gray hair. “Ready?”
I’m not, but I do what I always do when it’s time to leave: I get in the car and fasten my seat belt.
He starts the engine, and the little digital letter in the corner of the rearview mirror says we’re heading east. Somehow, though, I don’t think Greg has our future mapped out in his head the way Mom did. Mainly because as he drives, he’s working his lower lip, too.
We don’t talk on the drive to the airport in Chicago, except for when he says to tell him if the heat gets too warm or if I’d prefer a different radio station. Mom always talked—talks—she always talks too much, as if the silence makes her lonely. I don’t mind the soft musical babble of the radio or listening to the hum of the tires on pavement, and I’m glad Greg isn’t flooding me with words I’m not ready to hear. If no one says it out loud, there’s still a chance that none of this is real.
“Take the window.” Greg gestures toward the far seat in row eight. “You can watch as we take off and land.”
He doesn’t know if I’ve ever been on a plane before, so his suggestion makes me feel as if he thinks I was raised by wolves. My cheeks go hot with anger, but his expression seems earnest, and I realize maybe he’s being kind. The truth is, I’ve never been on a plane, and I do want to watch as we take off and land.
Sitting beside the window reminds me of Mom. We didn’t always have a car. Sometimes we rode the bus, buying as much distance as our money would allow. She always gave me the window seat, putting herself between me and the crazies—like the old lady whose lipstick bled into the cracks around her mouth. She was convinced I was her dead daughter come back to life. When Mom refused to give me to her, the woman screamed until the driver stopped and made her get off the bus. The plane to Tampa is different from the bus. It doesn’t smell bad and nearly everyone is smiling. Probably pleased to be escaping the breath of winter that’s been at the back of our necks for the past couple of weeks.
“Takeoff is always my favorite part,” Greg says, craning his neck to look out the window as Chicago shrinks smaller and smaller. “I guess because the destination—unless you’ve been there before—is ripe with possibility.”
The city disappears beneath a bank of clouds, and I close my eyes to keep from crying again. With every mile I’m farther away from my mom than I have ever been and I am … lost. Life with her is wonderful and terrible, but at least I know how to be her daughter. I have no idea how to live in Greg’s world.
“I have something for you.” He holds out a red leather photo album. I take it and open the front cover. Pasted on the front page is a pink birth announcement card for Callista Catherine Tzorvas.
Running my fingertips over the raised black letters, I speak to him for the first time. “My name is Callista?”
Greg’s chuckle dies in his throat when he realizes I’m not joking. “You didn’t know?”
I shake my head, and his eyebrows pull together. I watch as a battle wages on his face, wondering if he’s thinking the same bad things about Mom as I am. When she stole me, she left behind all the parts she didn’t want anymore. Including my real name.
“It’s Greek,” he says finally. “It means ‘the most beautiful one.’ And Tzorvas”—the tz makes a ch sound when he says it—“means you’re part of a big crazy Greek family whose noses will be in your business all the time, but who will drop everything if you need them.”
I don’t want to be angry with my mother all over again, so I push the feeling away and turn the page. There is a snapshot of her holding a newborn me, with Greg beside her. They’re teenagers—about as old as I am now—and she’s the beautiful grunge girl I remember. Mom is looking down at me and he is looking at her. He loved her and she wrecked him.
I exhale as I close the album.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s a lot to process, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I made it for, um—it’s yours, so you can look at it whenever. No rush.”
I rest my head against the little oval window, and for a while I just sit, watching the clouds and the miles pass. Through a break I see what I think might be Tennessee. Mom and I lived there for a few months when I was seven. I remember, because she worked the morning shift at a diner and would sometimes take me to the park to play with other kids. The other moms would circle up to talk—some with babies on their hips—but they never included my mom in their conversations. If she cared, she never showed it. She’d fan herself out on the grass with her portable CD player, chain-smoking cigarettes and singing along with Pearl Jam, her forever favorite band. Tennessee wasn’t as good as our first place in North Carolina—where I still went to school—but we were still happy. And Mom hadn’t met Frank yet.