“What are you doing, Ryden?”
I reach into Hope’s diaper bag and pull out a baggie with a silver twist tie around the top. “I brought you candy,” I say, holding it up. It’s filled with Smarties and rock candy and sour gummy worms and tiny boxes of Nerds and all kinds of other stuff. “I stopped at the candy store on the way over. I figure it’s my turn to bring you a peace offering.”
She covers her face with her hands and shakes her head. “You can’t bribe me with candy and expect everything to go back to the way it was.”
“I’m not—I mean, I would never think that. I just know you like candy, so I wanted to bring you some. You bring—brought—me stuff when I wasn’t in a good mood, and it always helped.” I take a deep breath. “Actually, it wasn’t the food that made it better. It was you. You make everything better, Joni.”
She moves her hands away from her face and looks up slowly.
I take that as a signal to keep talking. “I’ve missed you so much this week, you have no idea. I know I have no right to show up here and ask you to listen to me like this, but I…I don’t know. I want us to start over. I want you to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about you. Even the shitty parts. I can’t change the past or pretend it didn’t happen, like you said, but I’m hoping there’s a way to move forward from it. And I really want you to be there for that.”
I break off, gasping a little. The words rushed out, and I kind of forgot to breathe. Joni watches me, silent.
When I get my air back, I say, “So, first step toward you knowing everything about me: this is Hope.” I hold Hope’s car seat so it’s close to our eye level, lift one of her sleeping baby hands, and wave it at Joni. “Her name is Hope Rosa Brooks, and her mother’s name was Megan Elizabeth Reynolds. She’s seven and a half months old, she loves weird-looking monster toys with googly eyes and big teeth, and I’m pretty sure I’m her least favorite person in the world. But we’re working on it.” I hold Joni’s gaze. “She also loves your Washington Square Park soundtrack.”
“Ryden…”
“Yeah?” I can’t stop the hope that surges through me. I’m putting everything out there—it has to work. It just has to.
“I…”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t do this. It’s too little too late.”
“Joni, please. I—” I stop myself as my brain skips ahead of my mouth and I realize what I was about to say. I was about to tell her I loved her. Where did that come from? I can’t be in love with her. It’s only been seven months since Meg died. Seven and a half. Whatever. It’s too soon. Way too soon. Instead, I say, “I miss you.”
She shakes her head at me sadly. “Bye, Ryden.” She starts to close the door.
“No! Wait!” I spring into action, pulling open the screen door and sticking my foot in the doorjamb so she can’t close the interior door on me. She stops, sighs, and waits.
She wants honesty? Well, then that’s what she’s gonna get.
“Please don’t walk away from me. I feel like if you do, I’ll never get you back, and I’m really not okay with that.”
She doesn’t move. Her eyes narrow, but they’re somehow less sad than they were a minute ago. She’s giving me the chance to say whatever I need to say or do whatever I need to do to change her mind once and for all.
Time to pull out the big guns.
I look her straight in the eye and blurt out, “I got my scar when I was eleven years old.” Joni opens her mouth, then closes it, listening. “I was on my way home from my friend’s house a few streets over, and I noticed this Frisbee stuck in the branches of a tree right near the house of this family who had, like, nine or ten kids. The ones in my school were really popular. I got this idea in my head that I would climb the tree and get the Frisbee and knock on their door and say, ‘Behold! I have come to return your Frisbee!’ And they’d all be grateful and think I was so brave, and word would spread around the neighborhood and on the school bus that I was their hero.”
I keep rambling. “So I climbed the tree. Turned out the Frisbee was a lot higher than it seemed from below, but I got it out and tossed it to the ground. Except then I couldn’t get down. I couldn’t get a good perspective on the branches or footholds to lower myself down, and I was too scared to jump. So I ended up sitting in that tree, stuck, for hours.”
Joni giggles. Yes. It’s working.
I smile. “It gets worse. So after a while of sitting there, having no idea how I was going to get down, I had to pee. Knowing I had nowhere to go made me have to pee even more. So I peed from the tree.”
“No!” Joni covers her mouth with her hand.