But what if they didn’t?
I chewed on my nails as we drove to the police station.
“Nervous?” Alicia asked.
I nodded.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Daniel,” she said. “It’s going to be great.”
I rubbed my thumb over the back of my hand and nodded. “Yeah.”
Chief Constable Warner was waiting for us when we arrived. He took Alicia and me into an interview room, the same one they’d put me in the night they picked me up off the street. It seemed smaller than I remembered, and grubbier. Suddenly, I saw everything in hyperfocus, from the coffee stains on the carpet to the chipping paint around the doorjamb. This is where I’ll see Patrick and Alexis again, I thought. Surrounded by these paint chips and stains.
I looked down at my clothes, taken from the pile of secondhand stuff Short Term 8 kept in a closet. I pulled at the slightly too short sleeves of the sweater. What would they think when they saw me like this? The drip-drop of panic I’d felt all day turned into a steady stream pooling inside of me, filling up that empty space that usually gaped in my chest.
The door opened, and I jumped, but it was only Warner.
“They just called,” he said. “They’re in the cab. Should be here in about ten.”
I paced. This room was wider than Barson’s office, almost six steps across. I counted them over and over as I walked from one wall to the other. When I was a kid, I saw a tiger in a cage at the zoo who did this exact thing, pacing back and forth in front of the viewing window, danger coiled in the muscles that rippled under her coat. I wondered if she did it because she was scared too.
“Daniel,” Alicia said cautiously. “How you doing? Can I get you something?”
“I can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t do this, Alicia. I have to get out of here.”
“Hey, it’s going to be okay,” she said in her most soothing voice. “I promise.”
“You can’t!” I snapped. “You don’t know it’s going to be okay. You don’t know anything!”
Then the door opened. And the world started to move real slow.
? ? ?
Warner came in first. Behind him I could see just a corner of a person, an impression of neatly brushed brown hair. Then he stepped out from behind Warner and became whole. Patrick. Broader in the shoulders than I remembered but with a thinner face. Tall and handsome and solid except for the sharpness of his patrician nose. He was dressed in an impeccable gray suit, something I was not expecting. I guess I wasn’t the only one who’d changed in the last six years.
Behind him, holding on to his hand, was Alexis. As insubstantial as Patrick was solid, blonde and delicate, a dandelion of a person. Patrick had always been like a god to me—gigantic—and he still seemed that way, but Alexis seemed to have gotten smaller.
They stood just inside the doorway, staring at me. I stared back at them. My joints and nerves and blood vessels were all quaking, and I was sure I would shake apart at any moment. They looked at each other, something complex passing between them in their eyes and expressions, and then back at me.
Patrick was the first to move, just a small step taken toward me.
“My God,” he whispered. “It’s really you, isn’t it?”
I nodded dumbly.
He huffed like the air had been pushed out of his lungs, and then he was rushing toward me, grabbing me in a tight hug, filling my nose with the smell of expensive wool and aftershave. His shoulders were shaking as he laughed or cried or both. He believed me, and I felt like a little boy again in his arms.
But it didn’t lessen my fear. If anything, it made it worse. Disappointment after hope can be lethal, and behind Patrick’s back, Alexis was still just standing there. Staring at me. Her eyes looking as scared as I felt.
Patrick pulled away from me and turned to our sister. He reached a hand out to her.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s Danny.”
Her eyes were filled with tears, and she shook her head, just a little.
“Don’t be scared,” Patrick said firmly. “Come hug your brother.”
She looked back and forth between me and Patrick, and then she took a step closer to us.
“Danny?” she said softly.
I nodded, and she reached out slowly, touching the tips of her fingers to my cheek. Like she was afraid her hand might pass right through me.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. She started to cry and wrapped her arms around my neck, holding me with more strength than I would have thought her capable of.
“Hi, Alexis,” I whispered.
Patrick laughed. “Why so formal, little brother?”
I swallowed. Warner nodded at Alicia, and the two of them slipped silently out of the interview room, leaving the three of us alone. Alexis let go of me.
Time passed in a blur of tears and laughter and talk. I couldn’t stop staring at them, drinking in the way they looked at me. Patrick asked what had happened to me, where I’d been for the last six years. Warner had told them what I’d told him, but he still had so many questions. Alexis just looked at me and silently swiped at tears that escaped her eyes while Patrick asked me question after question.
But my answers wouldn’t come. My throat locked up around them, holding them inside of me. Patrick told me it was okay, that they weren’t going to push me to talk about things I wasn’t ready to. Now was the time for happy things.
“The constable said you don’t remember much,” Patrick said. “About us or your life.”
I nodded. “I guess . . . I guess it was just easier that way. To forget who I’d been.”
He glanced at Alexis and squeezed her hand. “We understand.” Then he smiled in a wobbly way. “It’s so strange to hear you speaking with a Canadian accent.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t thought about that. “I guess . . . the people who had me . . .”
“You don’t have to talk about it now,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. I tried to make the vowel rounder, more like the way Patrick would say it.
“Lex, where’s your phone?” he asked.
Alexis—Lex—dug into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. She seemed to understand exactly what Patrick was asking, because she opened up the pictures she had saved there, and the three of us bent over the screen.
“That’s Mia,” Lex said when she brought up a picture of a brunette little girl in pigtails and a yellow dress. “Can you believe how big she’s gotten? She was practically a baby when . . .”
She couldn’t finish the sentence. Patrick reached behind me to lay a hand on her back.
“She looks just like your dad, huh?” he said. He swiped the photo of Mia aside, and one of a pale, slim boy with glasses and a hint of a smirk around his lips replaced it. “And there’s Nicholas. He started visiting colleges a few months ago, and he swears he’s not going to pick any school within a thousand miles of California.”