Chapter Seventeen
Gray
The double doors to the school would have busted off their hinges had I put any more force behind them and by the time Alicia and I located Laura’s former tutor Jolene Berry, I already found myself in a place which I easily couldn’t come out of. I was in a tailspin. My mind was fucked beyond belief and I just wanted answers.
I wanted to see my daughter.
“Her instructor turned her back for two seconds, Gray,” Jolene said, sprinting down the hall with Alicia and myself. We met her in the principal’s office, the former tutor the one to call me today.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think as everything rushed around me and Jolene guided me toward the location of my daughter. She kept saying Laura’s instructor had been with her. She’d been with her all day and she had been doing so well.
The touch on my hand broke through the words and on the other side I found Alicia, her arm wrapped around mine and her fingers laced through the spaces of my own in a way that allowed me to fight through the haze in my head long enough to find speech, her eyes telling me everything was going to be okay with just a single glance in our hurried steps. I hoped everything would be okay. I needed everything to be.
My “what the hell happened?” left my lips not moments before I spotted her, my daughter ahead of me.
My daughter tucked away in a closet.
The images behind my eyes blasted away like flashes in a turbulent storm, errant and horrifying memories I fought so hard to keep away. They used to keep me up at night and did for literally months after that fateful day.
The day my daughter had become mine.
Stepping into the room now, drawing closer to my kid who cowered heavily in the tiniest ball she could make herself at the bottom of a broom closet, I saw her again that day.
I saw her neglected.
She’d been dirty that day I found her, covered in I didn’t know what and the smell saying so much as an indicator. She’d wetted herself. The room reeking of piss and other things she’d obviously projected at some point on the bedspread. That’s where I found her, locked in a room and all by herself. She’d been alone for hours, maybe even many days.
She had no voice to tell me.
Even after finding her like that, in that disturbing state that told so much of what happened even still I didn’t have all the details, the unknown I wanted to know at the time…
But hadn’t been brave enough to handle.
“She turned her back for a second,” Jolene continued in this moment now, shaking her head at the sight. But she didn’t see what I saw. She saw a scared little girl having another one of her spells. She didn’t see what I saw, the product of nightmares from Laura’s and my past.
Swallowing, she looked up at me. “It was an accident. I promise you. Her instructor turned her back for only a second.”
And yet a second was all it took, a second to find this, my kid and…
I stepped toward her, Jolene beside me as well as Alicia, Alicia who never let go.
She squeezed my hand now as I took in my kid, lowering. Jolene lowered too.
“She must have been curious,” Jolene let on. She frowned, her hands folding. “Curious about the other children. There was a music class going on next door. It must have been the sounds that made her wander in—”
My hand let go, empty.
Music…
It’d been that word to take me to another place, a place my daughter should have been as well as me. I think I lost sight of that for a while. I lost sight of a lot of things. I believed I was something I wasn’t and somewhere I shouldn’t be.
And I think I’d known that for a while now.
I couldn’t look at Alicia as I eased my way toward the closet in which my daughter cradled herself. I only had her in my sight at the present, the way it always should have been.
“Laura?”
She arose after my voice, her shoulders relaxing at a sight ahead of her. It hadn’t been me at first and I was aware of that, Alicia beside me. Even still, Laura eventually made her way over to me and once she had her expression nearly tore my damn heart out. It’d been the same expression she held when she knew she was safe back when I finally found her, when she knew she was loved and always would be loved. I never let her forget every day that she meant something to both the world and especially to me.
She crawled out of the closet and over to me and once she had it was over.
Picking her up, I saw sight of no one after that. I left.
I left.