Over the next week, Oliver and I kept to a pretty steady routine of going to school, going to the beach for more surfing lessons, kissing, making out in the backyard, and basically lying to our parents about all of that. (Except for school. That, unfortunately, wasn’t a lie.) Caro came to the beach a few times with us, since Drew was busy hanging out with Kevin at Starbucks or at soccer practice, but after the second time, she got bored. “I’m the third wheel,” she said on the way home. “I’m turning your bicycle into a tricycle.”
“Or we could just be three unicycles,” I replied. Oliver was in the front seat next to me, his hand on my leg as I drove with the window down, trying to dry my hair as fast as possible.
“Or we could be a penny-farthing,” Oliver said. “Maybe we could put Caro in a sidecar.”
“A penny what?” Caro and I both said at the same time.
“You know, that old-fashioned bike that had one big wheel up front and then a little wheel behind it?” Oliver mimed riding a bike, which, let’s be honest, didn’t help to clear up the confusion.
“Yeah, no, I’m not that,” I told him. “Can you roll your window down? I need more air.”
“You were saying about the sidecar?” Caro yelled, her voice nearly being drowned out from the sudden gust of wind. “It’d probably be less windy out there than it is in here!”
So after that, it just became Oliver and me. His surfing wasn’t really improving, but we spent most of the time bobbing up and down on the boards, talking instead of practicing.
But on Friday, when our parents thought we were doing another group project for AP Civics at Caro’s house but Oliver and I were actually down at the beach, he was subdued, almost tired. His eyes were heavy, his words soft. “Hey,” I said as we floated next to each other, our legs churning in the water. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine,” he said absently.
“You’re doing the dude sulk,” I told him.
Oliver laughed. “The what?”
“You guys always get pouty and sullen.” I poked my lip out and slouched down, trying to make him laugh for real this time. It worked. “What’s wrong?”
Oliver, though, just looked behind him and watched as a wave started to form. “You think I can get this one?”
I glanced at it. “Probably. You’re getting good.” And he was. He had already ridden to the shore several times that day, hooting and hollering with each successful wave.
“I’m taking it,” he said, then swung his legs out of the ocean and back onto the board as he started to paddle.
“Oliver, wait,” I said as he started to move, and he deliberately reached out and splashed me, leaving me sputtering.
“Oh, you’re going down,” I said, racing to catch up to him. It wasn’t too difficult—his arms were longer and stronger, but I had three years’ worth of experience—and we rode in together, almost like we were moving as the same person.
Afterward, we sat on the beach together, our wet suits drying on a rock next to us as we huddled together underneath a blanket that we found in the back of the minivan. “Your car needs a name,” Oliver said. “Something with personality.”
“Stealth Fighter,” I offered. “Secret Mission.”
“Barely Running,” Oliver said, and I laughed and pretended to choke him.
“Get your own car if you don’t like mine!” I cried.
“Oh, Emmy, I would if I could,” he said, and the sadness I had seen in the water was back now, clouding his eyes like a storm.
“What is it?” I asked. “What happened?”
Oliver shrugged and picked up some sand to run through his fingers. “I guess some national crime show called yesterday. They want to do a feature on my dad and . . . you know, everything.” Oliver brushed the sand away, then waved his hand, the kidnapping just a pesky fly that could be swatted away. “My mom thinks they could find my dad that way. ‘National exposure,’ that’s what she said.”
“And you don’t want to,” I guessed.
“It’s, like, I can move on or I can stay stuck here. I can’t do both. She wants me to adjust to school, to her new family, to be normal—whatever the hell that even means—but then she wants me to go on camera and talk about how my dad kidnapped me ten years ago? I just want to let it go.”
“You don’t want to find your dad, though?”
Oliver looked down at me, his face as sad as I had ever seen it. “I want that more than anything in the world. But not like this.”
He trailed off. “I just can’t hate my dad the way everyone wants me to.”
“Ollie, no,” I said. I reached for his arm but he pulled away. “We don’t want you to hate him.”
“You know what I mean,” he replied. “I had a life with him. He taught me how to do things, how to ride a bike and catch a pop fly. We went to movies, museums. He showed me the constellations.” Oliver laughed a little. “One time, he even used a flashlight and a grapefruit to explain the phases of the moon. It wasn’t awful. Except for the fact that my mom wasn’t there, I mean. That part sucked.”
I sat quietly, realizing that I had never asked him about his dad, about their life together. “I’m sorry we never talked about him,” I said quietly. “I just thought it would upset you, that’s all.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Oliver corrected himself, then put his hand over mine, pressing it into the sand. “But everyone acts like I stopped growing up at seven years old. They act like the past ten years didn’t happen to me, too.”
“It was just so terrible here,” I said. “It was scary, not knowing where you were for so long. Your dad just took you, Oliver. We didn’t know what happened.”
“I didn’t know what happened, either!” Oliver said. “Everyone has spent the past ten years thinking that my dad’s the monster, but I’ve spent the last ten years thinking that my mom left me. I spent all that time being mad at her, and I can’t just flip that. I don’t work that way, Emmy. My brain, it doesn’t . . .”
I tangled my fingers through his, feeling the sand rub between our skin.
“My mom and Rick and the twins, they have this perfect family, you know? And I just came in and fucked everything up. They’re fighting all the time and I know it’s because of me. And I can’t go back to where I was, and this town is just so fucking . . .” Oliver shook his head at me. “I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. We should go.”
“No, we should stay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“Even you and Drew and Caro, you have all these in-jokes and you talk the same and know all the places and people that I don’t know anymore. But I had places and people and in-jokes, too.”
“People?” I asked.
“A few friends,” he clarified. “I even had a girlfriend when I was fifteen.” He glanced down at me. “Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” I said, then thought, I’ll kill her if she hurt him. The jealousy passed after a second, though.
“I’m not. I just mean that I had a life before I came back. And no one ever wants to hear about it. I feel like if I talk to my mom, she’ll just use it against my dad.”
“Like on a TV news show,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I tightened the blanket around my shoulder, pulling Oliver and me closer together. It was freezing now, but I didn’t dare move. “Maybe we should talk about it more,” I said. “About both of us during the past ten years.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked after a few more minutes of silence, and I nodded against his shoulder. “What happened after I left? I mean, after my dad and I . . . ? Maybe we can start there.”
I sat up a little, trying to organize my thoughts. “Um, there were police. A lot of them, in your house talking to your mom, in my house talking to me and my parents, Caro and Drew. They took your clothes, your shoes, your toothbrush—anything that would help try to find you. But your dad, he already had a three-day start, you know? You can go anywhere in the world in three days.”
“Chicago,” Oliver murmured. “You can go to Chicago.”
I looked at him. “Really?”
He nodded, splaying his hand over mine so that his fingers reached all the way past my fingertips. “We were there for the first six months. He said we were having a vacation, that we needed some father-and-son-bonding time.” Oliver’s voice was as soft as his touch and he traced my fingers as he spoke. “But I wanted to go home after a while. Chicago is loud and we were in this tourist area and it wasn’t like here at all. And he said that we couldn’t go home because my mom had left, that she didn’t want to be with us anymore.”
Hearing him say the words so matter-of-factly made me wince, but he didn’t notice. “And I cried and I cried because I just wanted to see my mom, you know? And I didn’t understand why she would just leave like that because we were supposed to make cookies for Halloween. That’s what I kept telling my dad, that we had to make cookies, and I couldn’t stop crying. And he just held me and he just kept saying how sorry he was, that he was so, so sorry.” Oliver huffed out a laugh that didn’t sound funny. “And now I know what he was really apologizing for. But all I really remember was missing my mom.
“And then he said we needed a ‘fresh start.’ That’s what he said, a fresh start. And that he had always wanted to call me Colin so we should change our names.” Oliver shrugged. “I guess I was afraid of pissing him off, not because he was mean or abusive or anything like that, but just . . . I was already down a mom, you know? I didn’t want to lose my dad, too.”
“You should tell your mom this,” I whispered. “Oliver, you need to tell her.”
“What kind of kid doesn’t call his mom, though?” he murmured, looking down at the ground so that his hair fell down around his face, hiding him. “Why didn’t I just call her?”
“You were seven,” I whispered, brushing his hair back behind his ear with my free hand. “You were a little kid, Ollie, and you thought she didn’t want you. No one could ever blame you.”
He glanced up at me, and I suspected that he didn’t quite believe me. “I’m serious,” I told him. “No one has ever or will ever blame you. Your mom never has. She never did.”
“Yeah, but now . . .” Oliver’s jaw tensed before he said the rest of his sentence. “The problem is that now I miss my dad just like I used to miss my mom.” He glanced back at me, waiting for judgment.
“I would miss my dad, too,” I admitted.
“Even if he lied to you for ten years about everything?”
“Even then,” I said, because it was true. “I’d hate him and miss him at the same time.”
“That’s . . . pretty much what it is. And it sucks.” Oliver took another deep breath, then looked toward the purpled sky and exhaled. “Fuck. I am so tired of paying the price for something I never did and didn’t even want in the first place!”
I sat and I thought of surfing, of college, of ten years spent in a gilded cage. “I understand,” I said, then curled back up against him. “I really, really think I do.”
He wrapped his arm around my knees so that we were huddled together, and I tucked my hands into his hoodie pocket. We sat in silence for a long time, listening to the waves and seagulls and distant traffic. The world continues to spin even when we want it to stop, I thought. Especially then.