Losing Francesca Page 16

  "You told him that?"

  I nod.

  "What did he say?"

  "Um…" Crap, we're right back to where we were. "He told me the same thing you're telling me. Stay with him, let myself be loved by them."

  "And what did you say?"

  "I went inside and that's exactly where I want to go right now. Inside. To your room!" I pull him and he reluctantly follows until we get to the porch and then he opens the door and waves me in. I make right for the stairs, but he grabs me by the waist and swings me around. I squeal as he sets me down in the living room.

  "The computer is right there, Fee. And that's as far as you're going in here tonight."

  I can barely contain my blush and my smile. "You would be so easy to corrupt."

  "No, Fee. Not with you," he says as his expression turns serious. "I am going to be the one. I am going to be your first. But I'm not gonna rush it, or ask for it, or plan for it, or let you talk me into it. Because you are so much more than sex to me, Fiona. You are so much more. When it's time, we'll know. It will happen."

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Brody

  I take her by the hand and lead her over to the couch. Parker is the only one of us Mason kids who's into computers, so he has his own setup in his room, the rest of us just use the family laptop. We settle in and I pop open the computer, sign on, and hand it over to her. "Go ahead, knock yourself out."

  She pulls out her phone and I grab the charger off the coffee table and plug it in for her, then pull up the pictures.

  That picture of our feet in the creek seems like months ago. Fiona coming home seems like years ago. Fiona going missing feels like it never happened, that's how completely she has filled my life and wiped away all those bad years.

  She logs in and starts messing around with the back-end of her blog and I play with her hair as she chats about posting, and comments, and followers, and all sorts of stuff that make about as much sense to me as that horse back at the farm.

  But I don't care.

  I listen to every word. I pay attention to every word. I watch her fingers type out her feelings about being at the creek that day and she even writes about me.

  She calls me a new boy.

  "Plug your phone in now, Brody. So I can put up the one with the horse."

  I disconnect her phone and plug mine in and she finds the image and uploads that one too. I take a deep breath and lean back as I put my arm behind her on the couch.

  After a few minutes she stops and looks up at me. "Ready?"

  "For?"

  "To see my blog? You said you wanted to, do you still?"

  "Absolutely. I'm ready." You couldn't pay me a million dollars to miss this moment with her.

  "OK." She's not looking at me, so it's not easy to tell, but I can see how her cheeks puff out a bit from the side and I know she is beaming with happiness.

  The page begins to load and I watch as the images appear.

  The header is a picture of just her feet on a beach, like she's lying down and looking down her legs, like her feet are looking out at the ocean because they're on vacation. Her little toenails are painted cherry red and the name of her blog is My Well-Traveled Feet.

  "You are so fucking cute, Fiona."

  She giggles and sinks into my chest. "Not cute enough, apparently," she says with a sideways glance.

  I drag the hair away from her neck with the slightest of movements and feel her shiver, then lean down to kiss her in that little dent at the base of her skull. "When it's time for that, Fee, believe me, you will have my undivided attention. I will make love to you thoroughly, and I'll take that flower and your heart at the same time. And you will be the last girl I'll ever love like that. Ever."

  I can feel her swallow hard and she leans her head into my shoulder. "I don't want him to come."

  "Just tell him no."

  But she sighs. "I don't know if I can, Brody. I have never said no to him before. He's just trying to protect me, it feels wrong to make him worry. I hate the fact that he has to worry about me constantly."

  "But why are you in danger in the first place?" She stays silent. "The only possible reason for your life to be so secret is because of who he is and what he does. None of that has anything to do with you. Or Fiona Sullivan. If you were just Fiona Sullivan, you wouldn't be in danger."

  "But what if I'm not Fiona Sullivan? What then? Will you stop wanting me?"

  She looks up and I give her a squeeze. "You. Are. Her."

  "But just pretend I'm not Fiona. Just pretend I'm really that other girl. What then?"

  "What nothing. I don't care. I do not care one way or the other. I know you're her, but if somehow, some way, it turns out you're not, I don't care. I still want you."

  We sit in the silence a little more and she refreshes her blog page. Already there are a dozen comments from people asking where she is and what she's been doing. She types in a few vague lines about being on vacation and I figure she's got it down to a science, because half of what she writes is the truth and half of it is made up.

  She tells them about the creek. It's in America, she hints. It's in the woods, she hints. The boy is hot, she insists.

  I smile at that.

  And the horse was a gift. Again, not a lie. The big boot is the hot boy, the little boot is her.

  I watch them all go back and forth for several minutes and it feels a little like peeking into a girls' locker room, or a sleepover party, or any of the dozens of places girls go to be with each other and do girl things. All this is happening on her blog, right in front of me, and she's not embarrassed. She talks about me, she describes how I look, the things I've said to her. She calls me a gentleman, a nice boy, and a good person.

  I don't think anyone has ever called me any of those things, let alone all three in the same sentence. Certainly never written them about me while I was sitting less than three inches away.

  She logs on to a Facebook page with the same name as her blog and chats with them on there as well. And after about a half hour of her typing and snickering to her online girlfriends, as I twirl my fingers in her hair and trace the little dent in the back of her neck, she finally flips the computer closed and sighs.

  "Thank you so much. I really needed that. I didn't realize how important my blog friends were until just now. Even though I've never met any of them, and even though we live all over the world in very different places, I really enjoy their company."

  "You don't have to stop if you don't want to. I'm not bored."

  She turns her whole body and looks at me. "Can we go back to the beach for a while? I want a picture down there too."

  "We can do whatever you want, Fiona. Leave your phone here to charge and we'll pick it up on the way home." She hands it back as I disconnect mine and exchange it for hers and then I pull her up and take her back outside. She swings my hand as we walk and talks about lightning bugs. We trek through the grass and the shrubs to get out to our beach and then take a seat on the sand down near the water. The tide is receding and the waves are calm.

  "It's pretty here," she says suddenly. "I mean, the South Pacific is spectacular as far as natural beauty goes. It's got a lot going for it. And our island is so beautiful, I can barely comprehend it when I look out my bedroom window. But this place is pretty, too. We don't have trees like this in the tropics. They're spindly, not majestic and thick."

  I look around and take notice of the old elms and oaks behind us. "I have very little experience with other places, so this is really all I know."

  She lies down on her stomach, picks up a thin twig, and starts drawing in the wet sand as she gently kicks her feet back and forth in long arcs. I get a little lost in their hypnotic rhythm for a few moments. "I've been almost everywhere, I've seen almost everything, and I'm tired of it." She draws for a few more second and then scoots back and sits up. "My well-traveled feet need a rest, Brody."

  I look over in the sand and catch her doodle before a thin layer of water reaches out and wipes it
away.

  The word in the sand simply says home.

  I bet she's wondering where that is right about now.

  "When I was little, after you disappeared, I used to come down here to think about what it meant that you were gone. I looked for you, Fee. I spent entire summers out in the woods alone, wandering around. Pretending this place was Italy and you were being held captive by kidnappers. I fantasized about rescuing you."

  "Did you ever find me?" she asks as she grabs hold of my arm and leans against my shoulder.

  "No. I would never let myself find you because I knew it would hurt so much more if I fantasized about you coming back and then had to accept reality, accept that you were still gone and you'd probably never be back. I can't even explain how I feel about you, or how I felt when I found out you wouldn't be on the bus for school." It's my turn to pick up a twig and trace lines in the sand.

  "Let's take a picture," she says after several long minutes of silence.

  I fish out my camera. "Point your toes at my boots."

  "No, I mean, let's take a real picture. Of us. Can we do that?"

  "It's up to you, Fee. You're the one in charge here."

  She squints hard at me as she thinks about this. "Nothing has ever been up to me before, Brody. I'm not very good at making decisions. So can you just tell me it's OK?"

  I huff out a little laugh. "I think I'd like nothing more in this world than to have a picture of us together."

  She bounces to her feet. "OK, well, let's make it with the lake behind us. Maybe we can use the moon instead of a flash for light?"

  The moon is almost full and pretty bright, maybe even bright enough to light up a photo, so I turn off the flash, stand up, and put my arm around her. I hold the camera out and snap the picture and then turn it around so we can see. We are smiling in the moonlight, which is just bright enough to make the captured moment seem dark and dramatic.

  "Oh, I want one, hand it over so I can send my phone a copy right now! I'll look at it all night and get no sleep."

  She's happy and laughing now, but the end of this day feels sad to me.

  It feels desperate, like clinging.

  Like we're clinging to all the good things that have happened in the past few days. It feels like her father is very close. It feels like she's about to be stolen away from me again. I look down and spy my drawing in the sand as she busies herself with the photo on my phone. It's a heart with a crack in it.

  That's how I felt that first day of school as I waited for the bus that would not be the place where I declared my love for her with my Fruit Roll-Up. And that's how I've felt every day since then, until that day I picked her up on my dirt bike and finally, after twelve years of acting out, and sadness, and anger, and fear, and despair—I finally got my chance to rescue Fiona Sullivan out in the woods and set things right. For both of us.

  And even though I can't know for sure that our time together is short, I can feel it.

  And it hurts to have her here, it hurts so bad to know that she is only temporary.

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Francesca

  Sean is waiting for me on the porch again. I sit next to him in silence and the swing sways with my movement. "Is this our alone time or something?" I ask.

  He turns and smiles. "Sure." He hesitates. "I like this."

  "Yeah, me too." Coming home to an older brother waiting on the porch just so he can steal some time with me is all sorts of wonderful. "I'm not sure how things got so…" I struggle to find the word for a second.

  "Easy?" Sean adds after my hesitation.

  I nod. "Easy. That's the perfect word." I turn to look at him. "You guys are so nice. Way nicer than I deserve, really. I sorta wish I hadn't wasted all that time fighting in custody. I wish I had just said OK and come home. Because I would've had so much more time."

  Sean swallows and nods, but stays silent.

  "He's coming."

  Another nod from Sean. "I know. I can feel it too."

  "I want to stay, I hope you know that."

  "But you won't, will you?"

  I look at him, study his face. He's a very good-looking boy and if he wasn't my brother, I'd even think he was hot. "Tell me about you, Sean. I know nothing about you."

  He laughs a little. "What do you want to know?"

  I shrug. "I don't care. Just something more than what I have. Because all I know about you right now is that you love me. And I'm not even sure why you love me, but I feel it so completely, it's like a blanket that just falls over my whole body and wraps me up."

  "You're my sister." He shrugs. "I have two more, but in my mind you're my real sister. In my mind we are blood and we have always been blood. And all I want for you, Fiona, is to never leave me again. Maybe I never obsessed about you the way Brody did, not in public anyway. But I had the nightmares too. And while it was a big blow to lose Mom, the truth is, her and Frank were not happy. If we had all come back from Italy together, they'd probably have gotten a divorce."

  He shrugs again.

  "I need you," he says. "I need us. Because it's been Frank and me for so long, and I don't mean that in a bad way towards Angela, Lindsey, Aimee, Jake, and Quinn… but it's just been Frank and me, holding ourselves together in this grief and loss for so long, we almost forgot what it was like to have the missing pieces to our souls. And maybe three is not as good as four. Maybe a triangle is not as good as a square, but it's a hell of a lot better than a line that just leads nowhere. And now that you're here, I can't let you go. And if you leave, and Brody wants to go steal you back, I'm in."

  He stops again to look at me. A hard look this time.

  "I'm in."

  I scoot over and hug him.

  He squeezes me just hard enough for me to feel everything inside him.

  And the tears that fall out this time are nothing like any of the tears I've cried over the past two months. These tears are heavy. So, so heavy. And my heart has hurt before, but never in my life have I felt it weigh me down like this. It's like my heart is a mass of sadness inside my chest and it wants to get as close to Sean's heart as it can. It wants to fuse with it, until there is no space left between us.

  "I love you," I say.

  He nods his head. "I love you, too, Fiona. When he comes, just tell him you want to stay."

  I nod this time, but I don't say anything. Because I'm just not sure I can do that.

  Sean pushes me up a little and gets to his feet. "Come on, we better get to bed. The show starts at eleven tomorrow, but this place will be crawling with people and horses by seven AM."

  I get up and hug him one more time and then head for the door as he hops down the porch stairs.

  "Night, Fee. Love you."

  "Night, Sean," I say in a whisper. "Love you, too."

  The house is dark and quiet when I slip inside. Just a few hallway lights illuminate things here and there. I start to go up the stairs, then hesitate when I spy a phone in the formal living room off to the right. I hadn't noticed it there before. I walk over and pick up the receiver and listen to the dial tone. I could call him. I could call him right now and tell him to relax, just let me have this time with the Sullivans.

  I set the receiver down softly. Because the scene I imagine in my head if I called and said those words to him is nothing short of catastrophic.

  What would happen if I said no? It's so hard to even picture it. No. I practice it in my mind as I walk up the stairs. No. I'm not coming.

  I say it again, only this time I mouth the words and let them out in a little whisper.

  I go into my room and start a bath. If have to get up super early to do barn chores and work, I might as well clean up now and enjoy it in my sleep. I start a conversation with my dad in my head. I imagine his face when he finally gets to see me again. Will it be here at the farm? At the airport? Will he wait in another country and have Nic come get me?

  I don't know, and this bugs me. If I could picture it properly then I could have a real plan. I could practi
ce it better.

  I say the words again, only this time I whisper them a little louder. "No, I'm not coming."

  Should I be angry with him?

  Do I have a right to be angry with him? I'm not sure.

  Did he steal me? Did he kill my mother? Did my mother hate Frank and run away? Am I Fiona Sullivan?

  I know none of these things. The only thing I do know is that I'm not Fifi, Fritzi, Francine, Francesca, Fannie, Faith, Fatima, Faye, or Filia. Because none of those names are my real name. None of them are the name Frank gave me or the name my dad gave me.

  And even though I've been pushing it away since they told me I was supposed to be Fiona Sullivan the third day I was in custody, it's just too weird. It's just too freaking weird that my two real names are so very, very close. They are so close, they might as well be identical.

  They might as well be the same name.

  I might as well be the same person.

  "No," I say it again, only louder this time. "No." It echoes off the walls of the bathroom a little. "No!" It comes out loud enough to make me stop and listen for signs I disturbed the boys down below. "I'm not going."

  But that part is not loud and strong.

  It's a whisper again. It's weak and soft.

  I sigh and pull the plug on the water, then get out and get dressed in some shorts and a tank top. I slide in between the covers and even though my mind is still so busy thinking about my dad and Frank and Brody and Sean… I slip away easily.

  And in my dream, I am Fiona Sullivan.

  And in my dream I never go home, because this is my home. And I'm already here.

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Brody

  Grip is back in my garage, not for his car, but for his curiosity. "Make yourself useful and hand me that fucking socket wrench, will you?" I reach my hand out from under the Jeep and he drops it in my palm. "Thanks."

  "Well?" he asks.

  "Well, what?"

  "How the hell did she get back here? You gotta tell me, I'm going crazy picturing it. I mean, Fiona fucking Sullivan, after all these years? The whole town is talking about it. I bet Frank has never seen his stupid horse show so packed. Everyone's going just to look at her."