This was the most painful conversation of my entire life and that included the conversation I had with my mother about taking my father off life support. “I’ll work extra hard at not making any mistakes.”
“But what happens if you make a mistake and have to go away?”
“I’ll take care of you,” Shay said. We both looked up and found her standing at the foot of the bed, tears brimming in her eyes and Gennie’s backpack in her hands. “No matter what happens, I’ll always be here for you.”
“You won’t send me away?”
She shook her head. “Never.”
Gennie stared up at me, her dark eyes swollen and red. “What if Shay makes a mistake too?”
“Teachers always follow the rules,” I said. “Shay is very well-behaved. She won’t make any mistakes.”
“I won’t,” Shay added.
“What if I’m bad too many times?” she whispered.
“Gennie, you aren’t bad,” I said. “You’re the best kid I know.”
“You don’t know any kids.”
“I don’t care. You’re still the best one.”
She sniffled. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Neither does running away,” I replied. “The whole farm is looking for you. Bones, Wheatie, Nyomi. Everyone. The Castro kids are out on their horses. Even the police.”
Tears poured from her eyes and she clawed at my shirt, balling her fingers and scrambling up my chest. “Don’t let the police take me.”
“Fuck, no, that’s not why we called them,” I said, ready to punch myself in the mouth. “We called them because we needed help finding you. They’rehelpingus, Gennie. They’re not taking you anywhere. You’re not in trouble.”
In this moment, that was the truth. Later, we’d have a talk about pulling stunts like this one.
I ran a hand over her hair. “Do you want to go home now?” After a second, she bobbed her head against my chest. I picked her up and nodded at Shay to lead the way with Bernie the black lab.
We went downstairs and locked up the house using the key Gennie had lifted from Shay’s room earlier today. She also had several sandwiches, two screwdrivers, a ball of twine, and my iPad in that backpack.
With Gennie bundled in Gail’s blankets between us in the front seat and Bernie sniffing the night air in the cargo bed, I clicked on the radio speaker and exhaled for the first time in hours.
“We have her,” I said, “and we’re headed home.”
chapterthirty-two
Shay
Students will be able to crash hard.
Noah pushed openthe door and stepped into my room. His hair was a wreck, his eyes red and weary. He sat on the edge of the bed, exhaled a whole paragraph, and shook his head. “What the literal fuck happened here tonight?”
I folded a sweater, shook it out, started folding it again. I didn’t need to do this. I always organized my laundry the second it was dry. Putting it away was another story and that was the story that led me to this state of uncontrollable futzing. While Noah had tucked Gennie into bed, the day’s adrenaline spikes drained and I found my hands shaking. Conveniently, I noticed the shirt on the top of my laundry pile looked slightly rumpled and thus a perfect project was born. One that gave me a thread of control and just enough purpose to regain some calm too. “Are you looking for an answer to that?”
He glanced at the clock perched on a tall bureau. It was after two in the morning. Getting Gennie home was one thing, though thanking everyone for their help in searching and sending them on their way was something else altogether. They meant well, they certainly did, and I understood the desire to linger. Part of me wished they’d linger even longer than they did. I needed that crush of voices and bodies to distract me from—fromeverything.
“Not really,” he grumbled. “We’ll spend enough time figuring it out with her therapist this week.”
“Did Gennie tell you how she got out?”
He flopped back onto the bed. “Out her bedroom window, onto the porch roof, down a pillar to the porch. Apparently she’d tested the gutters and they were too shaky.”
