He gives me a grim look before turning to the window. “Then we’ll check outside. If there’s a chance she’s out there, we need to bring her inside before she gets sick.”
Our eyes meet, and in his dark gaze I see the haunting knowledge of his concern for her. He may be in over his head with this whole business of raising a little girl, but he does care about her. There’s stark fear in his eyes that he might fail her. It makes my heart squeeze.
We head to the front door, grabbing our jackets that hang by the door. I slip my worn-out Converse knockoffs onto my bare feet and head outside.
Without saying words we agree to split up and search in opposite directions. I head to the left and he heads to the right. I tromp over the uneven ground, slipping a couple of times. Even with the dim light of evening, it’s hard to get around.
Each drop of water that hits me feels like a slap in the face.
I keep going.
As I near the cliff, it turns into pure rock. I get this strange feeling as I walk closer, this sense that I’m testing the knife’s edge of my mortality. One slip, and I’d go over. One fall, and I’d break my neck. I don’t have the luck or the nine lives of a kitten. If I fell forty feet, I would die.
Morbid fear has me creeping closer so I can peek over the edge. In a moment of panic, I can almost imagine seeing her—a small broken body at the bottom where the water meets rock. The flash of red and black, the colors she loves to wear.
There’s nothing down there.
I pull myself back and continue walking along the water line. In the distance I can see mist covering a red lighthouse. I wonder if Paige can see it from where she is right now.
“Paige,” I call, though the wind whips my voice away to nothing. I keep shouting for her until I turn hoarse. Then I start making little kissy sounds for the kitten. “Kitten. Where are you?”
A meow trickles through the air.
I whip my head to the right, wondering if I imagined it.
“Kitten? Paige! Where are you?”
The meow comes again, and I start running, slipping and sliding over the terrain to get to her. I find her sitting in a forlorn little pile at the foot of a tree. I glance around, anxious to see Paige. Nothing. A faint crack comes from above. I look up and see her skirt hanging off a branch about ten feet off the ground.
“Oh my God. Paige. Are you okay?”
She peeks over the edge, her expression torn between anger and fear. It’s not a coincidence that she ran away while I was on the phone with her school. She must have overheard me. “I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone. Just leave me alone.”
“God, you must be freezing. How long have you been out here? This whole time?”
Quiet sobbing is the only answer. It would be easy to be angry at a child for being disobedient. I saw it often enough in the foster homes where I lived. It’s much harder to deal with the pain underneath. And she has so much pain.
Immediately I can see how this will play out. If I demand she come down, she’ll respond exactly the way she did when Mr. Rochester insisted she put on a jacket and pants. If I go get Mr. Rochester, he might drag her down—but ten feet off the ground, I’m not even sure he could retrieve her safely if she’s fighting him.
I take off my jacket and wrap it around the kitten so she’s safe on the ground. Then I begin to climb. This kind of tree doesn’t grow back in Houston where I lived before. I don’t even know what it’s called. Pine? Fir? It’s some kind of giant Christmas tree, basically. There’s a very small protruding branch about five feet off the ground. It probably supported Paige, no problem. It cracks ominously under my weight. The trunk of the tree leaves a gash on my forearm and sticks something sharp into my ankle, but I manage to make it onto the branch opposite her.
“What are you doing?” she asks, her voice watery.
“Sitting with you.”
“Don’t you want me to come down?”
“Well, yes. It is cold. And I care about you. I didn’t think you’d want to come down right away, though, and if you’re going to be out here, then I’ll keep you company.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Try me.”
“You’re just like him. You want me to eat broccoli and do my homework and be a good girl, but what does it even matter? Huh? It means nothing. He gets to walk around outside at night, but I have to be trapped in that house.”
“You’re right,” I say, my voice softer and shivering—whether it’s the cold or the starkness of the emotions, I’m a mess right now. “I do want you to eat broccoli and do your homework. One day those things will be important to you, too, but not right now. I get that.”
“No, you don’t.”
“It feels like nothing matters now that your parents are gone. It feels like there’s no reason for living. Or worse—like maybe if you’d just been better while they were alive, if you’d brushed your teeth without them having to ask you, if you’d gotten a better grade at school, maybe they’d still be alive. But they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. And it feels like it will never be okay again.”
There’s more crying. “Yes. Yes.”
Something shifts in the trees beyond us, and I realize that Mr. Rochester has found us. He’s letting me talk to her, though, and I’m grateful for that.
“I do know, sweetheart. My dad died when I was twelve. Older than you, but he was still my whole world. And it hurt so bad. Worse than the time I broke my arm. Worse than anything I could imagine. I felt like I was bleeding, like I was dying inside, and no one could see that. They thought I was fine. They thought I could just be sad and then move on.”
A sniffle now. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know. Or maybe I do know, I just don’t want you to copy my example. I went dead inside, really. I just pretended like I was okay, but I wasn’t okay. Not then, and not now. Maybe I never will be, but I don’t want that for you, sweetheart. You aren’t a ward of the state. You have a family. You have a home. You can feel safe again, someday.”
“It’s not a real home,” she says, her voice thick. This is not the child full of anger and resentment. There’s only sadness now. “It’s not a real family.”
“It may not seem like Mr. Rochester cares about you, but he does.”
“He doesn’t.”
“I care about you, too.”
“You don’t either. I heard Beau talk to you on the first day. I’m the reason why you’re getting a paycheck right now. That’s why you’re here. Because of money.”
The accusation draws blood because it’s true. “Yes. I can’t deny that.”
“See? No one cares about me anymore.”
“Do you know the reason why I accepted this job? Why I moved so far away from where I lived? Because I want to go to college and become a social worker. Because I want to help kids, kids like you who’ve gone through something hard. I may have only met you because I took the job, but now that I’m here and I’ve gotten to know you, I do care about you. Only for you.” I swallow hard around the knot in my throat, knowing I might very well get fired after this. “And no matter what happens, even if I have to go away, I will never stop caring about you.”