No. I wanted to run. Because that’s what I do. I don’t quit, I run. From all of it. And yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m no different than Santos then.
But it is different than Santos. Because when I run away, I’m not quitting. I always make myself do something harder. Something more challenging, not less.
I was already thinking about going back to San Pedro Sula so I could hand Lauren over to Santos for training and go back to my life hunting down the wayward Zeroes. And if Lauren was eliminated, so what? Right? So what? If she was eliminated that was the best thing for her. There was no happy ending in this baby’s future. There was no real way to save her.
It was either train her and make her capable, or kill her.
So in my mind, this wasn’t quitting.
I was handing her over to people more qualified than me so I could go back to the challenge of hunting down Zeroes. So I could make this world a safer place.
Yeah. I was pretty fucked up that day. And I was on the verge of this alternative path in life when you came out of the plane slinging a backpack over your shoulder and cussing like a sailor under your breath.
You saved me that day, Wendy.
You saved my fucking soul that day at the airfield.
You were nine years old, you had no clue what to do with a baby, you were unpleasant, and angry, and threatened to kill me three times before we even got to our hotel that night, but the moment you got in the back cab of the truck and looked at Lauren, she stopped crying.
And that’s the moment when I decided to stop running.
Your friend,
Nick
Once Wendy became a part of my life she was just there. As in, I counted on her being there, even when she wasn’t. There were a lot of good times. Maybe we weren’t happy all the time, but happy is a strong word if you think about it. Most days people aren’t happy. This doesn’t mean they’re unhappy, it just means they’re having a regular day where one doesn’t have to consider the question—Am I happy?
It’s more like satisfaction, I guess.
Those early days with Wendy and Lauren were almost all very satisfying. And more than half of them were downright happy.
One day when Lauren was a little over six months old, we were in St. Augustine, Florida. We had been visiting libraries and bookstores for about a month now. Wendy was into it. Like, seriously into it. She had a guidebook app about libraries and we were making plans to go on this stupid library tour across the South.
Even now, this still makes me smile. Libraries and bookstores were a big part of my time being Lauren’s father.
But anyway. There were some unhappy times. Not a whole day. I can’t recall a whole day where Lauren, Wendy, and I were all unhappy together. But there was this one moment. And the weird thing is that I didn’t even know it was an unhappy moment until years later because Wendy isn’t an unhappy girl. She’s not one of those people who needs to be coddled. She doesn’t crave attention. She doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her.
So I didn’t even know.
In the beginning, Wendy was pretty pissed off about being dropped off with me and this girl has always been able to hold a grudge like nobody’s business. She didn’t yell, or talk back, or do lots of passive-aggressive things. But I knew she was mad.
She thought I was a dumbass because I had no home and I had no plan. We weren’t technically living in the truck because we didn’t sleep in it, but we were basically living in the truck. And she never stopped talking about the amazing home she had with Chek. She didn’t tell me where, but she described it. And even I had to admit, it sounded pretty nice.
I decided I needed a way to mitigate this anger and keep her happy. So I told her she could choose where we went each day. Sometimes we didn’t go anywhere. We’d hang out at a nice hotel for a few days. But people notice nine-year-old girls who don’t go to school. Homeschooling is a thing. Everyone knows this. But people don’t jump to that particular conclusion when they see a nine-year old girl with a twenty-two-year-old man who is clearly not old enough to be her father. Especially when he’s carting a baby around.
They think the worst so we were almost always on the move and Wendy was put in charge of destinations.
She took this job seriously.
Wendy takes every job seriously.
This is how we spent our days:
Wake up in our hotel room, wherever that happened to be.
Get breakfast—sometimes the free continental breakfast in the lobby if we were staying at a cheap roadside place. Or in the hotel restaurant if we were staying somewhere nice.
Wendy would consult her app, tell me my choices in an A, B, C ‘choose one’ multiple-choice-type question, then tell me nope when I picked A, or B, or C. She was going with C, or B, or A. The point was, whatever I picked, she picked something else. It was a way for her to be in control. Little Zero girls are kinda bossy like that, so whatever. I let her do this.
After breakfast we’d get in the truck and drive to the new place. I always got to choose the hotels though. Wendy had no interest in the hotels. Sometimes she wanted to stay at the beach—we were almost always near a beach—but accommodations were my domain, and destinations were hers.
Sometimes we’d be in Brunswick, Georgia, and Wendy would say, “We’re going to this library in Mobile, Alabama, today, Nick.” In the beginning she would narrow her eyes at me when she made destination decisions like that, waiting for me to object. But I didn’t. I just drove our asses over to Mobile, Alabama.
But if she did that, the next ten or fifteen destinations would be logical. Maybe logistical is a better word. They would make sense, is what I mean. We’d drive the coast of the Gulf, hanging close to the beach.
So anyway. It was in this particular library in Mobile that Wendy stole a book. It wasn’t a chapter book, either. It was a picture book. She tore the security tag off, slipped it into her backpack, and I didn’t know about this until that night when we were putting Lauren to bed and Wendy produced her contraband for story time.
I didn’t ask about it. Not that day at least. This book kinda plays a major part in our story so it comes back up later. But on this night Wendy just took it out of her backpack, climbed into bed with Lauren, and started reading it to her.
I don’t remember who it was by, but it was called Wild Child. And it had a nice rhyme to it. Lauren was paying attention to the cadence of Wendy’s words. She wasn’t really talking yet—six months old is early for that, even for Zero girls. But she understood shit. You could see it in her eyes. And she babbled in her own baby language as Wendy read the rhyme that night.
It was a poem about feral children, obviously. Children who lived in the wildwoods and didn’t have any rules, and were happy. And then the grownups came, and they pulled them out of the wild, and they made them go to school, and stop playing, and put on shoes.
The grown-ups stole the wild right out of the child.
Lauren didn’t get it, of course.
I don’t even think Wendy got it. Not back then. She was the wild child and she was in no danger of ever being pulled out of the woods. She was gonna spend her entire life in the woods.
Wendy showed no guilt or remorse about stealing the book, so I figured there was some logical reason in her head for this act of rebellion. The poem was nice, and lyrical, and beautiful, actually. But it made me uncomfortable. I’m not sure why, it just did. So I never asked her about it. I didn’t reprimand her for stealing, either.