“Everything. Show me everything.”
So they kept walking. She took him to her old school, the self-defense studio where she’d got her first legal job as a trainer, and the hostel she’d lived in for the better part of two years.
“It doesn’t look safe.” Kris eyed the backpackers’ hostel in concern. The kind of place that crawled with young tourists who’d left their decency balled up in a drawer at home.
“The owners got to know me,” she said. “They looked out for me. Gave me one of the single rooms with a new lock on it. I told them I was in college, not high school, and paid every week, so they pretended to believe me. Besides, I could handle myself.”
Kris stared at the building for a long time. The downstairs common room was a mess of hollers and raucous laughter, and a sudden uproar of singing petered out drunkenly when the participants seemed to realize none of them really knew the words. The crash of glass bottles being emptied into a waste container travelled from the back alley, and there were unmistakable groans escaping an open second-level window.
It wasn’t the place for a sixteen-year-old runaway to put herself through school.
“Okay,” he said quietly, something broken in his voice.
They kept walking. It was late now, the dull beat of music travelling along the shadowed streets, the occasional burst of laughter coming from a rear courtyard. The people of Kira City rarely slept, and never all at once. Frankie led him to a traders’ hub, streetlamps illuminating a steep curving road, sidewalk benches, and a strip of stores. Some were closed for the night; others were selling ice cream and kebabs and cocktails.
“I lifted my first wallet while giving directions out the front of that bakery.”
He followed her pointing finger. “How old were you?”
She thought back. “Maybe seven?”
“Seven.” He gazed at the bakery as if he could picture it. A young Frankie and an older woman bending over, eyes on Frankie’s pointing finger instead of the wallet being slid from her handbag. “How did you feel about it?”
“Mixed.” Frankie looked down the road, remembering the route she’d taken to get out of sight before the woman realized and shouted after her. Up two shopfronts, left into the back street between the delicatessen and poultry market, and then crouched low and running behind a row of parked cars. But the shouts had never come. No one had chased her. Perhaps the woman hadn’t noticed until she’d reached the end of Frankie’s directions. Perhaps she’d never suspected the little girl at all. “I was scared. Disbelieving that I’d really done it. Exhilarated that I’d gotten away with it and proud to tell my dad. I remember wanting to get better at it so I wouldn’t have to run.”
And she had. Swallowing shame, she led Kris on.
“Growing up,” she said as they walked, “my dad would ask if I had my lunch money. But he would ask after school, not before, and I’d hand over the money I’d shortchanged when buying my lunch on the way to class.”
Then finally, they reached an innocuous street corner on the border of the eastern crest and Kira City center. The place that hurt the most.
She pressed the knuckle of her thumb into her brow, pushing outward, as if she could swipe the pain aside. “This was where I last saw my mother before she left.”
There was nothing to see, but Kris looked around anyway.
“Dad was pulling an all-nighter.” Also known as banging one of his marks. “It was late afternoon. I was walking home from school the long way. I can’t remember why. And I stopped on this street corner, waiting for traffic, and saw that opposite me, Mum was putting a bag in the back of a taxi. She looked pale and scared. She didn’t notice me, and for some reason, I didn’t call out. She got in and the taxi drove away. It took forever to find a gap in traffic to cross, but then I ran home. The apartment looked the same, like maybe she’d gone to get groceries, except her favorite coat was missing and it was the middle of summer. I waited up all night.”
She paused, her breath uneven, as a car swept past them. It was overloaded with teens and one waved out the window, shouting, “Drinks at mine, butterflies!”
Frankie stared, dull inside, while Kris raised a hand in return.
“Dad was so angry when he got home,” she continued, shaking her head at how his fist had put new holes in the plaster walls. “I’ve never . . . He grilled me for days about whether I’d known about it. No joke. He asked me if I’d known my own mother was planning on running away—and what, leaving me behind? Thinking that I might have helped her, but chosen to stay with him? Likelihood of fucking zero.”
“So,” Kris said, and then stopped to pull off his cap and rake fingers through his hair. “She just left you with him?”
Frankie stared at the street sign where the taxi had idled. “Yes.”
“But she’s . . .”
“My mother? Yeah. But apparently I was too much like my dad.” A truth Frankie had forced herself to swallow, and even now, it cut like fish bones in her throat. “She clearly didn’t trust me to keep it secret—not to tell him in the lead up or contact him once we were gone. So she left me behind.” She paused. “Put that back on.”
Kris slid his cap over his head and used his hold on the brim to tip his face down.
“I did everything he told me, and I did it well. I had a temper, just like him.” Frankie had had so many years to think it through, her mother’s defense almost made sense. “She was scared of me.”
The problem was that her mother had been scared of Frankie for longer than she’d had any cause to be—which had meant she’d always kept Frankie at a distance. There’d been no opportunity to see that beneath it all, they were as scared as each other.
“And she never came back for you?” Kris’s question was hushed.
Frankie considered him. The concern in his eyes, the dismay pulling at the corners of his mouth. The hand that continued to grip hers. He’d asked for her to share everything. Why should she stop here?
“No,” she answered. “So I went to her.”
Frankie’s focus glazed in the direction of that street sign as she told him the painful details.
She’d been twenty. After high school and working for a few years, renting her very own shithole of an apartment, she’d finally felt ready. She had her mother’s last-known whereabouts—on a train destined for Paris. Frankie had noted the taxi’s license plate that fateful afternoon and the driver had later accepted the crisp bill a ten-year-old Frankie had offered to tell her where his passenger had been bound.
She’d never passed on that information to her father. He could have used it to track her—Frankie could have got her mother back. But despite her abandonment, Frankie still felt like she and her mother were on the same side, and she’d wanted to protect her from him.
Ten years on, she’d finally used the lead herself.
It had taken time. Internet searches that went nowhere, deep dives that spat out nothing more than an old record, but determination had eventually led her to an upper-class home in the west of Paris. In the years that had passed, her mother had married a man who earned his wealth as honestly as a banker could, and with him, she’d had two children. Foolishly, Frankie had imagined shock upon her arrival, sobbing apologies in the warmth of her mother’s arms, and long-awaited introductions to her little brother and sister.