Page 107 of On His Mind

What she does is press her spine into mine. Harder. Deliberate. All the way through, until I can feel the individual bones of her, until my own weight is coming back at me through her, and she holds it there.

I have been touched by a lot of people. Doctors. Coaches. Two nurses in Sherbrooke. A woman with a laminated badge who put a hand between my shoulder blades to move me toward a car. Josh, in the doorway of that room, with his palm heavy on the back of my neck.

Nobody has ever pushed back before.

"I went back to him," I say, and my voice has gone to pieces. "Both times. Both times they took me out, I went right back."

I turn my hands over on my knees and look at them in the dark.

"Second time I asked to."

I wait for it. The intake of breath. The why. It's what everybody does — there's always a why, always some adult with a folder trying to get me to say the reasonable thing, and I could never make any of them understand that at nine years old, my dad was the only person on earth who I ever had. On drugs or not, he was all I had.

She doesn't ask. She just breathes against my back, in and out, steady, and after a while I notice my own breathing has gone and matched hers.

"When I was fourteen."

I stop. I haven’t told anyone this part, and I don’t know if I should start now. I remember the day like yesterday, and it haunts me in my dreams which is why I don’t like to sleep.

I start again from further back. "We were in Maine by then. There's a gas station off the highway, about ten minutes from where we were staying. One of those ones with the green sign."

I thought my heart would be racing, but instead, it’s beating slowly.

"He pulled in and told me to wait inside for him."

He didn't say it like that. He said, attends-moi à l'intérieur — wait for me inside. He said it with his hand on the back of my headrest in a good mood. I always think about that day, about how he was in a good mood, and I remember being glad about that. I remember thinking it was going to be an okay day.

I've never told anyone that. It's the last thing he ever said to me, and it lives in my head in French, and it's the one piece of him I've got left that hasn't been written down in a report. I told the authorities that I didn’t know who brought me there, that one of his friends dropped me off and told me to wait for him.

"I waited a long time," I admit, even though once Mike pulled out, I knew what he was doing. He was running. He was leaving Maine. He blamed me for not being able to return to Canada my entire life, and he was done with me. It didn’t make it hurt any less.

I stop talking. When I hear it out loud, I hear how pathetic it sounds, how I should’ve put the pieces together sooner. I can feel the excuses for Mike stacked up in my throat. How I waited for him, even though I knew in my gut that he was never coming back. The guy behind the counter let me stand there for three hours before he picked up the phone. I asked him for more time, but he didn’t give it to me. He bought me a bag of chips and let me sit out front in the cold until the cops came. I've never said any of that out loud. Not to the police. Not to the woman with thefolder. Not to Josh, not once in four years I’d been with him. He never asked, and I appreciated him and Mary for that in a way I have also never said.

I find out, sitting on the edge of my bed with Penelope holding my back up, that I can't say it now either. The words don’t come.

She doesn’t say anything for a while. Her back rises and falls against mine, and I lean into it. Her warmth and silence is the only thing keeping me together right now.

"After that it was foster homes," I say when I can get my throat open again. "A lot of them."

I press the heels of my hands together between my knees until it hurts.

"Nobody keeps you at fourteen."

I hear her swallow.

"You learn to stop unpacking."

I could explain it — about the duffel bag under the bed instead of in the closet, about how you keep the toothbrush in the front pocket, so it takes ninety seconds instead of five minutes, about how the first thing you do in a new room is find the nearest safest exit. I don’t explain it.

I say, "Then there was Josh."

The name comes out rougher than the rest of it. I hear it go and I don't fight it.

"Him and Mary. They kept me."

My eyes are stinging.

That's what undoes the knot in my chest. It’s not that my dad left me at the gas station, or him breaking my arm –– it’s that they kept me, three words, and my eyes are going and my throat's closing and I have to open my mouth to breathe, and I'm grateful — I'm so grateful I could put my head in my hands — that she can't see my face.