Find the Girl

by Lucy Connell

‘But,’ he continues, powering on despite my comments, ‘the only thing I can do is hope that you’ll forgive me and let me make it up to you. Finally.’

  ‘Well, thanks, but no thanks. We don’t need you. Mum has done everything by herself and you can’t simply decide to come back whenever you feel like. That’s not how parenting works.’

  ‘I know, and Karlene is an amazing person.’ He smiles at Mum but she isn’t looking at him at all. She’s just watching us with a concerned expression on her face. ‘I’m not expecting to click my fingers and be a dad again. I only wanted to come here today and ask you to consider it. You can take your time. However long you need. I had to come and see if I still had a chance to be your father.’

  He pauses, before his face lights up, looking at Nina.

  ‘I saw you playing the piano on YouTube, Nina. I was so proud of you. And so disappointed in myself. Disappointed that I’d missed so much of your lives because of my selfishness and cowardice. I should have done everything in my power to be there for you when things didn’t work out between your mother and me. After seeing that video, I made a New Year’s resolution to try and contact you again, and it’s taken me a few weeks to build up the courage, I suppose. But here I am.’

  ‘Did you read a book on all the right things to say to the daughters you walked out on or something?’ I ask, prompting him to look back down at his feet. ‘Because we’re not buying any of it.’

  ‘I’ll go now. I just wanted to see you and … well, I hope you’ll think about it.’

  I notice he’s looking at Nina when he says this and not me.

  He glances at Mum. ‘Karlene, you’ve got my phone number and email address. And my London address if any of you wanted to see me at all. Nina, I know you’re down there a bit these days. I saw in the paper that you’d got into the Guildhall weekend course. Anyway, you have my details. If you want them. I really hope I’ll be hearing from you.’

  He slowly turns to go.

  ‘I’m really sorry. For everything,’ he says quietly. ‘I’ll show myself out.’

  He walks out into the hallway, his footsteps echoing in the silence before he leaves us, the door slamming shut behind him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nina

  ‘I can’t believe he thinks he can just walk back into our lives!’

  Nancy kicks at the sand and a couple of pebbles go flying. She pulls up her coat zip against the breeze and stuffs her hands in her pockets. I hate seeing Nancy this upset but at least she’s talking about it.

  She hasn’t spoken much at all in the last few days, ever since Dad visited the house. This would seem strange to most people as Nancy is usually the talkative one and I’m the quiet one, so you’d think when something big happens in our lives we’d handle it in the exact opposite ways to how we do. When Dad walked out all those years ago, I really wanted to talk about it but Nancy refused. She would get angry at me if I ever brought it up, as though she was trying to push it out of her brain and forget that it ever happened.

  Since seeing Dad at the weekend, she hasn’t been herself. Not that any of us have, if I’m honest. Mum has been trying to pretend like she’s completely fine but she must have got such a shock when he turned up out of the blue.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I said that night.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Nina,’ she’d said with a weak smile. ‘I’m absolutely fine. You’re the ones I worry about.’

  But it was my fault.

  Not Dad turning up out of the blue, obviously, but it was my fault she didn’t have any preparation. Because I’d seen him. Outside the cafe where I was with Chase, before I had to rush back to Guildhall. I’d seen him, right there, watching me. I had convinced myself that it hadn’t been him, that it was just a trick of the light and, besides, he was so far away, how could I be sure? But in my gut I’d known that it was my dad, standing at the end of the road, staring at me, disappearing as soon as I recognized him. He must have come to see if I really was at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, so close to his house, and then spotted me by chance.

  I know he lives just down the road because I searched for the address he’d left with Mum, and there it was on the map, only a ten-minute walk from Guildhall. I almost fell off my chair when I saw pictures online of the kind of houses and flats in that area. They’re super posh and expensive. I guess Dad’s business does pretty well.

  ‘He showed up at our house, without even calling first!’ Nancy goes on. ‘Who does that? What if we’d not been in? It seems very arrogant to show up like that, expecting everyone to be home.’ Nancy’s brow is creased in anger as she stares out at the sea.

  ‘The boys are coming back,’ I say, nodding towards Chase and Jimmy who are walking towards us with hot chocolates.

  Chase gives me mine and then wraps his arm round my waist, while Jimmy passes one to Nancy. It’s really nice to have Chase here. I hadn’t been able to get through to him on Sunday to tell him what happened and then he was in meetings all day Monday, only able to message during the day rather than call, and I didn’t want to tell him about Dad in a text. Once we’d spoken that evening and I’d filled him in, he’d promised to come and see me one evening this week after school to cheer me up.

  I’d had to wait a few days as he had so much on, but he’s here now and that’s all that matters. I invited Jimmy and Nancy to join us for a stroll on the beach after school because I thought it might help cheer Nancy up too, and give us an opportunity to talk about it and get it all out in the open with people we trust.

  ‘I can’t believe you two came here on your first date,’ Jimmy says, smiling at Chase. ‘Wasn’t it like October or something? You must have been freezing!’

  ‘It was actually a bit like how it is today,’ Chase says, taking a sip of his drink. ‘Nice and empty. I taught Nina how to skim stones.’

  ‘That’s not how I remember it.’ I laugh. ‘You picked up a perfect stone for skimming and just threw it into the water with no skill whatsoever. And you’d been so confident in the lead-up, too. I seem to remember you describing yourself as quite the champion when it came to skimming stones.’

  ‘I’m pretty good at skimming stones,’ Jimmy declares, scanning the beach for any smooth pebbles as we walk.

  ‘Challenge accepted.’ Chase grins, showing off his dimples. ‘What about you, Nancy? Any good?’

  ‘Terrible,’ she says apologetically. ‘Nina’s really good. Mum taught us when we first moved here after Dad left.’

  ‘I can’t believe your dad came here on Sunday,’ Jimmy says in a gentle tone. ‘It must have been so weird for you.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s mad that he just showed up,’ Chase says. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if my dad turned up at my house with no warning. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive him for walking out on me and my mum.’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ Nancy says, kicking another pebble and sending it skittering across the sand. ‘I hope he doesn’t come back. I don’t want anything to do with him.’

  She looks at me pointedly as she says this and I know what she’s thinking. She wants me to agree with her. She wants me to say that I never want to see him again. She wants me to promise not to contact him, not to meet up with him in London.

  But I won’t. I don’t know what I want to do, but my gut is telling me to give him a second chance.

  ‘Do you really want to let him back into your life after he left us?’ Nancy asks, without me saying a word.

  It’s so unnerving how she can read my brain like that.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. It’s complicated. My brain feels all jumbled and confused.’

  While I’m saying this, I notice Chase glance at his watch and I get a pang of irritation, but I push it aside and focus on how good it is that he’s here.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Jimmy says. ‘It’s kind of a big deal.’

  ‘He knows absolutely nothing about us,’ Nancy says bitterly. ‘Nothing. How can he catch up on all the years h
e’s missed? Just sit there while we read off a reel of our biggest moments throughout our lives? I don’t think he even knows about the car crash last term. His daughter was in a coma and he had no idea!’

  ‘How’s your mum coping with it?’ Jimmy asks. ‘It must be stressful for her to see him again after all this time.’

  ‘She seems all right, I think,’ I say. ‘She keeps asking us about it and encouraging us to talk to her rather than bottling anything up.’

  ‘Would she mind if you met up with him?’ Chase asks, moving his arm from my waist as his phone beeps in his pocket. ‘I reckon my mum would be really angry if I tried to see my dad.’

  ‘If anything, it’s the opposite,’ I point out. ‘I get the feeling that, after the initial shock of him showing up, she’s quite happy that he wants to be a part of his family again. She’s always worried about us not having a father figure and she doesn’t want us not to have a dad because it didn’t work out with them.’

  ‘That’s the phrase he used,’ Nancy says coldly. ‘The other night, he said, “It didn’t work out,” as though it was some kind of puzzle. But it’s not. He left. It’s simple. He walked out. He doesn’t get to just walk back in whenever he feels like it. Why has he come back now?’

  ‘It was his New Year’s resolution,’ I reply, glancing at Chase who is reading a long email on his phone.

  ‘What was?’ Jimmy asks, finishing his hot chocolate.

  ‘Re-bonding with his daughters,’ Nancy answers, rolling her eyes. ‘Imagine telling people that at a party.’ She puts on a voice. ‘“So, my New Year’s resolution is to join the gym. What’s yours?”; “I’m going to track down the daughters I walked out on and ask to be their dad again. I wonder who will stick to their resolution the longest.” It’s so ridiculous. I think there’s something more to it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Chase interjects, holding up his phone screen as a call comes through. ‘I need to take this. I’ll catch up in a second.’

  He answers the phone and hangs back while we carry on along the beach. I try not to be annoyed but I am. Giving me a few hours one evening doesn’t seem like that much to ask, especially when such a huge thing has happened in my life. I know that this is an important moment in his career, I get it, but couldn’t he focus on me for a little bit?

  But then I think of when he called last night and I didn’t pick up because I was in the middle of working on a new piece to play to Caroline on Saturday. I had spent ages researching the most difficult piano pieces out there and then picked one that would be bound to impress everyone, even Jordan, if I could get it right. I meant to call Chase back, but, by the time I was done practising, it was midnight and he’d already texted me an hour before, saying he was going to bed.

  I can’t exactly be angry at him for being busy, when I’m so busy myself. We needed to somehow make our moments of free time coordinate better.

  ‘They must be writing lots of new songs at the moment,’ Nancy says.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Chasing Chords,’ she prompts, nodding back towards Chase. ‘I’m guessing that’s why he’s so busy. He writes them all, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Um, yeah, I think so.’

  ‘I don’t know how he does it, writing all those songs,’ Jimmy muses. ‘It takes me ages to write anything for my website and that’s only words, let alone making them all poetical and meaningful, and then match some catchy melody. I have a whole new respect for writers these days.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be a journalist. Haven’t you always had respect for writers?’ Nancy says with a small smile, the first I’ve seen since we walked out of the school gates this afternoon. I knew it would be a good idea to invite Jimmy along.

  ‘Yes, but I did not realize how stressful it is, writing under pressure! It’s impossible! Impossible, I say!’ he cries dramatically, flinging his arms up in the air like a total drama queen and making Nancy and me laugh. ‘I’ve only written two articles so far, ready to upload, and they’ve taken a lot of time and concentration to put together. I haven’t even got started on the layout and design of the website yet.’

  ‘What’s yours about?’ Nancy asks curiously.

  He wags his finger in her face and she swats him away.

  ‘Nope, Miss Palmer! I’m not telling you one thing about my genius project, and do you know why? Because we are competitors. Media rivals!’

  ‘That’s true,’ she says as he sticks his tongue out at her. ‘But I’m going to find out what your site is about when you launch it at the end of the week, so why don’t you just tell me now?’

  ‘And how do I know that you won’t go straight to Layla and Sophie, your best friends, and tell them all about my wonderful ideas that they’ll then copy straight away, having no original or creative bone in their collective bodies?’

  ‘I actually disagree with you there,’ Nancy says haughtily. ‘They are creative in their own ways. Layla can get creative with make-up and Sophie once suggested I write a story about Chasing Chords set in a world of dinosaurs and robots. That’s definitely imaginative thinking outside the box. And they’re not my best friends, thank you very much. You two are.’

  Jimmy stops dead in his tracks and places a hand on his heart, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply, before shoving his empty hot chocolate cup at me.

  ‘Here we go,’ Nancy says, rolling her eyes at me.

  ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear that?’ Jimmy cries out. ‘I am Nancy Palmer’s best friend! What an honour! She has finally embraced her nerd roots.’ He flings his arms round her. ‘Who could have guessed that this would be in our future? That the most popular girl in school would declare herself my best friend. You remember that time you said very openly that you didn’t mind which group the teacher put you in, but you didn’t want to be in a group of three with me and Nina?’

  ‘In my defence,’ she says, ‘you two were drawing on each other’s faces with marker pen. And, besides, I’m not the most popular girl in school any more. I barely exist there.’

  I’m about to probe her on what she means, but Chase comes running up to fall into step with us again.

  ‘Sorry about that. It’s really hard to get Uncle Mark off the phone. What were you saying about your dad before Mark called, Nancy?’

  Nancy’s face falls at the mention of Dad again.

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You were saying you thought there was more to it than the New Year’s resolution,’ Chase reminds her. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ She sighs. ‘It just seems odd that he’s turned up now. If it was a resolution and he wanted to get the new year off to a good start by making up for his past mistakes, wouldn’t he have come to see us weeks ago? He mentioned Guildhall, so maybe it’s that. It’s convenient that Nina is in London more or something.’

  ‘Have you thought about seeing him when you’re down in London at the weekends?’ Jimmy asks me.

  I nod gently, purposefully not looking at Nancy’s expression.

  ‘I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know if I will. I guess Nancy and I need to chat it through and make the decision together.’

  Nancy lets out a groan. ‘Nina, are you seriously considering meeting up with him?’

  ‘A lot of my memories of music include him and I can’t ignore that,’ I reason. ‘He was the one who first sat me at a piano.’

  ‘So? Chase’s dad first sat him at a piano at the age of four and he’s not trying to re-bond with his dad!’

  Jimmy shoots Chase a look. ‘It’s weird how much she knows about you.’

  Chase nods. ‘Tell me about it. I didn’t realize I had a distant cousin who is some kind of famous cheesemonger until she told me about it.’

  ‘Anyone who has ever read your Wikipedia page knows about the cheesemonger,’ Nancy huffs, crossing her arms. ‘I only know the stuff that Chasing Chords fans know. I don’t know any personal stuff like how you butter your bread before using peanut butter, which Nina told me about
. By the way, that’s gross.’

  ‘Everyone butters their bread before putting peanut butter on!’ Chase claims defiantly.

  Jimmy wrinkles his nose in disgust. ‘No, they don’t! What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Nancy,’ I say, trying to focus on the topic of Dad now that I’ve finally got Nancy talking about it, ‘all I’m saying is, I don’t think we should be completely closed to the idea of seeing him. Don’t you remember how much fun we used to have? How encouraging he was?’

  ‘Not really,’ she says.

  I know she’s lying because she’s angry, and I can understand that. But she remembers as well as I do.

  I remember so vividly the day he took us to London to see a show, but he made us go there really early for a big surprise he had planned. We had barely seen him all week because of work, and he’d been away travelling for his business the weekend before. Nancy and I could barely sleep on the Friday evening because we were so excited about our family day out the following day.

  On the train we begged him to tell us where we were going, but he just tapped the side of his nose and said it was a surprise. And then he made us all take a guess. Nancy, as usual, yelled out so many funny possibilities that other people on the train started to laugh along with us and one woman in the seat in front of us even turned round to have her own guess.

  ‘The aquarium, perhaps?’

  ‘Boring! Are we going to go have tea at the Ritz with all the celebrities?’ Nancy had asked, making the lady chuckle.

  When we got to London, he took us to this really posh street and then, as Mum walked along with Nancy behind us, he had pulled me ahead and stopped in front of a huge door.

  ‘Ready, Nina?’ he’d said, and then we’d walked in.

  It was an amazing piano shop, which sounds silly, but for me it was like walking into heaven. I’d never seen anything like it. I had gasped, taking in all the shiny pianos, my fingers itching to play on the biggest one by the window. It looked like the one all the famous pianists played in their grand-hall concerts. A smartly dressed woman had then come over and asked us if she could help.