Every Wild Heart

by Meg Donohue

  Ah, I thought. A woman in the throes of a divorce. My target audience.

  The living room held a couch, an armchair, and a TV, but there was nothing on the walls. There was a mess of Legos on a small table in one corner of the room, and an overflowing bin of kids’ toys. “I’ll just grab my phone from the kitchen,” Evie said. “Please have a seat anywhere you like.”

  I faltered when I noticed a copy of my book, Number One Single, splayed cover-up on the coffee table. Denny noticed it, too, and raised his eyebrows at me.

  “See!” Evie said, coming back into the room with her cell phone in her hand. She plopped down close beside me on the couch and pointed at the book. “I told you I’m a fan. It’s not even my first time reading it! I was just sitting here alone”—she lowered her voice confidentially here—“feeling a little sorry for myself, when I decided to pull out your book and reread some of my favorite parts. I have all the best bits underlined so they’re easy to find when I need them.” She beamed at me. “And then the doorbell rang! Who knew you made house calls!” Evie gave my knee a playful shove.

  “I’m really worried about my daughter,” I said, casting an unsubtle glance at her phone.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Let me call Lucas right now.” Evie poked at her phone a couple of times and then held it to her ear. I could hear the phone ringing and ringing, the faint sound of a male voice on an outgoing voice message. Evie held my gaze, her mouth twisting apologetically. “Lucas,” she said. “It’s me. Mom. You’ll never guess who I’m sitting next to right now . . . Gail Gideon! From the radio show? Anyway, she’s very upset. Her daughter is missing and she says the two of you are friends. Is that true?! Are you friends with G.G.’s daughter? Have you seen her tonight? Call me when you get this, sweetheart.” She looked at me. “It’s important.”

  She seemed disappointed as she set down the phone. Then she brightened. “Let me text him, too. He might not listen to the voice message when he’s at the movies, but I bet he’ll see a text.” Her fingers pecked at the phone, her brow furrowed with the effort of concentration. After a few moments she looked up again. “I’m so sorry. I wish he’d picked up. Hopefully he’ll text back soon.”

  “Do you know which theater he went to?” Denny asked. “Maybe we should drive there.”

  It was hard to imagine Nic sneaking out of her father’s house to see a movie, but it was also impossible to imagine her stealing a car, or secretly riding a dangerous horse, or signing up for an anonymous Instagram account and posting things about her classmates.

  “I don’t know,” Evie said slowly, embarrassed. She waved her hand in the direction of the hallway behind her. “Lucas’s little sisters are both down with fevers. I’ve been so distracted with them, I didn’t think to ask Lucas which theater he was going to. I’m sorry.”

  “Would you mind if we waited here with you for a few minutes?” I asked. “In case he texts back right away?”

  “Oh, no, not at all! Please, make yourselves at home. It’s the least I can do. I should have asked Lucas where he was going. It’s just that I’ve been trying to give him space lately. That’s what our family therapist thinks he needs.” She looked down at her knees. “He’s been so upset about the divorce. I think he holds everything inside too much—he needs to let it out! I wish he’d talk to me. But the therapist says not to worry, he’ll talk when he’s ready. He has his art, at least. Even when he won’t talk to me, I know he’s processing some of his emotions through drawing.”

  I was half-listening to Evie, half-staring at her phone, willing her son to text her back. Where was Nic? What teenager goes out without bringing her phone? The kind, I thought, feeling a pang of dread as I mentally answered my own question, who does not want to be found.

  “Would you like to see them?” Evie asked.

  I looked up at her.

  “Lucas’s drawings,” she said. “They’re really quite wonderful.”

  I glanced at Denny. “Sure,” he answered, surprising me. “Let’s take a look.”

  As we followed Evie down the hall, he whispered to me, “Thought it might not hurt to have a peek in the kid’s room.”

  I nodded.

  It turned out that Lucas’s drawings were wonderful. The boy was an artist. His work was full of movement, tiny lines that filled pages. The room was papered with hundreds of his drawings. There were a lot of studies of trees moving in the wind, darkly beautiful works that reminded me of that strange electrical storm that had hit the city the night before Nic’s accident.

  “Your son is very talented,” I told Evie.

  Her face beamed with pride. “I’m just so happy he has this outlet. Art has been his guiding light through everything that has happened—the separation, moving across the country.” She kept talking as Denny and I moved slowly around the room, looking at the drawings. “He has his art, and well, frankly, G.G., I’ve had you. I’m sure you must hear this all the time, but I really don’t know where I would be without you. You gave me the courage to face the fact that Max would never really love me. Listening to your show every night, reading your book . . . it gave me the strength to leave him.”

  “I’m glad I was able to help,” I told her. “But I hope you know I didn’t give you that courage. You had it in you all along. Maybe I helped you find it.”

  Denny was standing in front of one particular group of drawings. I moved to his side. They all showed a girl riding a horse. The girl was faceless, but there was something both powerful and ethereal about her stance that reminded me of the way Nic looked when she rode.

  “Yes,” Evie said. “I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure that courage was in me all along, buried deep down and neglected for so many years. But you guided me to find it. I don’t know where I’d be without you, G.G. Not here, though. I know that. You’re my role model.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I even decided to send Lucas to Kirke because I’d read somewhere that that was where you planned to send your daughter to high school. And now they’ve become friends!”

  Her words were still burrowing their way through my mind when I saw it, the drawing that made me suck in my breath. I felt my knees buckle as fear took me in its grip.

  Swirls of tiny angry lines that formed a vase of rotting roses, blackened petals falling from broken stems.

  Chapter 22

  Lucas drove Nic across the Golden Gate Bridge. On one side, the lights of the city glowed beautifully; on the other, the sea was an invisible expanse of darkness. The Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” played on the radio. Nic wanted to ask him why he’d requested to be her senior buddy, why he’d lied about knowing who her mother was, but when she looked at him, the soft, steady pulse of her heart overwhelmed her. Warmth spread through her chest. She reached out and traced his cheekbone with her thumb, because she could. She believed that her questions could wait. She believed she had time.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. They were driving into the city now, one of a line of cars speeding along the curves of the road as it cut through Golden Gate Park.

  “You’ll see,” Lucas answered. “We’re almost there.”

  They turned onto a street that hugged the edge of the park. After a few minutes, Lucas pulled the car to the side and turned off the ignition. He reached into the backseat and grabbed a flashlight and a backpack.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Nic’s pulse suddenly thudded. There was so much that she didn’t know about this boy, and yet—he’d helped her blindly, when there was no one else she could ask for help. “Yes,” she said.

  They walked deeper into Golden Gate Park. Nic reminded herself that they were still in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people lived within a few miles of where they were now walking. Lucas held her hand tightly, interlacing his fingers with hers. She wondered if the sudden quiet made him feel a bit spooked, too. He turned on the flashlight and they followed its bobbing light into a cave-like tunnel that ran below an overpass. Wind caught in the tunnel sounded like a low
moan. Nic’s teeth began to chatter.

  Lucas stopped in the center of the tunnel. “We’re here,” he said. “It’s time.”

  Before she could ask what he meant, he leaned down and unzipped the backpack he’d placed on the ground. Then he turned off the flashlight and the tunnel fell into thick blackness. Nic felt a cry forming in her throat—

  She heard a click.

  Suddenly on the dark walls and the ceiling of the tunnel, a painting emerged, its tiny strokes glowing fluorescent, pulled from darkness by an ultraviolet lantern that Lucas had taken out of his backpack. Nic’s portrait was on one side of the tunnel, her hair whipping the air above her as though blown by storm winds, but her hair also seemed to be the storm itself, swirling through the tunnel in spirals big and small, a sheet of rain and dancing winds that were as intricately patterned as embroidered cloth, as mysterious as the lines and dots of some ancient alphabet, a letter written from another time.

  Nic turned in the center of the tunnel, her head thrown back as she tried to see everything at once. She lowered her eyes, finally, to meet Lucas’s. His face glowed in the strange light of what he had created.

  “I’ve been working on it all week,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she whispered, walking toward him. “It’s amazing.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “It’s you.”

  When Nic wrapped her arms around him, she realized that he was trembling.

  ON THE DRIVE back to her father’s house, Lucas told her that the painting was his way of apologizing.

  “For lying to me?” Nic asked. “You acted like you didn’t know who my mother was, but Dr. Clay said you did know. She said you asked to be my senior buddy.”

  Lucas glanced at her, then back at the road. She could not read his face. “I knew who your mother is,” he said. “I’ve known for years.”

  Nic listened, frozen, as Lucas told her that a couple of years earlier, his mother had become obsessed with listening to The Gail Gideon Show. When Lucas’s mother told him that she was leaving his father, Lucas had felt sure that it wouldn’t have been happening if it weren’t for Gail Gideon. Yes, he’d known all along that Nic was Gail Gideon’s daughter. He’d wanted to get close to Nic so that he could get close to her mother, and find ways to make her mother’s life as difficult as his own had been for the past year. He told her that he’d called her mother’s show and sent her messages and even broken Roy’s car’s headlights one night.

  “I thought I was going to hate you, too,” he told Nic. “I wanted to hate you. But I couldn’t.” He glanced at her and then quickly away again, as though he couldn’t bear the look on her face.

  “You weren’t at all who I expected you to be, Nic. You changed everything. You’re so beautiful, inside and out. I started to see myself, what I was doing, through your eyes, and I felt ashamed.” When he blinked, a tear rolled down his cheek. Nic squeezed her hands in her lap. She didn’t want to believe what he was telling her.

  “The night I saw you ride Peach, I knew I couldn’t hate your mother anymore. I did one last thing, just to . . . prove to myself that I could, I guess. To mark that the whole thing was done.”

  “You left the roses in our kitchen,” Nic said slowly. He’d seen where she hid the house key. He’d been at her side when she entered the alarm code.

  Lucas nodded, his expression pained. “I would never have done anything that physically hurt her,” he said quietly. “She didn’t do anything to physically hurt me.”

  Nic felt her temper leap to life. “She didn’t mean to hurt you at all, Lucas! She doesn’t even know who you are!”

  “But that’s exactly what made me so mad. She doesn’t have any idea about the real lives of the real people who listen to her show.”

  “She helps a lot of people, Lucas. Millions of people. Do you really think that your mother should have stayed with your father? That they were happy together?”

  Lucas shook his head.

  “My mom can’t make people get divorced,” Nic insisted. She felt angry and confused, her loyalty to her mother flaring bright. He had threatened the person that Nic loved most in the world.

  “No, I know she can’t,” he said. “I just kept hearing her voice on the radio every night, over and over again, and it sank into me. And then I couldn’t let it go. But I have now—I’ve let it go. I promise that I have. I know I was wrong, and I’m so sorry for what I did. I thought that moving here meant that my life was over . . . I thought it was the worst thing that could happen to me.” He looked away from the road and into Nic’s eyes. “But now I know it’s the best thing that could have happened to me.”

  Quiet fell over the car. Lucas’s confession had left Nic feeling sucker-punched. Her whole body ached. But there was a part of her, she was surprised to discover, that felt moved by the ferocity of Lucas’s anger, his compulsion to act, finally, and take control of a part of his life that had felt out of his control for so long. It was confusing to still care for him, but she did.

  “Can I ask you something?” Lucas said. “You write the KirkeKudos posts, don’t you?”

  Nic hesitated for a moment, wondering if she was ready to give up this secret, before answering. “Yes.”

  “No one has ever said anything like that about me before.” When Lucas glanced at her again, his face was full of anguish. “Can you ever forgive me, Nic?” he asked.

  She thought of the picture he had drawn for her in Angel Bully’s car, how it had helped her remember the way that the earth had cradled her when she fell from Tru, protecting her, teaching her, sending her back.

  She was about to answer Lucas when she saw the headlights that should not have been moving toward them. It was too late to warn him, or to answer him—or to say anything at all. The jolt slammed her backwards against the seat and forward again. The car was spinning, screeching.

  When Nic tried to find Lucas, she saw only stars.

  Chapter 23

  When Evie received the call from the hospital alerting her that Lucas and “a female passenger” had been in a car accident, she ran to ask her neighbor to watch her sleeping daughters and then we piled into Denny’s truck and sped toward the city. In what felt like a moment of déjà vu, I called Tyler on the way and he said that he would meet us at the hospital. Denny drove so fast that it was a miracle we didn’t get into an accident of our own. My stomach was in my throat the entire ride, my knuckles gripped tight as though preparing to hurt the boy who had put my daughter in danger yet again. I kept hearing Dr. Feldman’s voice telling me that a second head injury would be more serious than the first. Every once in a while Denny glanced over at me, his expression a mix of worry, empathy, and stoicism. He didn’t say a word, though. Didn’t offer one syllable of verbal comfort. Even in the midst of a crisis, he was a straight shooter. I found more consolation in his quiet than in any number of empty words.

  Still, I would have traded everything—every paycheck, every fan, even the unexpected happiness that took hold of me in this man’s company—for my daughter’s safety.

  Denny let us out at the doors to the emergency room, and Evie and I ran inside. Nurses led us straight back to our children. Evie was taken in one direction and I was taken in another. We exchanged one final glance before she turned out of view, and in that look I saw all the worry of a mother in my same shoes.

  “Mom!” Nic said as I ran to her bedside. She was sitting up, smiling, and looking ludicrously healthy despite her hospital gown.

  “Oh, Nic!” I cried. I hesitated, running my eyes over her body for signs of broken bones, and then threw my arms around her.

  She released a sound that was half-laugh, half-moan. “They told you I was okay, didn’t they? You weren’t worried, were you?”

  “Nicola Clement. You ran off somewhere and didn’t tell anyone where you were going and the next thing I know, you’re in the emergency room. Again. Of course I was worried! What the hell happened? How’s your head? Has someone c
alled Dr. Feldman?”

  “I’m fine. Yes, someone called him. They already did a CT scan and said everything looks okay. I didn’t ever lose consciousness or anything. I remember the whole thing. A car ran a red light and hit us.”

  “You and Lucas Holt.”

  She nodded. “One of the nurses told me that he broke his arm in three places. But he’s okay.”

  “He won’t be when I’m through with him.”

  Nic’s face fell. “This isn’t Lucas’s fault.”

  I sighed. “Nic,” I said gently. “I’m pretty sure that Lucas is the person who has been threatening me for weeks. He smashed Roy’s car headlights. He broke into our house.” I was still having trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that it was highly unlikely that Jenny Long had anything to do with the recent string of threats that I’d received, but my daughter looked suspiciously unsurprised by the news that her friend was involved. Had she known?

  “He didn’t really break in. He knew where I kept the key. He knew the alarm code.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just saying he didn’t technically break in to anything.”

  “You’re defending him? And, wait—what do you mean he knew where you kept the key? You had this guy over to our house?”

  Nic ignored this last question. “You just need to get to know the real Lucas, Mom. He’s an amazing person. He made a mistake. One big one.”

  “More than one. So many more than one! Nic, he has been threatening me. I don’t think you understand how serious this is.”

  “I do . . . but he has reasons for what he did. And he’s sorry. And he would never have hurt you. He’s an artist, Mom. He’s passionate and talented and intense . . .” Nic trailed off. She looked beyond me, her eyes brightening. “Denny!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

  Denny walked up beside me, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and grinned at the sight of Nic, healthy and chatting away. “I wouldn’t miss one of your hospital stays, Nic. It’s a tradition at this point.”