“SHE KNOWS IT’S TODAY, doesn’t she?” Lucinda asks, glancing down the long hallway of the Burnley County courthouse.
“I reminded her,” I say.
That’s a slight understatement. Besides the reminders I put in her phone a few weeks ago, I called her yesterday after waking up on Levi’s couch feeling less-than-stellar.
He was right. I’m never going to like anyone else half as much as I like her, fuckups and all.
Charlie didn’t answer. She didn’t answer two hours later, or around lunch, or any of the other three times that I called her and apologized and rambled into her voicemail, telling her that I was sorry, that I needed her, that I fucked up just as much as she did and we were both imperfect and that’s what made us beautiful together.
She didn’t pick up once. She hasn’t called. She hasn’t texted. Not even a smoke signal, and I’m starting to panic. I’m wondering how badly I fucked up on Saturday.
Lucinda checks her watch just as the doors to the courtroom open, and she looks at me.
“She knows where to go, doesn’t she?” she asks.
I just nod. I told her in the voicemails.
We go in. We sit. We’re five minutes early, and I pull out the same things as always: report cards and teacher statements, testimony from her ballet teacher and her piano teacher, the schedule of every visit over the past five years, and finally, her drawing.
Shit.
I packed all this last week. The drawing has Charlie in it, next to me, her hair a cacophony of squiggles. We’re both smiling and standing next to a castle surrounded by palm trees.
Looking at it feels like a trap door just opened under my heart, and I nearly put it back, but I don’t. I keep it out because if Charlie doesn’t come, I’m prepared to lie my damn face off and say that she had a work emergency or her dog died or her grandma is sick or whatever bullshit used to work when I was a kid in school.
“Cute,” Lucinda says. “No wombat?”
“Not in this one,” I say. “She’s still on that kick, though.”
The door opens again. I turn towards it too fast, but it’s not Charlie. It’s Crystal, coming belly-first, her lawyer and husband behind her, and she doesn’t so much as look in my direction as they sit, talking amongst themselves, her husband helping her into her chair like she’s got two broken legs or something.
“Do you want to try texting her?” Lucinda murmurs.
I think she’s getting antsy, and that knowledge makes the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, my palms start sweating because Lucinda is rarely antsy. She’s cool and calm and collected and a legal badass, but she’s not antsy.
“I’ll try,” I say, pull out my phone, text Charlie: Where are you?
I wait thirty seconds, a minute. There’s no answer.
I want to throw up.
The bailiff — Pete Bresley, officially Sprucevale’s biggest gossip — pulls the huge wooden doors closed, folds his hands in front of himself, stands by them.
“All rise,” he intones, and we do. Lucinda throws me a look. The judge walks in from chambers, casts a glance around the assembled parties, sits. I’m sweating, anxious, and I feel like someone’s put chains around my heart and thrown it into the ocean.
She didn’t come. She ignored all my voicemails and texts and apologies and pleas and even if she doesn’t want to forgive me, she couldn’t get over it and come for Rusty’s sake.
“Be seated,” the judge calls. “I hereby call into session the matter of Thornhill vs. Love—”
The giant wooden door creaks open again, and everyone turns, but we can’t see anything. It’s open about three inches and there’s nothing on the other side but the sunlight in the hallway.
I don’t hope. I don’t let myself. It’s probably someone looking for another courtroom, someone who got lost on their way to a bail hearing or something.
“Bailiff,” the judge calls, and Pete steps over, pushes the door open, and even though I’m not hoping, my heart is beating on my ribcage like it’s trying to break down a door.
“Thanks Pete,” says Charlie. “That thing’s heavier than it looks, huh?”
She steps in. She’s wearing a suit and her face is bright red. Her hair’s wild. She’s breathing like she’s just run a marathon but trying to pretend she’s breathing normally as she looks around, uncertain until her eyes land on me.
Relief douses me like a summer rainstorm, leaves me shivering. Pete points in my direction and Charlie walks over, careful in heels, drops neatly into the chair to my right.
Up close I can see tiny rivulets of sweat on her temples, and without being told I can see it: Charlie knowing she’s late again, knuckles white on the steering wheel, Charlie taking off her shoes and running barefoot through the courthouse, ignoring the weird looks and mutters that followed her.
I love her for it. She’ll probably never change, and she’ll probably never be on time, but I love her for the flaws, the cracks, for the fuckups and mistakes.
She scoots her chair in, still trying to catch her breath, and glances over at me.
“Sorry I’m late,” she whispers.
I reach over and take her hand. She’s got the ring on, and I lace our fingers together, raise it to my hand, kiss it.
“You’re fine,” I whisper back.
IT FEELS ENDLESS. Crystal’s lawyer talks about schools and gated communities and college acceptance rates and opportunities unavailable to the child in her current situation. He suggests that Charlie and I aren’t actually a couple. He goes on and on about the fact that she’s going to have a sibling, that a child needs her mother, that it’s a shame to raise a child in any situation that isn’t a picture-perfect nuclear family.
We hear about the knife, about the broken arm, and I look over at Charlie. She’s staring dead ahead, glassy-eyed, jaw clenched.
I can’t say anything, so I just squeeze her hand.
Then it’s Lucinda’s turn.
The report cards. The teacher statements. We hear about how Rusty is in second grade and reading at a seventh-grade level; how she’s ahead of the rest of her class in math; how she has an interest in abyssal fish and Little House on the Prairie and brain teasers.
Lucinda reminds us it’s a miracle, given how delayed Rusty’s development was when I got custody. She details every single time in the past five years that Crystal has cancelled visitation. She points at Charlie and reminds the room that I’m in a long-term, stable relationship with a suitable woman.
Then there are the questions: about my intentions with Charlie and with schooling and with the brewery, to Crystal about the move to Colorado and the new baby. I tell him what I know, and what I don’t know I make up and state confidently.
Finally, the judge stops asking questions. He looks down at his notes. He adjusts his glasses. He frowns. My heart is a kick drum in a punk band, thrashing away. It’s a wave in a hurricane, pounding against the rocks and dissolving.
“Let’s take a ten-minute recess,” he says, stands, and leaves the room.
My fingertips go cold as I watch him go. I can feel the blood draining, coming back to my heart, my brain, my lungs, my body’s stress reaction. There’s a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s a big decision,” Lucinda reminds me calmly. “It doesn’t mean you’re losing her. It means he wants to get it right.”
I nod. Charlie squeezes my hand so tight the band on her engagement ring cuts into the webbing between my fingers, her hand strong and firm in mine. I’m not normally a weak man, but I am right now.
If I go straight from here and get her from school, we could be across state lines by this afternoon, I think. We’d use cash. Go to cheap motels, stay under the radar, and we’d live like that and I’d never have to be without her…
“Tell me something,” I say to Charlie, leaning my forehead on my fist, trying not to think.
“Tell you what?”
“Anything,” I say. “Distract me.”
“The sound llamas and alpacas make when they mate is called orgling and it sounds like a jalopy trying to turn the engine over,” she says.
My eyes are still closed, and I take a deep breath.
“Orgling?” I say.
“Sounds exactly like you think it does, kind of a… bludabludabludabluda,” she says, then clears her throat, lowers her voice. “I’m not doing a very good job. Turtles squeak when they fu— uh, mate, like this high-pitched ennnhhhh. Though in most of the videos I’ve seen they were actually doing it to shoes, which I guess look like female turtles.”
“Were there feet in the shoes?” I ask.
Kidnap Rusty and get fake names, maybe Charlie will come…
“Some of them,” she says. “Apparently Crocs really look like hot lady turtles, which is kind of ironic given the name.”
“I knew there was a reason my mom hates them,” I say, and Charlie smiles.
We keep talking about nothing, or rather, Charlie keeps talking: about the weird noises animals make when they mate, about how speed walking is an Olympic event, about how President Andrew Jackson was once gifted a 1,400 pound block of cheese and threw a party at the White House so people would come eat it.
Then the door at the back of the courtroom opens again. Charlie stops cold. Our palms are sweaty against each other’s, but I couldn’t care less.
“It’s fine,” she whispers. “It’s fine.”
Despite myself, I glance over at Crystal.
She looks bored. Court resumes. Formalities are said, and finally, Judge Hughes takes his glasses off and leans forward.
I swallow, waiting, Charlie’s ring digging into me.
“After serious consideration, I’ve decided to amend the custody agreement between Mr. Loveless and Mrs. Thornhill,” he states, and I hear Charlie gasp. She squeezes harder.
His words push the breath from my body, like I’m in a vise.
I lost. The last six years don’t matter, because I lost my daughter to a woman I can’t stand, to a woman who doesn’t love her—
“In light of Mrs. Thornhill’s new life circumstances, I’m awarding you partial custody,” he goes on.
I might throw up. Charlie might break my hand. I think, desperately, of everything I might be about to miss: watching her run through the sprinkler and reading her bedtime stories and teaching her to make scrambled eggs, all the simple, day-to-day things that seems like nothing until they’re gone.
Please, don’t let them be gone.
“That custody will consist of four weeks per year at your new home in Colorado, to be divided as you see fit,” he says.
I was so set for bad news that it takes me a moment.
The information reaches my brain like snow melting through cracks in the asphalt, and I don’t understand it right away because I’m still thinking of singalongs in the car and games of Candyland.
“Mr. Loveless will retain custody for the other forty-eight weeks…” he goes on.
I finally get it.
She’s staying with me, and she’ll be gone once in a while, but day to day, morning and night, it’ll still be me.
Just as I realize it, Charlie gasps. I look over, and she’s crying, tears streaming down her face, and she grins at me, and the next thing I know our arms are around each other and her face is in my neck and she’s sniffling and I’m burying my face in her hair.
A month is nothing. It’s nothing. That’s fall break, spring break, and two weeks over the summer. It’s less than she theoretically has in visitation right now.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie says into my neck, whisper-laughing as she sniffles. “I’m sorry. Shit.”
I just laugh, my face still buried in her hair. For the first time in years and years, my own eyes are wet, and I blink against tears because Rusty is staying with me and I’m so happy and grateful that I don’t know what to do.
There’s more court. Lucinda handles it, I assume, because I sure don’t. I don’t hear anything that anyone else says, I just know that Rusty’s staying with me and Charlie showed up and while life is never perfect, it feels damn close right now.
Court adjourns. We all stand, and after the judge leaves, I finally give Charlie a proper hug, holding her against me, her breathing ragged and deep to match mine. Crystal, her husband, and her lawyer leave, dry-eyed, looking annoyed.
Charlie pulls back, wiping her cheeks, her face bright red and her eyes highlighter pink.
“I think that went quite well,” Lucinda says, snapping the latches on her briefcase shut, the hint of a smile on her face. “A month a year isn’t too bad.”
I just laugh.
“A month a year is fine,” I say. “I never wanted her not to get to see Rusty, I just… didn’t want her to take her away.”
Lucinda reaches out, takes my arm.
“I know, Daniel,” she says. “Pleasure working with you. Call me next time she gets up to her tricks again.”
She offers her hand. We shake. She leaves, and I pack up all my papers that are scattered over the table, shove them back into a folder, put them back into my bag. Pete Bresley watches the whole thing, and though part of me wonders whether he’s taking notes so he can tell his mother Mavis the most accurate version of what happened, I don’t care.
Let him tell everyone that Charlie sprinted in and that we held hands the whole time and that I cried tears of relief when I found out I got to keep Rusty. Fuck it, I don’t care.
We walk out of the courtroom holding hands.
