Part 1: Gone Three Weeks Out of Four
I’m away from home three weeks out of every four.
I drive long-haul, running the same route from Amarillo to Atlanta and back, over and over.
That job is how I kept our house after my first wife, Amy, died. It covered Kaylee’s braces, her softball shoes, and the college savings account her mother had started before she got sick.
Two years earlier, I had married Tara.
She came across as warm and kind, with a great sense of humor. She always told me, “Go do your job, Wade. I’ve got the home front.”
And I trusted her completely.
Six months into the marriage, her brother Rick moved in “for a few weeks.”
Those few weeks never ended.
At 11:40 p.m. on a Wednesday, I pulled into our driveway with a grocery store cake on the passenger seat.
Strawberry. Kaylee had loved that flavor since she was four.
Inside, the house was bright and warm. The television was blaring.
Rick lay asleep in my favorite recliner, boots propped on the coffee table.
Tara came out of the kitchen in her robe.
“Wade! You’re early!”
She threw her arms around me and held on longer than usual.
“Where’s Kaylee?” I asked.
“Asleep.”
I walked down the hallway and pushed open my daughter’s bedroom door.
Her bed was gone.
A weight bench and a treadmill stood in its place, with a big mirror mounted on the wall.
“I turned it into a gym,” Tara said from behind me. “Kaylee didn’t need all that space.”
“Where. Is. My daughter.”
Tara crossed her arms.
“She stole forty dollars from my purse. She’s grounded. She chose the camper.”
I went straight out the back door into the freezing dark.
The old camper sat at the far end of our yard, right where I’d parked it years ago. Someone had fastened its door shut with a bungee cord.
I yanked the cord free and opened the door.
Kaylee was curled into a tight ball on the narrow bench seat. She wore two coats and a ski hat, with nearly every blanket in the house heaped on top of her. An extension cord ran to a small electric heater on the floor.
But someone had unplugged the cord at the house.
When the light hit her face, she flinched away.
Then she recognized me.
“Dad?”
She had lost weight. A frightening amount of it.
I dropped to my knees and pulled her against my chest. Her body was ice cold.
“How long, baby?”
“Since Thanksgiving.”
Five weeks.
Every time we’d talked on the phone, she had told me everything at home was fine.
“Dad, please,” she whispered. “Don’t make it worse. Just two more years. I can do two more years.”
Then she slowly lifted one shaking hand toward the wall.
A white baby monitor was taped beside the camper window. The parent unit. Its green light was on, but the volume had been turned all the way down.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “Tomorrow. At the party. When everyone’s there. Please, Dad. Trust me.”
I scooped her up, carried her back inside, and tucked her into my own bed.
Tara watched from the kitchen doorway.
“You’re undoing everything I’ve worked for,” she said. “Amy spoiled her rotten. I’m raising her right.”
From the recliner, Rick laughed. “Girl’s got a mouth on her, man. You’ve been gone too long.”
The next morning, Tara poured my coffee and flashed me a pleasant smile.
“Take her side on this,” she said softly, “and she spends her sixteenth year in a program for troubled girls. I already have the paperwork, Wade. All it needs is your signature.”
I held her gaze for a long moment.
“Okay,” I said.
Her smile widened.
She thought she had gotten exactly what she wanted.
