Page 135 of Free Heart
“Hey,” Dan says,looking up from his phone. “You have today off?”
“I do. Yeah.” I’m shaving, and he’s leaning against the doorjamb waiting his turn.
In the mirror, I see him nod before gazing down at his phone again. His lower lip tucks between his teeth.
“What’s wrong?” Immediately, I’m imagining money issues or a message from his doctor saying they’ve been wrong about his leg this whole time, and he’s not allowed to climb anymore after all.
Maybe that last is a combination of fearfulandwishful thinking.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he says, and then pushes his phone over to me.
At first, the words don’t make sense, but then I flick my gaze up to the name at the top of the text messages—Henry Trust Guy—and suddenly it makes a lot more sense. “This is about your mom?”
“Yeah.”
I look at the address again. “That’s not so far from here.”
“Closer than I ever knew.”
I hand the phone back to him and return to my shaving. After I’ve finished, I wipe my face dry with a towel, still watching Danin the mirror. Now he’s looking at a map on his phone, and I’m pretty sure I know what that means.
“Do you want to go there?”
Dan fiddles with the map, zooming in. It takes him a few more long seconds before he looks up and says, “Will you go with me?”
“Of course.”
Getting the cats settled is easy enough, and we’re in my car and driving within the hour. About twenty minutes in, Dan flips on the stereo. He connects his phone to the Bluetooth and cues up a song. Shortly, strummy guitar plays from the speakers.
I blink, surprised. The song is nothing like I’ve ever heard him listen to before. It’s not his psyched-and-ready rock music, and it’s not KPop either. It’s “How to Save a Life” by The Fray. The song’s so familiar to me from my childhood, mainly as something played overhead in grocery stores, but I’ve never listened to it on purpose before.
When it’s over, Dan cues it up again.
On the third time around, I turn the volume down a little. “What’s this song mean to you?”
He turns to look out the window. At first, I think he might not answer, but eventually he says, “Have I ever told you about my seventh foster mother? Kristie?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
The song warbles on in the background. Dan presses something on his phone, and then sighs heavily. “She was a teacher. Young. Probably twenty-six.” He shifts in his seat. “I don’t know why she even became a foster mother. Whatever her reasons, she was in over her head with me. I was twelve by then, suffering through an angry puberty. She’d probably hoped to get a cute little kid, but got assigned me.”
The song hits the stride of the chorus again, and he frowns, listening to it for a moment before continuing with his story. “She wasn’t a bad person.”
“I’m sure she wasn’t,” I whisper, though I’m not sure of any such thing. Plenty of the people Dan lived with growing up sound bad to me.
“In the weeks leading up to the day Kristie gave me back over to the state, she listened to this song a lot. I’d hear it coming from her bedroom at night, and I’d lie in my bed, and…”
I let him trail off. We listen to the song in silence, until it starts over once again. Dan resumes his story.
“I knew, because of the song and how she kept playing it, that she was going to give me up. So, when the social workers came, I wasn’t even sad or mad. I was ready. I’d cried about Edith a lot when they first took me from her, but Kristie… I didn’t cry. On the way out the door, she gave me an iPod Nano. Do you remember those?”
“Barely.”
“She put it in my hand with some earbuds, and she said, ‘Don’t let anyone take this from you, okay? It’s got songs on here that I want you to listen to and really think about.’”
I blink. “How strange.”
“I didn’t listen to it at all for around a week, but the state had put me with the O’Nallys and those babies just kept screaming and screaming. I was losing my fucking mind…” He gets quiet again.
