Page 94 of Free Heart
But his life is too full of “if onlys.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Dan
Nine weeks since free solo attempt
“Is this howyou do it, Dan?” Jeremiah asks, hanging upside down from some low bouldering holds. Lowell and I drilled them into the walls of Peggy Jo’s empty, detached garage last week. She gave me permission during one of the FaceTime calls she insists on.
Beneath Jeremiah is the stack of foam mats we put down to catch my falls. And I fall a lot as I work on my arm strength and begin to build my leg strength back.
“That’s it,” I encourage Jeremiah. “Now move the other foot up a little to the blue hold, and—ah!” I shrug. “Now you brush it off and try it again.”
Jeremiah rolls around on the mats, clearly enjoying the bounce and give of them, and then hops right back up to climbing again. “When Mommy comes, I’m gonna show her how high I can go!”
“She’ll love to see it,” I lie.
Leenie isn’t pleased that Jeremiah thinks I’m some kind of hero with godlike climbing skills. She absolutely hates that he professes he’s going to grow up to be just like me one day. I’m not sure how I feel about that either.
“I’ll even marry Sejinie too,” he’d declared proudly earlier in the day, puffing out his chest before launching himself into Sejin’s lap and giving him a teeth-gritting hug.
Sejin had shushed me when I’d attempted to explain polygamy and the law. “Let kids be kids, Danny,” he’d said. “I promise he won’t want to marry me once he’s grown.”
I have my doubts about that.
Speaking of Sejin, he’s back in the house with Sarah Kate trying to get her down for the night. It’s not going well. I can hear her warbling cry all the way out here.
The sound of crying babies always reminds me far too much of my eighth foster family and those eternally crying twins. Why couldn’t they soothe them? Did those babies feel what I’d felt from that family? Did they know they weren’t loved? Were they heartbroken too? The question haunted me then, and it haunts me now as Sarah Kate’s screams redouble in strength. The mountains ring with her discontent. It’s unnerving, and I hope it stops soon.
“Dan?”
“Yeah?”
“When’s Mommy coming back?” Jeremiah has already asked that twice tonight, but I follow Sejin’s lead from earlier and explain it again.
“She and your dad are in Fresno. They’re spending the night there so they can pick up Sejin’s father—your Uncle Buck—and my friend Peggy Jo from the airport. They’ll bring them both back here tomorrow and take you and your sister home.”
At which point, Sejin and I will move back into the van for good. I have mixed feelings about that. Strange that only a few months ago, I was all about the van life. See? Living in Peggy Jo’s cozy househasmade me soft.
“Why didn’t Sejinie go get his daddy?” Jeremiah asks, tugging himself back into the position he’d fallen out of before.
I watch him kick his left foot up to the blue hold I’d coached him on, and this time he makes it. “Good job! Sejinie—” I huff a laugh. I never call him that. “—couldn’t go because he has towork on the Tater Tots Christmas show. It’s the dress rehearsal tomorrow morning. You’re going to be in it, aren’t you?”
“I’m a Christmas kitty,” Jeremiah confirms, grunting as his tiny arms haul him up to another, even harder position on the wall. “Sarah Kate is gonna be a Christmas Moon.” He frowns. “She’s gonna wear a big white ball thing on her head.”
Sejin has let each child choose what they want to be in the show, so he’s got his hands full with Christmas kitties, Christmas dinosaurs, two Christmas trucks, a Christmas Spiderman, and a Christmas Taylor Swift. Amongst other things.
Sarah Kate is fascinated by the moon right now. She points at anything round and declares it a moon. Leenie wants her to be a Christmas Moon.
“Then you already know that tomorrow is the dress rehearsal. Sejin can’t miss that.”
Despite our best planning—or Sejin’s best planning, I should say—we’d only managed to get one thing to go right timing-wise this week. Peggy Jo and Sejin’s dad arrive on the same day at the airport.
Rather than driving home across the country, Peggy Jo left her truck for Bella and the baby to use. What she’ll do to get around once she’s back here, I don’t know. Drive her motorcycle like the badass biker grandma that she is, I guess.
Icoulddrive, but Sejin needs the car to get to the dress rehearsal. In the end, it’d fallen on Leenie and Martin to get Buck and Peggy Jo. They’d actually been pretty excited about it when Sejin had asked for the favor. Which made sense once I realized they planned to take the opportunity to indulge in a romantic night at a hotel—“with an indoor swimming pool!” Leenie enthused—away from the kids.
The trade-off is we need to watch Jeremiah and Sarah Kate, and since Martin also arranged to have their house deep-cleanedby a professional for Leenie’s Christmas present during the time they’re gone, we have to keep an eye on them here.
