“That’s why you wanted to bring us out here, isn’t it?” I asked. “To see him.”
“No,” he said. “Well, that’s not the only reason anyway. I really did want to see y’all one more time before you have to go.”
A bunch of guys were out on the courts shooting basketball up on the hill behind Brady. Down here at the park, kids were playing, running past us and laughing and hollering at each other. I didn’t see any police, and I was happy for that, but that didn’t mean somebody else might not recognize Wade from the news and call the cops.
“He’s going to be in trouble if he comes out here, isn’t he?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Brady said. “We’ll have to see.” He looked toward the playground and pointed at the little merry-go-round. It was empty. “Do y’all want a push?” he asked, standing up.
I pulled Ruby toward the playground. “She’ll only let me push her,” I said. “She don’t like to go too fast.”
Ruby climbed on the merry-go-round and stood right in the center. “Hold on tight,” I said.
“Not too fast,” she said.
“I know.” I started pushing it around.
Brady walked over and sat down on a bench beside an old woman who was reading a book. He sat there and just looked around at all the other people in the park like he was waiting on something, but he didn’t quite know what it would be.
A little girl, maybe a year older than Ruby, came and stood beside me and watched me spin the merry-go-round. “Can I get on?” she finally asked.
“Sure,” I said. I stopped it and let her climb on, and I made sure she got ahold of one of the bars before I started spinning it again.
“I’m getting dizzy,” Ruby said. She was smiling.
“I’ll spin you the other way,” I said. “That’ll get you un-dizzy.” I wanted to laugh at Ruby, but the whole time I couldn’t help but look at every single person in the park, half expecting to see Wade. Brady was still there on the bench, looking all around him, and I figured he was probably expecting to see Wade too. The old woman sitting beside him must’ve been the little girl’s grandmother, because she’d set her book down on her lap and was watching me push the merry-go-round.
And that’s when I saw Brady lean over and whisper something to the woman. She pulled back and stared at him for a second like she couldn’t believe what he’d said, and then she leaned closer. He whispered to her again. She closed her book and stood up and grabbed her purse. Then she walked over to the merry-go-round and reached for the bars to try to stop it from spinning.
“Come on,” the woman said. She reached out her hand to the little girl, but the girl didn’t move.
“Are we leaving?” she asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“But we just got here,” the girl said.
The woman looked back at Brady, and then took the girl’s hand. “It’s just time for us to go home,” she said. She picked the girl up without saying anything and walked back toward the parking lot. The girl started crying, and the woman turned her head and looked at me and Ruby, and then she looked over at Brady. Other people were looking at us too.
“Why’d she leave?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing,” he said. He smiled, but I could tell he was hiding something from me.
I started pushing Ruby again, the other way this time. She was sitting down now, turning her head around and around, watching the old woman carry the little girl back to their car. It felt like a lot of people were staring at me and Ruby after what had happened, but when I looked around I saw that a couple of them were staring at Brady. One of them was a man up on the hill to our right, sitting on a bench, holding a newspaper. He let it drop to his lap so he could see, even though he’d been too far away to hear anything the woman had said. And then I noticed a man closer to us, standing on the bridge that ran over the little creek off to the left of the playground. He was staring at Brady too. When he saw me looking at him, he looked away, and I swear I saw him say something to himself.
Then I saw what looked like a little wire running up into the man’s ear. He was way too young for some kind of hearing aid, and as soon as I saw that wire I knew the real reason Brady had brought us out here in the first place, and I couldn’t believe he’d do this to us, to Wade. But he had.
I grabbed on to the merry-go-round and ran with it in circles as hard as I could. Ruby hollered out that I was going too fast, but I didn’t stop. She was half screaming, half laughing by the time I jumped on. The park moved past me in a blur, and I could just make out Brady where he sat on the bench, the man up on the hill, the one over on the bridge, and all the other people who may have been there for the same reason those three were.
Ruby was still sitting down, and I climbed to the middle and leaned up against one of the bars. I watched everything rush by, and I reached up and touched my nose with each finger, and then I touched both ears before rubbing my hands down my arms one at a time. I kept doing that until the merry-go-round slowed down, and then I hopped off and pushed as hard as I could and jumped back on and kept giving the same sign Wade had showed me.
Brady had stood up from the bench, and he hollered my name. “What are you doing?” he said.
Ruby was lying on her back, staring up at me. “Faster!” she screamed. She was laughing now, and she didn’t seem one bit scared anymore. I wasn’t either.
CHAPTER 35
We didn’t see Wade that day, and we didn’t see him before we left Gastonia for Alaska either. I don’t even know for certain if he was there at Lineberger Park that afternoon, but I like to think he was.
That night, one of our last nights in the home, I laid there with my head against the pillow and realized I’d been wrong about what Wade was doing after he’d left us in St. Louis. For the past week I’d pictured him headed west in the opposite direction of me and Ruby, that black bag of money on the seat beside him, his brain working and working, trying to figure out what to do next. But he’d actually tried to come back for us.
I didn’t like what Brady had done, trying to use us to get Wade caught by the police and the FBI and whoever else, and I had a hard time forgiving him after that. But then I remembered that he didn’t know Wade like I did, and he’d probably never had his own father disappear on him twice and come back both times. Brady thought he was doing the right thing for me and Ruby, even though I thought he’d been wrong to do it.
It took a few days of Miss Crawford fussing over us to get us all packed, me and Ruby going through our bedroom as slow as we could, trying to decide what things to keep and what things to give away to other kids who could use them: the new bedspreads that finally matched our sheets, the books on our bedside table, the clothes hanging in the closet.
But there was one thing I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave behind; it was one of those old baseballs Wade had signed back before he’d left us, back when he thought he might be somebody one day and that baseball would be worth something to someone besides him. As hard as I’d tried to rub his signature off all those years ago, it was still there-even though you couldn’t hardly see it. That’s a little bit what it was like being Wade’s daughter too.
And then me and Ruby were in Anchorage with Mom’s parents. When we first got there I’d lie in bed at night in a room that was all my own for the first time in my life, and I’d listen to strange voices coming from strange rooms in a place I knew I didn’t belong. But the only thing those voices did was tell me how happy they were that me and Ruby had come to live with them and how much I reminded them of Mom.
But I knew better than that, and I knew that was just something they’d probably said to make me feel at home, to make me feel like I belonged. Once all that brown washed out of my hair and my tan finally faded for good they’d probably stop seeing Mom when they saw me, and that was okay. They’d have Ruby there to remind them of Mom. So would I.