Page 112 of Secret Husband
I blurted out everything I could think of. “Coffee. Exploring Pike Place. He liked the fishmongers and their show with the fish. Meeting with friends. Playing chess.”
“When I was here last, Maya said she had taken him to the park. Did he play chess in the park in Seattle?”
“Yes, but there is no one here doing that.” Realizing how foolish that sounded, I turned the car around. My father did not know that chess was no longer happening. He would see a park and think this was where to go to find his friends and the life he had been forced to leave behind.
I headed back the way we came. The entrance to Founders’ Park was on the other side of my house.
“But the parks are not usually open so early, are they?”
“We’ll see,” Lauren soothed.
We parked outside the entrance, which was miraculously open. This was a big space that would be hard to cover.
She handed me my phone. “I’ll go right, you go left. I’ll text you if I find him.” Her instincts were better than mine, which had been dulled by panic.
I rounded the lake with its paddling ducks, looking for signs, praying that my father had not tried to feed them and fallen in. I had gone no further than the park’s gazebo, when I got a text.
Silver Eyes
Over at the bandstand!
I raced back the way I had come, tracing Lauren’s path. Charging up the steps, I knelt in front of my father. He was in his pajamas but had maintained sufficient self-preservation instincts to put on slippers.
“Papa, are you okay?”
“Where are they?”
“Where is who?”
“Charles and Josef.” His chess friends in Seattle. “Are they dead?”
My heart cracked wide open at witnessing his frailty. Lauren sat beside him, holding his hand, and I contemplated the decision to take him away from Seattle, where he had built a life. Now his world had become so small. The house, the yard, the occasional walk around a neighborhood he did not recognize. I had done this. Circumscribed his life so I could follow this woman.
“They are not dead. It is too early for them to be here.”
He nodded, but he didn’t understand.
“You haven’t even had your breakfast yet, Sasha,” Lauren said in a soft tone.
He looked at her. “You are a good hockey player.”
She chuckled. “And you’re a sharp one.”
“My son plays hockey.”
“Is he any good?” Lauren peered up at me.
“He is. But he is also lazy. His mother has to yell for half an hour to get him up for practice in the morning.”
I swallowed my emotion, and with it the pain of witnessing the disappearance of another piece of him. “Come on, Papa. We should head home for coffee.”
“With an almond croissant,” he said absently.
“With an almond croissant.”
When we returned to the house, Maya was waiting in the driveway. She rushed forward to open the back seat door.
“The adventurer returns!”
