Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,36
Paris still hung on the wall. Bri had always dreamed of going to France but hadn’t gotten any farther east than Phoenix once for a human-resources conference. Among other laundry a pink sweatshirt rested over the couch back, which was the closest he’d gotten to seeing Sofia in one year, five months, and thirteen days.
She’d been so little when they’d moved in. Back then the apartment smelled of fresh paint, new carpet, and promise. When he’d get home from work, she’d toddle out and hold her arms up to him. She’d put her bare feet on top of his shoes and they would dance in the kitchen, and the stove would smell like fresh tortillas and spiced beans, would smell like home.
His throat was closing up, and he looked down and blinked till the ground stopped blurring. How far the fall from grace, from that kitchen filled with life to a rickety not-to-code room in El Sereno. One night, lubricated with a pint of the cheap stuff, he’d drawn a sketch of his daughter, re-creating her features one by one, each line a love letter, every curve a memory etched into his brain. He kept it tacked to the wall as a comfort and a punishment, a reminder that he’d left a mark on the planet but had been too flawed to build on that foundation.
His thoughts pulled to the smooth, smooth taste of rum and the feeling when it hit the blood, how it eased the cramps in the chest and loosened his focus so that for a few precious moments everything seemed warm and touched by grace. Even him.
He reached for the mantra, worn threadbare from repetition in his mind: An alcoholic alone is in bad company.
There was a crash from the backyard behind him. In trying to stand up, one of the meth heads had knocked over a barbecue. The man had a beard and no visible lips, an unsettling effect, as if his wiry facial hair had sprouted teeth. Red charcoal lumps dotted the concrete of the backyard and the six or so broken spirits stared down at them as if they were tea leaves prophesying the future.
The party unfroze, the people rumbling back into motion. The bearded man hit a pipe and then let a wasted girl shotgun the smoke right out of his mouth. She slumped back against a torn lawn chair, a sack of bones topped with straw hair. The other tweakers did hot rails of crushed meth, snorting it off what looked like an amputated tennis racket handle, eyes rolling white, hands jittering, tongues poking Morse-code patterns in their cheeks.
It brought Duran back to his childhood, where he’d seen a lot of things kids weren’t meant to see and some stuff beyond that. It had been like a tour of duty, his childhood, a state of mind to be endured. His senses had been alive then, that was for sure. So much unrealized potential, so many dreams of who he could be and what he’d do when he got there.
And here he was hunted and terrified, hiding under the cover of a meth house, looking at the apartment where his lost wife and daughter lived, a zippered pouch in his back pocket holding ninety-nine dollars and change.
How was it possible to fuck up this badly?
The cat-piss and paint-thinner scent of meth was making his brain hurt. He stepped out from beneath the carport, leaning against a decrepit oak tree, its bark cracked like the skin of a wizened elder.
A car rolled past, deep bass bumping, the headlights illuminating a rusty knife discarded in the gutter amid scattered squares of aluminum foil. Each square had a dark patch in the middle, heroin residue staring up like a cyclops’s eye.
Duran wanted to cry. He wanted to vanish through his shoes into the dirt and never come back. He wanted to see his daughter and say good-bye before they—whoever they were—caught up to him.
He hadn’t dared to go to his house, holing up in the off-the-books sublet. And he knew he shouldn’t be here either. But he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to go out without looking Sofia in her deep brown eyes and telling her that having her as a daughter was the one true thing this life had given him.
A flicker of movement caught his attention, and he looked across into the apartment. Sofia spun into view holding a basket of laundry, approximating a ballerina’s pirouette. Her dark hair whipped across her