“But David was going to tell you,” Oliver assured her, like he was standing up for him. “We were supposed to go to your house for dinner one night. He wanted me to meet you.”
“What happened?”
“He never came to get me. I didn’t see him again.”
Claire’s voice cracked as she asked, “Was that in February? Three years ago.”
Oliver thought for a moment. “I think so.”
The entire weight of the world came dropping down on top of her. “That’s the day he died, Oliver. I’m sure of it. He told me he was bringing someone over.” She set her hands on the table. “Of course it was you. He was hit by a drunk driver around four o’clock. On February 18.”
Oliver crossed his arms and squinted, looking past Claire’s shoulder to nowhere. Claire could tell he was counting back. Oliver choked up, and his eyes grew wet. He was pressing his mouth together, fighting off a cry. He turned right, looking at the gravel bed below.
Everyone let him process the news.
For more than three years, she’d wondered who was supposed to have dinner with them. And Oliver was the answer. David was going to tell her about him.
“I thought he just—” Oliver stopped and shook his head, biting down hard on his emotions. Kari put a comforting hand on his back.
“I thought he was mad at me and decided he didn’t want me to meet you.”
“No, honey,” Claire said. “He never would have done that. From what I can tell, he cared about you so much.” That foreign feeling came rushing back, but more familiar now. It was love but different somehow.
Oliver was floored by the news, his whole body folding in.
“After the accident,” Claire said, “the police found a Yankees hat wrapped up as a gift in his car. Was that for you? Are you a Yankees fan?”
A tear nearly shot out of his eye. “Yeah.” His lip trembled.
Claire’s heart ached, feeling the boy’s pain from across the table, a lifetime of fighting to survive, fighting to find a place in the world. Bad news, death, abandonment. It was all he knew. She was witnessing a boy discover that he hadn’t been abandoned after all, that the world maybe wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Or was it? David was still dead.
In the silence that followed, she heard an engine starting up on one of the boats near the landing.
Oliver rubbed his eyes, still climbing back from the news. “I thought he was just like all the others.”
Tears flowed like waterfalls from the adults. Claire swallowed, now knowing exactly what the foreign feeling was. It was the inner mother inside of her trying to escape, the instincts she had suppressed so deeply that she’d forgotten about them. Until now. Looking back at Oliver, she saw him as his mother might, and her heart ached for him.
“Who could blame you?” Whitaker asked, wiping his eyes. “No one knew to tell you. Claire didn’t know anything about you until recently.”
As Claire processed her years of running from the mother within her, Whitaker told Oliver briefly about the book, then added, “Apparently, you meant everything to David. He was writing a book about you. Not exactly about you, but based on your relationship with David. We think you really changed his life.”
“Yeah, I knew about the book,” Oliver said. “He talked about it sometimes.”
“What did he say?” Claire asked, caught off guard once again at how well Oliver possibly knew David.
“Just that he was writing a story with me in it. Like, you know, a kid based off me.”
Whitaker took over. “He didn’t finish it, but the kid is in trouble in the book. Were you in some kind of trouble?”
Oliver looked at Kari and back to Whitaker. “No, I wasn’t in any kind of trouble.”
“But you said you and David had gotten in an argument.”
Oliver nodded. “I had skipped a baseball game, and he started lecturing me. I didn’t like it. So we got in a fight. It was the day before I was supposed to meet Claire. That was the last time I saw him. He dropped me off at the group home and told me he’d be back the next day to take me to meet Claire. I was kind of a jerk but told him I’d still go.”
Claire squeezed Whitaker’s hand and asked Oliver, “I don’t understand why he didn’t give me a heads-up that you were coming, at least. Why the surprise?”