Page 92 of Death is Familiar

I turned to head back upstairs. I did what I set out to do. I wasn’t going to force the child to accept my help. She seemed capable. Her anger would do her wonders. But before I could make it to the elevator, I felt a gentle tug at my hand. The girl had grabbed it, and let go just as quickly. “I… I can’t remember which apartment,” she admitted.

“I see.” Honesty. I could work with honesty. It gave me a place to figure out where there was room to help. “Do you have a number we could use to call him?”

The girls mouth formed and re-formed with no answer.

“I see.”

“I’m not dumb,” she defended. “I just don’t know his number, whenever I used to call him from mom’s phone it just said ‘the ex’.”

That was a loaded statement if I ever heard one. “Could we call up your mom to get the apartment number?”

The little girl shook her head frantically. There were a lot of ways I could unpack her reaction, but then I remembered that this was just a child looking for her father, and not some Machiavellian scheme with layers of inner workings. Sometimes things were as simple as they appeared on the surface.

“I see.” I huffed, “Okay, come on then.” I turned and walked towards the first-floor hall way.

She kept up pace behind me, her feet taking two steps for every one of mine. “Are you kidnapping me?”

Sigh. “Normally, I’d make a sarcastic comment here, but seeing as I’m an adult and you’re a strange lost child… no, we’re going door-to-door. And I’m going to make sure you find your father.”

The girl stopped. “You’d do that for me?”

“It’s time I said hi to the neighbors.” I trudged on and waited by the first door. “But I need you to promise me that if we don’t find him, you’ll let me call your mom.”

The little girl held up her tiny pinky.

“What? What is this? What are you doing?”

“Pinky swear.” She wiggled her pinky closer to my face. When I didn’t move, she let out a flustered sound as she grabbed my hand pulled out my pinky and briefly wrapped hers around mine. “There. Now you know I’m for real. I don’t break pinky promises.”

“Come on then.” I held in the smile that threatened to bloom on my face. I hadn’t made a pinky promise in a very long time. “I don’t know what your dad looks like, so I’m going to need your help finding him.”

It took a few doors for us to settle into a routine. I’d knock, the girl would shake her head when she didn’t recognize the person who answered, then I’d apologize that we had the wrong apartment.

The first two doors we knocked on, however, got a version of, “is this your child?” Which did not go over as well. But I like to think I showed growth as we improved our process.

“You know,” the little girl started as we took the stairwell up to the next floor. “You keep calling me a child, but you aren’t treating me like one.”

Unease unfurled in the pit of my stomach. “Sorry, I don’t have much experience with children.”

“It’s a good thing.”

Oh, well… I hadn’t been expecting that. I kind of liked it.

“Most adults would also be asking me all sorts of questions right now.” I liked that less. Now, I felt irresponsible.

“Like what?”

“Like why I’m here.”

“You’re here to visit your dad. And whether he is expecting you or not, I figured you had a good reason, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” But I assumed children weren’t subtle creatures. “Do you want me to ask you questions about it?”

She gave me a little shake of her head, then held open the door for me, before we started our round on the second floor. We cleared one hallway before she asked, “Do you have any kids?”

Blinking away the array of emotions that washed through me at the loaded question, I thought of the only truthful response I could muster. “Not right now.”

She didn’t miss a beat before asking, “Do you want them?”

Did all kids lack filters, or just this little raven-haired girl? “I’m not really in a position to adopt, sorry kid.”