Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Oregon
The shattered glass was from a framed picture Zoe kept on her nightstand.
When I unlocked the door and pushed it open, the frame lay facedown on the pine floorboards, surrounded by jagged shards of glass that caught the pale Indiana sunlight. Beside it sat an overturned ceramic lamp, its shade crushed into a lopsided oval.
Zoe was standing in the center of the room, her chest heaving, her knuckles bleeding slightly where she had scraped them against the edge of the nightstand. She looked wild, cornered, like a stray dog that had spent its entire life expecting to be kicked and was finally ready to bite anyone who offered a hand.
Lydia didn't look at Zoe. She walked directly past her, crouched down, and carefully picked up the photograph from within the broken glass.
It was an old picture. Zoe was six years old, wearing a faded pink life jacket, sitting on the shoulders of Erik Pruitt at an inlet near Cannon Beach. Erik was grinning at the camera—handsome in that careless, rugged Pacific Northwest way, with longish brown hair tucked under a worn trucker hat, holding a can of microbrew in one hand while balancing his daughter with the other. He looked like the picture-perfect dad for an outdoor gear catalog.
Lydia had taken that picture eleven years ago, back when she still believed that Erik’s charm would eventually evolve into responsibility.
"Pack a bag," Lydia said. Her voice wasn't loud. It wasn't angry. It had dropped into a terrifyingly calm, flat register that I had never heard from my wife in all the years I had known her.
Zoe froze. The defiance in her eyes flickered with a sudden, sharp spike of panic. "What?"
"You heard me," Lydia said, setting the glass-smeared photo on the desk without looking at it. "You want to live with your father? You want to yell through my floorboards that this isn't your home? Fine. Pack your clothes, Zoe. Pack your sketchbook. Pack whatever you want. We’re going to call Erik right now on speakerphone, and we’re going to arrange your flight to Portland."
"Lydia," I said softly from the doorway, taken aback by the sudden shift.
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"No, Will," Lydia cut in, not turning around. "Zoe is thirteen. She’s an adult in her own mind. She knows how the world works. She knows how cruel and unloving we are. She knows that her real family is waiting for her in Oregon, where nobody buys dinosaur cakes and nobody expects her to share. So let's stop keeping her prisoner. Pack the bag, Zoe."
Zoe stood frozen in the middle of her room. Her hands, which had been clenched into tight fists, slowly unclenched. The fierce
