The engine roars to life, and the comfort of his scent surrounds me when I lean into his back. He drives us away from Moldavia and back towards the lights of the city.
My heart is calm, but my mind is loud with questions. It only gets louder when the scenery begins to change. When Javi turns into my old neighborhood. Then onto my street.
I hold onto him long after he parks in the driveway. He doesn't move either. But then the front door opens. And everything implodes.
My father stands on the stoop. The same stoop where I never thought I would see him again.
He is alive.
And his eyes are on me. Swimming with relief. I try to spring from the bike, but Javi captures me around the wrist. Our eyes meet for a split second, and there is real fear in his. Fear that he might lose me.
“Javi, it’s okay,” I tell him. “It’s okay.”
He hesitates for another long second before releasing me. I bound towards the stoop, the aches in my body fleeing in the presence of the joy I feel at this moment.
My father moves to meet me. Slower than usual. He is walking with a limp. But he is alive. Alive and... hugging me.
I sob against his chest. There are no words. None. Not between either of us, for a very long time. We just hold each other. And I am a little girl all over again. But he has never held me this way.
It feels so right. It feels like everything in my world is right again. Until I look up at his face and catch the way he is staring at Javi.
I have never seen him look at anyone this way. I have never seen so much hate. My arms fall away, and I wrap them around myself instead.
Relief dissipates and fades into confusion. Turmoil. The reality of my current situation is like a brick to the face. There is no peace to be had. There never was. Because now I'm caught between the two of them. The two men that I love the most.
The two men who hate each other.
"Let's go inside," Dad says. "Shall we?"
Javi dismounts from his bike and reaches the stoop in three long strides. Both men try to usher me in beside them, but Javi is the one I allow to guide me.
I don’t know why.
I am ashamed when I see the hurt in my father’s eyes. I am torn. I want to feel happy, but right now, all I feel is that the ground is about to give way beneath me at any moment. And Javi is the one I lean to.
He has been my source of comfort and pain for so long now. Perhaps it is just conditioning, but it doesn’t make it less real. I want my father to understand that. But it is clear he does not.
I try to read the unspoken messages that linger between them. Awful silence fills the room as they look to each other and then me.
Dad instructs us to take a seat on the couch while he sits in his usual chair. The chair that has been empty for so long.
I have so many questions.
“Where have you been?” I ask.
And now it is me who is unable to hide the hurt. It might not be rational, and I never realized it until now, but a part of me has blamed him for his absence. A part of me has been so angry with him for leaving me.
“Isa, I am so sorry,” he answers. “Something went bad on a job. It wasn’t meant to happen this way, but it did, and I’m sorry for the pain I have caused you.”
“That isn’t good enough,” I tell him, swiping away the fresh wave of tears as they fall. “You’ve been gone for months. I need to know where. I can’t accept your canned responses anymore. I need to know what happened to take you away.”
He sighs and rubs his forehead.
“I was in South America,” he says. “Our convoy got hit by a rebel group, and they took us hostage.”
I search his eyes, trying to discern whether he is telling me the truth. But the reality is, I don’t know. I have always accepted whatever my father told me without question. Only now, I am not so sure.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter where he was. He could tell me whatever he wanted to, and I wouldn’t know the difference. He could be spoon feeding me agency scripted dialogue, for all I know.