Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Galvin, Aaron (classic fiction txt) 📖

great ones, as you say. From the stories she told me, I think my father is a great man also and would have helped to raise me if he were given the choice.” He looked to Chidi with the same shining innocence in his eyes that she remembered seeing when first meeting him on the lonely beach outside of Chicago. “And you, Chidi? What would you say to him, if you were me? If you were meeting your father for the first time?”

The question stumbled Chidi. For a moment, she was transported back to the little girl she remembering being once, those few scattered memories she desperately clung to and yet kept locked away deep within the recesses of her mind. All to protect them from Henry’s wroth and the other sort he meant to instill in her. What would I say to you, Papa? Chidi wondered, remembering all the times she would sit upon his knee and rest her head against his shoulder as he sang her off to sleep, or else to banish all the nightmares that had woke her in the night. What would I say if seeing you again? Would you even recognize me at all now?

“Chidi?” Allambee called, interrupting her from her thoughts. “Did I say something wrong?”

As Chidi attempted to formulate any sort of hopeful answer, Bryant spoke up for her instead in answer to Allambee’s initial question.

“Kid, whenever and wherever you see your daddy for the first time, you don’t got to say nothing at all.”

“But what if he does not know I am his son?” Allambee asked.

“He’ll know,” Bryant assured him. “Whether he’d admit it or not, I can’t say for certain. But either way . . . he’ll know.”

Chidi’s eyes glistened then, remembering all that Bryant had told her of the pain in his life caused by Henry Boucher. Of his wife and child stolen away, both murdered at the hands of the same monster who had taken her away from all those she knew and loved also. Chidi glanced away when Bryant looked in her direction, she not wanting him to see her moved by his words.

She estimated he understood it all the same.

Bryant clapped his hands upon his knees as he stood up. “Right, well, I think I’m gonna see to that coffee after all,” he moved to head inside, reaching for the cabin door. “Make sure Bourgeois is still with us too. Don’t think there’s any windows down there she could fit through, but I don’t reckon she got her reputation as a runner for just walking through the front door.”

You might be surprised there, Silkstealer, Chidi thought to herself as he stalked into the captain’s cabin and disappeared inside. For a moment, she toyed with the notion of Marisa leaving her behind once more. Chidi doused such thoughts with the reality that Marisa had willingly placed herself in Orphan Knoll as if waiting for both Chidi and Bryant to come and meet her there.

Not for the first time, Chidi wrestled with how Marisa had seen such things come to pass and always moved to be one step ahead. She wondered what such a gift of foretelling might be like, then cast that idea aside just as quickly for the glimpse of doom and destruction that Marisa had given her after the Sancul had brought down the Knoll.

For all of Chidi’s inner debates, she nearly forgot that she was not alone upon Girard’s boat deck.

“What would you say, Chidi?” Allambee asked, smiling at her in such a way as only he could, one to manage teasing a smile from her also. “If you could see your father and mother again . . . what would you say to them?”

“I-I don’t know,” Chidi stuttered.

“You have not thought about it?”

Too many times. The response was on the tip of her tongue, yet Chidi could not brave herself to voice it for fear of tempering Allambee’s own hopes and dreams. Again, she looked in his dark eyes, wishing she could bathe in the youthful innocence that he had somehow managed to keep alive and well, despite all that he had witnessed of the merciless Salt world. Chidi swallowed the lump in her throat. “I think . . . I think that I would just hug them.” She brushed away the immediate wet stain upon her cheeks. “I would just hug them both and tell them how much I have missed them. How I’ve thought of them every day and done everything I know how to do just to get back to them again.”

“Ah, yes,” said Allambee. “I like your answer very much, Chidi. If you do not mind, I think that I will say the same to my father when I finally meet him. For I too have thought of him every day of my life and wondered who he might be. Aye, and what he might think of me also.”

“He’ll be proud to call you his son, Allambee.” Chidi beamed. “And sorry that he wasn’t around to see you grow up.”

“Yes,” said Allambee. “My mother says the same, and yet I have always wondered.”

“Wondered what?” Chidi asked. “If he’s proud of you?”

Allambee nodded. “How can one be proud of a person they do not know, Chidi? Someone they have never met?”

Chidi went to him then, placing her hands on both of his shoulders and squeezing. “He’ll see the goodness in you, just like we all do,” she said. “Just like I have from the very start when I met you on the beach. And if for whatever reason your father doesn’t see that in you, Allambee, then I will tell him and make sure he knows. Just like I’m telling you now.”

Allambee chuckled at that. “Will you tell me how to help my father also, Chidi? For I do not know how I am supposed to do that either. Even though Marisa promised me I will know and do what is right when the time comes to show him the