I've Been Waiting For You

The sun was what woke me this time.

I must’ve slept in longer than yesterday. I guess time traveling back to your teenage years really wears you out.

I opened my eyes slowly and rolled over, fully expecting to see him this time.

Nope.

The door.

That damned door.

I stared at it for a long moment, almost waiting for it to disappear. Yesterday had felt impossible. Surely today I’d wake up in my own bed. Surely Francisco would be beside me, half asleep, reaching for my hand before either of us even opened our eyes. Instead, I was met with the same faded paint, the same wooden door, and the same bedroom I’d left behind sixteen years ago.

I let out a long sigh and pulled the blanket over my face. I stayed there for a while, hiding beneath it like somehow refusing to look at the room would make it disappear. I listened instead, hoping I’d hear something familiar. Emma’s little babbles. The television playing cartoons in the living room. Cisco humming while he made coffee. Anything that belonged to my real life.

There was nothing.

Just silence.

Yesterday I had cried until my chest hurt. I’d prayed. I’d begged. I’d fallen asleep convinced I’d wake up back where I belonged.

I hadn’t.

Whatever had happened to me wasn’t fixing itself.

I threw the blanket aside and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my hands over my face before letting out a slow breath. For the first time since opening my eyes the day before, I stopped asking myself how this had happened.

Instead, I asked myself what I was supposed to do now.

My thoughts immediately found Cisco.

He was here somewhere.

Not the Cisco I knew. Not the man who kissed me goodnight every evening and carried our daughter around the house on his shoulders. Not the man with laugh lines around his nose and a beard Emma loved to tug on every chance she got.

He was only sixteen now.

Still just a kid.

But he was here.

I just had to find him.

I stood up so quickly the room tilted for a second. I steadied myself against the wall as my brain raced ahead of me.

Where would I even look?

It was Sunday and summertime, so he wouldn’t be at school. I didn’t know where he’d lived back then either. In all the years we’d been together, we’d talked about his childhood countless times, but somehow his old address had never been one of those conversations. We’d never driven past his childhood home, and now I realized I couldn’t even guess where it had been.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to think.

There had to be something.

Some detail.

Some memory.

Then it came to me.

His sister, Camila.

My eyes flew open.

She was seventeen years older than Cisco, and she’d lived in the same house since he was a toddler. Cisco and I had spent birthdays there, holidays there, random weekend cookouts there. I could picture the drive without even thinking about it.

I didn’t know where he was.

But I knew exactly where his sister lived.

For the first time since I’d woken up yesterday morning, I felt something other than grief.

Hope.

If I could find Cisco…

Maybe I could find my way home.

The idea sounded simple enough.

Find Francisco.

Or at least find someone who knew him.

Actually doing it was another story.

I quickly changed into a pair of jean shorts and a t-shirt. Looking at myself in the mirror still felt strange. Every time I caught my reflection, there was a split second where I expected to see the woman I’d been yesterday. Instead, there was just a fifteen-year-old girl staring back at me.

I pulled my hair into a messy ponytail and took one last look around my room before heading upstairs.

The television was already on.

Oliver sat cross-legged on the floor watching cartoons while Evan crawled around beside him with a toy truck clutched in his tiny hand. Eliza was stretched out on the couch, completely absorbed in whatever was on TV.

It would’ve looked like any other Sunday morning to anyone else.

To me, it felt like I was walking through a memory.

Before I could even make it to the kitchen, my mom’s bedroom door cracked open.

“Can you make Evan a bottle?” she asked, not even looking at me.

Then, without waiting for an answer, she disappeared back into her room.

The door clicked shut.

I stood there for a second with my eyes closed.

Of course.

Some things really never changed.

I scooped Evan up onto my hip and made his bottle without thinking. My hands remembered exactly where everything was. Formula. Water. Shake. Test it on my wrist.

Muscle memory.

He wrapped his tiny fingers around the bottle and looked up at me with those big brown eyes.

For one painful second, he reminded me of Emma.

I kissed the top of his head before setting him in his highchair.

Oliver wandered into the kitchen a minute later.

“I’m hungry.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

I poured him a bowl of cereal, wiped the milk he’d immediately spilled across the counter, and listened to him ramble about something that had happened on his cartoon. Normally I would’ve smiled and answered every question.

Today my mind was somewhere else.

Every minute I stayed here felt like another minute farther away from Cisco.

I glanced toward my mom’s bedroom.

Nothing.

The television was still blaring behind the closed door.

She wasn’t coming out.

I looked at Eliza.

She’d wandered into the kitchen without me noticing and was standing beside Evan, making him laugh by pretending his spoon was an airplane.

She caught me looking.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

I swallowed hard.

She had no idea that one day she’d become the backup mom whenever I couldn’t be.

No one asked her to do it.

She just did.

Just like I’d done before her.

A knot settled in my stomach.

If I left…

She’d figure it out.

She always did.

The thought made me feel sick.

But another thought pushed its way to the front of my mind.

Somewhere across town was the only lead I had.

If I didn’t go now, I didn’t know when I’d get another chance.

I walked back downstairs as quietly as I could, trying not to let the old wooden steps creak beneath my feet. My heart hammered so loudly I was convinced someone would hear it.

The keys were hanging exactly where they’d always hung.

I stared at them for a second.

I wasn’t even supposed to be driving yet.

I didn’t have my license.

If my mom caught me taking the car, I’d be grounded until I turned thirty.

The thought almost made me laugh.

Grounded?

I’d spent the last sixteen years paying bills, raising children, surviving an abusive marriage, falling in love, becoming a wife, becoming a mother.

Somehow the idea of being grounded didn’t seem all that terrifying anymore.

I reached for the keys before I could talk myself out of it.

If I got caught…

I’d deal with it later.

Right now, none of it mattered.

I quietly opened the garage door and slipped inside.

The silver car sat exactly where I remembered it, sun shining through the dusty windshield. I slid into the driver’s seat, wrapped my fingers around the steering wheel, and let out a shaky breath.

“I really hope you still start,” I whispered.

The engine sputtered twice before roaring to life.

I winced, waiting for someone to come running outside.

No one did.

I backed out of the driveway as carefully as I could, my pulse racing the entire time.

Only when I turned onto the main road did it hit me.

I was fifteen years old.

Driving without a license.

In a car I’d just stolen from my own parents.

For the first time since yesterday, I should’ve been terrified.

Instead…

All I could think about was getting to Cisco.

The drive felt both impossibly long and far too short.

Every road looked exactly the way I remembered it. The little gas station on the corner. The faded church sign with crooked plastic letters. The tiny family-owned diner that somehow always smelled like bacon no matter what time of day you drove by.

Sixteen years had passed for me.

For this town, it looked like barely a week.

My hands stayed locked around the steering wheel the entire drive. Every few minutes I’d catch myself gripping it so tightly my knuckles turned white. I kept trying to decide what I was actually going to say once I got there.

Hi, remember me?

Actually, you don’t.

I’m looking for your little brother because, sixteen years from now, he’ll be my husband.

Yeah.

That wasn’t going to work.

I let out a nervous laugh and immediately shook my head.

“I’ve officially lost my mind.”

The words sounded hollow inside the quiet car.

Eventually the familiar neighborhood came into view, and my stomach twisted.

I knew these streets.

Francisco and I had driven through them hundreds of times. We’d parked along these curbs for birthday parties and cookouts. We’d walked these sidewalks carrying paper plates piled too high with food while everyone laughed on the front porch.

I knew exactly where I was.

I turned one last corner.

There it was.

The white house sat exactly where it always had, tucked behind two enormous maple trees that shaded almost the entire front yard. Flower beds lined the walkway leading to the porch, though they looked much smaller than I remembered. Maybe they really were. Or maybe everything seemed smaller now because I was seeing it through older eyes.

I pulled to the curb and turned off the engine.

Silence.

My heartbeat suddenly sounded louder than the car had.

I stared through the windshield for what must’ve been several minutes.

This was crazy.

Absolutely insane.

There was no reason to believe Cisco’s sister would know anything.

There was no reason to believe she could help me.

For all I knew, she’d tell my parents where I was and I’d spend the rest of the weekend grounded for stealing the car.

I almost started the engine again.

Almost.

Instead, I climbed out.

The summer air wrapped around me immediately. Warm. Heavy. Familiar.

I slowly made my way up the cracked concrete walkway, every step feeling heavier than the last.

Halfway to the porch, I stopped.

I looked back at the car.

This was my last chance to leave.

To pretend none of this had happened.

To go home, crawl back into bed, and keep hoping I’d wake up.

I closed my eyes.

Please let someone here have answers.

When I opened them again, I climbed the remaining steps to the porch.

The old wooden boards creaked beneath my feet.

I’d heard that sound so many times before.

Only never like this.

I stood in front of the door and stared at it.

My hand refused to move.

What if nobody answered?

What if someone did?

Neither possibility felt better than the other.

I took one slow breath.

Then another.

Finally, before I could lose my nerve, I raised my hand and knocked.

Three soft knocks echoed through the house.

I waited.

Nothing.

My heart began sinking.

Maybe nobody was home.

Maybe—

Footsteps.

Slow.

Steady.

Coming toward the door.

Every muscle in my body tensed.

The doorknob turned.

The door opened just a few inches at first.

Then it swung open the rest of the way.

Every thought inside my head disappeared.

I knew that face.

I’d never stood in front of her before.

I’d never heard her voice.

I’d never hugged her.

But I knew exactly who she was.

Francisco.

For just the briefest second, that’s who I saw.

Not because he was standing in front of me, but because he had her face. The same warm brown eyes. The same smile lines around her mouth. The same dark, curly hair. I had spent years looking at family pictures hanging on these very walls. Cisco had pointed to them one by one, telling me stories about the woman who raised him before cancer took her far too young.

She had been gone for nearly seven years by the time he and I got together.

I’d spent years wishing I could’ve known her.

And now…

She was standing in front of me.

Alive.

My mouth fell open.

“You…”

The word barely came out.

She smiled gently, almost sadly, as if she’d been expecting my reaction.

“I know,” she said softly.

I couldn’t breathe.

My eyes searched her face over and over again, desperately looking for something that would tell me I was mistaken.

But I wasn’t.

This was her.

Every photograph I’d ever seen had prepared me for this moment without me realizing it.

“No…” I whispered, taking a small step backward. “No… you’re…”

Dead.

I couldn’t make myself say the word.

She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t surprise.

It wasn’t confusion.

If anything…

It looked like compassion.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.

The world seemed to stop.

I stared at her, certain I’d misheard.

“…What?”

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

She said it so matter-of-factly that it almost sounded ordinary.

Like she’d been expecting a neighbor to stop by.

Not a terrified fifteen-year-old girl who believed she’d somehow fallen sixteen years into the past.

Every alarm inside my body went off at once.

“How do you know me?”

She tilted her head ever so slightly.

“I know who you are.”

“No…” I shook my head. “You can’t.”

“I do.”

My heart was pounding so hard it hurt.

“I’ve never met you.”

“I know.”

“You’ve…” I swallowed. “You’ve never even seen me before.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“I’ve seen you many times.”

I just stood there.

Nothing she was saying made any sense.

She looked past me for just a second toward the quiet street before stepping back from the doorway.

“You should come inside.”

I didn’t move.

Every instinct I had told me to run.

Every other part of me knew this woman somehow held the answers I’d been searching for since I opened my eyes yesterday morning.

She noticed my hesitation.

“You’ve been looking for answers,” she said quietly.

The blood drained from my face.

She couldn’t know that.

No one could.

Not unless…

She stepped aside again, leaving the doorway open.

“Come in,” she said softly.

“I’ve been expecting you for a very long time.”