Keeping Watch (34 page)

Rachel thought about this, then sat back in her chair. “Allen, I don't think you understand. You and Alice asked us to take Jim in, and that's what we did. We took him in, to our family, to our hearts. You can't just rip him out again. It doesn't work that way, not with us.”

“It's going to have to, Rachel.”

“That sounds pretty final. You talk about returning him to us, then you say something like that. You're not going to bring him back, are you?”

“I honestly don't know,” he said, but she heard the answer in his voice: No.

She stood up. “Oh, Allen. This is going to cause so much pain, all around. I'll go get dressed, and put some of his things together. Will you be taking the dog?”

“Oh, God. Did you get him one, then?”

“You told me to, Allen,” she said, suddenly angry, biting off each word. “You stood in my home and you told me to get Jim a dog, and so I called over half the state until I found someone with a puppy like you said he wanted and Pete drove to the other side of Helena and paid two hundred dollars for the animal, and Jim fell in love with it the minute he saw it. And now you're going to break that up too.”

Before he could protest, she stalked out of the room. In a minute, he heard water running. He unlatched the back door and went to sit on the dark porch, watching the stars fade.

He ached to be home, with Rae. She would leave for Japan in thirty hours; at the rate things were going, he did not think he would be in the seat beside her.

It was after four when Allen heard sounds in the kitchen behind him. He cast a final look up at the lightening sky, and let himself back inside. Rachel was making Pete's once-a-day coffee. Pete sat at the table, fully dressed; he looked up at Allen, his face grim.

“So you're taking our boy.” In spite of his gruff farmer's exterior, Pete sounded nearly as devastated as if Allen had been taking one of his own children. (
So there, Ms. Rao,
the back of his mind retorted,
other people love this boy.
)

“I don't have any choice, Pete. If I saw any other way, I'd do it.”

“I believe you.”

To his astonishment, Allen found himself not far from tears.
Good, good people,
he thought, and opened his mouth to offer yet more hollow reassurances. But what came out was, “What do you make of him?”

Pete looked taken aback and Rachel turned from what she was doing to listen to his answer. “Well, he's not an easy boy to get to know. I guess that's what makes him interesting.”

“What about you, Rachel?”

“What do you mean, what do I make of him? He's a child who needs a lot of love, and as far as I can see, won't be getting it for a while longer.”

“I mean . . .” Allen began, and then stopped. What did he mean? She loved Jamie, that much was abundantly clear, but for a person like Rachel, love was what one gave a child who needed it. Wasn't that why he and Alice had brought Jamie to her in the first place? But he also needed to know how the other side of Rachel Johnson responded to the boy, the canny side of the woman who had seen abused kids and knew enough about them not to fall for their manipulations, even while she was lavishing on them all the love they could handle. “I guess what I'm asking is, do you like him?”

Perhaps it was the intensity with which he asked the question that made her come to the table and sit down next to her husband, absently letting Pete thread his massive fingers through hers.

“Jim keeps the world at a distance,” she said. “He's polite, even thoughtful, but he rarely allows you to draw him in to family activities. He watches. The reluctance with which he lets himself get interested in something could just break your heart. But you get the feeling that, once he does, that bond is there for life. Like with Terry, the dog. I thought at first that when Pete put the animal on Jim's lap, Jim was going to have nothing to do with it. He looked like he'd been slapped, he was so shocked. Of course, as soon as the puppy started licking his face, his hands seemed to take over. Now, he and Terry are inseparable, but at first, I didn't think he was even going to let us give it to him.”

“I thought he was going to throw the thing against the wall,” Pete commented, and then looked horrified at what he'd said. “Not really. It was just for a second. I surprised the kid is all, and someone who's been through what Jim has, well, he's not going to be used to good surprises.”

“Personally, I think he was afraid of it—or, not of the dog itself, but of his reaction to it. It was the same with Sally. He was kind to her, but standoffish, up until the day she disappeared. Since then he's become her fiercest protector. So if you're asking if he is capable of forming relationships, I'd say yes. At least, he
was,
” she added grimly.

Allen had to look away from her accusing eyes. He understood all too well what Jamie had been afraid of: Once you learn the names of the new guys, they're inside your defenses.
Jesus,
Allen thought,
what the hell am I doing
? If he was wrong, this could well be the final blow to the poor kid. Jamie would never let himself bond with anyone, ever again.

Rachel continued. “But you asked if I liked Jim. I'll be honest: I didn't at first. But when I understood how hard it is for him, how much he's missing, I began to see that you can't relate to a boy like Jim the way you do other kids. In two months, he's started to get an idea of where he could be, if he let himself. He's a lot like that little dog: not much muscle, but when he sees something he wants, he throws his whole being into it. I respect that. And you have to respect someone before you can like them, don't you?”

In other words, yes, she liked him. It was a relief, hearing that. Allen felt as if he'd just let out the breath he'd been holding since he'd walked away from Ms. Rao's apartment door.

The kid wasn't a monster; he hadn't caused his father's plane to fall out of the sky. His dad was a crook and the boy's future was uncertain, but in a few days, or weeks, Allen would drive up that long dirt road one last time and push this kid back into the arms of this family for good.

God, he hoped.

But in the meanwhile, it was time to get things moving.

He laid his hands on the table and pushed himself up. “You want to get him, or should I?”

“I'll get him,” Rachel said. “Let me put breakfast on first.”

But once she had laid the sausages in the pan and taken a loaf of grits from the refrigerator, Allen took the knife from her hand. “I'll finish up here, I'm sure Pete can eat my cooking as well as yours. But, Rachel? Don't tell the boy about his father yet, okay?”

Reluctant to relinquish her kitchen to a mere man, Rachel hovered until she had seen that he knew how thick to slice the loaf, then gave Pete a worried glance and walked away upstairs. Allen finished slicing, turned down the flame under the spattering pork links, and lit the fire under the other griddle.

“You want to tell me what's really happened?” the gruff voice behind him asked.

Allen, paying close attention to the empty cast-iron surface, thought about it. “Pete, I don't know. The kid's father disappeared on his plane, I went down to see about it, and what I found confused the hell out of me. Pardon the language.”

“Allen.”

Allen forced himself to meet the eyes of this good Christian man.

“Allen, I been in the Marines, and what I saw there drove me to God. Since then I've seen just what one of these abusing . . .
bastards
can do to a child.” The obscenity was deliberate. “Now, I won't pretend that I'm much a part of the modern world, but I haven't spent my life in Neverland either. I'm asking you, if Jim's father is a criminal, and he's somehow tracked the boy here, is my family in danger?”

“Pete, I wish I could say, absolutely not. Like I told Rachel, I honestly don't think there's any threat to you. But the whole picture's so fuzzy, all I can say is, I'm ninety-five, maybe ninety-eight percent sure there's not so much as a whiff of danger to any of you.”

The big farmer nodded, his face thoughtful. Allen wished the man would rise up and attack him with the iron skillet, but he didn't even give Allen a reproachful look. He merely accepted the information, that his family's adoptive son might somehow be in danger, and by contagion, his whole family. Allen again felt the inexplicable urge to weep; turning, he began laying the slices of cornmeal grits into the heating pan. It was light outside before Rachel reappeared with the boy in tow.

Jamie had grown during the summer, taking on the gangly appearance of early adolescence. Right now, awakened from a sound sleep, he looked rumpled and apprehensive; Allen, looking up from his empty plate at the boy, was oddly reassured by the normality of his reactions.

The third person entering the room was canine, a young white and brown dog with almost no tail. It gave a brief
whuff
under its breath at the presence of a stranger and trotted across the linoleum on clicking claws, to plant its wet nose under the cuff of Allen's pants. Allen reached down to offer his extended hand, felt the animal's tongue dart across his fingertips, and then Jamie was opening the back door and sharply ordering the dog outside. The puppy paused to greet the old dog with a respectful sniff, then raced gaily out past his owner's legs. The boy closed the door and returned to his chair, having said not a word to the newcomer. Allen hoped this silence wouldn't last all the way to Seattle.

Allen cleared his dishes, letting Rachel serve the boy a final breakfast. Pete swallowed the dregs of his coffee and went out the back door, where he stepped into his work boots as if this morning was no different from any other. Jamie bent over the food on his plate and inserted each bite into his mouth, chewing as if it was a school assignment, taking large swallows of milk after each mouthful to force it down his throat. Seeing the heavy weather the boy was making of it, Allen went back outside, leaning against the post that held up the porch roof.

The cows mooed in the milking shed, a rooster was crowing, birds flitted overhead in the sweet blue sky, and Allen wanted nothing more than to drive away and leave them to it. He was paranoid, he was nuts. This kid hadn't followed the instructions on that sheet of paper, he wasn't some juvenile psychopath ready to succumb to a fit of pique and burn down the Johnson house with everyone inside.
You've been in this business too long,
he berated himself.
Short-timer's jitters got to you, and now you're about to undo all the good these people have done for this poor kid in the last two and a half months, and for what? A sheet of paper. A sheet of fantasy hidden inside a box of stories.

But he couldn't chance it. His head told him to go home, but his gut told him that Jamie was just the kind of prepubescent boy who snapped, who took a rifle to school one sunny morning to get even with the bullies, who bashed in the skull of the neighbor's kid to see what happened.

Who cold-bloodedly rigged a booby trap in the controls of his abusive father's plane.

Had Jamie intended to be on the plane, when he'd set the trap? Was the device another form of the self-destructive play that Rachel had mentioned, typical of the disturbed adolescent—suicide as ultimate control, linked in Jamie's case with a means of ensuring his father's love, plunging together into the deep blue sea? Had the boy intended a murder-suicide, only to have it thwarted by the chance timing of Alice's appearance in the library?

But the question that really tormented Allen's inner vision was this: Five years ago, with his mother's blood drying on his clothes, had anyone thought to test the bereft child's hands for gunshot residue?

And eight months before that, had there been a search for a rock—not a big rock, fit for an adult hand, but small enough for a slight seven-year-old to lift—with a stain and perhaps a few blond hairs attached, discarded in the lake?

It was too much. Allen left the porch and took a slow circuit around the barn. Pete was muttering to his cows. When Allen neared the house again, he could see Rachel talking to the boy. Her face was serious, but not tragic. The boy's face was not visible.

Allen took two steps up and crossed the back porch. When he opened the kitchen door, the small dog shot out of nowhere, skittering across the linoleum, coming to rest with his paws on the boy's knees. Jamie reached down to ease the dog back to the floor, a gesture that appeared habitual. He followed it by a caress of the puppy's ears, then, for the first time, looked at Allen.

“You're sure we can't take Terry with us?”

“We need to leave him here for now. But I promise, I'll do everything I can to get you two back together as soon as possible.”

The look Jamie gave him held no belief in it at all.

At the front door, Jamie stood stiffly while Rachel hugged him, then shook hands with Pete and turned for the steps. Rachel stayed on the threshold, but Pete went with the boy, his hand resting on Jamie's shoulder. The dog fretted around their feet, knowing something was up and not wanting to be left out. Jamie took one step and the puppy got in his way, bouncing eagerly around his legs and nearly tripping the boy. Jamie took another step, again hindered by the animal, and then the third time the dog got underfoot, he drew back his leg and aimed a vicious kick straight at the small animal's rib cage. Pete felt it coming; either that, or he happened to bend down at just the right instant, because his hand on the thin shoulder unbalanced the boy just enough that his kick landed a glancing blow, spinning Terry around and off the porch steps, but saving him from real injury. The dog yelped in surprise and pain, and then Pete scooped the creature up and handed him to Rachel. She set the dog down on the floor inside, and shut the door in the animal's face. Nobody said anything, least of all Jamie, who continued down the steps and got into the car, taking with him only the backpack he'd arrived with.