by Dana Nussio
Not from any other day, either, but he didn’t need to know that. What reasonable excuse could she offer for her fear of including photos of herself with Aiden, even on her own camera? She would tell him whatever she needed to though. How could she live with herself if Michael recognized her in a picture, and it led him to her son?
Jamie lowered his hand, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Here, I’ll try mine.”
“No!” Her gaze shot to her son and then back to Jamie, who was watching her too closely. She cleared her throat. “I mean...well, sure.”
She pulled the camera strap off her wrist and held it out to him. He returned the phone to his pocket but didn’t reach for the camera. She lowered her arm to her side.
“Just wanted to keep all the photos in the same place, so I could upload them to my computer.”
“Makes sense.”
His expression said otherwise.
“I also don’t like my face splattered all over the internet.”
“You think I’d do that?”
She’d been avoiding his gaze, but now she couldn’t help looking at him. Was that hurt that flashed in his eyes before he hid it behind a neutral mask?
“No,” she said, and then pressed her arms to her sides. Worse than that she’d said it, she meant it. She didn’t know him at all. How could she know what he would or wouldn’t do?
“Oh, I get it. I’m not big on social media myself.”
“Thanks for understanding. It’s just so... I don’t know...invasive.”
“I agree, but I also would never share anything without permission. Crappy thing to do.”
Again, she believed him too easily. That reason alone should have sent her running for the zoo exit, tugging Aiden along with her. Her track record for believing lies was epic. But because she had learned not to trust her instincts, she held her camera out to him a second time. Maybe he would never plaster her photos all over social media, but this way she could be sure. This way all the photos would be on her memory card.
She was relieved when he accepted the camera, but as he closed his hand over it, his fingers accidentally brushed hers. A wave of tingles danced over her fingertips, and her stomach clamped tightly. She jerked back, but even shoving her hand in her pocket wasn’t enough to dull the sensation. Her mouth was so dry she had to lick her lips. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t that silly teenage girl anymore, so why was she acting like her?
“Oh. Sorry.”
He fiddled with the camera’s picture review button and ignored her. She might have received a jolt from that errant touch, but she was the only one.
“I can’t remember how to use one of these things,” he said after several seconds. “You’re going to have to help me out.”
“You’ve got to be—”
Just as she pointed to the LCD panel to instruct him, he looked up from the device and grinned.
“Now do I have to wear one of those black capes over my head when I take the photo so that the light doesn’t get inside?”
It took her a few seconds to realize he was talking about old-fashioned cameras, and then she stuck out her tongue at him.
“Hey, I’m not old enough to remember shooting tintypes, but you do you,” he said.
She couldn’t help laughing with him, and he snapped a photo of her before she could stop herself. Her face heated. He was supposed to be taking shots of her and her son, and Aiden wasn’t close to being in that frame.
“What was that for?”
“Couldn’t resist.”
“Well, try.” And she would try to slow her racing pulse and will the heat to drain from her face.
Aiden saved her from having to say more. “Mr. Jamie, can we see the tigers now?” He pointed to the exhibit across from them.
“Absolutely, buddy.” Jamie turned to Sarah. “I mean if it’s okay with your mom.”
“Let’s go see some tigers,” she said. Jamie insisted on taking a few shots of her and Aiden together as they stood with a snoozing tiger in the background. She was strangely at ease, whether posing on the other side of the camera or falling into step beside Jamie and Aiden on the long walk to the Polk Penguin Conservation Center.
After they entered the center, where the low lighting made photography difficult, Jamie let the camera hang from his wrist.
Sarah weaved through the crowd, ensuring that Aiden was no more than a few feet ahead of her, but as they stepped through the tunnel where water enclosed them and majestic aquatic birds swam over their heads, she stepped back and rested on one of the benches. Aiden zipped back and forth, following one speedy swimmer, but Jamie sat next to her.
“He’s a great kid.”
She smiled as she continued to watch the child.
“It’s a tough job being a single mom, isn’t it?”
She turned to look at Jamie, who he was watching a pair of macaroni penguins chasing each other through the water.
“It’s not so bad. And Aiden’s worth every bit of the effort.”
She hoped the conversation would end there but knew it wouldn’t.
He cleared his throat. “Is, uh, Aiden’s dad in the picture?”
He still wasn’t looking at her, so she couldn’t just shake her head. “No.” She paused, considering whether to say more. “That’s a good thing.”
“Separated?”
This time she could feel his gaze on her and couldn’t help smiling. He’d never considered the other possibility—that she and her child’s father could have never married.
“Divorced.”
“Where is he now?”
She shrugged. “Never far enough.”
“I bet there’s a story there.”
“Not an interesting one.”
She waited, since she didn’t expect him to buy that one, but instead of asking more, he jumped up from the bench and jogged over to Aiden. They stared at the tunnel top and pointed to each bird as it swam overhead.
“Which species do you think that one is?” Jamie pointed to a leisurely swimmer. “Macaroni, king, gentoo or rockhopper?”
“It’s a king penguin. See those bright orange feathers on his head?”
“Ding! Ding! Ding! You’re right.”
He turned to Sarah, who’d taken a few steps closer. “You didn’t tell me your son was so smart.”
“If you get me started bragging about this kid, I won’t be able to stop.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
She must have been grinning as widely at him as he was at her when Aiden tugged his sleeve.
“Mr. Jamie, how come you know so much about penguins?”
“My younger brother, Mark, used to love penguins. Everything about them.”
His lips were still lifted, but his smile no longer reached his eyes. A lump settled low in her stomach. She’d seen that stark look before, and now she had to know.
“Used to?”
“He’s gone now.” He cleared his throat. “It was a long time ago.”
“I bet there’s a story there,” she said, repeating his words.
He only shrugged.
He had a story, all right. Maybe even as painful as her own. And though she had no business sticking her nose in anyone else’s personal life when she had so much to hide herself, God help her, she wanted to know about his.
Chapter 6
“You see, I do think of everything.”
Jamie added the last few packages to the snack cakes, chips and cheese puffs already piled on the bench between him and Sarah late that afternoon. No more than twenty feet away, Aiden dangled from a monkey bar on the zoo playground, oblivious to the bounty of junk food he was missing or the two adults keeping a careful watch over him as he played.
“You weren’t kidding,” Sarah said. “You had all kinds of surprises in that
backpack of yours.”
Sarah was grinning as she rifled through the packages, which had no more than trace vitamins in the lot. In fact, she’d been generous with her incredible smiles all day, and he found he would do anything if it would continue to inspire her charitable spirit. Sure, she’d had her uncomfortable moments, like when he’d pulled out his phone, but there were a few times that she’d relaxed around him and had fun.
It had made her nervous that he’d tried to take a photo with his phone. Now he couldn’t help wondering which would bother her more—that he’d planned to use her photo for an internet reverse-image search to look for more information on her or that he’d had every intention of keeping the shot so that he could see her face whenever he liked. He shook away the thought that both might worry her equally. He reached for his backpack instead.
“There’s more.” He pulled out three juice boxes and a handful of wet wipe packets, the kind that came as a necessary bonus with fried-chicken carryout. Next, he unzipped the front pocket. “And now for la pièce de résistance.”
He pulled out three zipper bags that now held smashed white-bread sandwiches with peanut butter and jelly oozing out from all sides. “Well, that didn’t go the way I’d planned it.”
“Résistance, huh?” she said with a grin. “I think I might be able to resist.”
Despite Sarah’s joke, when Jamie dropped the bags on top of the pile, she reached for one. She held it out in front of her and examined the messy plastic.
“Let me guess. Grape jelly?”
“Wow. You’re good. Psychic or something?” He grabbed a candy bar, ripped it open and bit off the end.
“More like with a six-year-old, I’m an expert on jelly smears. Anyway, thanks for lunch.”
“You’re welcome. Think Aiden’s ever going to eat anything? He said he was starving.”
“With a whole playground available to him?” She sneaked another peek at her son, who’d moved on to the rolling slide. “Doubt it.”
“Then more for us.”
Sarah unzipped the sandwich bag and carefully peeled the bread off the plastic. She took a single bite, chewed it and swallowed. She was so preoccupied with the boy on the playground that it was a few minutes before she took a second bite.
“Don’t worry,” Jamie said, before he could stop himself.
She peeked at him with her side vision. “It’s just a little flat. It tastes fine.”
“Not the sandwich. I mean about Aiden.”
She slowly turned his way. “Moms worry. It’s what we do.”
“I mean right now. I’m watching, too, so you can relax. I won’t let anything happen to him. I promise.”
“That’s nice of you, but Aiden and I are fine. Just the two of us.”
Those were also the most revealing words Sarah had ever spoken to him. This mother and son were used to relying only on each other. If he ever hoped to get closer to either of them, he needed to take his time and earn Sarah’s trust.
“Oh, I know. You two are great.”
He opened a bag of pretzels and started eating, peeking over at her every few seconds. Each time he found her watching her son. He had so many questions for Sarah, but getting information from her was like trying to open a safe with an Allen wrench. They were alike in that way. He understood her temptation to lock secrets deep inside, so maybe if he opened up about his, she would trust him enough to share some of hers.
“Aiden’s always such a comedian,” he said. “Sometimes when he’s telling one of his knock-knock jokes, I can almost see my brother, Mark, telling one of his.”
Her eyes fluttered, and then she shifted so that she was facing him with one knee up on the bench.
“How long ago did your brother pass away?”
Pass away. He swallowed. Like commit suicide, her words were the kind that people used to whitewash bloodstains, an attempt to make some sense of incomprehensible loss. They offered the grieving no relief. At least Sarah was inviting him to talk about it, which was more than most people did.
“I can’t believe it’s been nine years now. Mark was a freshman in high school.” He waited for the inevitable question: How? When she didn’t ask, he answered it anyway. “He hanged himself.”
“Oh, God. That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
Her voice was so filled with emotion that he couldn’t help looking over at her. Her eyes were damp as she stared back at him, like windows into a soul that had known its share of sadness. But when he would have expected her to blink away the compassion he saw there, to return to her familiar, unreadable mask, Sarah met his gaze with a strength and surety that surprised him.
“How old were you? That must have been awful for you to lose your little brother.”
Jamie swallowed, heat welling behind his eyes. He’d been asked to recall the story dozens of times, but few seemed to remember that he’d just been a kid, too, when it happened. A kid who would never be the same.
“It was just before my eighteenth birthday.”
“I’m so sorry, Jamie.”
Her repeated words were barely above a roughened whisper.
He could have told her about being the one to find Mark. About struggling to cut down that godawful rope. He could even have talked about how he’d sobbed between breaths while performing CPR, though Mark’s skin was already cold. But Jamie didn’t want to share any of the macabre details with her. He wanted her to know about Mark. Just Mark. The person no one would get to know now.
“I loved being his big brother,” he began. “Though I suppose I should have been jealous of him. He was better at...well, everything than I was.”
She grinned back at him. “That can’t be true.”
“Oh, it was. Like we were both on the varsity soccer team, but I came off the bench as an outside defender, and he was starting center-mid.”
“If I knew anything about soccer, I would be really impressed, right?”
“Oh, yeah, you would.” Strange how he never talked about Mark to anyone, and now he couldn’t stop. It was as if his brother would disappear completely if he didn’t share these stories with her.
“He drew everyone to him. Guys. Girls. Especially girls. He had this gift with the ladies that the rest of us...” As his words trailed away, Jamie shrugged. “Anyway, he’d just started high school, and he’d already been elected freshman prince on the homecoming court. Me? I was voted ‘nicest’ in the Senior Superlatives.”
Sarah squinted her eyes and watched him for so long that he couldn’t help shifting on the bench. Would she conclude that Jamie really had been jealous of his brother, when he would have traded the use of his feet and hands just to have one more conversation with Mark?
But she only smiled again. “Nicest. I can see that. Aiden sure thinks you’re a nice guy.”
Even if she didn’t say whether or not she shared that opinion, nice guy didn’t sound so bad when she said it. “Maybe. But Mark...now he was amazing. Great athlete. Life of the party. Class clown.”
“And under all of that, he was sad, wasn’t he?”
Jamie blinked, as she’d pointed so easily to the truth that had evaded him until it was too late. He swallowed a few times and then nodded.
“His comedy routines must have been an effort to cover his sadness. He never said a word about it. To anyone. But the more I read about suicide, the more I recognized that he’d demonstrated plenty of warning signs.”
“What kind of signs?”
“Oh, he was sleeping more, but not drastically more. And when he decided not to go out for lacrosse that spring, it was supposed to be so that he could focus on soccer for the fall.” Jamie paused, self-accusations becoming an acid burning his insides. “There was even a good excuse for him to hang out less with his friends, since his perfect grades were slipping a little. All those signs, and I missed every damn one.”
“Anyone could have missed those signs. Anyway, you were a kid, Jamie. Didn’t the adults in his life miss them, too? Your parents? Teachers? Coaches?”
“He was my little brother. My...responsibility.” His voice betrayed him by cracking.
He planted his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands. What had he been thinking, reopening old wounds to convince her to share some of hers? Did he believe that the blame would just bounce off him this time instead of imbedding and infecting?
“This explains a lot.”
Jamie sat up straight. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected her to say after hearing his sad story, but it wasn’t that. “What do you mean?”
“About the other night. The rough call the other officers were talking about before you came in. It was a suicide, right?”
“Yeah. I was too late.” Again, he almost added.
“That must have triggered some memories.”
“I guess so.”
“The others know about your brother, don’t they?”
He closed his eyes and recalled the faces stationed around the table the other night. As he opened them again, he shook his head. “A few of my superior officers know about Mark. I had to share my past during the interview process. I told a couple of my close friends, like Shane Warner, too. But none of the officers at Casey’s the other night knew about it. I’m pretty new to the Brighton Post.”
“Even if they didn’t know, they were still worried about you. I told you I overheard them talking.”
He remembered that, all right, though that humiliation paled when compared to his vulnerability now. “They were probably just concerned about the rookie who took a tough call. A case like that is hard on you no matter how many years you’ve worn a badge.”
“Either way, isn’t it nice to know that your coworkers have your back?”
“It is.”
“But the other night is only part of what I’m talking about,” she began again. “Your decision to become a cop. Your volunteering with kids. Didn’t your brother’s death directly lead you to those choices?”
Jamie blinked several times. No one had ever put it as succinctly as that, but he’d been asked about that possibility during his job interview after graduating from the Michigan State Police Recruit School and again when he’d volunteered at Kids’ Space.
