by C. L. Stone
As we approached, I realized he had Dr. Green’s sedan, and shortly remembered his own was just purchased but likely hadn’t made it back yet, or they’d switched cars for whatever reason.
He turned in the lot at the back bumper of the car and looked at me as he spoke to Kota. “We’re leaving here together, but you should be ready for Mr. Griffin’s arrival. It should be in the morning.”
“Where should I leave Mr. Buble’s keys?” I asked him after he hung up on Kota.
He held out his hand for them, and I passed them over.
He went to Mr. Buble’s town car and placed them on the top of the rear tire, balancing them on the rubber so they wouldn’t slide forward or back.
“Send a message and let him know where they are.”
I didn’t do it until we were both inside Dr. Green’s car and I could secure our desserts on the floor of the back seat.
Victor’s phone was password coded. I showed it to Mr. Blackbourne.
“He changes it, but I believe now it’s your birth year.” He started the car, instantly backing up out of the parking spot.
The phone opened after I entered my birth year. The phone’s saved background was a picture of me with someone else, as I thought I recognized Luke’s arm around my shoulder. It was just zoomed in on me.
I wanted to linger on it but I found the messages app, opened it, finding Mr. Buble’s near the top and sent a message.
Victor: Mr. Blackbourne and I are heading to your house. Your car is where you left it, keys on the rear left wheel.
There wasn’t word back, but I assumed they could still be dealing with Mitch and the library staff and it might take some time to settle.
Out of habit, I turned Victor’s phone screen off and tucked it into my bra to hold on to.
Mr. Blackbourne was already on the road, heading away from Summerville. He took the onramp to get to the interstate toward Charleston.
He kept his hands on the wheel, a confident grip at ten and two.
My heart was racing still. Could someone have a heart attack at sixteen? While the emotional rollercoaster was crazy, at least for now, I enjoyed my heart racing.
A night with Mr. Blackbourne, a surprise but welcomed.
♥♥♥
Mr. Buble’s house was nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood with imposing, big houses. I wasn’t sure where we were exactly, but it was further away from the school and in areas I didn’t recognize. The streets were dotted with lean, trimmed evergreens, iron gates, and tall wood fences. At the very end of the road seemed to be the biggest, with a large fence that surrounded the backyard, and a wide driveway.
The brick house at the top of the hill, at the end of the cul-de-sac, was two stories… and while I’d been around and inside Victor Morgan’s house that seemed big, this one seemed much bigger. I supposed the difference was it wasn’t downtown and limited to historical downtown style. The house was very contemporary… almost something like I’d seen back in Illinois. Red brickwork, black shutters, and white window frames.
We parked at the end of the drive. The garage door was open, a spot for a car, possibly Mr. Buble’s. Another car was parked just outside the garage, a small green car with black bumpers.
Near it was a large white van, windowed, at least three rows for seats in the back. Around the rest of the garage were many, many shelves with boxes and labels on each one. The only exposed items were toys too big for the containers: a doll house, a large plastic toy car made to drive around outside, a couple of skateboards.
Mr. Blackbourne turned off the car and reached into the back for the desserts. “We’ll go in through the garage.”
“Is that okay to do?” I asked. “Is anyone here?”
“Likely the kids are here with the housekeeper.”
I tried not to think, fearing I’d shake the entire time we were here, nervous. Being tired, I was losing my courage quickly.
Also… how did he know? I didn’t think they really knew each other that well.
I followed Mr. Blackbourne into the open garage. He kept his set of keys out and I didn’t understand why until he used it on the door to get in.
He had a key? I watched him, a bit stunned, unsure if I’d noticed Mr. Blackbourne’s set of keys had a few extra keys on them compared to everyone else.
The hallway we entered was narrow, but had several doors, with one bigger room at the end, door open, that appeared to be shelves and storage. Voices echoed to us quickly, with several people talking all at once.
We passed closed doors until the space opened up into a massive open kitchen, dining area and corner desk workspace. In the dining area, sitting around the table, were four kids, three around twelve, one younger, maybe seven. A plump Black woman sat at the head of the table, her large brown eyes widened immensely in our direction. She stood as we came further into the house.
She got a look at Mr. Blackbourne and put a hand on her chest. “My word, I swear, I thought you were Mr. Buble at first, coming in through the side door… No one told me to expect you.”
“I should have called,” Mr. Blackbourne said. He put down the grocery bag onto the kitchen’s large island counter and walked around it to get to her.
Arms open.
She went to him and opened her arms too, and hugged him. Fully. Chest to chest. Like great friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time.
I studied her as she hugged him, darker freckles dotted her cheeks. Her hair was pulled back in a short braid, some white mixing in at the temples and wrinkles around her eyes.
“Boy, you don’t visit like you promise you’d do. I haven’t seen you in a year.”
“It’s been a very busy year.” He backed away from her to motion with a wide swinging arm in my direction. “Mrs. Rhodes, this is Miss Sang Sorenson.”
Her lips puckered with a smile and she came toward me, arms open and looking wide-eyed and expectant. “Girl, you are always welcome here.”
Heart melted instantly. There was something about her, the wide eyes, the way she made someone feel very calm in her presence, that you were wanted. I walked forward, still feeling a little intimidated in the new place, but understood a hug was expected.
Her hug was strong, comforting. I blinked rapidly, wanting to tear up.
Feeling that this was something I lost not having family like other people did.
This was supposed to be normal.
And for once, surprisingly, I didn’t hesitate. Like when I’d been hugged by girls before and suddenly felt so uneasy and uncomfortable. This was completely opposite. I wasn’t totally sure why. I wondered if it wasn’t just her demeanor, something special about Mrs. Rhodes that made her comfortable to be around.
She released me and tugged me by the arm toward the table. “Are you hungry? We were just sitting down to dinner.”
The table was ladened with homemade lasagna, a fruit salad, and grilled parmesan zucchini.
The kids were… different from each other and not what I was expecting. In my mind, I thought they were Mr. Buble’s kids for some reason, even if he said otherwise. One was taller than the others, perhaps taller than me but he was sitting down. The youngest and the tallest sat next to each other. The other two sat opposite facing them. Only one girl, one of the twelve-year-olds.
Different but the same wide, expectant eyes that hesitated showing any emotion at all until Mrs. Rhodes invited us to sit for dinner. Their expressions changed nearly instantly. Warmer smiles, curious tilts of their heads. Once the older woman approved, it seemed the others followed.
“Then we did get here just in time,” Mr. Blackbourne said. “We’ve brought dessert.” He went immediately to where Mrs. Rhodes was sitting and touched the back of the chair as if to hold it out for her. “Unless you’re going to head out.”
“I’ll stick around for a few minutes,” she said. “Jon won’t fuss if I’m a little late.”
“Your husband
is very generous,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
Mrs. Rhodes sat heavily in the chair at the end of the table. The large table could easily fit three more. Mr. Blackbourne quickly moved to a spot aside the youngest sitting at the table then pulled the chair out and looked at me expectantly.
I sat quietly where he directed, yet I wished I had a moment to compose myself a little. Who was she? Where were we? Who were the kids? Didn’t Mr. Buble say there were only three of them?
While Mrs. Rhodes started to encourage the others to help themselves to the food and to eat, Mr. Blackbourne went to cabinets in the kitchen, opened one, pulling out plates and finding the silverware to make us the additional place settings, complete with cloth napkins and placemats. He did it all before he sat next to me and without asking where anything was.
And from where I was sitting, there was a more formal dining room within view, through an archway nearby. I could also see the front door, a set of stairs going up to the second floor, and the open door under the stairs that led down… a basement? I hadn’t seen a basement anywhere I’d visited here, and not since Illinois.
Mrs. Rhodes talked to Mr. Blackbourne while the others helped each other cut out portions of lasagna and dole out food. “I heard about your unexpected promotion at work. How they picked a teenager to be in charge…”
“I’m a little older than you remember,” Mr. Blackbourne said. He undid the buttons on his sleeves, rolling them up neatly, like how Victor would often wear his shirts. He took up the dish of fruit salad that was at the end that he could reach. He silently offered to plate for me. I silently accepted, and he gave some to me and himself before trading serving bowls with the tall kid across the table.
It only took moments, but I never touched my plate and it filled up with everything there was to eat. A cup appeared, filled with ice water, beside it. I hadn’t even noticed the girl at the table had gotten up to go get them for me and Mr. Blackbourne.
I ate when everyone else ate, too stunned to talk or pay much attention to anyone else. I was way too involved in listening to Mr. Blackbourne and Mrs. Rhodes reminisce and trying to piece together what this was.
“Did he tell you to come?” she asked him.
“In a way,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
She eyeballed me and then nodded in my direction. “Are you joining us? Are you one of my new ones?”
“Temporarily,” he said.
She laughed shortly. “That’s what they said about you, and you kept trying to tell me but you didn’t want to go at the end.”
I stared hard at my food.
When Mr. Blackbourne was young, his mother died… I hadn’t wondered what happened to him after. Some part of me, in the back of my brain, maybe assumed there was other family… or the Academy…
But there was a before the Academy time, before they knew him and recruited him. What’d happened then?
♥♥♥
Mrs. Rhodes left before dessert, not having eaten anything except to nibble on some fruit salad.
I learned several things during that forty minutes: Mr. Blackbourne had lived here, this was a home for foster children, the newest one arrived that afternoon without Mr. Buble being aware yet, the youngest.
And for the few hours after Mrs. Rhodes left to go to her husband, Mr. Blackbourne and I cleaned the kitchen and watched a movie with them in the living room. We didn’t talk too much about ourselves, just about the movie. Mr. Blackbourne didn’t ask questions. The kids mostly made jokes and laughed.
Soon, we were upstairs and the kids were getting themselves ready for bed, putting on pajamas. Upstairs, there were three large bedrooms which had two beds each, two dressers, etc., and a master bedroom where Mr. Buble slept
One bedroom was empty, beds stripped of everything. The youngest had decided to room with the tallest one. The other two, the boy and the girl, slept in the same room together. I made an assumption they were siblings.
A whirlwind of confusion and other emotions overwhelmed me the whole time and I just followed along. Mr. Blackbourne set up the routine, blindly accepting the new addition to this group without question and letting them decide who slept where.
Weren’t I and the others supposed to sleep here? Wasn’t there supposed to be bunkbeds? I didn’t see any, and Mr. Blackbourne also didn’t invite me to get ready for bed, either.
The kids weren’t fully in bed yet when Mr. Blackbourne motioned we should head downstairs. “We’ll leave you to finish,” he said. “But we’ll be in the other upstairs room.”
“Aw,” the tall one said. “Really? I was wondering who was getting that one. I thought we’d get it.”
Mr. Blackbourne wished them goodnight and followed me downstairs.
I hesitated now in the front hallway facing the door. There was a formal dining and parlor room here near the front. I’d assumed prior to Mr. Blackbourne saying anything that perhaps we were meant to go into the basement. However, he said other upstairs room.
Mr. Blackbourne reached gently for my wrist, tugging. “This way.”
This time, he didn’t release my arm for a full couple of minutes, when it got too awkward to walk next to him as we passed through the kitchen again back toward the short hallway by the back door.
He opened a door, and there was a set of stairs. Just like Kota’s house, there was a finished room over the garage.
In fact, when we went up the stairs, it looked almost identical, with windows facing the front of the house and the side where we’d parked and an attached bathroom and closet next to each other on the left. Instead of a single bed though, there were two bunkbeds, and even those appeared to have roll away beds underneath the lower bunk. There were two short dressers up here but not much else, no décor.
“Spare room for us in the Academy and older refugees,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
“How long ago did you live here?” I asked him.
“Immediately after my mother died.” He looked toward a window on the far side of the room. “Before Mr. Buble took over, but I was still here when he arrived. Mrs. Rhodes seems to have always been here.”
I touched a forefinger to my thumb, rubbing them together. I wasn’t sure what to do. I assumed I’d be staying here, maybe with Victor if he got back. This whole day felt huge, too big to be one day.
“You should sleep,” Mr. Blackbourne said. His tone seemed to indicate that he’d go back downstairs, but he lingered where he was, looking at me.
“I drove Kota’s car and blew it up,” I said, one of a million things that was circling through my mind.
“I noticed,” he said, without an ounce of judgement.
“Erica hasn’t been at work when she said she was, especially on days when we saw Volto.” I don’t know why, but I kept going. I simply fell into report-giving mode.
“We’re working on a plan to follow her every time she leaves her house to identify where she’s going.” He shifted and motioned to one of the beds, indicating I should sit down. “Mr. North Taylor is taking care of it.”
I moved, continuing to talk. “I’m really worried about Victor. He needs his old clothes back but he’s being stubborn about wearing his Armani clothes. He says everything else is itchy.”
“He’s probably trying to figure out a new identity,” Mr. Blackbourne said gently.
I sat on the lower bunk of one of the beds, close to a ladder and was over enough Mr. Blackbourne could sit down with me, as I thought he was going to do.
Instead, he kneeled in front of me and nudged the back of my foot, indicating to lift it. When I did, he started taking off the sneakers I was wearing, untying them and easing them off my feet. “Were you just worried about our Mr. Morgan’s clothes?” he asked.
His motions felt so intimate, and time had slowed so much, that it felt like an eternity before I could focus on what he asked, and once I started talking again, I rambled as he continued to remove my shoes. “He told me about Brie. About how he started to
think maybe he should lie to his mother about seeing her instead of me, but then after they got him drunk, he was changing his mind. I don’t really know what to do. I have this feeling about his mother, how she doesn’t like me.”
He finished removing my shoes, and instead of putting my second foot down on the floor, he held it in his hands, his thumbs smoothing over the surface, rubbing. “If it makes you feel any better, Mrs. Morgan doesn’t like me either.”
It was preposterous to think he was making light and a joke about this and my brain froze, my lips twitching with words that didn’t make any sense. Also, the sensation, the massage he was giving my feet, the whole situation seemed surreal. Had I just fallen asleep and this was a dream?
He continued, “Did anything else important happen today that you’re worried about? The situation with the librarian and Mr. Buble?”
I shrugged a little, still overwhelmed with what he was doing with my feet. “I don’t think I should drive again.” I didn’t really have an opinion about Mitch. While I was worried, I didn’t know the situation. Also, my mind was just jumping from one thing to the next.
He stopped massaging but held on to my foot with one hand and reached up, grasping gently at my arm and looking up at my face, those gray eyes sending hot waves through my body.
“You will, because I know you enough that you won’t let a little thing like that get in your way. You’re much stronger than that. You’re just a little rattled.”
He seemed so sure of this.
After a moment, he released my arm, continuing the massage. “Anything else on your mind?”
I hesitated. “Yes…”
He continued, looking at my foot and remaining silent, giving me the chance to take my time to answer further.
“I’ve been rambling and I never asked you how your day was,” I said. “And I don’t really get a chance to talk to you outside of the principal’s office anymore. And I never knew you lived here. I hugged Mrs. Rhodes. I didn’t feel weird about it.”
