Pete forced himself to take another bite, even though his stomach felt dicey. He shifted uncomfortably on his still-sore welts. He had to use his legs to keep his full weight off his backside, and the muscles were growing hot and sore.
It struck him that he hadn’t asked his father if Boomer Leggett had been one of the ones who beat Justin. And if his dad had known—had given his blessing, or even not gone out of his way to stop it.
He didn’t ask.
He hated himself for not asking. And he knew it was a deep shame that would not leave him anytime soon. If it ever left him.
But he had survived coming home. He was not screaming in pain again. He was being fed, and he could live here. Since he had no place else he could live, he shoveled spaghetti into his mouth and said nothing at all.
“I’m going out for a walk,” Pete said to his dad.
His father was in the living room, reading an outdated news magazine, with those funny half-sized reading glasses on. Squinting to see in the dim, golden light from the chair-side lamp.
“Not until you do those dishes, you’re not.”
“I did them.”
His father looked up into his face as if listening for the first time.
“What do you mean, you’re going for a walk?”
“Just what I said, I guess.”
“You never go out for a walk for no reason.”
“I just feel too full, kind of. I thought it might help me settle my dinner.”
“How long you plan to be gone?”
“Not long. Ten minutes. Twenty, tops.”
“All right, well, go then.”
Pete slipped through the front door and out into the world.
It was dusky now, the air still warm and humid, but not so oppressive without the glare of direct sun.
He turned toward town. Toward the liquor store.
As he walked, he fingered the dime in his pocket. And thought about his weekend up until now. Being at the doctor’s instead of home. It felt something like the time his parents had taken him on a vacation to Washington, DC. Pete had loved every minute of it. He’d loved seeing the government buildings, and staying in a hotel, and being Not Home. Then the vacation had ended and Pete had been forced to come back to his dreaded routine and go right back to school.
What does that mean, he wondered, when where you are is exactly where you don’t want to be, and you know it?
He crossed the street toward the liquor store against the light, because there was no one to see him and no cars coming. Then he padded across the parking lot, his sneakers making flapping noises on the hot tar.
He tucked himself into the phone booth and pulled up the telephone directory.
“Armstrong,” he said out loud, running his finger down the A names.
He found it right away. “L. K. Armstrong.”
He dropped his precious dime into the slot and dialed, allowing the rotary dial to pull his finger back into place after each number.
She picked up on the fourth ring.
“I hope I didn’t get you away from something,” Pete said.
“Pete?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s me. But it’s not an emergency. I’m okay.”
“Did you go home?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not really sure. It didn’t go like I thought it would at all. I really don’t understand it. And maybe that’s part of why I called. ’Cause you’re good at figuring out stuff like that. Much better than I am. But that’s not the main reason I called. Mostly I called because I thought you might be worried about me. Even though I know maybe that’s not true. I mean, why should you worry? I’m not your kid. I’m not really yours to worry about. I guess what I’m saying is that I was hoping you were worried about me.”
A brief pause, during which Pete realized he was talking over any chance of finding out.
He kept going.
“It would be nice to have somebody who actually cared enough to think about me after I went home and wonder if I was okay. But it’s not your job or anything. So if you didn’t, that’s okay. I don’t blame you or anything.”
“You’re not really letting me get a word in edgewise, Pete.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
It was nearly dark out now, and Pete watched the headlights of a car go by, lighting up his strange new world and then plunging him into the dim again.
“Of course I was worried about you, Pete. What happened?”
“It was weird.”
“I was hoping for more detail.”
“He asked me some questions. And I tried to tell him how scared I was to come home. At first he seemed the way he always does. Kind of too calm but like he was just ready to blow. And then it’s like he got it, how I’m so scared of him now. And then he said he’d let it go by. And what was really weird . . . he tried to get me to say we were a team, me and him. Strong, you know?”
“That doesn’t seem so strange. You’re his son. He doesn’t want to lose you.”
Another set of headlights lit up his face.
“How could he lose me?”
“I don’t understand the question,” she said. “People lose each other all the time.”
“But I can’t just move out and get my own place or anything. I’m twelve.”
“I didn’t necessarily mean lose you in a literal sense. I meant he doesn’t want to lose your love.”
“Oh,” Pete said. But he could not force his brain to decode that idea. How does one remove love from one’s only parent? It was a concept—an option—Pete had never considered. “I lied to him. I said we’re strong. But we’re not.”
Silence on both ends of the line.
“Was that wrong to lie?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Pete. I really don’t. Things like that are hard. But I know you were trying to do what you thought was best, and that’s the main thing.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He wanted to tell her how he hadn’t asked his father about a possible role in Justin’s beating, but it was too terrible. He was too ashamed. And maybe she already knew. Maybe everybody knew Pete should be finding that out from his dad. And maybe nobody would want to be anywhere near him if they could see he wasn’t brave enough to do it.
When they could see.
All he said was, “So I guess I can come see Prince again tomorrow. I was wondering if you’d wait for me. You know. When you come to pick up Justin. I’ll be up and ready while it’s still dark. I promise. I won’t keep you waiting.”
“Of course,” she said.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“I’m glad you called, Pete.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Very. I was worried. I do care what happens to you when you go home.”
Pete wanted to thank her again but he was just on the edge of crying, and knew she would hear it in his voice if he did.
“See you tomorrow,” he said as fast as he could.
Then he hung up before she caught on to his emotion. Or at least, he hoped so.
When he arrived home, he slipped through the door to find his father dozing on the pain pills. Snoring in his chair.
Pete slipped past him and into his bedroom.
He had an early morning. He was exhausted, purely drained from fear and emotion. It was time to get some sleep.
Chapter Seventeen: Dr. Lucy
She sat parked in her car at the curb, in a space as far from a streetlight as she could possibly have found. The whole moment felt unsettled inside her, leaving her vaguely guilty and afraid, as if she were about to be caught and punished for some serious transgression. And familiar. It felt so familiar.
At first she couldn’t remember why.
Then she connected it to the fear in her belly when someone pounded on her door in the middle of the night, and she knew—before even crossing to the window—that against her best judgment she’d feel compelled to allow them into her home
.
She looked up at the rearview mirror to see Calvin standing in the glow of a streetlight halfway down the block, his arms aimlessly at his sides, as if wanting to do a number of things he could not. She might have seen some small movement of Justin in that same mirror image, but if so she did not register it. Her eyes remained glued on the motionless form of Calvin, and she raised one hand as if to wave, not even sure if he would see in the darkness and at the distance. She didn’t wave, exactly, just raised the hand and held it very still.
A moment later he mirrored the gesture perfectly.
They froze that way a moment, staring at each other in a setting that allowed them to see almost nothing.
A thought filled Lucy’s head, more or less uninvited.
Look at that, it said. I’m a tragic figure in a love story, and I don’t even remember how I got myself into the thing.
And it all happened so damned fast.
Then the sound and feel of her car door being opened knocked such thoughts out of her head.
“Good morning,” Justin said, a small mouselike voice from her backseat, pulling the door closed behind him.
“Good morning, Justin.”
“Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Of course.”
A silence and pause. She looked up into the glass of the rearview mirror again. The street was empty. Calvin was gone.
“Why aren’t we driving away?” Justin asked.
“We have to wait for Pete.”
“Oh, Pete. Good! Pete’s coming, I didn’t know. I thought he might be in so much trouble with his dad that we wouldn’t see him for a long time.”
“We got lucky on that score,” she said. “Well, mostly he got lucky. But yes, it’s lucky for us, too.”
A minute—or two minutes, or five minutes—later Pete jumped into the backseat, and Dr. Lucy fired up the engine and eased the car down the block toward home.
“I’m sorry I made you wait,” Pete said.
“You were fine, Pete. The timing was fine.”
They drove in near silence for a mile or two, marked only by a quiet whispering between the boys. It was too quiet for Dr. Lucy to make out any words. Which seemed regrettable. Their tone, their body language, the very energy that surrounded them like a cloud and followed them through the world, smacked of genuine trust and friendship. It was an animal so foreign to her that she was anxious to study the phenomenon to see how such a thing was done. But in its quietness it evaded her grasp, as usual.
She looked up to see some kind of law enforcement vehicle in her rearview mirror. It jolted into her stomach as a big, undisguised fear. More fear than she had openly felt for some time. If he pulled her over he’d find two boys hidden in her backseat, neither of whom belonged to her. How would she go about explaining a thing like that?
She couldn’t tell what branch of law enforcement the car represented. It could have been police, or sheriff, or state highway patrol. She couldn’t even make out the color of the car in the dark. But one thing was very clear: The car had a red light on its roof which, blessedly, remained dark.
She watched it from the corner of her eye as she drove, praying it would not light up.
Then she wondered what she was doing praying. Praying to what, or to whom? She’d long ago given up on any sort of God—probably while she was still a child—particularly the one forced on her by her parents. It seemed wrong to drag that relationship back into play now simply because she was afraid. It felt two-faced and selfish.
She made a left onto the two-lane highway.
So did the car with the light.
Strangled by a rising fear, she attempted to rehearse what she would say when he pulled her over. If he pulled her over. But there was nothing to rehearse. It was a story she did not intend to tell, and one that would not help her case even if she did choose to share it.
She decided, in a panicky moment in her brain, that she couldn’t do this every morning. The idea that she could keeping picking up the boys unnoticed simply because it was dark was naive. It wasn’t going to work. But what suitable arrangement would replace the plan? Her desperate brain could not imagine, could not even organize itself to try.
She glanced again without moving her head. He was still back there. The light was still dark.
She saw her street up ahead, the place where she would make a left off the highway for home, and knew she was headed for a moment of truth. What felt like her stomach and her heart—the whole of her frightened insides—seemed to sit in her throat, refusing to be swallowed back down.
She slowed. The police car behind her slowed. But how could it not? There was only one lane in each direction, and it had to accommodate her speed.
She turned left.
The cop car kept going straight.
The moment it was out of sight she pulled over and rested her head on the steering wheel and tried to calm her heart and normalize her breathing.
“You okay?” Pete asked from somewhere behind her.
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Are we there?” Justin asked.
“Not quite. We’ll go in a minute.”
She pulled a few more deep breaths, then drove the rest of the way home.
“I’m going to pull around behind the house,” she said to both of them at once. “I want you to get in the habit of staying out of sight from the road. Not that there seems to be anybody on the road right now, and normally there isn’t, but you never know. So every morning when I pick you up, just try to remember that you never want to get out of the car when anyone else can see.”
“How do we know if they can see?” Pete asked. “We’re back here with our heads down.”
“Right. Well, every morning I’ll tell you when the coast is clear.”
But as she pulled into her driveway the question of whether she dared do this again the following morning remained.
“I’m beginning to think it’s time to put Prince into one of the indoor-outdoor runs,” she said a couple of hours into the morning. “It’s so small, that little cage where he’s been confined. It must be hard for him. It’s starting to seem cruel.”
“Sure,” Pete said. “It’d be nice if he could move around a little.”
They stood in the examining room staring at the wolf-dog. All three of them. He looked back with a pleasant anticipation, seeming to know they were talking about him, seeming to gather that there was nothing to dread in their conversation.
“How do we do it, though?” Pete asked.
“Not sure I’ve figured that out yet,” Dr. Lucy said.
“Can he walk on that back leg now?”
“Not really. But it should be easy enough for him to move around on three legs now that the bone is stable. It shouldn’t hurt much to hold it up and hop around. And the incision is mostly healed. I’m not worried about him popping those stitches.”
She looked into the animal’s deep eyes and he returned her gaze.
“It’s amazing that he hasn’t tried to take out those stitches himself,” she said. “I thought when the anesthetic wore off I’d have to put some kind of cone around his neck. But he’s just leaving them alone.”
“He knows,” Pete said. “He knows it’s all to help him.”
A brief silence.
Then Pete said, “I could put a leash on him and lead him out there.”
“No. I wouldn’t suggest that. We have no idea if he’s ever been trained to walk on a leash. If not, he might object to being held by his neck. If he broke away from you, that would be very bad. The last thing we want is for him to run away now, when he can barely hobble. The coyotes or some other wild animals would have him in no time. That would be it for him by sundown.”
“Hmm,” Justin said, as if wanting into the conversation but not quite knowing where he fit.
“I sure wouldn’t want that,” Pete said.
“I know!” Justin said. “We could carry the cage outside and into one of the kennels. And then open the door.”
“We could?” Dr. Lucy asked. “He’s heavy.”
“All three of us could.”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe so. Maybe all three of us could.”
“It won’t fit through the gate,” she said. Or rather, she huffed it. She set down her end of the cage in the dirt, leaned on it, and tried to catch her breath.
They had walked the cage right up to the chain link of an open kennel run, but it had hung up on both sides, too wide to fit through.
“It was a good idea, Justin,” she added. “But I think this is as far as it goes.”
“I could climb over the cage and into the run,” Pete said. “And then I can open the door of his cage. And if we keep the cage real tight up against the opening of the kennel run, he’d have no place to go but in.”
“But if you can climb over it,” she said, indicating the space above the top of the cage, “he could jump up onto the cage and get away through that same space.”
Pete’s eyebrows scrunched down, as if thinking pained him.
“Think he could do that with his bum leg?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. But if he goes into a moment of panic . . . well, I hate to take the chance.”
“Okay, leave it to me,” Pete said.
He carefully climbed up onto the cage and moved along it on hands and knees to the fence of the run. Prince lifted his head and watched his every move. Pete leaned through the opening, over the top of the cage, and dangled his upper body downward until he was able to flip the latch on Prince’s cage and swing the door open.
Then Pete pulled up to his knees and used his body to block the only space the wolf-dog might have utilized to escape.
Prince reached his muzzle out and explored the empty space where the door had been. Almost as though he couldn’t believe such an unfamiliar thing as all that space. He crawled forward a few inches and stuck his head out. Looked around.
Then he rose onto three legs and hobbled out into the run, where he stood, bad leg held slightly off the ground, and sniffed his new surroundings.
Say Goodbye for Now Page 16
