Dealing in Deception

by Samantha Joyce

  I grabbed my pillow and screamed into it, shoving every feeling about Bax, his skilled fingers, and his blond bimbo fiancée into the goose down.

  Baxter Linton was the last piece of Veronica Wilde I needed to leave behind. The minute it stopped snowing, I would leave this city.

  I closed my eyes and waited.

  • • •

  White everywhere.

  When I peered out of my window in the morning, it was all I could see. White. Freaking. Everywhere.

  At some point in the night, it had stopped coming down, but not before burying the city in sparkling peaks that glittered like diamonds in the sun. I cleared some of the condensation from the window with my hand and held my palm there until my fingers numbed from the chilled glass. DC looked like a place out of a storybook, all crystallized and shimmering.

  It also looked really fucking cold.

  The plows would be out already, so I took a deep breath, said good-bye to my loft, pulled on my coat, and grabbed my suitcase. I’d already canceled my cell service, so I left the phone behind, too. A new city meant a new phone with a different number. It was one of the only ways to get a clean break. After the number of times I’d done this, I had it down to a science.

  As I headed to the street, I tried to figure out where I should go. New York was one of my favorite places in the world, and the Upper East Side would cradle me like a blanket, but it would also be freezing and full of people in a rush. Maybe I’d go to Maui and spend some time on a beach, let the sun burn the memories from my skin. The first step was getting out of town. I’d be able to decide as distance cleared my head.

  I piled the suitcases in the trunk and headed down the street, glancing at my disappearing building in the rearview mirror. Turning up the radio, I sang along to some random hit I somehow knew all the words to, even though I couldn’t tell you who sang it. Already, my head felt lighter, my spine looser.

  I’d managed to hit the outskirts of downtown when I spotted the black bag under the dash on the passenger side.

  “Shit. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Bax’s stupid gym bag. It still had that blanket of his in it from our meeting with Herberto. I drummed my fingers against the steering wheel as I tried to figure out what to do. I could ship it to him, but the damned thing was worth five million dollars now. I couldn’t exactly stick it in a FedEx box and hope for the best.

  Cursing, I pulled a U-turn, gritting my teeth against the icy road, and pointed my car in the direction of Bax’s apartment. I’d just leave it on his porch or something. Or maybe ring the bell and run away. Because that was the level of maturity I’d achieved: relating giving a guy I used to like his multimillion-dollar blanket back to leaving a pile of dog crap on his porch like a teenager. Well, at least the smell was about right.

  The buildings became smaller and more run-down the closer I got to Bax’s neighborhood. People in rags huddled over steam grates and under sleeping bags, struggling against winter’s wrath. My hands tightened on the wheel. Great, not only did I have to figure out how to get Bax his product without actually talking to him, I had to drive through the bad area of town, too. A FedEx box was looking more and more attractive now.

  A homeless man with a brown cap ran into the road, yelling at cars as they passed and waving his arms. I clenched my jaw. The crazy way he staggered reminded me of my mother on the nights she drank away her personalities. She’d become unpredictable and scary, exactly like him.

  I hit the door locks and pressed on the gas to get away from the man, when his hat fell off his head, exposing his copper locks. I gasped. I knew that hair.

  Connor’s dad. Bax had said his name was Ian. He hadn’t seemed crazy when I’d met him, or drunk. He was just a dad who cared about his son. Oh, crap. His son.

  Where the hell was Connor?

  Slamming on the brakes, I hopped out of the car and shouted to the man, “Ian?”

  The wind whipped the name back at my face as the cold bit into my skin, making my eyes water. I rubbed my palms together to keep the feeling in them.

  “Oh, thank God.” Connor’s dad ran to me. Despite his many layers of clothing, his body convulsed with shivers. “You’re B-B-Baxter’s friend, right? V-V-Veronica?”

  “Yes.” I placed my hands on his shoulders to get him to focus on me. “Ian, where’s Connor?”

  “I-I-I don’t kn-kn-know. That’s our car there.” He pointed to a beat-up VW Bug. “When we went to sleep, the snow had just started. C-C-Connor loves the snow. H-he must’ve gone to play in it while I was sleeping. B-but he hasn’t come back.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “D-don’t have a phone.”

  Shit. Neither did I anymore.

  I bit my chattering bottom lip. “Okay, he can’t have gone far. I’ll help you look for him. You go south and I’ll go north. Yell for me if you find anything.”

  “Ok-kay.”

  Before I left my car, I made a quick decision and grabbed Bax’s bag from the passenger side. I sprinted down the street as fast as my heeled boots would let me, shouting Connor’s name in every direction. Within minutes, my cheeks burned and my fingers were numb. The running kept my blood pumping, though, so I coiled my hands up my sleeves and kept searching.

  The bright yellow of a swing set in a small park at the end of the street caught my eye. As a kid, Danny and I had escaped to the park all the time. He loved going on the teeter-totter and flying down the slide. We pretended it was our very own amusement park. One time, I’d even cut tickets out of colored construction paper and he handed them to me when he wanted to ride one of our “rides.”

  “Connor!” I darted into the park, my throat raw from screaming through the thin air. The path hadn’t been shoveled here, and the snow reached the top of my knee-high boots. Trying to get to the playground was like wading through mud—very cold and very frozen mud.

  My heart almost stopped when I spotted a small bundle in army green in the shelter above the slide, red hair gleaming in the sun.

  “Oh my God! Connor!” I sped up. “Ian!” I called over my shoulder. “Ian! The park! He’s here!”

  I raced to the slide as fast as the snow would allow, praying to anyone who would listen. I couldn’t deal with another dead child in my life. I couldn’t relive that horror. And I couldn’t watch Ian live it, either.

  Snow and ice blanketed the ladder, but I wiped them away and climbed to the top, the bag slung over my shoulder. Connor lay in the corner of the compartment, his eyes closed, his face a terrifying white. I touched his wrist. His skin was colder than ice, but I felt a faint pulse. It was tiny and weak like Connor himself, but it was there.

  I murmured reassurances to him as I stroked his hair, and I called down to Ian. “He’s alive. But he’s freezing. We need to get him to the hospital now.”

  The zipper on the gym bag had frozen shut, but I tore it open with a grunt. I pulled out Bax’s blanket and wrapped Connor in it before gathering his small body in my arms.

  “Ian, I’m going to pass him down to you. Are you okay to take him?”

  “Y-yes.”

  The little boy barely weighed more than the gym bag. I eased him over the railing of the slide and Ian cradled him to his chest, whispering prayers and pleas into his ear.

  We shuffled back through our own footsteps, and I cursed the powder-encrusted ice for slowing us down. Every moment that kept us from the hospital was one less moment for Connor.

  I drove as fast as the weather would allow, weaving around streets that hadn’t been plowed yet. Ian sat in the backseat, with Connor in his lap. The boy still hadn’t woken up, but I could’ve sworn there was a bit more color in his cheeks.

  We pulled up to the emergency entrance and I parked illegally, not giving a crap if I was towed or ticketed. I ran ahead of Ian, practically tackling the first nurse I saw.


  They got Connor onto a bed and we sped down the hall, the doctor asking us questions about how we found him and how long we thought he’d been outside. I explained about the blanket.

  “Please,” I said, “just bring Danny back.”

  “I thought you said his name was Connor,” the doctor said, looking at me questioningly.

  “It is.” I gulped down the ache spreading through my body. “Please help Connor.”

  “We’ll do our best.” She stopped us as we got to a set of double doors. “You’ll have to wait here.”

  Ian and I watched as the doors clamped shut behind them. We clung to each other without a word, both of us lost in our own worry and grief. The last time I’d been at this hospital, my mother had died. The thought of the white walls hurling any more sadness at me squeezed against my lungs, making it hard to breathe.

  It was only a few hours before the doctor returned, but it felt like weeks. Ian and I had slumped in plastic chairs, flicking through year-old magazines without really reading a word and trying not to voice all the worst-case scenarios we both envisioned.

  Ian jumped out of his seat as the doctor emerged. “How is he?”

  The doctor’s easy smile had every good thing wrapped in it—whiskey and chocolate and long walks on the beach. “He’s going to be okay. There’s a chance he may lose a toe or two. We’ll know more over the next twenty-four hours, but he’s no longer in any immediate danger. We’ll keep him here for the next few days to make sure he’s okay.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Ian threw his arms around me and pulled me into a hug. Normally, the smell of dirt and sweat on him would’ve made me recoil, but I wrapped myself around him and sobbed with relief into his holey scarf.

  “I wanted to ask you about this.” The doctor held up Bax’s blanket. “You said earlier this was yours?”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s an invention of a friend. It was all I had.”

  “It’s actually kind of brilliant,” she said. “It saved that boy’s life. We could use these in the hospital. Are there more of them?”

  I laughed, slowly at first, then so hard my sides hurt. Gripping my waist, I doubled over, fits of laughter rocking through me. Ian and the doctor looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had.

  Bax

  A week after the snowstorm and we were still all hands on deck at the shelter. Winter pummeled the city with arctic temperatures and traffic-stopping whiteouts. The beds on the second level overflowed, to the point where we let people crash on the floor of the dining hall. Although we probably violated about ten fire codes, Rickie didn’t have the heart to turn anyone away.

  I helped wherever I could, whether grabbing clean blankets from the laundry downstairs, making beds upstairs, or offering my lackluster cooking skills to the understaffed kitchen. I’d brought Ari with me, and we slept in the office at the back, me on the weathered couch and Ari on the floor beside me. Rickie hadn’t protested the intrusion of my dog. She knew it meant I could stick around without pet-parent guilt, and the guests adored him. Nothing brightened a person’s spirits like the wagging tail of a golden retriever.

  Although I was exhausted and my back ached from restless nights on the couch, I was grateful for the work. Not only did I feel I was making a difference, the constant movement of my body kept my mind off the fact that Veronica had never returned the apologetic texts I’d sent or that when I’d finally broken down and called her, a robotic voice had informed me her number was no longer in service.

  I heaved a box of apples onto the kitchen counter. “You guys need anything else?”

  The fear in the cook’s eyes as he shook his head told me he hadn’t forgotten the way I’d burned the garlic bread the other day. Well, set on fire were the words he’d used. But hey, garlic bread was hard. One moment it was this buttery piece of goodness, and the next it was in flames. All I’d done was check my phone to see if Veronica had called.

  “Okay, then. I’ll see if they need help up front.”

  Grabbing the discarded end of a sausage for Ari, I wandered to the serving line. Rickie had a strict “no dogs around the food” policy, so Ari lay in a yellow U in the corner of the room, close enough to the serving station that he could nudge his nose in to catch a fallen gem, but far enough to make Rickie happy. I tossed the dog the sausage and he caught it in his mouth, then settled back into his nap.

  “Bax,” Rickie said, filling a plate with Caesar salad, “you’ve been here for five days straight. You look like crap.”

  “Gee, thanks, Rick.”

  “Don’t think I’m not grateful for all your help, but you won’t be any good to anyone if you collapse.”

  “I’m fine.” I swapped her now empty bowl of greens with a fresh one from the kitchen window. “I don’t have anything to do at home anyway.”

  “What about your blankets? Don’t you have a business to run?”

  “Herb and Catia are away till the New Year. Right now, it’s just a lot of paperwork.”

  She let out a deeply rooted sigh—the kind she usually reserved for when she caught one of the teen volunteers outside smoking—then her eyes widened. “Well, I’ll be . . .”

  “Rick? What is it?”

  She nudged my shoulder so I faced the door. “Look for yourself.”

  A man stood at the entrance, a plaid cap in his hands. The first thing I noticed was the fine-tailored suit he wore. Veronica had gotten me a similar one. I knew from seeing the price tag, someone wearing clothing that expensive did not belong in a homeless shelter.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  Rickie tipped her head at me. “You don’t recognize him? Look closer.”

  The man shuffled forward, and a little boy on crutches hopped out from behind him. Every bit of saliva in my mouth dried on my tongue. “Is . . . is that Ian and Connor?”

  Rickie’s answer was cut off by the bellowing cry of the boy as he saw me.

  “Baxter!”

  The pair made their way through the packed bodies of the dining hall, Ian nodding at those he recognized. I stepped out from behind the serving counter as they reached the front.

  “Connor!” I fluffed his shining—and obviously recently shampooed—hair. Even he no longer wore rags. Although he wasn’t dressed as fancily as his father, he had clean jeans and a blue sweater that peeked out from under a black, puffy coat. I eyed Ian up and down. “Whoa, did you guys win the lottery or something?”

  “No.” Connor giggled. He held up his left foot. “But I did have two toes cut off. I only have eight toes now! Isn’t that so cool? The kids at school are going to be so jealous of my awesome feet.”

  “What? You . . . you lost toes?” Confusion clouded my head, and I started to wonder if maybe I was making all this up and I really did need sleep, like Rickie had suggested.

  “He would’ve lost more than that,” Ian said, “if it hadn’t been for Veronica and that blanket of yours.”

  I gripped the counter at the mention of her name. “Veronica? How did you know about my blanket?”

  Ian explained about the morning after the storm and how Veronica had found Connor in the park and used my blanket to keep him warm on the way to the emergency room.

  “The doctors were really impressed with your invention,” he said. “I think they want some for the hospital.”

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said to Connor. “And yes, having eight toes is pretty cool. But this still doesn’t explain your clothes.”

  “Ah.” Ian held on to his lapels and puffed out his chest. “This is also thanks to Veronica. She’s friends with a man who owns a fancy clothing store and she got me a job there. He gave me this one for free.” He frowned. “For some reason, he kept calling her Cassandra, but he gave me a job, so who am I to question his memory, right?”

  If I hadn’t been holding on to the metal counter, I might’ve fall
en over. “She did all that?”

  “Not just that, but she paid all of Connor’s hospital bills. Then she helped me find a small apartment we could afford on my new salary. I’d hardly believe one person could pull all of this off in a week, but that woman has connections. Oh.” He pulled a white envelope out of his pocket and motioned Rickie over. “She also wanted me to give you this. For the shelter. Merry Christmas.”

  Rickie took the envelope from him and flicked through the green bills inside. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “There has to be like fifteen grand in here.”

  “Fifteen thousand exactly,” Ian said. “She told me she got it from a job that had turned out to be anything but a job and she’d never really earned it. I don’t know what that means, but she wanted it said.”

  The breath wheezed out of my chest like I’d been kicked in the stomach. All of this, it was too much. Veronica didn’t see me as a paycheck, as she’d claimed. She cared about these people, this shelter. She cared about me. “Where is she? Is she at her loft?”

  “She said she was leaving town when she’d stumbled on us, and she only stuck around until Connor was released from the hospital and we were set up in our new place. I hugged her good-bye about half an hour ago.”

  “Rickie,” I said in a voice so breathless it sounded like I’d just run a marathon. “Can I borrow the shelter’s truck?”

  She tugged the keys out of her pocket and tossed them at me. “Bax, I’ve been trying to get you out of here for days now. If you can get it to start, it’s all yours.”

  “Thanks.” I pulled Connor into a side hug, made extra difficult by his crutches. “I’m so happy for you both. And, you know, Connor, I think you and your cool toes might make an awesome face for my blanket campaign, what do you say?”

  “You mean I’d be famous?” His eyebrows disappeared under the front of his hair.

  “Well, not sure how famous you’d get, but someone would take your picture, and you’d be helping other people in situations like you and your dad used to be in.”

  “Yes, please!” He bounced on one foot. “That is, if it’s okay with my dad.”