by Nancy Rue
He paused as a couple approached up the walkway, already looking at us as if there might be something to see here. “Come on,” he said, “let’s talk someplace else.”
“We’re wasting time!” I said.
The couple stared from the bottom step. Chief pressed his hand into the middle of my back and lowered his voice near my ear. “We’re going to waste more if we don’t have a plan. Let’s go—I brought your helmet.”
I got on the Road King behind him, and as we drove east, I wished my head could turn 360 degrees. I probed every parking lot and crosswalk and clump of tourists on the corners, searching for that pharaoh head atop a stick of a body, dying to hear “it’s all good,” praying for another chance to check his pockets for contraband candy before I let him out of the house. When Chief pulled the bike up to a bakery-coffee shop on Granada, I realized my fingers were curled into the leather of his jacket.
He turned his head, helmet tapping mine. “Classic,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s not time to panic.”
“And you’re going to tell me when it is.”
“You got it.”
That was enough to get me seated at a table in a sunny corner of the bakery with a cup of Earl Grey, but I was still scanning the landscape through the window—the hedges around the museum, the trails of visitors hurrying inside out of the wind that had picked up.
“I doubt he’s hanging out at the Lightner,” Chief said.
“What better place to scam a few tourists out of their money?”
“Do you really think that’s what he’s doing?”
“No. I don’t know what to think.”
“Try this.” Chief cupped his big hands around his mug, smothering it from view. “He sees you get arrested; not a new scene for him, except you’re the one person who gives him stability, and if you can be hauled off to jail, chances are he’s next, so he splits.”
“Is this supposed to be making me feel better?”
“Is it about you?”
I let my spoon fall onto the saucer. “I should have just done what the cop said and gotten out of there. I wasn’t even thinking about him witnessing the whole thing.”
“What did he witness?”
“Huh?”
“What did he see you do?”
“Why do I feel like I’m on the stand right now?”
“He saw you stand up for your rights, and his mother’s rights. I don’t think he’s seen a lot of that in his life.”
“It’s not going to do him any good if he’s dead in an alley.”
“It doesn’t sound like anybody’s going to off Desmond. They’re just trying to scare him into bringing Geneveve back. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to take him out.”
“You actually think any of this makes sense?”
“What people do almost always makes sense to them. It’s my job to figure out how. It’s what I do.” He shook his head. “I’m not entirely convinced there’s a connection between him running off today and what’s happening with this Sultan character. Which is why it’s not time to panic. I want to believe Desmond will get hungry and head for home—”
“Except that he doesn’t know I’m not locked up. He thinks he’s homeless again.” My throat closed, and once more I put my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t wail.
“And where would he go if he needed a place to crash and score some food?” Chief said. “Not to his mother.”
I shook my head. “In his mind it’s all over. He’ll think the whole safe-place-to-live thing was nice while it lasted and go looking for a drunk in a gutter to befriend.”
“Or, come sundown, he’ll go back to the safe place and wait.”
“You think he has that much faith in it?”
“You’re the expert on that.”
“No. I’m not. And this is not the time to be pooh-poohing God when I need him the most, so just back off the cynicism.”
I plunked my face into my hands, elbows on the table, which, of course, tilted, sending the tea cup sliding right into my lap. Lukewarm Earl Grey splashed from my midriff to my knees and soaked miserably all the way to my skin. Face turned to the ceiling, I could feel the tears streaming into my ears—and I never cried. Ever.
Chief was on his feet, a wad of napkins in his hand. “Did it burn you?”
“No, it wasn’t even hot. Look, I’m—”
“Come on. I’ll take you home.”
“We have to find Desmond.”
“In wet clothes? You look like you didn’t make it to the bathroom. Come on.”
The temperature was a good sixty degrees, but between the wind and my damp lap and the wedge I’d just shoved between Chief and me, I was shivering when we got to Palm Row. I had to stop. My focus had to be on finding that kid.
“If you want to go in and get dried off, I’ll put your helmet up,” Chief said.
While he went toward the garage, I turned to the house, eyes sweeping the yard without a whole lot of hope. When a shadow crossed my path, I already had Desmond’s name on my lips and my heart in my mouth, but it was Owen. It hadn’t even occurred to me to call him—
“You lose somebody?” he said.
“Tell me he’s with you,” I said.
“He’s not—”
My heart plummeted.
“I tried to get him to come over and wait with me, but he said he’d rather stay out there.”
I pointed stupidly to the garage. He nodded.
“Owen,” I said, “you are an angel from heaven.”
I was still saying it as I tore back across the road and through the side door, where I skidded to a stop.
Before me stood Chief, taller than he’d been two minutes before, arms wrapped around a scrawny figure in a motorcycle helmet. Neither of them was saying a word as they rocked back and forth, Desmond’s enormous feet dangling a foot from the ground. I wouldn’t have spoken even if the lump in my throat had let me. I certainly didn’t move, because the longer I watched Chief hug the boy, the more I felt him hugging me. This was as close as we were ever going to get to that, and I wanted it to last. For all of us.
When Chief finally set Desmond down, I rearranged my face and crossed to them.
“I knew the minute my back was turned you’d try to take off on my Harley,” I said.
Desmond turned and grinned, though I could see him doing a little face-shifting of his own. If those were tears sparkling in his eyes, they weren’t coming out if he could help it.
“I was just keepin’ a eye on it for ya,” he said.
“And a fine job you did.”
He looked me over. “They didn’t use no police brutality on you, did they?”
“Nah—it was a piece of cake. Speaking of which, anybody hungry?”
“No doubt,” Desmond said. “You and me gotta talk about me havin’ my own house key. I coulda starved to death out here.”
“In your dreams, Clarence,” I said. “Hey.…” I heard my voice soften.
“You not gonna get all emo on me are ya?”
“Emo?”
“Yeah, all cryin’ and huggin’ my neck and sayin’, ‘Oh, my poor baby.’”
“Once again, in your dreams. I just wanted to say thanks for coming home.”
Desmond pulled in his chin. “Where else I’m gonna go, Big Al?”
“Well, yeah,” I said.
If I was ever going to “get all emo,” that would’ve been the moment.
We called Hank to have her tell Geneveve her son had been found. I fed Desmond and hung out with him until he conked out on the couch in the den, while Chief went to the grocery and came back with everything Hank instructed him to buy so she could make some kind of amazing pasta thing that I shamelessly wolfed down. I was now wrap
ped in two blankets in the chair-and-a-half, listening to Chief’s version of discovering Desmond in the garage.
“He was sitting there on the bike with his helmet on, just waiting for you.”
“The kid’s smart,” Hank said. “He knows a die-hard biker will come back to her ride eventually.”
“Either that or he was counting on me doing fifteen to twenty so he could take off with it.”
Chief gave me an eagle look.
“No, I don’t really think that. It’s just hard for me to believe he trusts me.”
“O ye of little faith,” Hank said.
I made it a point not to look at Chief. After the way I spiritually mugged him in the bakery, I was surprised he was still here.
“Speaking of faith.” Hank looked at Chief. “It might get a little religious here, just so you know.”
“I’m good,” he said.
She turned to me. “I know now what it is that’s going on with you—the Nudges, the voice messages, the words coming out of your mouth that you didn’t know were in your head.”
“So I am crazy.”
“Al, I’m serious.”
I could see that she was, and my mouth went dry.
“It just hit me when you were standing up there in the park today. I’ve never heard you speak with that much passion before. I don’t think you’ve heard yourself like that either.”
“I haven’t had time to think about it—what with being arrested and all.” She frowned, and I shook my head. “Sorry. There’s so much going on—it’s hard for me not to run back to my shtick and hide.”
“You can’t hide from this,” she said. “Allison, you are a prophet.”
The room held its breath. Even Sylvia’s German clock seemed to pause in its ticking, waiting for my response. In the pregnant stillness I could only shake my head again.
“I don’t foresee things,” I said.
“A prophet doesn’t see the future. She sees the Word of God. She sees things exactly as they are now, and she knows what that’s going to mean for the future.”
“I see the obvious and that makes me a prophet?”
“It isn’t obvious to everybody,” Hank said, “although it should be.”
“I don’t think so.” I shook my head again and felt my messy bun come undone. “You’re talking Isaiah, Jeremiah—I’m not that caliber. I was falling all over myself up there today.”
“What I heard was you speaking in the prophetic perfect tense.”
“What?”
“You were speaking of things in the present tense as if they’re already happening, but we heard it as the future tense.”
I turned in desperation to Chief. “Okay, it’s time for you to tell her this isn’t making sense.”
He shrugged. “What people say always makes sense to them.”
“Hank—seriously—you don’t know me that well. I am not prophet material. I’m not Isaiah going, ‘Here I am. Use me.’”
“Really? Isn’t that what you told me you prayed for seven years until God told you to buy a Harley?”
“But I was thinking he’d send me down to Ecuador real quick to do a little short-term mission trip or something. I’m not a good risk for something like this. I’ve never had a dream and followed it through. I’ve had no sense of direction. I’ve failed at just about everything I tried because I didn’t really try.”
Hank grinned. “I said you were a prophet, not a saint. Besides, I think those are all the very reasons God picked you. You’re not all wrapped up in your own agenda, so you’re free to adopt his. You don’t know where you’re going, so you might as well follow where he’s taking you. You’re afraid of success, so he gives you something that has nothing to do with succeeding.” She held up both hands. “You’re perfect for the job.”
“‘Prophet’ is definitely not on my short list of possible careers.”
Hank scooted to the edge of the couch and leaned toward me. “You became all the things you’ve said in the last two months before you ever said them. That’s what a prophet does. You didn’t choose this job—it chose you.”
“And you’re saying I don’t have any choice but to keep doing it.”
She sat back and said, “There you go.”
“I don’t know from prophets, obviously, but I do know this.”
I looked at Chief, surprised he hadn’t snuck out during that conversation just to get away from these two Jesus freaks.
“Speak to us, O Chief,” Hank said, grinning.
He didn’t grin back. “You made a lot of people uncomfortable in the park this morning. Five hundred dollars worth of uncomfortable.” He pulled a bulky envelope out of his vest and dropped it on the coffee table trunk.
“That’s what was in your helmet?” Hank said.
“Yep. Five big ones and change.”
I pressed my palms together at my lips. “I need to pray about this.”
“I’m going to leave you to it,” Hank said. “Chief, don’t feel like you have to run off just because I’m going.”
I made a note to self: Knock Hank up the side of the head for that later.
She showed herself out, and Chief stood up.
“I’ll leave the money for you,” he said.
“I don’t feel right doing anything with it,” I said.
“Mind a suggestion?”
“Bring it.”
He held his thumb and index finger close together. “You know we were this close to having to call the police if we hadn’t found Desmond when we did.”
“Yeah.”
“And if they had found him, they would have either turned him over to his mother or put him in custody until they found a foster home. They wouldn’t have given him to you—”
“Because I don’t have legal guardianship,” I finished for him.
“I think Geneveve would sign it over temporarily, and I’m happy to handle the paperwork for you, but there will still be court costs. If you want to go that route.”
“I’ll have to talk to her.”
“Sure.”
“Meanwhile—” I folded my arms uneasily across my chest—“could you put the money in an account or a fund or someplace until I can wrap my mind around this?”
“Around what?” he said. The twinkle was there in his eyes. “Being a mother?”
“Get out,” I said cheerfully.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“We did good today.”
“Yeah, Chief,” I said. “I guess at the end of the day, we did.”
When he left, I leaned against the door and rolled the word we around in my head.
Chief called me early Monday morning to tell me he’d made an appointment for me with a woman I needed to see at FIP.
“Would her name be Elizabeth Doyle?” I said.
“Yeah, Liz Doyle. Do you know her?”
“Sort of.”
“Is that problematic?”
No, it was just ironic. When Bonner had told me to go see her, I’d blown it off. Chief made the appointment for me and I had my lipstick on and my purse in my hand.
“I’ll be there at ten,” I said.
Whenever I ran into any of my former classmates, they usually remembered me first, making it necessary for me to rummage through the memories I’d purposely tossed into the mental recycle bin to find some tidbit I could mention so it didn’t look like I didn’t know who in the world they were. I had to do some serious rummaging on my way to the FIP office to come up with something—anything—about Elizabeth Doyle.
She was a year behind me.
She was the glasses, braces, hide-behind-a-book type. Prime target for the social bullies.
She’d told Bonner I had “rescued�
� her at some point, which—okay, she did have her gym locker near mine and was obviously and painfully embarrassed about having to undress in front of said bullies because the acne on her chest gave them such good humiliation material. I could remember telling them to back off the chick, which, after some, “Ooh, aren’t you tough, rich girl?” they did. Money talks even when you try to shut it up.
With that little information I wouldn’t have recognized the woman who greeted me in her cubicle at FIP as the Liz Doyle I went to high school with. She was slightly overweight but not bulgy in a deep olive suit. She now wore contact lenses that made her green eyes blink furiously, and her teeth seemed to have made the orthodontics worthwhile. Overall she wasn’t unattractive, even with the weary look worn by most public servants. When she saw me, the weariness gave way to a delighted smile.
“Allison,” she said as she gave my neck a brief squeeze. “Good to see you. It’s been a long time. Come in—sit down if you can find a horizontal plane.”
She removed a stack of files from a faded upholstered chair, and I was still sinking into it when I said, “Look—I’m sorry about standing you up last time. I can see you’re swamped in here.”
“Which is exactly why I was miffed about it for approximately—” Liz glanced at an oversized watch “—two minutes before I moved on to the next crisis.” She let a sly smile pass through her eyes, something I didn’t remember from high school. “I guess Jack Ellington is a little more persuasive than Bonner Bailey, huh?”
Good grief—was I blushing? Blushing? I was sure she didn’t remember that about me from high school. It seemed to be amusing her to no end right now.
I managed to shake my head. “It’s neither one of them. Another guy is persuading me.”
“Desmond Sanborn.”
I nodded.
“Good,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” She somehow located a file on her desk. “From what Mr. Ellington tells me, it shouldn’t be difficult to have Desmond’s guardianship signed over to you as long as his mother is willing. And as long as you don’t get yourself arrested again.”
“He told you about that? I guess he had to.”
“No, I read it in the paper.”
I stared.
