Welcome Home

by Eric Smith

  Oliver’s phone rings, breaking my thoughts. He looks down and shakes his head.

  “Your agent?”

  “Yep. I’m sure I know what this is about.”

  “Go ahead and answer it.” I lean back, away from him, and can tell instantly the call is about me because he rolls his eyes and looks pointedly at me.

  I think about that last time I met her and remember why I was hurt so badly, I mean, besides the whole money issue. It was because my plan worked and, yet, it didn’t. I wanted to act, to have a job like I do, so I could be visible. So I could be found. And I was. I wanted her to see me and know that I turned out okay, despite her. I wanted her to see me and remember me. I wanted her to think about me. I did want her to reach out to me, so she could see all that I had done. But in the end, she just came for her own selfish reasons.

  But maybe I was doing it for a selfish reason, too.

  Oliver hangs up and looks at me. “Yeah, it was about you.”

  “What’d your agent say?”

  “She wanted to get the full story, but I didn’t tell her. That’s your story to tell.”

  I nod at him and say, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Screw it.”

  “I can’t just screw it.”

  “Yes, you can. At least the TMZ part. People will judge. Who cares? They judge us on everything else. The Internet is full of people lashing out at us for one reason or another. It sucks that this stuff happens, but people who like you? Like the show? They won’t care. They’re behind you.”

  “Um, excuse me? You’re Tallulah, right?” I turn around and see a girl, about ten, looking at me. She has dark skin and big, puffy hair and this amazing smile. I can’t help but smile back.

  “I am, yes,” I say.

  “I’m Shae. I love your show. I watch it all the time. You’re my favorite.” Then she looks at Oliver and says, “Sorry.”

  “No big deal,” he shrugs good-naturedly.

  “My mom said for me not to bother you, but I wanted to say hi.” She points across the room, and I see a very pale blonde woman running over to us.

  “Oh, my gosh, I’m so, so sorry,” the woman says. “I told her not to go over here and disturb you.”

  “It’s okay, really,” I smile.

  Shae smiles up to her mom and then back to me. “What’s going to happen? Is Sylvester going to come back?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” I say, sadly, but add, “but I can tell you this—he’s never quite gone, now, is he?”

  She grins at her mom again, then jumps around and hugs me. I gasp, surprised by the movement, but hug her back. After everything tonight, it’s like she knew I needed a hug. When she lets go, I ask, “Would you like a picture?”

  We say “cheese” and smile, and she happily bounds back to her mom, giving me a wave before leaving.

  “You made her day. Thank you,” her mom says, and they walk back to their table.

  “You think she’s a bit too young to be watching our show?” Oliver asks.

  “You’re just jealous that I’m the favorite.”

  He smiles. “Feel better now?”

  I shrug and look down. That girl just went against her mom’s wishes to see me. She wanted to see me that badly. Maybe that’s how badly my mother wants to contact me. Enough to go against what I told her the last time. Enough to give up all her dignity and come back. Enough to go to a website to get my attention. Maybe this time she wants to get to know me and not just ask for something. Maybe she wants to know what she missed out on, learn who I am. Maybe she’s finally realizing that that’s what I wanted last time.

  Like looking at the billboard earlier, I feel so visible to her. Maybe it’s a good thing. It’s what I wanted, after all.

  “Let me ask you this.” Oliver says, rubbing his hands together and looking at me with these eyes he never uses on the set—the ones reserved only for me. “Do you even want to see her?”

  I think for a second, because I never actually answered this for myself. I always pushed the calls aside. I always thought I’d handle it later, too nervous or confused even to think about it at the time. But do I? Do I want to see her and hear what she has to say? See if she really is sick?

  I close my eyes and think about it. I have no connection to her at all, but sometimes it’s as if I can feel her. I can feel her pulling me, tugging me. Telling me I need to go. So I nod my head. Because, yes, I do want to see her, I just never knew when to do it. Or what to say. I didn’t want to until I was prepared.

  But now I don’t want to be too late.

  I remember being thirteen and just wanting to know if she knew I still existed. I remember being seventeen and just wanting her to know I was okay. And now, I’m eighteen and want to know if she’s okay.

  Looking back to Oliver, I answer, “I think I do.”

  My phone buzzes again and I sigh, already knowing who it is. I take a deep breath in and look at the text. I know it’s time.

  “What’s up?” Oliver asks.

  “Nothing. Hang on. I’ll be right back,” I say, standing up.

  He stands up with me. “Where are you going? Everything okay?”

  “Yes.” I reach down to squeeze his hand—no public displays of affection—and say, “Give me five minutes.”

  He cocks his head to the side. “You wouldn’t.”

  I show him my phone and smile, thinking how the scene we filmed just two hours ago feels like two days ago. Or two years. “I would.”

  The front door is packed with photographers, so I head to the bathroom and see a back door. I look out the window. It’s empty outside. Opening the door, I feel the fresh air and once again see my billboard. It’s weird and eerie and big and perfect. It’s everything I wanted when I started out and maybe didn’t even know. Back then I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be seen by her.

  So when I see a woman standing a few feet away, shuffling from foot to foot, and tentatively raising an arm, I know it’s her. And I know it’s time.

  I step forward and say, “Hi.”

  Lauren Gibaldi is a public librarian who’s been, among other things, a magazine editor, high school English teacher, bookseller, and circus aerialist (seriously). She has a BA in Literature and MS in Library and Information Studies. She lives in Orlando, Florida, with her husband and daughter. Her books include The Night We Said Yes (HarperTeen, 2015), Matt’s Story (HarperTeen, 2015), and Autofocus (HarperTeen, 2016).

  “Teen years are both exciting and scary because everything feels important, and, honestly, everything is. You’re figuring out who you are and what you want out of life. You’re figuring out who you’ll become. But for a select few, you may also be figuring out where you came from. There are so many different types of teenage journeys, and I’m incredibly honored to be in an anthology that celebrates these.”

  Salvation

  by Shannon Gibney

  I.

  A fly landed in the middle of Sully’s mid-sight, and he swatted it away. He anxiously repositioned the rifle, working to get the small boy and the desgraciado into focus. They were standing about fifty feet away, lifting their small tote bags out of the back of the Buick. Jacqui’s worn Star Wars shirt was ripped on the side, and Sully wondered if that was the result of some kind of scuffle. The large, sweaty man was smiling at the boy uneasily, saying something to him. Sully didn’t dare take off the trigger guard, as he didn’t trust himself not to shoot if the desgraciado tried anything. He was officially there just to scope out the scene, make sure nothing funny happened before backup arrived. No one back at the station even knew about his “borrowing” the rifle. Through the front sight, Sully watched the man lift his arm to pat the boy on the back. Jacqui jumped, and it took all of Sully’s self-control to steady his jumpy shoulders and steady his grip on the gun. Calm down, asshole. And get that bottom-feeder back
into focus. He moved the rifle to the left, as the man who was reputed to love young boys walked toward the entrance of the broken-down motel. “Say cheese, motherfucker,” Sully snarled.

  II.

  Jacqui knew that he was lucky, but he still couldn’t shake the feeling that his luck would run out. Like the earthquakes that had destroyed his family’s small shack in Cité Soleil, Jacqui knew that sometimes the earth felt its only recourse was to swallow bodies whole. The disaster had critically wounded his younger brother, Nico, and annihilated the modest kiosk his mother sold goods out of to keep them alive. And the way things were going, he wasn’t convinced that the ground had been satisfied yet.

  He stepped off the jetway in Miami and shivered, even though the adoption agency had given him a warm, wooly sweater to wear on his trip. There were so many white faces in the crowd—far too many, really. Honestly, it reminded him of home, where the streets were crawling with them. He could never make out one from another, would never feel easy near them. And besides, how could he even take a step without Nico’s soft face buried in his side?

  “Jacqui? Jacqui?” someone shouted, a woman, he thought.

  He scanned the crowd anxiously, looking for “Kelly,” the blonde-haired woman in the photograph he had been shown so many times at the agency. But there were at least six other white women with blonde ponytails that he could see, and none of them looked anything like the image he had tried to burn into his brain. Kelly had cool, gray eyes, and her smile was inviting, as if to say, Welcome home!

  Someone grabbed his arm then, and he was pulled off-balance toward a short white man with balding hair and a wrinkled plaid dress shirt. “Frank! It’s Frank Bolden, Jacqui, your adoptive father. Kelly’s right here.”

  And then she stepped forward, the lady in the picture. Except that she wasn’t the lady in the picture; she was both weightier and less substantial. The woman before him was solid, like his Aunt Roseline, and wore ugly plastic shoes on her wide feet. Her plump hands rested on an enormous, doughy white baby that she had somehow managed to fasten onto a carrying contraption on her chest. Her eyes were a dull gray, not the bright blue the photo had somehow conveyed.

  “Jacqui,” Kelly said, “I can’t believe you’re really here.”

  The sound of his name was unfamiliar to him from her mouth, all hard and angular—not at all how it sounded from his mother: light and crisp, like the breeze from the beach at dusk. My boy, I am dying now. But I have prepared a new family for you, in Miami. She had given the instructions on her deathbed in the Red Cross tent two years ago.

  Jacqui blinked and forced himself to come back to the present. He tried to smile but he could feel how awkwardly the attempt sat on his face. “Hello, Kelly,” he said. It came out almost in a whisper.

  The woman laughed, a loud, sharp sound that made him jump. “Kelly?” she said. “Jacqui, after all this time and correspondence . . . after everything, you can call me Mother.” Then she took another step toward him and placed a cool palm on his flushed cheek. “My ‘son.’”

  Jacqui flinched. How he wished Nico were here, with his half-leg and tiny crutches. What would happen to him now? Initially, the plan had been for the Boldens to adopt both Jacqui and Nico, but after they had finally understood the extent of his injuries from the earthquake, they balked at taking on two children with “special needs.” Jacqui had been diagnosed with PTSD, having seen Uncle Stanley and his cousin David killed before his very eyes by a falling pillar. He had no idea what “PTSD” was, although he did understand it had something to do with the nightmares that plagued him and the endless nervous jiggling of his right knee when he sat down. “PTSD” also meant that he had to converse with a smelly old white lady at the adoption agency every week and talk about his family, his friends, his home, and what he hoped for in America.

  If the Boldens had noticed his reaction, they didn’t let on, and Jacqui was relieved when they abruptly headed away from the gate and toward the baggage claim. Kelly chatted all the way there and all the way to the house, asking him silly questions about Haiti and the rebuilding efforts and his flight. He tried to answer all of them with the same eagerness she displayed toward him, but when she got to the questions about Nico, he just shut his eyes and laid his head back on the plush leather seat of the truck. He wanted to say, If you had bothered to bring my brother here, you would not have to ask. And I would not be all alone in this cold, white place. But since he knew he couldn’t say that, he thought it best to say nothing at all. Instead, he clasped his chapped hands together tighter and told himself that God would forgive him for leaving his little brother behind.

  III.

  When Kelly Bolden saw the fallen-down buildings, the city turned to rubble and dust, the post-apocalyptic nightmare that Port-au-Prince had become just after the earthquakes, she knew she had to do something. She immediately phoned the Red Cross emergency fund and donated five hundred dollars from their savings. She walked down the street to the neighbors, who had come from Haiti more than twenty-five years ago, and asked them if their family there was OK. They told her that they were still working to account for everyone, but that most of their family was from the other side of the country, which had not been hit by the quakes, so they were not really worrying about it. When Kelly asked them what else she could do to support the relief efforts, the dour-faced woman simply said, “Nothing. There is nothing more to be done from this side, if you have already given money.”

  Kelly had smiled stiffly, thanked them for their time, wished them and their family well in the crisis, and walked back to her house twice as quickly as she had come. Then she sat at her desk and pulled on her hair absently. There had to be something she could do. She got out her laptop, and halfway into an email to her pastor, she realized why this issue was bothering her so much, why she couldn’t seem to let it go no matter what she did: God was calling her to act. And what He was specifically asking her to do was to feed, clothe, shelter, and love some of these Haitian children whose lives had been upended by the disaster. She and Frank had been trying to get pregnant for years and were currently in the middle of their second round of IVF. Suddenly, she understood why nothing had worked, why they had been made to suffer simply for their common desire to have a child and raise a family. God was calling them to something greater than just ordinary family-making. Yes, she could see it now: In making their family, He was calling them to save those who, by no fault of their own, had gotten in harm’s way. In a matter of minutes, it all became clear to Kelly. The way forward. How she would approach Frank to convince him. Where she would begin looking for the children and making ready their collective salvation.

  IV.

  Two years and five months later, Jacqui crouched behind the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. He could hear Kelly bawling on the other side. “We have to give him up. I know that.” She sniffed. “You know it, too.”

  Jacqui’s stomach fell, and he pressed his eyelids together. God, what is this talk, now? His adjustment to the Bolden household had certainly not been easy, but he thought things were getting better. He wrung his hands absently. That he was getting better.

  Frank’s voice: “Give him up? Give him up? He’s our son, Kelly. Not a carton of milk that’s gone sour. For God’s sake!”

  Yes! Frank always stood up for him.

  Kelly cried harder. “There’s no need to swear.”

  “Oh, there’s a need. There’s definitely a need,” said Frank.

  “Shhh! He’ll hear you!” she said.

  Behind the wall, Jacqui shook his head. She still thought she could protect him, even from themselves.

  “I hope he does hear,” Frank yelled. “I hope you at least give him the decency of looking him directly in the eyes when you tell him that he came all this way and survived that hell in Haiti just so he could be thrown away again.”

  Kelly’s voice changed then, went back to its
usual evenness. He heard her labored breathing come back to normal. “We’re not throwing him away. We’re sending him somewhere where they can deal with his outbursts better. Somewhere where he can get the help he needs, the help he deserves.” Then, almost in a whisper: “Somewhere where he can’t hurt Katie.”

  Jacqui’s eyelids flew open.

  “That was a mistake, and you know it,” said Frank. “He didn’t mean to do it. He just needs some help regulating his emotions. You heard what Dr. Frasier said.”

  “It doesn’t matter if he meant to do it or not. The fact is, he could have seriously hurt her.” Kelly’s words were cold and deliberate.

  Jacqui resisted the urge to punch the wall. Two weeks ago, they had caught him in the act of slapping Katie in the face in the living room as they played with the Star Wars Lego set Frank had let him pick out. When Kelly confronted Jacqui and asked him why he did it, he did not have an answer. It had just been a reaction: His hand had flown of its own volition. He hadn’t commanded it to do anything of the sort. The child was as greedy as she was impetuous and had taken the X-Wing fighter he had spent all morning assembling. He knew that if he did not retrieve it, she would break it, and he did not want that to happen. So he had gotten it back. That was all.

  Frank sighed, which worried Jacqui. He was usually Jacqui’s fiercest advocate in the face of Kelly’s endless lamentations. But his one weakness was Katie.

  Kelly had become pregnant while finishing up all the adoption paperwork—the shock of her life, she often said sheepishly. And though she tried to hide it, Jacqui had a sneaking suspicion that she had really wanted to stop the whole process of bringing him here once she had discovered she would be having her own baby. She would never admit it, of course, but that was what he felt.

  “I thought you said that God spoke to you,” said Frank, “that He called you to take on this ministry of Jacqui’s salvation by bringing him into our family. Were you wrong? Was that all a lie?”