by Nancy N. Rue
“I’ll send somebody to get you.”
“Where is he?” I said.
But she had already hung up.
“Dear God!” I said, out loud, to my empty home. “Please show me what to do.”
And then I got my clothes on and brushed my hair into a ponytail and waited by the front door.
*
The car that pulled into my driveway was so covered in snow I couldn’t even tell what color it was, but I knew it was a vehicle I hadn’t seen before. And it definitely wasn’t one I would have expected Lizard to be driving.
“Is this your grandfather’s or something?” I said when I climbed into the front seat. What kid our age drove a land yacht with leather seats?
“I borrowed it,” Lizard said.
“Can you even see over the steering wheel?” I looked nervously through the windshield, where the snow was smacking into the glass faster than the windshield wipers could slap it away. “Can you even see, period?”
“It’s all good,” Lizard said.
But now that I really listened to him, he didn’t sound like anything was good. I’d never seen his face puckered like it was right then, as if he were barely holding something back.
“You okay?” I said.
“No, man. Somethin’ bad is goin’ down. You’re the only one can stop it.”
“It’s not like I have this power over Rafe,” I said. “You and Tank are his friends—you could probably talk him out of running better than I can.”
“No, see, you don’t get it. Rafe talks us out of doing stupid stuff. It’d be like him tryin’ to tell his old man what to do.”
“Is he hurt bad? From when his dad hit him?”
“Not any worse than usual, but it’s gonna be worse if his dad finds him before you go to the police and get him off.”
“Then why don’t we go to the police first?”
“Because his dad might find him by that time.” Lizard pulled his eyes from the driving snow to give me a look I could only describe as helpless.
“You don’t think Rafe’s gone already, do you?” I said.
“No,” he said, “‘cause we already told him you were comin’. He said he’d wait.”
“Where is he?”
Lizard turned the wheel and the car slid into what was probably a driveway under the snow.
“He’s here,” he said.
He pointed a shaky finger at Old Man Stutz’s house.
“How is he here?” I said. “I thought Mr. Stutz died. You guys didn’t break—”
“Rafe always came here when his old man messed him up. He still has the key the old man gave him, in case Stutz wasn’t home when he came.”
I fought off panic. Just because Rafe had a key didn’t mean it was legal for him to be in there. I had to get him out before this got any worse than it already was.
*
Rafe looked small sitting in a huge recliner in the corner of a room as big and empty as a cavern. Even my rubber-soled boots were loud as I walked across the rugless floor toward him. There were no drapes at the windows, only blinds, and the walls were bare. They obviously hadn’t always been, because large rectangles looked cleaner than the spaces around them.
“Hey,” I said when I was close enough for my voice not to echo in the void.
“They already took all his stuff.”
“I’m sorry?” I said. I sat on an ottoman that was oddly placed without its chair, right next to the recliner.
“They already came in and got his Navajo rug and all his art. They even took the curtains. They were made out of cloth the Utes wove by hand.”
I started to ask him who had made off with Old Man Stutz’s belongings, but we didn’t have time for that. I was already imagining blue lights flashing through the blizzard.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Why don’t we—why don’t we go to my house?”
Rafe’s eyes came out from under their heavy, grieving hood. “You gotta be kiddin’ me. Your father’s not gonna—”
“He’s not home,” I said. “We’ll go to the police first, and then we’ll go to my house—”
“Yeah? And then what? They decide I didn’t do it and then they send me back to my old man.”
Rafe leaned forward into what little light there was in the room, slanting through the blinds. I gasped out loud. His left eye was swollen shut and his wonderful lip was split and twisted.
“I’m not goin’ back,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. And then again, “Okay.” Nothing was, in truth, okay, but I had to say something while I swallowed back the nausea that was creeping up my throat. “Okay, we’ll go to the police and get you cleared, and we’ll tell them your dad’s abusing you, and they’ll find you—”
“What? A foster home?”
Rafe scooted to the edge of the recliner, where I could see the fresh scrapes on his knuckles. His father evidently wasn’t the only one who’d gotten his licks in. I felt sicker.
“See, you don’t know about the system,” he said. “Foster ‘parents’ are worse than your real parents. And if it doesn’t work out with them, they put you in the state home, which is this far”—he held his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart—“from bein’ in juvie. I might as well go to jail, and I’m not goin’ there, either, because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know,” I said. “I’d know it even if I hadn’t been with you while that kid was falling off the freeway. I’ll tell the police that—and then we’ll figure out what happens next.”
Rafe shook his head. “I know what happens next.”
“Nobody can predict that,” I said. “All we can do is what-ever’s going to make it better in this moment. And in this moment, we need to get out of here.”
He didn’t move. He was, in fact, so still that I realized he was paralyzed down to his soul.
“Come on,” I whispered to him. “I’ll be with you the whole time. We’re here for the same reason, remember? The two losers?”
He stood up and reached for his coat from the back of the recliner, while I held my breath. He nodded at the ottoman where I was perched.
“I used to sit there when I talked to the old man,” he said. “He was, like, deaf as a brick, so I had to get close to him—
Rafe’s voice broke. I stood up and his arm came around my shoulders. I could feel a shudder going through him.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “Under two conditions.”
“One.”
“If it starts meltin’ down, you get as far away from me as you can. I mean it—you’re not going down for my stufi.”
“Two.”
“You stop calling yourself a loser.” He pulled my face against his neck and whispered, “You never were.”
“Rafe—dude!”
Lizard bolted into the room, eyes wild.
“We’re comin’,” Rafe said. “Only we’re not takin’ the old man’s car. We’re callin’ Tank—”
“No, man—you gotta run. It’s the cops!”
*
The only place I had ever seen a human being move with that kind of practiced precision was on a professional basketball court.
Rafe had the light off and Lizard out the side door to create a distraction and me at the back door before I even had a chance to panic. That only kicked in when he said, “We have to make a run for the wall.”
“I’m sorry, Rafe,” I said. “I can’t run, remember?”
“I know.”
“You go and I’ll stay here and explain to the police—”
“Do you women never know when to shut up?” he said.
And then I was over his shoulder and we were sliding across the back deck like a pair of figure skaters. Rafe stopped short of the edge and tightened his hold on me before he jumped into the drifts below. He was already running again when I heard an engine roar.
“Is that the police?” I cried.
“No.” Rafe swore under his breath. “That was Lizard takin’ off
in the old man’s car.”
That must have been Lizard’s choice of a “distraction.” No wonder Rafe was always telling him not to do stupid stuff. Even when he was warned, the moron didn’t listen. It struck me that Lizard was taking a huge chance so Rafe could get away. Had I ever even had friends like that?
“Rafe, stop!” I said. “I’m slowing you down.”
If he heard me over the now howling wind, he didn’t show it. His steps got longer and faster, and the wall got closer and closer. What we were going to do when we got there, I had no idea.
“There’s scaffolding down there at the end.” His words came out in heavy breaths, and with them thick puffs of frost. “That’s how I reached the high parts. I’m gonna carry you up there, and then I’ll—”
“Police! Stop!”
The voice was so loud it had to be coming through a bullhorn.
“Do it, Rafe!” I said. “Stop!”
“No!”
“Please—it’s only gonna be worse. I’ll tell them—please!”
I felt him slow, and I felt him turn so that he faced the direction of the bullhorn. My head dangled down his back, but I just kept saying, “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
“Put the girl down!” the officer screamed through the bullhorn.
Rafe bent his knees, and I knew he was trying to lower me gently.
“Put her down!”
“I am!”
“Do it!”
Someone lunged across the snow and Rafe lost his hold on me. I tumbled face-first into the snow and twisted to get my face free. Pain seared across my knee.
“All right—on your feet!”
I blinked into the icy pellets that stung at my face. An angry face came toward me, still shouting, “On your feet!”
“I can’t!” I shouted back. “I can’t!”
Because the horrible, wretched truth was—I couldn’t move my knee.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The ambulance ride was the worst part.
Next to the part where I lay in the ER wrapped in a heated blanket while a doctor said he thought I might have blown my graft, he couldn’t be sure, and that I’d need an MRI to confirm it.
And even that was nothing compared to the part when the police officer came in as I was constructing a wall to hold back the tears, to say they’d arrested Julio Jimenez—who I assumed was Lizard—for auto theft, and Raphael Diego for breaking and entering, and that if I told him where they could find DeLeon Shermann, they wouldn’t charge me as an accessory to all of the above.
I was trying to convince him that I didn’t even know who DeLeon Shermann was, much less where he was, when the curtain scraped back and my mother flew into the cubicle and knocked Officer Whatever His Name Was out of the way to get to me.
The wall came down.
“I’m sorry, Mom!” I sobbed into her neck. “I was just trying to get Rafe to go with me to the police so I could tell them he was at our house when that kid fell off the freeway so he couldn’t have pushed him off, and he was trying to get me out of that house so I wouldn’t get in trouble, only he shouldn’t be in trouble, because Mr. Stutz gave him a key—”
“Okay, Cass, it’s okay. I’m concerned about you. The doctor—”
“Wait,” the officer said.
Mom pulled away from me just enough to be able to say over my head, “Do you have to do this now?”
“If you don’t want her arrested, yes, I suggest we do it now.”
It was my turn to pull away. I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders and pushed aside my tears with the backs of my hands.
“It’s the truth,” I said. “All of it. And I would have told you before but you didn’t give me a chance.”
“Are you willing to make a formal statement of everything you just told—your mom, is it?”
“Does that mean you’ll let him go? Raphael?”
“It will definitely help him—”
“If you let him go, you have to promise you won’t make him go back to his father.”
“Now, that I can’t—”
“He’s a child abuser,” I said. “He’s the one who should be in jail.”
“One thing at time—”
“Did you see his eye? And his lip? His own father did that to him.”
The officer looked at Mom like he was expecting her to stop me, but her face was somewhere between mother bear and news person. She showed no signs of putting a halt to my tirade.
“All right,” the officer said. “I promise you we’ll look into it. The doc said your knee needs to stay on ice for a while, so why don’t you start from the beginning.”
I did. At a corner table in my mind, I wished Ruthie was there. She could tell a story a lot better than I could.
*
It was almost dark by the time the hospital released me with the promise that I would see my orthopedic surgeon on Monday. When the I-don’t-really-have-time-for-you ER doctor took off the ice pack and checked, he said the swelling had already receded some. I couldn’t say. I was afraid to look.
They tried to give me pain meds, but I opted for the ibuprofen Mom had in her purse and left the hospital a free woman without a rap sheet. I wasn’t as worried about my knee or my criminal record as I was about Rafe.
I couldn’t even eat the soup Mom fixed for me, and if I hadn’t been wrapped in both ice and a hot blanket, I would have been up pacing the family room. Mom tried everything from a fire in the fireplace to a cup of chamomile tea to calm me down (chocolate wasn’t even offered), but all I could think about was Rafe, pacing a jail cell where nobody was offering him anything.
Mom was handling it all with blue-eyed calm and a lot of hair tucking. I was sure I was about to drive her nuts, and then the phone rang. My attempt to roll off the couch to get to it was met with a particularly rough hair tuck and the phone being put on speaker.
“This is Officer Meadows,” the voice said. “I thought you might like an update.”
Julio Jimenez, aka Lizard, was charged because he did, in fact, “borrow” Old Man Stutz’s car. I felt bad about having to tell the police that he’d picked me up in it, but the boy really was a moron. The judge, Officer Meadows said, would probably go easy on him since this was his first offense.
Who’d have thought? Rafe really must have been doing a good job keeping him in line up ‘til now.
DeLeon, aka Tank Shermann, was picked up, questioned, and released. His statement confirmed the alibi I’d given Rafe for Thursday night. The only question was why he hadn’t come forward with his information before. Uma was going to be surprised by that.
“What about Rafe—Raphael?” I said.
“Mr. Diego has been cleared of all charges. It helped that he led us to the people who stole Mr. Stutz’s home furnishings before his body was even cold.”
How did Rafe know who and where they were? It was becoming more and more clear that Rafe lived in a world that was as foreign to me as Saudi Arabia, and probably just as scary. I really wished he didn’t have to live in it.
“What about the other thing?” I said. “You didn’t make Rafe go back to his father, right?”
I thought Officer Meadows snickered. “You didn’t actually think I was going to call you without the skinny on that, did you?”
Mom grinned and mouthed the word “no” at the phone.
“Mr. Diego did make a statement pertaining to his father’s abuse, and Mr. Diego senior has been taken in for questioning. I don’t know any more than that except—”
“Where’s Rafe now? You didn’t put him in foster care?”
“At the moment I believe he is in the custody of Mrs. Shermann—”
“Tank’s mother?” I said. And Uma’s? I tried not to let that drag my heart down. Rafe was safe, and that was all that mattered.
*
The snow was already melting when I woke up the next morning. I could see it dripping off the roof as I lay in bed wondering what was going to happen when I tried to move my leg. It hur
t the same way it had on Tuesday, and it turned out to be okay then. Maybe I would be lucky a second time.
Or maybe I should get busy saying, “Please, please, please.”
Actually, I felt more like saying thank you. Mom and I had stayed up late making s’mores in the fireplace—a celebration of everyone’s freedom—and talking about … everything.
I tried to remember it all now, but the words themselves had been lost in the sleep I’d finally fallen into around one o’clock. The feeling, though—that was still with me, the warm safeness that filled me when Mom was nodding at me, firelight dancing across her face, erasing the “lines and wrinkles” she was always complaining about.
She’d looked just the way she had when I was little and would come to her lap for what she used to call a “pit stop.” I never stayed longer than about sixteen seconds—I had stuff to do—and she never tried to hold me there.
I saw now that she must have known early on that I wasn’t going to be into cuddling and pink and shopping for sweaters with kittens on them. She probably knew who I was before I did, and even though my father had taken me over for the past six years, I knew as we twirled melted Hershey’s around our fingers that she was still one of the only people who knew the real me.
It gave me a spurt of courage. I tossed the covers aside and was about to take off my brace so I could inspect my knee when I heard the front door slam—harder than we were supposed to slam in the Brewster house.
“Did you see this?” I heard my father growl as he very obviously marched through to the family room.
He hardly waited for my mother’s sleepy “See what?” before he bellowed on.
“She made the paper. Front page of the sports section. Wonderful.”
I heard paper slap on wood—the Sunday Gazette hitting the coffee table.
His next bellow was, “Cassidy!”
“Trent, honestly, she’s exhausted,” Mom said.
“Cassidy!” he yelled again, this time closer.
Before I could even think about swinging my legs over the side of my bed, he was in my room, my mother right behind him. He was still in his overcoat, like he’d driven in from Denver for the sole purpose of yelling at me. Mom didn’t look like she’d been to bed at all.
Dad threw the newspaper on my bed, but I didn’t look at it. There really was no need, with him spewing out the article about me, probably word for word. The longer he went on, the lower his voice got, until it was down to its finest point for the final stab.
