Temporary Family
Page 2
A street kid worked hard not to let his fear show.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
The boy gave up nothing.
“Do you have a name? It doesn’t have to be your real one, just something I can call you.”
The boy just glared at him.
Nick tried everything he could think of to get the boy to talk. Nothing worked. Finally, Nick laid it on the line for the little boy.
“Look,” he said. “This is how it is. You can’t stay here. You’re too young, and A.J. has already called social services. You know what those people will do? They’ll take you downtown. They’ll fill out all sorts of paperwork and make a million phone calls. Then they’ll start looking for someone to take care of you while they find your mother or your father or your grandmother. Believe me, kid, you don’t want to go through that unless you absolutely have to. So why don’t you just tell me – who can we call to come and get you?”
Again Nick received a blank stare in return. He pulled a pen out of his pocket and a notepad out off the desk.
“How about writing it down, then,” he said. At times kids found writing things down less threatening than saying them aloud. “Can you do that for me?”
The boy refused to take the pen.
“I’m trying to help you,” Nick said. “I swear I am.”
But the kid didn’t want his help. Finally, disgusted with himself and thinking that this child deserved someone much more professional and compassionate than he could possibly be, he simply gave up and took the boy downstairs to the party.
An hour and a half later, Nick stood outside the cafeteria, where the party was winding down.
“Excuse me. Do you work here?”
He turned. Standing in the hallway, he saw the figure of a young woman in jeans and a sweater, long black hair streaming down her back. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for a little boy. His name is Rico Leone. Someone at the police station said he might be here.”
“Oh,” Nick said. “Our mystery man upstairs. Eight or nine years old, skinny, short curly brown hair and brown eyes, light-brown skin?”
“That’s him. He’s eight.” She sounded relieved. “Is he all right?”
Nick wanted to give the young woman hell about losing track of the boy for what they suspected was a couple of days. He felt that old familiar stirring of anger over the way a child had been treated by the people who were supposed to take care of him, and for a moment, he felt more alive than he had in months.
Then, just as quickly as it came, the feeling was gone. He was calm again, cool, unaffected by it all. That brief flickering of emotion simply died within him.
“Well?”
The woman sounded worried when he didn’t answer right away.
“Is he all right?”
The flicker was back, stronger than before, but would it be just as fleeting? He thought about the boy huddled in the corner of the shelter. No, he couldn’t pass on this, and let loose full force on the woman.
“He was starving, soaked to the skin, shaking from the cold. Other than that, he was fine...physically.”
“Physically?”
That seemed to frighten her.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Who are you?” Nick asked, losing his patience with this whole situation. “Are you his mother? Are you the one who lost track of him for the past two or three days?”
The woman flushed hotly. Nick noted with some detachment that her coloring was striking—jet-black hair, a mountain of it, caught up in a thick braid that hung down her back, nearly black eyes fringed with dark, thick lashes.
When was the last time he’d noticed the color of a woman’s hair or her eyes?
“If I were his mother, I would not ‘lose track’ of him for three days at a time. I’m his teacher,” she said quite deliberately, as if talking to someone with the IQ of a rock. “You can call me Ms. Sandoval.”
Nick took another look. She was petite, fresh faced, with all that hair, those eyes and this beautiful olive skin. The musical lilt to her speech had him wondering about her ancestry. Spanish, he guessed, or maybe Latin American. She caught him staring, and that clearly annoyed her even more.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Her tone was one he was sure she used on the kids in her classroom.
A year ago, he would have given his name and identified himself as a doctor. A year ago, half the population of Chicago wouldn’t have recognized him and hated him on sight.
“I’m Nick,” he said simply.
“Nick?”
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
“That explains it,” she said.
It explained nothing to Nick, though.
“Could you tell me what’s wrong with Rico?”
“It’s hard to say. He won’t talk to us.”
“What do you mean?”
“He hasn’t said a word. Not since he showed up here. We had no idea who he was. We were just hoping someone would report him missing and the police would send them here.”
“I can’t believe he wouldn’t have someone call me,” the woman said, looking hurt rather than annoyed at him. “And what about his mother? Did he say where his mother is? Does he even know?”
This situation grew only more puzzling to Nick. He wished now that he’d escaped from the shelter when he had the chance. “I have no idea where his mother is, but I would like to know her name.”
“Renata Leone.” She rattled off an address. “But no one is there. I went there first, but the place had been... trashed.”
“Trashed?”
The woman nodded. “Can I see the boy?”
“Sure. Follow me. He may be asleep, but we can check.” Nick led her down the hallway toward the back stairs.
“What’s going to happen to him?” she asked.
“It’s hard to say. We called Child and Family Services, and we’re waiting for someone from their office to show up.”
“He’ll go into foster care?”
“If they can’t locate his mother or a relative.”
“Did you tell him that? He must have been so scared, because he hated it there,” she said.
“He’s been in foster care before?” Nick asked.
“Last year, before he came to live with me for a while.”
“With you? I thought you said you were his teacher.”
“I am, and for a while I was his foster parent.”
“Oh.” Nick didn’t know many teachers who went to those lengths to help their students.
“His mother... she has her problems.”
“Don’t we all.”
She stopped dead in the middle of the hallway and whirled around. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“Oh, really?” Apparently, he’d set her off again. He wondered how she managed to teach with that temper of hers.
“You’ve got some nerve, Doctor.”
She made his title sound like a dirty word.
“I know just your type.”
“Really?” Nick knew he should put an end to this right now, while she still had no idea who he was.
He knew what would happen once she figured it out. There would be this long silence, this puzzled stare, then a flicker of recognition, morbid curiosity, then most likely anger. Most people had convicted him based on nothing more than what they’d heard on TV about the case.
This woman had judged him inside of two minutes based on something he didn’t understand at all. He was curious, and he was mad. He was sick and tired of being found guilty by a bunch of strangers.
“And just what do you know about me and my type?” he asked, going with the anger that he’d kept bottled inside him for so long.
She moved a step closer. “You come down here to the poor side of town, wearing your fancy clothes and your expensive shoes, worrying that someone is going to mess up your car while you’re in this lousy neighborhood.
Under any other circumstances, Nick would have admired her for sticking up for Rico and all the other kids like him.
Any other day – when he hadn’t just walked into Hope House for the first time in a year and hadn’t been half-scared out of his mind over a fifteen-minute, one-sided conversation with a little boy in trouble—and Nick would have cut her some slack for the way she lit into him.
But not today.
“Lady,” he told her, “you’re way out of line.”
“Am I? I’ve seen your kind before.”
“My kind? You don’t even know me.”
She just glared at him. Obviously she cared a great deal about the kids with whom she worked.
He wanted to tell her to give it up, that she was only going to get her heart broken again and again, but he doubted she would listen to anything he had to say.
Besides, he was actually enjoying sparring with her. He didn’t think he’d had a conversation or an argument with anyone in the past year that he’d enjoyed. He took it one more step. “And I suppose you’re going to save the world single-handedly?”
“No, just my little corner of it.”
Nick shook his head and struggled to hold his tongue. He had nothing to prove to this woman. Still, he had an urge to tell her just how much of himself he’d given these kids, how much of himself he’d lost and might never regain. He fought that urge and won this time. Let this woman keep her illusions, her naiveté. She would lose them one day, just as he had.
“Up the stairs, down the hall, to your right. It’s the second door on the right,” he told her tightly. “Once you’ve seen him, come downstairs and ask for A.J. The two of you can decide what to do with him.”
Nick turned and left.
Chapter 2
Laura Sandoval was fuming as she followed that arrogant man’s directions. He said he was a psychiatrist. Years ago she had nearly married a psychiatrist. She was afraid Mitch had left her with something of a blind spot. Still, that wasn’t the only thing that upset her where this man was concerned.
She was truly sick of the way wealthy people came into these neighborhoods, looking down their noses, shaking their heads and clicking their tongues. Who were they to judge? They always had their safe, secure world to return to. She saw it happen too many times.
Families in these parts could eat for months on what that man downstairs bad spent on his shoes. So how could he possibly know anything about these kids or their mothers or their problems?
Laura hoped he hadn’t said anything to Rico to upset him. She’d lay into him again if he had.
She was relieved when she found the little boy curled up under the blanket asleep. She leaned over the bed and stared down into that familiar face. Some of the tension of the past few hours started to ease.
Rico. What in the world was he doing all the way across town? And where had he been for the past three days? Surely not on the streets alone. Surely he would have called her rather than stay on the streets. He’d grown up on the North Side of Chicago. He knew how dangerous it was out there.
Laura pulled the desk chair over to the bed and sat beside him for a minute. She put her hand in his hair, ran her thumb through his curls, then wiped away a tear from her cheek.
Rico’s mother had been in and out of drug-treatment centers over the past year, and after Rico’s first, bewildering experience with foster care, Laura had decided she wouldn’t let anyone put him through that again. She became his foster parent, taking him into her home, giving him his own special corner of her heart.
Twice in the past year he’d come to live with her. Twice, with great difficulty, she’d relinquished him to the dubious care of his mother. Could she do that again? Give him up like that?
She wasn’t sure. But she knew one thing for certain. She would never turn her back on this child when he needed her help. Not now. Not ever.
Nick was outside in the rain, almost to his car, and he felt like throwing up. How long had it been since he’d felt so powerless? So helpless? So alone?
He turned around and was back inside the shelter. He walked swiftly and purposefully to the back of the building, up the back steps and across the hall to the room where Rico slept.
Nick would not sleep tonight. Cold, wet, hungry, with blood splattered on his shoes – Nick couldn’t shake that description out of his mind. What in the world had happened to the boy?
His teacher said the Leones’ apartment had been trashed and there was no sign of Rico’s mother. Nick suspected fear had kept the boy silent.
What had the boy seen? What kind of danger could he be in because of it? Nick hated to think about that.
He rounded the corner and looked through the doorway. Inside, the woman was stroking the boy’s back, making small circles with her splayed fingers.
So, this was her Rico. Nick needed to be sure about that before he left. He wanted assurance that the boy had someone to look out for him. And not just anyone – Rico had a tiger on his side, and she was going to save her little corner of the world.
Nick hoped she managed to do that before something robbed her of her illusions, as he’d been robbed of his.
Still, he couldn’t help but look on, fascinated, as the woman comforted the boy. She felt his forehead, checking for a temperature. The boy had none before when Nick checked him.
The woman’s touch was filled with almost a reverence. Watching her, Nick sensed something stirring inside him, some emotion he couldn’t name, some yearning that had been long denied.
The woman lifted the blanket covering the boy and pulled up his shirt, no doubt looking for any sign he’d been hurt. A.J. had already done that and told Nick she’d found no obvious injuries, nothing to account for the blood on his shoes or his clothes.
Only then did Nick remember – he hadn’t told the woman about the blood.
He saw her tuck the cover securely around Rico, stroke his hair once more, then wipe away a tear.
Nick wondered just how many tears she’d already shed over this particular child, how many more tears she would cry over him in the future.
He turned away to leave, not wanting to think that at one time he’d shed tears of his own over some lost child.
Behind him, the woman gasped, and Nick brought his attention back to her. She held one of the boy’s shoes in her hand. Blood.
Nick must have made some sound, something to alert her to his presence, because she whirled around and faced him. Holding the shoe in her hand and looking at him accusingly, she demanded, “What is going on here?”
Suddenly Rico stirred. Both stared at the boy, who merely turned over and settled back to sleep again.
Nick motioned for the woman to come into the hallway, then closed the door. He was sure they were going to end up arguing again, and he didn’t want their discussion to wake up Rico.
“There’s blood on his shoes.”
“And his pant leg.” Nick swallowed hard. He’d had the most peculiar response to blood ever since the shooting. He could get a paper cut with two drops of blood on it and actually feel light-headed – him, a man who’d been through medical school and interned in the emergency room before settling on psychiatry. It was the most ridiculous thing. But this wasn’t about him, he reminded himself. This was about Rico.
“You didn’t tell me that,” the woman accused.
He was tempted to say that she never asked, that he’d barely gotten a word in after she finished trying to take him down a notch or two. But he was too surprised at finding out something he had no business noticing – here in this instant one of the most basic of human emotions – well, male emotions, at least – had come roaring back to life.
He wanted her. A man who for months now had li
ved like a monk, found himself attracted to this woman.
He couldn’t say why it had happened now, with her. Granted, she was attractive, but so were a lot of women he knew. He hadn’t had a lustful thought about anyone in—
“What are you doing?” she said.
Nick was caught staring at her breasts. “Damn,” he said, staring at her.
“Well?” She demanded an answer.
What could he say? That she had somehow shaken him out of this awful lethargy he’d been trapped in for months, that he’d just discovered there might be some spark of life left in him, after nearly giving himself up for dead?
He wasn’t about to tell her those things. And he was having trouble concentrating on anything she was saying anyway. He wanted to know if this was real or if it was some sort of a fluke. Would he go back to his apartment and bury himself alive for the next year? Or was he coming out of this awful fog that had settled around him following the shooting? Could this woman transform him back to the man he was before?”
He doubted it. After all, she thought he was nuts. Hell, until a few hours ago, he wouldn’t have argued the point with her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not about to explain why.
She paused for a moment, tilting her head so slightly to one side. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. She took a step backward, away from him.
He threw up his hands in front of him to tell her she had nothing to fear from him. He didn’t think anything had embarrassed him this much since he was fifteen and trying so clumsily to seduce the girl next door. And he’d give anything if this beautiful woman would somehow forget that the past fifteen seconds had ever happened. She could go back to chewing him out and hating his guts. Contempt, hostility, even rage – those he could handle. This unnameable thing between them was something different altogether.
Nick watched while she squared her shoulders and crossed her arms in front of her, then came at him again.
“What happened to Rico?” she demanded.
Relieved, he said, “I don’t know, and he wouldn’t tell us.”