Temporary Family

by Sally Tyler Hayes

  Laura’s eyes filled with tears.

  She was just about to pull him to her, when a man’s voice broke through the haze that had settled in around her.

  “Don’t pick him up,” the voice commanded.

  She sat back on her heels and turned toward the voice. “Nick?”

  He, too, sat back on his heels, breathing heavily, looking as dazed as she felt.

  “Don’t try to move him,” he said, then gasped again.

  Torn, she gazed at the little boy and knew she should listen to his advice. She’d been taught enough first aid to know she shouldn’t move an accident victim, but she’d never imagined how hard it would be to leave an injured person, especially an injured child, where he had landed.

  “Somebody call 911.” Nick yelled into the crowd.

  “Got it,” a voice shouted back.

  Laura didn’t try to pick up Rico, but she moved as close as she could to him. She called his name softly, then louder.

  Nick put a hand on the boy’s chest. Laura was relieved to notice that it was still rising and falling; he was breathing.

  “Let me in here, Laura,” he said.

  She hesitated, stricken. She knew what she should do, but she couldn’t seem to make herself respond. And she didn’t want to leave Rico’s side.

  “Laura?” he said again, louder this time. “I’m a doctor, remember? Let me try to help him.”

  Of course. He was a doctor. Psychiatry was a medical specialty. He had a medical degree. He could help. Oh, please, God, let him be able to help.

  She moved out of the way and let Nick do what he could.

  Rico would be all right, she told herself. He had to be all right.

  She repeated that to herself over and over again. Still, it didn’t lessen the terror. Every time she closed her eyes, she heard him scream and saw him go flying through the air.

  It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to get to the hospital and then for anyone to come out and tell her anything once they reached the ER.

  She imagined the worst of things with each passing minute. And she hated hospitals.

  When she was eleven, her father was diagnosed with cancer, and so began a seemingly endless string of visits to the hospital. Two exhausting years later, her father was gone. Six months after that, her mother died from a heart attack.

  Suddenly Laura was on her own. Her mother’s sister had taken her in for a while, then her mother’s brother. But no one really had room for her. They all had big families of their own, and there was never enough money to feed and clothe their own children, let alone Laura. After her uncle deserted his wife, Laura was put into the foster-care system; she was fourteen years old.

  Laura supposed that was why she didn’t think she could ever give too much of herself to the children in her classroom. They were her family. To many of them, she was their anchor.

  The only problem was, the children couldn’t fill every need a grown woman had. Laura still felt incredibly lonely at times. There was no man in her life; there hadn’t been for a very long time. She’d tried to fool herself into believing the children were enough and she didn’t need anyone else in her life.

  But right now, back in a hospital for the first time in years, she wished someone were there for her.

  With that, her thoughts turned to Nick.

  She’d somehow lost track of him after they’d gotten to the hospital. She remembered him sliding into the ambulance beside her, consulting with the paramedics and taking her hand in his for a tight, quick squeeze. But as soon as they arrived Nick was gone. He and Rico were now somewhere inside the bedlam of the emergency room. And she was alone again.

  Laura looked at her watch—twelve-forty—then tried to remember when this whole nightmare had begun. She paced the floors, gazed out the windows, glanced at the weather report on that all-news channel on the television in the corner.

  The woman at the admissions desk didn’t have any information for her. Laura tried to look through the doors, to spot which room Rico had been taken into, but didn’t see him anywhere. She tried not to think about what that might mean.

  People had warned her she had to find a way to harden her heart against everything she saw and heard—otherwise she’d never be able to continue teaching.

  But Laura couldn’t do that. She was a teacher. If her students needed mothering, she mothered. If they needed a good dressing-down, she delivered it. If they just needed one constant in their lives, one person who would always be there, always care, always listen, she offered them that.

  She gave them everything she had to give, every minute, every day, year after year. And it was true, she did get tired. She grew discouraged, at times depressed, often angry. But she’d never give up teaching. She’d sooner cut off her right arm.

  But then, it had never been as bad as this. Nothing had hurt her as much as this.

  She closed her eyes and offered another heartfelt plea for Rico’s recovery.

  Sometime later, she was standing in the corner, her back to the room, slowly going out of her mind, when someone touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  “Laura?”

  She whirled around. “Nick.”

  He had a white bandage on his right temple, which stood out starkly against his skin and his dark hair; a mean-looking cut at the upper right corner of his lips; and a bruise on his right cheekbone. Confused, Laura touched her fingertips to his cheek, then outlined his lips.

  He was real. His skin, rubbed raw in one spot, was still warm to the touch.

  And he was back. She was so grateful he was back. She thought she’d only imagined what a lifeline it was to have his hand wrapped around hers for a while on the nightmarish trip to the hospital. But she hadn’t. He was standing by her side now, and she had her hand on his face, and she was so thankful for that simple connection between the two of them.

  Conscious now of the way she was touching him, she let her hand fall away. And then she realized exactly what she was seeing—what she hadn’t seen before on the street when everything had been so crazy.

  “It was you?” she asked. “I saw two people go flying through the air. A man and a little boy. And the man was you. Someone told me that a man saved Rico from the worst of the impact, and it was you. You knocked him out of the way of that car.”

  He merely nodded, eyed her curiously, then caught her by the arms. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”

  She didn’t try to deny it. “I didn’t know,” she said, remembering him gasping on the street beside her. He must have had the wind knocked out him, in addition to everything else. This cut under the bandage, the split lip, the bruise on his face. How had she missed all that? “After it happened, all I could see was Rico. He was the only one I even thought about.”

  She realized then that he hadn’t told her anything about Rico’s condition.

  “Nick?” she said, more urgently than before.

  “He’s going to be fine.”

  She swayed on her feet, but stayed upright thanks to him.

  “He has a slight concussion,” Nick continued, “some bruises, some scrapes, but so far nothing else.”

  “So far?”

  “They’re still checking him over, but I honestly don’t think they’re going to find anything, Laura. We were nearly to the other side of the street when the car hit us”

  “Nearly?” She thought about explaining to him how it had looked from where she stood.

  “It just clipped us,” he said.

  Clipped? He was talking about a car. They’d been run down by a car, for God’s sake.

  Laura caught her breath at last. She felt his hands holding fast to her arms just above the elbows, gazed up into that darkly handsome face of his, all battered and bruised now. He looked even more appealing than before.

  She thought again about fallen angels and devilishly attractive men. How could the two images possibly belong together in one person’s face?

  “Are you okay?” he asked
.

  She laughed, the sound warning her how little self-control she had left.

  “Laura?”

  She forced herself to bring her mind back to the conversation. What were they talking about? Rico. “He’s going to be okay?”

  Nick nodded.

  “And you?” She brought her hand to the side of his face once more. And somehow, when she laid it against his face it felt more like a caress than anything else. “You’re all right?”

  He nodded, looking as wary as she felt. He still held her by the arms; she still had a hand to his face. And it wasn’t enough. She felt herself pulled closer to him by a force she couldn’t begin to explain.

  Suddenly he pushed her back. “Don’t,” he said, his hands locked on her arms.

  “What?” She didn’t understand this at all.

  “Don’t look at me that way.”

  He sounded thoroughly disgusted with her and the whole situation, so different from the man who’d held her hand in the ambulance and promised her Rico was going to be fine.

  How did he do that? Turn off and on like that? Right now, he looked like that arrogant man with the expensive shoes who had infuriated her in the hallway of the shelter last night. And he looked as though he didn’t care about anyone or anything in this world.

  “What way?”

  “Like I’m going to charge in here on a white horse and make everything better. I’m nobody’s savior, Laura,” he said bitterly.

  Nobody’s savior? An odd choice of words. Most definitely, he had saved Rico. She considered pointing that out to him, but didn’t think this was the time or the place. She didn’t think he would listen and was certain he wouldn’t believe her.

  “Who are you?” she asked, instead.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said bleakly, then dropped his hands and walked away.

  But it did matter—to Laura at least. It mattered very much. And she had an overwhelming urge to go after him before he disappeared around the corner.

  But she stayed put. Rico was somewhere in the emergency room, and she wouldn’t leave him.

  Still, she didn’t want Nick to go either.

  Nobody’s savior, he’d told her bitterly. What in the world had he meant by that?

  Chapter 5

  Laura would bet her next month’s rent that Nick was coming back. She didn’t even question the fact that it was very important to her that he come back.

  When she finally got word from one of the nurses about where Rico had been taken, she hurried to the elevators. Walking down the corridor, she found the room easily. Rico was lying on the bed, with an IV in one arm, a blood-pressure cuff on the other and a bandage almost identical to Nick’s on his forehead.

  As she had the night before, she nervously checked for any other signs of injury, and found none. The nurse promised that the doctor would be in shortly to tell her what was wrong, and she waited impatiently for him.

  Laura sat by Rico’s side and held his hand, thinking about all they’d been through in less than twenty-four hours ... and about Nick.

  Thirty minutes later, Nick was back, standing in the doorway to Rico’s room. He didn’t say anything about where he’d been and seemed determined to pretend nothing had happened between them in the hallway.

  Maybe he could forget, or maybe he was good enough at hiding his emotions that he hoped to make her think he’d forgotten. It only served to heighten her curiosity about him even more.

  “How is he?” Nick asked at last, still standing in the doorway.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to the doctor yet.”

  “I could go find someone for you,” he offered.

  “No.” She wasn’t going to let him escape that easily, not when she sensed so clearly his need to simply get away—despite the fact that he’d just come back. What was going on here? What was haunting this enigmatic man?

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “The doctor was called back to the emergency room. The nurse said he should be finished there soon.”

  “I was downstairs, almost out the door, when I started wondering about something, and I couldn’t leave until I knew what happened earlier,” Nick explained.

  So, he had almost left. Laura couldn’t say exactly how that made her feel. But for now, she didn’t have to examine those feelings too closely. “What do you mean, what happened earlier?”

  “With Rico. Why was he running into the street like that?”

  “I don’t know.” She’d wondered briefly about that herself, when she could force her mind away from the question of whether he was going to be all right.

  “What happened inside the shelter this morning?” Nick asked. “Were you with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right before it happened?”

  “Yes. He was frightened because you and A.J. talked to him about foster care, and he was afraid of going back there. But once he saw me, and once I told him he was going to come home with me, he was...”

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “I was going to say that he was better, but he was still scared.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know”

  “You said he was in foster care before. Did anything happen to him while he was there? Anything to make him run into the street like that?”

  “Even the best foster-care arrangements can be terribly frightening to children,” Laura said.

  “I know, but he ran right into the street.”

  “Unless you’ve been through it, you’d never understand.”

  Laura hadn’t meant to say that. He was watching her even more closely with those dark eyes of his then.

  “You seem to know a lot about foster care.”

  “I do.”

  “Firsthand?”

  He’d spoken so gently. Something in his expression had softened, as well. The words sounded somehow intimate, the question growing too personal. The Nick she’d glimpsed in the ambulance, the one who had held her hand tightly and been her lifeline for that long, harrowing ride, was back for a minute, and she found him thoroughly unsettling.

  She also didn’t want to talk to him about foster care.

  Laura merely nodded, then forced her chin up. She wasn’t ashamed of anything in her past, and she didn’t want this man feeling sorry for her, either.

  “Can we get back to this morning?” she asked. Now that she believed Rico was going to be fine, she had questions of her own.

  “Sure. What happened next?”

  “We talked to the social worker. Or I talked, and the social worker talked. Rico listened and nodded every now and then.”

  “He still isn’t speaking?”

  She shook her head, more worried than she cared to explain to this man. “I’m sure he will, once he calms down, once I can get him back to my apartment and we’re alone. I’m sure he’ll talk to me.”

  “I hope so.”

  “What happened next?” Nick asked.

  “We were waiting for the final paperwork, so I could take him, when the social worker said there was a policeman downstairs looking for Rico. Rico didn’t want to talk with the officer. He was more nervous than before—agitated, even. I tried to calm him down, to explain to him that his mother was still missing and the policeman was going to find her. And then—”

  Her voice broke on the last word, and she felt a hand, warm and reassuring, on her shoulder, felt the presence of a man close behind her. She shut her eyes and tried not to analyze the feeling, tried simply to find strength and comfort in the touch of his hand.

  “He started to cry,” she said, nearly crying herself. “I was trying to reason with Rico. We were in the hallway upstairs, and the policeman was coming up the steps.

  “The next thing I knew, Rico just took off in the other direction, and I...I ran after him. The hallways were crowded, but he’s so fast. He just darted in and out between people and he got through.” Laura had to stop for a minute. “It took me a few seconds longer to get thr
ough the hallways, and when I reached the door it was too late.”

  Laura looked down at the floor through a rush of tears, her voice faltering on the final words. Too late...she didn’t ever want to have to say that again. She couldn’t let herself be too late to help this child.

  Nick sat down on the edge of the bed, facing her, and took her hands in his. Looking straight into her eyes, he said, “It’s all right. It’s all over now.”

  She nodded. Her chin came up a fraction of an inch. “I’m sorry.”

  “Laura, just tell me what happened next.”

  She closed her eyes, dismayed to find the image all too real. She heard the thud again, felt the terror that had gripped her, heard her own screams fill the air.

  “Laura?” he said, low and steady, pulling her back.

  “I saw it happen. I saw him. And you,” she said quickly. “Flying through the air.”

  She couldn’t hold anything back then. She had no self-control left. In the privacy of the room, with Rico sleeping peacefully beside them and Nick with his warm hands, his beautiful bruised face, she just let loose. A sob first, one that was her undoing, one tear, then another, then this bone-deep trembling that seemed never to end.

  Nick hauled her up into his arms, and she didn’t even think of resisting. She was never so grateful for the touch of another human being, for the solid weight of a man’s body against hers.

  She was always the one who did the comforting, who dried the tears and murmured reassurances and hung on tight. She did that for the children.

  But this ... this was something different altogether. Laura realized the difference right away. This was a man, a very unsettling man, holding a woman.

  She stopped crying right away and got herself under control, with all sorts of warning signs going off inside her. She couldn’t help but notice that he was so much bigger than she was-taller, broader, leaner, stronger. He was solid muscle and heat and power.

  He was a man, a privileged one, an educated one, whose life was so different from her own. She wasn’t going to. lose her head over another man like that. Surely she had too much self-respect. Surely her sense of self-preservation was too strong.