Chapter 8
Jake closed his bedroom door and checked to make sure the only window was open. No matter what the temperature outside, he couldn’t sleep with it closed. The glow from a streetlamp filled the window well and he closed the shade. Black cement-block walls sucked the brightness from his bedside lamp. He’d painted the room when he was fifteen, right after his father died. It suited his shortlived Goth phase. And it suited him now, at thirty-three, back in his cave in his mommy’s basement like all the other statistics who’d failed at playing grown-up.
He hadn’t failed. But only his two closest friends knew that. He wasn’t advertising his reasons for selling the house he’d put his sweat and soul into. He wasn’t talking about why his work truck was now his only transportation. His friends just assumed the economy had sucker-punched Braden Improvements and he was hanging on by his fingernails like too many of the guys he’d known since he was a kid. None of it was true. In spite of refusing to cut corners, the business his father had started the year Jake was born was still growing. But human nature gravitated to the worst. He put up with the razzing and enjoyed his mom’s cooking.
He sat on the bed and opened his laptop. His version of Emily’s floor plan lit the room. Tomorrow would decide which one of them would cave on the two walls he was determined not to destroy. The girl was definitely falling under the house’s spell. He had that on his side.
His eyes traced the double black line encompassing the dining room and stopped at the window, at the two square feet she’d occupied when he walked in on her, saw the tear streaks on her face, and did nothing. Palms sweating, mouth turning to dust, he’d merely said good-bye and left.
But even when he played the scene over, he couldn’t make it end right. In his first do-over, he asked if there was anything wrong. She responded with a head shake and an awkward silence. The next remake featured him dropping to one knee beside her and brushing away tears with the back of his hand.
Slapping the laptop closed, he slumped against black pillows and turned off the light. In the thick blackness he couldn’t even make out the outline of the hand that acted out the sweep of tears from a soft, damp cheek.
“Like this.” Jake dropped the pencil onto the unsteady card table and dared Emily with an unblinking gaze.
“But you said you’d changed your mind about doing it my way.” She picked up the pencil and aimed the eraser at the line he’d just sketched on the floor plan she’d drawn by hand.
“You’re a very good artist.” His voice dripped with intentional patronization.
“I majored in art.” She chewed her bottom lip, until it slipped out with a quiet sucking sound. “And you majored in getting your own way.”
Jake snickered through his nose. “You’re right. I have a BS in narcissism.”
In spite of the straight line of her mouth, her eyes glittered with mirth. The pencil lowered and she closed both hands around it on the table. She leaned back. “So what I need to do is figure out how to get that ego to want what I want.”
If not for the telltale glint, she might have pulled off the coldhearted, ruthless act. “Exactly.” He followed her lead, as if the rickety table were laden with poker chips.
“So what is it that will break you, Mr. Braden? Money? Fame? Your rep—”
His phone, on the table beside him, vibrated against his watch like a swarm of yellow jackets. He looked down. Ben. Or Ben’s phone anyway. Any other number and he would have ignored it and let Emily play out her hand. “Sorry. I have to—”
“Take it. I’ll just occupy myself….” She opened her hands. The pencil rolled out. She picked it up and began erasing.
One hand lunging for the pencil, he answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Jake. Can you come get me?” Lexi was breathless, her voice hoarse, as if she’d been running and crying at the same time.
“Where are you, Lex?”
“Ben is… I locked him outside and I just need you to come and—”
“I’m on my way.” He jumped up, knocking over a chair. “Did he hurt you?” He gestured an apology to Emily as he tossed her the pencil and strode toward the door.
“Not me. Pansy.”
“You know what to do. Don’t unlock the door. Call 911 and—”
“I gotta go. I gotta catch her.”
The phone was silent.
“Alexis, don’t be an idiot! You know who’s going to suffer for this. Open the door.”
Lexi swiped at her cheeks and flattened herself against the wall as her stepfather’s voice sliced through the fresh gash in the window screen. Pansy mewed, rubbing against Lexi’s legs. The cat had an angel. It was the only way to explain how quickly she’d recovered after Ben ripped her off the screen, threw her on the cement, and punted her into the house like a football.
It wasn’t the first of her nine lives she’d lost to the fat man screaming on the front step.
“Open the door or I’ll tear the whole screen off and you’ll pay for it.”
Gripping the phone in sweaty fingers, Lexi picked up the cat. “Shh. It’s okay.” Her eyes darted toward the back door. Jake had told her to stay inside until the police came. But she hadn’t called the police. She knew better than that.
The door rattled under huge hammering fists. “The longer you play games, the worse it’s going to be. When I get my hands on that cat…” This time he didn’t finish the sentence. This time he didn’t say he was going to pull her claws out one by one with pliers and then smash her head on concrete.
Lexi shut her eyes and took a deep breath. Mom, what should I do? She’d already done the thing her mother had told her over and over. If anything happens, any time you’re scared, call Uncle Jake. But she shouldn’t have. She just wanted him to come and take Pansy, but her uncle wouldn’t do that. He’d yell at Ben and tell him he had no business raising his sister’s kids because he was doing it just for the money and he’d threaten to call the police and Ben would swear at him and finally Jake would leave. And then she’d get screamed at for the rest of the night, and if Adam tried to defend her he’d get locked in his room. It always went like that.
Except for the times when it was worse. The times Ben said he was calling the social worker.
Shivers snaked up her bare arms, and she wished she could close her ears the way she scrunched her eyes. She wished there was a remote to click off the stuff in her head. “Fear not. Fear not,” she whispered in Pansy’s ear. She’d heard once there were three hundred and sixty-five fear-not verses in the Bible. One for every day of the year. What was the one for today?
Taking a deep breath and pulling her shoulders back the way she did in ballet, she told the fear to leave. Jake would take the cat and Ben wouldn’t call the social worker. That’s how it would be this time. Pansy would be safe and Ben could use all the disgusting words in the dictionary and she wouldn’t care. She looked up at the clock with the butterflies painted on it and tried to see the minute hand under the cracked glass. She remembered the day Mom bought it. Before Ben. And she remembered the day Ben threw the phone at it. After Mom.
The memories in her head were sorted out like her scrapbook. Before Dad left. After Dad. Before Ben. After Ben. Before Mom died. After Mom. Some pages were black and white, some were colored and decorated with flowers and butterflies.
There hadn’t been color for a long time.
“This, too, shall pass.” She breathed Mom’s words into Pansy’s fur. She and Adam were survivors. That was something else her mother always said. The two of them together had weighed less than five pounds when they were born. Dad could hold one of them in each hand. There were pictures of Baby Girl Sutton and Baby Boy Sutton in clear plastic cribs with tubes taped to their mouths and noses. The doctors said Adam was a fighter and Alexis was stubborn. That’s why they survived. And they were still that way.
Staying in the afternoon shadows along the wall, Lexi slipped into the dining room and around the table. Dust filled the holes in Mom’s lace tablecloth. Tools and wires and pieces of metal covered the cloth. Computer guts, Adam called it. Ben said he was going to start a business fixing computers. Sure he was.
“Ten seconds and I’m breaking the window!” Ben pounded on the side window in the living room.
No you won’t. He wouldn’t break anything he’d have to fix, because he never fixed anything.
Lexi snuck into the kitchen, praying Ben would stay where he was. He’d already tried the back door, but she’d gotten there before him. She was always faster than Fat Ben. If she could get to the garage without him seeing, she’d call Jake and tell him to meet her at Echo Park. Moving like a cat, with no more sound than Pansy’s paws made on grass, she grabbed her backpack off the table and darted out the door. Once outside, she ran like a track star, down the sidewalk and to the alley. The garage door was wide open.
Forcing her fingers not to shake, she punched in Jake’s number. He sounded more scared than she was when he answered. “Lex, you okay? Are the police there?”
“Not yet. I got another idea. Meet me by the lion at Echo.”
“No, Lex. Stay put until—”
“I’m on my way.” She tossed the phone behind a pile of flowerpots. Another one of Ben’s get-rich-quick schemes—“Aloe plants. They’ll sell like hotcakes.” She dumped her shoes and clothes behind the garbage cans and set her open pack on the floor. “Get in.”
Pansy obeyed. She loved bike rides. Weird cat. She didn’t know they were riding for her life. Lexi kissed the silky place between Pansy’s ears. “You’ll be okay.”
She was always faster than Fat Ben.
He didn’t have what it took to be a dad.
Jake’s hand cramped on the shift knob. Deciding at the last second not to challenge the grace of the yellow light, he mashed the brake pedal. His truck tires hit the crosswalk as the light changed.
Red lights. That’s what his life had turned into since his sister died. One long, exasperating stoplight after another. Abigail, if you’re looking down on all this, you gotta know I’m trying. But she couldn’t be watching. Tears weren’t allowed up there.
He stared at the Wendy’s sign. You CAN’T FAKE REAL, it said. The slogan resonated in a deep place inside him. If only people came with labels declaring them real or artificial. His brother-in-law should have come with a warning on his bloated side: People-using, cat-hating, toxic blob of humanity. Approach with caution.
Or don’t approach at all. He’d tried to warn Abby, but she was lonely and exhausted from being both parents to two spitfire kids after their dad bailed. He’d tried to warn her about that first one, too: immature, self-absorbed, irresponsible jerk. “I sure know how to pick ’em,” she’d said the first time she landed in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer.
The red eye blinked green and he sped into town, keeping the needle a safe seven over the speed limit. He turned right into Echo Park and put the truck in neutral. He jumped out and sprinted over to the drinking fountain—a huge, openmouthed yellow lion. Water squirted from its tonsils when a little girl who looked to be about eight turned the handle.
If Lexi were still that age, he’d know how to deal with her. The little girl ran off and he leaned on the lion’s mane, remembering the scary thrill of sticking his head in that immense mouth when he was a kid. He’d never been too sure the thing wouldn’t come alive.
Shading his eyes, he scanned the sidewalk along Milwaukee Avenue until he saw her. Pedaling her little pink bike over the tracks and across the bridge with all she had in her, blond hair flapping on bare shoulders. She needed a bigger bike. So did Adam. They needed a lot of things he was ready, willing, but not able to provide. He waved and she smiled. Man, the girl was resilient.
“Jake! You gotta take Pansy.” She skidded to a stop on the blacktop, laid the bike down, and ran up the bank to him. “Ben threw her and kicked her and…” Skinny arms wrapped around his chest and he hugged her, and the cat.
“Did Ben follow you?”
“Are you kidding? He’s too slow.”
And you’re too cocky. His greatest fear was that someday she wouldn’t outmaneuver Ben Madsen’s temper. “Tell me what happened.” He led her to a park bench facing the playground. She took off the backpack and sat down with it on her lap. Jake waited while she caught her breath.
“Ben was sleeping on the couch when I got home from track.” The cat’s head stuck out through an opening under the flap, and she nuzzled her face in the fur. “He locked Pansy outside. You know… how she…hates…” Her shoulders heaved, one hand rose to her chest and rubbed a spot just below her collarbone. “She must have heard me…come in…” Her breath rasped. The next one was clearly a struggle.
“Where’s your inhaler?” Jake took a deep breath, as if it could somehow get to her lungs.
“In my pack.” She fumbled the clasp on the flap, the wheezing getting louder with each inhale.
Jake grabbed the cat and shook the bag upside down. “Where?”
Green eyes widened. “I…dumped…” Shoulders rounded, cords standing out on her neck, she stood and quickly lowered her head. “Can you…take…me home?”
Eyes darting around the park, he stuffed the cat in the pack. Slinging it over his shoulder, he scooped up Lexi and ran to the truck. As he opened the passenger door, the train signal clanged. He whipped the seat belt across her. The skin around her mouth had a purple cast. “Hang on, baby. Try to relax.”
Lexi nodded. The rumble of a train muffled the clanging and doubled the distance he’d have to drive. He couldn’t chance taking her home. If she couldn’t find her inhaler, or it didn’t work fast enough…
Jake jumped in, started the truck, and did a U-turn, tires squealing. He glanced right when he got to the road, thinking for a fraction of a second about trying to beat the train. Gates lowered on his thought. Red lights flashed. He weaved between slowing cars and onto Bridge Street. Sunlight lasered an SOS through the spaces between boxcars. Through the open window, wheels clacked over the tracks. A shadow train barreled along the grass beside him. He ran a stoplight and sped onto the overpass then barely missed a car on Robert Street. Lord…
He flipped open his phone, dialed 911, and asked them to call the ER at Aurora Memorial. His voice shook. He gave them Ben’s number.
Lexi grabbed his arm. “Take…me…home.” Her words were tight, faint. Her exhale whistled.
“No time.” As he closed in on the sign for Perkins Street, he glanced at Lexi. Looking straight ahead, white hands gripping the seat, spine hunched, she fought for every breath. Jake’s damp palms gripped the steering wheel. Pulse hammering in his throat, he zigzagged—Kane Street to Highland to Randolph. He took the back way in to the hospital, praying no one got in his way. He wove around cars and people in the parking lot and slammed the truck into neutral under red block letters. Unfastening Lexi’s seat belt, he slid her toward him.
The hospital doors opened automatically. He ran through the waiting area and was ushered through double doors and into the ER. He answered questions as he laid Lexi on a bed then kissed her forehead and stepped out of the way. She reached out for him. A man in blue scrubs tucked her hand back at her side. Jake moved around him. “I’m right here, Lex.”
“Pulse ox eighty-nine.”
“BP one-forty over eighty.”
A nurse put an oxygen mask over Lexi’s nose and mouth and explained they’d be giving her Albuterol through the mask. She lifted the tips of her stethoscope to her ears then stopped. “Are you her father?”
Not yet. “I’m her uncle.”
The nurse nodded. “I’m going to start an IV on that side. Why don’t you come over here and hold her hand. Might calm her down a bit.” She smiled at Lexi. “You’re going to be just fine, Alexis. It’s scary, isn’t it?”
Lexi nodded. The weight of responsibility dropped from Jake’s shoulders. She was in good hands. She was going to be fine. He walked around the bed. Her fingers wrapped around his. “Is it getting any better?”
Her chest still heaved, but she nodded again.
“Good. I’ll stay right—”
“What happened?”
Ben Madsen lumbered through the curtain. His hair was greasy and he hadn’t shaved in days. He wore a faded yellow shirt unbuttoned over a stretched-out undershirt, baggy jeans belted under his enormous belly. Couch-potato poster boy. Sometimes stereotypes were the only thing that fit.
“She had an asthma attack.”
“She always has asthma attacks. She’s allergic to that blasted cat, and I’m forking over a hundred dollars a month for an inhaler. How’d she get here? Where was she? Little twit left the phone in the garage or I wouldn’t have gotten the call. She locked me out.”
The LPN looked up at Ben. One eyebrow rose and she shook her head. Jake wondered if she’d be allowed to testify in court. If that day ever came.
“Looks like she’s going to be just fine,” Jake said, keeping his voice steady and even.
Ben nodded, eyed the young nurse, and glared at Jake. “You can leave now.”
Lexi’s fingers tightened around his. He squeezed back. “I think I’ll stay awhile.”
“If you want to be useful, go pick up Adam at the library.” Beady eyes narrowed under scrubby eyebrows.
Useful. Steel fingers gripped the back of his neck. He didn’t trust himself to answer or even look in the face of the man who stood with his hands on the leather belt curling under the overhang of flesh. Kissing Lexi’s cheek, he whispered in her ear, “I’ll get Adam and we’ll both be back here in fifteen minutes. You’re going to be fine.”
He didn’t have what it took to be a dad. But he didn’t have what it took not to try with everything in him. He turned and walked out through two sets of automatic doors. Yanking open the truck door, he looked down. The backpack was empty.
The cat was gone.
September 3, 1852
“Stay home tonight, Liam. I need you to help with the rendering in the morning. “Mam planted reddened hands on the tie of her apron.
“I have traps set. I can’t leave them.”
“Traps? So early?” She held the speckled blue pot over his cup.
He kept his eyes on the murky coffee swirling like a river current. “Wolf traps.”
Mam made a clucking sound and lifted the iron cornbread pan from the table. “And what are you worried about? That a rabid chicken stealer will suffer if you leave it overnight? Serves it right, I say.”
Coffee scalded his throat, but he couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t take the chance Da would finish in the barn and come in and enforce her request. Not to defend her, but to hurt the son he claimed was not his. Liam smiled but hid it from his mother. With each passing year, Da’s denial grew more foolish. The face that looked back at him from the drinking barrel on a windless day was a young version of Da, but Liam vowed to spend the rest of his life proving any resemblance to Patrick Keegan ended there. And Da knew it. With a brush of lips on Mam’s creased brow, he snatched his coat from the bench and his musket from the hooks above the door.
The fringe on his sleeves slapped his sides as he sprinted toward the woods. He’d tethered Fallon to the apple tree behind the outhouse, though he’d fought for the shelter of the barn when they’d returned from church. Avoiding Da’s distrusting eyes on these nights had become a game. As he tightened the saddle, he prayed this would be the last time then repented of his prayer. Father, You alone know when this will end. Grant me patience to do Your will. Protect us all this night.
He rode the three miles to the river in prayer. The sky was cloudless, speckled with stars. Only a sliver of darkness at the edge of the moon betrayed its waning. Still low, it hovered over the pines. Shadows stretched from headstones in the cemetery. The light would make the going easy. And treacherous. A coyote howled. Yelps followed. Liam guessed at least five. Sweat trickled down his sides in spite of the cold.
The hair stood on his arms as he neared town, reining Fallon to a walk. “Whoa, boy.” He spoke as much to his racing pulse as to the gelding. On the other side of the river, lamps burned in two of the hotel windows. He crossed the bridge. Fallon’s hooves echoed like drumbeats. Just checking traps. He rehearsed his defense.
A bit early to be trapping, isn’t it? The pelts aren’t thick yet.
Wolves, sir. Fear conjured the outline of a gun. They’ve become a nuisance. I get paid for each carcass.
The jacket opened. A .45 caliber Derringer glinted in the moonlight.
Get hold of yourself, Keegan. Liam took off his hat and ran a gloved hand through his hair. God had given His angels charge over his comings and goings thus far. He chastened himself for doubting as he rode silently into the trees across the river from Hannah’s house.
A candle burned in the upstairs window. Her window. But tonight she wouldn’t be sitting at her desk. He slid off Fallon, tied the reins to a skinny birch then hoisted the saddlebags over his shoulders. Did Mam wonder if she was losing her mind when every few weeks a loaf of bread would disappear from the cupboard or a slab of smoked sidepork wasn’t where she’d put it? He hated the deception, but there would be no place for him under his parents’ roof if they thought he sympathized with the abolitionists. If Da knew what he was doing tonight, Liam might well find himself swinging from a limb of the twisted oak that shaded the chicken coop.
He lifted the pine boughs off the canoe then stood still, trying to shake the feeling he wasn’t alone. Fallon’s nicker broke the night silence. And a branch snapped behind him.