Equal Access (17 page)

“Here.” Shad shook the cloth open and handed
it to her.

Charissa took the handkerchief and wiped at
her face. When she tried to give it back to him, Shad motioned for
her to keep it.

“You might need that for a while.”

“I’m ... I’m supposed to tell you ... I don’t
want Mom and Dad to get a divorce. And I don’t.” Charissa blew her
nose into the handkerchief. “But Mom’s dying. And Dad –” Her voice
cracked. “I want my dad ... when he’s not mad. If I would be good
enough –” Charissa took another shuddering breath. “He just gets
mad when I’m not good. I want my dad –” Her voice cracked again.
“But I want my mom, too!”

Shad blew out a slow exhale as he began to
softly pat her on the back again. “You can’t stop your dad from
getting mad. That’s why it’s better for Uncle Eliot and Aunt Tess
to adopt you.”

Charissa wiped at her nose as she hiccupped
again. “They’re not just being mean to Dad?”

“No. They love you and they want to do what’s
best for you.”

She sniffled into the handkerchief for
several seconds before speaking again, and Charissa’s voice was
less tremulous. “Did your mom die, too?”

He shook his head. “Remember when we were
talking about people who are supposed to love you and take care of
you? The woman they adopted me from, she wasn’t like that. She
didn’t take care of me.”

“What about your dad?”

Shad drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled as
he found the words to explain his situation. “I never knew him. He
left us before I was born.”

Charissa frowned slightly. “So when you said
your parents told you about miracles, you were talking about the
people who adopted you?”

“They’re the only real parents I ever had.”
Shad smiled. “And you know what? They didn’t just tell me about
miracles. They showed me miracles by teaching me how to see them.
And one of the biggest miracles I’ve seen was when they adopted me.
Actually, I think all adoptions are miracles.”

Charissa twisted a corner of the handkerchief
around the tip of her index finger. “I already have real
parents.”

“I know.” Shad sighed. The idea that suddenly
hit him renewed his encouragement. “That makes you lucky, you know.
What a blessing it must be to have not only natural parents, but
also have people who love you and take care of you even when your
natural parents can’t. You can give them special names if you want,
because they’re special people to you. You know what I call my
parents? Mam and Pap.”

“Mam and Pap?” A faint hint of a smile
trembled on her lips. “Those are funny names.”

“My mom, Mam, came up with the idea. Since I
was so old when they adopted me, they thought I might not feel
right calling them Mom and Dad, so they asked if I wanted to call
them Mam and Pap.” Shad smiled again. “Maybe one day, at the time
it feels right to you, you’ll want to call Uncle Eliot and Aunt
Tess by different names.”

Charissa looked down at the handkerchief she
grasped. “I want to believe you when you say things like that.”

“I’m really, really sorry I said you could
fire me. If it will make you feel better, just burn that hanky when
you’re done with it. While you’re at it, burn this tie, too. And my
socks. No, maybe you’d better hold off on those. Might release too
many toxic fumes.”

A peep escaped from her. Shad wasn’t sure if
Charissa had laughed slightly or was starting to cry again. But
when she returned her gaze to his face there was a little more of a
smile on her lips.

“You remind me of Dad when he’s nice.”

Shad stopped patting her back. He wasn’t
entirely sure how to take that comment.

“Except Dad never said he was sorry.”
Charissa leaned against him and her head rested under his left
shoulder.

“I’m just a sorry son of a gun,” Shad
muttered. Her proximity to him was beginning to sink in. And there
was an eerily familiar sensation stirring in his core.

“Do you mean it, Mr. Delaney?” Charissa
wrapped her arms around his left thigh. “Nothing bad is gonna
happen to me?”

That despicable longing ache unfolded within
him as Shad became acutely aware of every point of contact she was
making with him. The poor child was reaching out to him because she
saw Shad as one of the few people who might actually fulfill her
needs, and that was exactly what the demon within him wanted to
take advantage of.

“I’ll do everything in my power to keep
anything worse from happening to you.” Shad’s voice was a bit
hoarse as he decided to end this session as quickly but delicately
as possible.

“You’re not gonna tell Mom, are you?”

“I have to.”

“Don’t.” Charissa sat up to look at him but
left her arms around his leg. “She’ll think ... I’m bad.”

“Charissa.” Shad managed to keep his voice
steady as his empathy for the girl struggled with a less noble
impulse. “I’m not gonna keep a secret from your mom. She’s your
mom. Part of being a parent is ...” Shad tried to come up with
something a little less colorful than Pap or Karl would say. “...
you’d face down the devil himself to do what’s right for your
child. The things we’ve talked about might hurt your mom’s
feelings, but she’d rather have her feelings hurt than let anything
happen to hurt you. She loves you. Nothing’s gonna change
that.”

Charissa studied his face. “It would make me
feel better if you didn’t tell Mom.”

If he were an actual molester, this would
have been a dream come true. Her maneuver was a perfect setup to
establish a “secret” between them. Charissa might as well have been
gift-wrapped for him.

Gift-wrapped ... gift ... a gift from God ...
Dulsie.

His resolve not to give in to temptation just
got its reinforcements. “You don’t keep secrets from your
parents.”

She frowned slightly. “Even if it’s a
surprise?”

“What surprise?”

“Vic is gonna take us to his friend Drake’s
houseboat one day. But he said not to tell Mom because it was a
surprise.” Charissa’s face brightened. “I’ll get to ride in a
boat.”

“Then that’s different.” Shad removed his
hand from her shoulder. He felt as though there were two dueling
forces within him. For the moment they seemed evenly matched but he
wasn’t sure how long that would last. He placed his hand over
Charissa’s wrist but didn’t immediately move her arm. “Thank you
for talking to me about this, Charissa. It will help me to help
you.”

“Do you have to go now?”

Shad moved Charissa’s arm to her side and
released it. “I have to. I ... have other clients I have to
see.”

“Can I talk to you again?”

Shad hesitated in the process of getting to
his feet. His side of light urged caution while the demon was
intrigued by her question. “If you want to tell me more ... to
build my case, sure.” He didn’t look at Charissa while he stood,
but then glanced down at the child with an expression Shad was
certain to be grave. “Remember, though, about your mom. No
secrets.”

Charissa frowned slightly as she gazed up at
him, then with a sigh she returned her attention to her book.

As Shad turned to leave the room his memory
dredged up various aspersions the boyfriends had used against him.
Only this time Shad used the most hateful remarks he could think of
against himself.

Great is peace, seeing that for its sake even God
modified the truth.

--Babylonian Talmud

To this day Shad didn’t trust anybody
immediately. Before he turned eleven, Shad assumed anybody who made
pretensions of friendship toward him would either try to take
advantage of him or decide he was unlikable and mistreat him. When
Erin began visiting with him at the library, Shad believed she
would figure out he was a twerp and quickly distance herself from
him.

So when Erin started giving him food, Shad
got a little confused. He definitely appreciated the sandwiches and
fruits and vegetables she would hand to him, but Shad told himself
Erin had to have an ulterior motive. One evening she showed him
pictures of her parents and of the farm where she grew up, and then
asked Shad if he would like to go there for a week. Shad figured
something terrible would happen to him if he went, but just the
night before Brody had launched a particularly vicious attack on
him, so Shad decided he could either be killed by Brody or killed
by strangers. At that point in time discomfort of the unknown
became actually preferable to the pain of the familiar. He chose to
go to the strangers.

So that woman sent him off with this person
she didn’t even know, and Shad was a little surprised when he
actually arrived at a real farm. Erin had to go back to St. Louis
after the weekend, but every night during the remainder of the week
she would call and chat with him on the phone. Every day Shad did
wonder when Erin’s parents, especially Mr. Delaney, would turn on
him and do something like slice open his throat the way Mrs.
Delaney and her sister did with those chickens on the third day of
his visit. When on the fifth day they asked Shad if he wanted to
stay longer, like for the duration of summer vacation, Shad took
that as a sign he was doomed. But he replied in the affirmative
because Shad figured his fate was sealed, and until they actually
did him in life wasn’t so bad. Besides, he still didn’t want to
return to Brody.

Erin’s contact with him became less frequent
but remained steady and dependable. It took nearly a year before
Shad decided that these people he started calling Mam and Pap could
actually be trusted, but he also developed a solid anchor of
respect for Erin. When he could finally take his new lifestyle for
granted, Shad never forgot it was Erin’s intervention that had
brought him here.

It wasn’t until after Pap’s hospital stay
that Shad learned how divine that intervention had really been.

When he got up from bed that Saturday
morning, Shad told himself to be cheerful. He was always glad to
see Erin again, especially since her younger sister Iona had a
friendly, but not as close, relationship with him. Shad had moved
in on the heels of Iona’s move out to begin college early, so he
never got to know her as well as the rest of the family.

Erin and her husband Stan had two children
and lived in the Rolla area, about an hour south of Jefferson City.
Stan was an instructor at the university and Erin was still a
librarian. Their son, Grady, was ten years old, and they had a
daughter, Ida, who was six. They were coming out to visit this
weekend since they had spent the Fourth of July weekend with Stan’s
family. As Shad got dressed in chino shorts and a light green,
button-down shirt, he thought again how there was a certain
convenience to his and Dulsie’s families being so close.

Around mid-morning Dulsie drove to the
Delaney farm after Mam telephoned to tell them Erin’s family had
arrived. The farm was located on yet another back road, and the
driveway that led up toward the house was about half the length of
the Wekenheiser’s driveway, but it was still considered long. The
land was a mix of crops, timber and pasture in a patchwork quilt
pattern on river bottom and hills. The Osage River, outsized in
this state only by the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, created a
physical border on the back side of the farm. On the hills at the
front of the property sat the house and various outbuildings:
garden shed, chicken coop, well house, granary, machine barn, and
most impressively the enormous timber frame barn. Although the
exterior of the barn was covered with sheet metal to protect the
over one-hundred-year-old oak planks, the interior was all wood and
dirt and hay with a ground-floor plan that accommodated horse
stalls and milking stanchions for an era long ago.

The two-story house was the second largest
building on the farm but shared the barn’s venerable age. Like many
of the older homes in the area the house sported a corrugated steel
roof that had weathered to a dull gray. It was a roughly T-shaped
building, although the lower floor had an additional room on either
side of the back wing. Its newer but still older-looking clapboard
style siding was a soft wedgewood blue and the railing that graced
the semi-wraparound porch and the trim around the windows were
white with red accents. At the beginning of World War II, in a fit
of patriotic fervor, Pap’s Grandpa Ward originally applied the red
paint to sections of the columns on the porch and the windows, and
Pap felt duty-bound to keep it maintained.

The silver, mid-sized SUV parked near the
faded green Delaney pickup belonged to Erin and her husband Stan.
After Dulsie parked their own car near the other vehicles, Shad
helped her carry the food they’d brought toward the porch. No
sooner did they reach the front steps than the two kids raced
around the corner from the other side of the house. Mam’s and Pap’s
two dogs, one that resembled a border collie except its coat was
uniformly red, and the other a beagle, were gleefully running
alongside them.

Ida almost bumped into Dulsie as the girl
sprinted up the concrete steps and grasped the first column on the
right when she reached the short distance to the top.

“Safe!” Ida gasped as she hugged to the post.
Then she grinned at the adults. “Hi Uncle Shad! Hi Aunt
Dulsie!”

“Ida cheated!” Grady was more winded and he
grasped the railing that bordered the steps. A brown-haired boy
with his grandmother’s – and mother’s – green eyes, Grady was
wearing denim shorts and a blue tee shirt with a Chinook helicopter
pictured on the front.

Both Dulsie and Shad greeted the kids. Then
Dulsie spoke again. “Ida has to cheat. She’s younger than you.”

“No she doesn’t.” Grady frowned up at his
sister. “Mom told me not to run as fast as I really can.”

The dogs sniffed around Shad’s and Dulsie’s
feet, but neither patted the animals because their hands were full
with boxes or bags. Ida continued to hug the post as though her
well-being depended on it.