Lake Magic (22 page)

Through the screen door Jenny watched Cody follow Jared across the yard. Jared walked like a man with a purpose, a man who knew exactly who he was and what he wanted. His long legs made the distance seem short, while Cody hustled to stay abreast. For every one step of Jared’s, Cody took two. His small head was cocked to the side, turned toward Jared, and even from here, she could tell Cody was jabbering away. From the stiff set of Jared’s shoulders, Jenny had a pretty good idea her nephew was nailing him with one question after another. She probably should feel bad for Jared. Probably, but she didn’t.

She braced her arm near the door, squinting into the bright sun. Twice she’d headed out to call Cody back, and twice she’d stopped herself. He’d made it more than clear he wanted to spend the afternoon outside with Jared. But that didn’t stop her from feeling guilty. Less than an hour ago, she’d vowed to be a better aunt, to find a way to bridge the gap between them. But then Jared had walked into her kitchen, and all of her good intentions had flown out the window.

She rested her head near her shoulder. He infuriated her . . . annoyed her . . . flustered her. But most of all, he scared her. Around him, she was finding it impossible to stay numb like she had for the past nine months. Each heated look he gave her seemed to thaw her heart a little more. When he’d first arrived, Jenny’s only worry had been about Blue Sky. Now . . . now she had a far greater scare.

Jared reached the hangar first and disappeared into the long shadows. A few moments later, Cody followed.

Jenny dropped her arm and went into her office. She turned on the computer, and as she waited for it to boot up, her gaze slid to the desk’s bottom drawer. Staring at it, her heart began to race and her palms sweat. She reached out, intending to open the drawer, only to draw back her hand. She sucked in a deep breath. Ever since Steven’s death, she’d been avoiding this moment.

She lifted her gaze and stared out her window to the hangar. Even though she couldn’t see Jared, she knew he was there. Where he would stay until she repaid him. And while she still had four months to come up with the money, she was beginning to realize there was no way she would survive that long. His loan and the letter from Steven might have brought him here, but it was up to Jenny to make him leave.

Steeling herself, she opened the desk drawer and withdrew her camera. The moment her hand closed around the cool metal, her heart kicked into overdrive. Her breathing became short and choppy, and she fought hard to drag slow, even breaths into her lungs.

She stared at the camera, marveled how something so light could feel so heavy. But then she knew. It wasn’t the camera itself that weighed so much; it was the memories it held. She tried not to think about the last time she’d held the camera in her hands . . . the last time she’d snapped a picture. She tried . . . and failed.

She’d been outside, under a hot summer sky. Steven had been getting ready for a charter.

She’d clicked away, nearly filling the memory card, never realizing that would be the last time Steven would ever fly. A day later, he’d been gone.

As the pictures uploaded into the computer, tears pooled in her eyes. Each image cut deeper than the last, but she refused to look away. She drank them in. The first dozen or so were close-ups of Steven. Silly, candid shots of him smiling, goofing off. She soaked up each picture, finding it all but impossible to move on to the next. When a new photo loaded on to the screen, she laughed out loud. It was another shot of Steven, one of him just before he was about to board the plane. With his hand braced on the door, he’d turned around and stuck out his tongue at her. The camera had caught it all: the sunny day, his sandy blond hair that always needed to be trimmed, his bright green eyes, and that big-as-the-sky smile. She laughed again, even as fresh tears filled her eyes.

For months, she’d avoided looking at these pictures, not wanting to feel the pain of them. And while her heart still ached, there was also an unexpected joy. She was shocked to realize that looking at the still images of him didn’t crush her like it once would have. Now, instead of remembering only the pain, she was also remembering all of the good times, too.

She wiped at the tears on her cheeks and finished saving the images. Then she picked up the phone.

“Barb,” she said when the line was answered on the other end. “It’s Jenny Beckinsale. I’m ready to finish the website.”

“Son of a bitch,” Jared swore as the wrench busted free and his knuckles scraped against a bolt.

“You shouldn’t swear. My mom says so.”

Jared picked the wrench off the hangar’s cement floor and looked at the back of his hand. Welts were already beginning to form. A thin gash beaded with blood. He sucked at the wound. If he’d been paying attention to what he was doing and not to the kid, he wouldn’t have made such a careless mistake. But Cody hadn’t stopped yammering since they’d left the house almost an hour ago. “Yeah, well, your mom isn’t here, is she?”

“She never is. Neither is my dad.” Cody pushed off with his feet and sent the office chair careening across the open expanse of the hangar.

Jared braced himself for the inevitable crash. When he’d first brought the chair out for Cody to sit on, he’d never considered the wheels to be weapons of mass destruction. He was quickly rethinking his tactical error. “Sounds like they both have pretty important jobs.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

Jared refitted the wrench on the bolt.

“What did your parents do?” Cody asked.

The wrench paused. “Nothing much.”
Nothing at all
.

“I bet they didn’t treat you like a baby. I’m thirteen. I don’t need a babysitter.” Again the chair went flying. “You’re mom was probably cool.”

“Yeah, cool.” That was the last way Jared would describe Nancy.

“Your mom probably let you stay home all the time by yourself.”

Jared nearly laughed. “Kid, my mom split when I was eight. I haven’t seen her since.”

The chair stopped. “Never?”

“Never.”

“How come?”

Jared knew he should just shut up, but there was something about this kid, this place . . .
Jenny
. . . that was making him remember a past he fought hard to forget. “She didn’t want to be a mom,” he said with enough finality to end the conversation. Cody didn’t take the hint.

“That sucks.” Using the toe of his tennis shoe, Cody spun the chair in a circle. “Do you want to see her?” he asked when the chair stopped.

“I saw a small rowboat behind the hangar,” Jared said, sidetracking the conversation. “Why don’t you ask your aunt if you can take it out?”

“I can’t go on the water, remember?”

No, Jared didn’t remember. The only thing he wanted to remember was a way to get the kid out of here.

Cody leaned down staring sideways at Jared. “Do
you
have a dog?”

“No.”

“A cat?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

Christ
, did the kid ever shut up? Jared retightened the wrench on the bolt. He glared out the hangar’s door, toward the house. He scowled against the bright sun, scowled at the woman who had put him in this position. Babysitting hadn’t been part of the plan. And Jenny damn well knew it. But the minute Cody had said
booby prize
, Jared felt himself cave. And like a predator, she’d sensed his weakening and pounced. “Just because.”

The chair rolled away and then came back to a stop near where Jared was working. From under the plane, he looked up at the kid. There was nothing about Cody that should stir up memories from Jared’s past. Nothing at all. So why was it the more time he spent with the kid, the more old memories resurfaced?

“There are worse things than not having a dog and parents who work,” Jared said.

“Yeah? Like what?”

Hadn’t the kid been listening?

Like having a mom who screwed so many guys she didn’t know who your dad was. Or who split one day while you were at school. It had taken Jared over a week to realize Nancy was never coming back. He’d held on to hope like some pathetic fool clinging to a waterlogged life ring. Not even when the small amount of food they’d had in the house had run out, or the power had been shut off, would Jared let himself believe his mom wasn’t going to return.

His grip tightened on the wrench, and he put everything he had into it. His muscles bunched and bulged, and he was surprised the damn bolt didn’t just snap off.

Cody kicked at the empty oil pan. “Mom’s missed all three of my baseball games.”

“Tough break,” Jared said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

The kid didn’t notice.

At least his mom hadn’t missed the last three decades of his life. Well, not quite three. Jared would give Nancy that. She’d waited until he was in second grade to split.

There was no stopping the memories now. As if in vivid Technicolor, they sputtered to life and began to play and replay over in his mind.

It was ironic, really, the day his mom chose to leave. She couldn’t have planned it better if she’d tried. On the same day she hustled out of town, Jared had been called into the principal’s office. Back then, he’d had nothing to fear from the principal. School had come easily to him. More than easy. He’d excelled in every subject. While his classmates were still working their way through elementary equations, Jared was breezing through work two to three grade levels above. And that was exactly what Mr. Larson had wanted to talk to him about on that fateful day.

Proud and excited. Yeah, that’s what Nancy would be.

Even at eight, Jared had had a hard time not laughing. The last thing his mother had been was proud and excited over her son.

How many times had Jared been forced to listen to how she
coulda been something if only she hadn’t gotten knocked up
. She’d been planning on going to cosmetology school; she was going to be
somebody
. Then
some bastard
had gotten her pregnant, and she had been forced to give up her dreams.

Some bastard. That was the only name Jared had for his father.

From what Jared could see, the only thing Nancy had been forced to give up was having to get off the couch. With Jared around, she had someone to wait on her hand and foot.

Still, even knowing what his mother was going to say, he hadn’t been able to hold back his excitement when he got home from school. But by that time, Nancy was already gone. For two weeks, he’d been able to lie. To keep his mother’s disappearance a secret. But in the end, it didn’t do any good. He never knew how they found out, but one day Child Protective Services had shown up, and just like that, he was thrown into the system, along with hundreds of other kids whose parents hadn’t wanted them.

Jared had always known the truth: Nancy had never cared about anything except her next drink, her next man. But knowing it didn’t make it any easier for an eight-year-old to swallow. While most people might think he’d been given a raw deal—tossed like a Frisbee from one foster home to the next—Jared knew the truth. His mother’s leaving had taught him the most valuable lesson of his life: the only person you could depend on or trust was yourself.

He’d learned quickly how to work the system. Another thing he could credit his mother for. From years of living with her, he knew how to put on a front. How to build a facade that to the outside world looked as if everything was okay. The state, the social workers, even the foster families he stayed with all bought it hook, line, and sinker. No matter how hard people probed or how far they tried to dig, Jared never let them in. And in time, that facade became more than just a pretense. It became who he was.

But somehow Jenny was able to see him clearer than anyone else.

She’d found a way to get to a place inside of him that no one else had. The more he was around her, the more he was beginning to remember all those stupid fantasies he’d had as a kid. Of how he’d wanted to find a home where he could belong . . . where he could fit. Where there was someone waiting just for him, wondering about him. Wanting to hear from him. He shook his head. By the time he was on his sixth foster family, he should have learned. And he had. Until his first year of flight school. He’d come home one day and found the gal he’d been seeing had moved in. He should have told Lisa to leave right then. To this day he still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t. But, in the end, it didn’t matter. Three months later she’d stormed out, telling him he was a coldhearted bastard who didn’t know the first thing about caring for anyone other than himself.