Noah's Rainy Day (27 page)

Noah’s laugh was weak, his bony shoulders jerking beneath the covers. I studied him and brushed the strands of brown hair from his forehead. Emma told me once that Noah hated when people touched his head, felt his hair, sometimes long and silky, sometimes cut short like Streeter’s. A military flat-top. Noah turned his face toward mine and studied me.

“Have you been lying here thinking about the case of the missing backpack?”

Noah smiled.

“I wish I was as good at the five-finger method as your sister. Seriously, do you have a question about the backpack?”

Noah smiled.

“Let’s see, have I figured anything out yet? No, because I’ve been working on that case at the airport. Did you?”

Noah didn’t smile.

“Oh, sweet pea, you’ve got to get some sleep. Today’s a big day. It’s Christmas.”

Noah’s eyes searched my face.

“No, I have to go back to work. We still haven’t found the boy yet. But we’re all trying. I just wanted to bring Beulah back home so she could get some sleep. She did great last night. Found a lot of answers for us.”

Noah rolled toward Beulah on the bed, poked her side with his stiff arms. She groaned and went right back to sleep.

“Oh, wait. I did learn something about the case of the missing backpack. Guess what? I found a name in the boy’s backpack on some old homework stuck in one of the books. Well, at least a first name. Clint. Does that ring a bell?”

Noah looked perplexed. His eyes flicked up and his mouth moved to an “o” shape. I wasn’t sure what that meant. “Thirsty?” No, that was when he poked his tongue out. He kicked his leg and his bony heel struck the top of my thigh. “Do you want me to get the stocking off the bed?” Nothing. His eyes found mine. “Something about the backpack I found?”

Noah smiled.

“Let’s see. I told you the contents of the backpack. I told you about the two cars that appeared to be well worn, played with a lot; the candy wrappers, Milky Way. You figured out he was in the fifth grade because of the December field trip to the Baugh House.”

Noah flung his arm toward me, smacking me in the arm. “What? You did, too. You figured that out. You told me the fifth graders went on field trips in December.”

Noah smiled.

“And I found the notice in his backpack that the field trip was to the Baugh House at Historical Park.”

Noah did not smile. What did that mean?

“You didn’t know that they went to the Baugh House? I hadn’t told you.”

His face stayed hard and blank.

“Something more? Something different? Didn’t the fifth graders go to the Baugh House?”

Again, no smile. No mistaking Noah’s growing frustration with me.

“Did they go somewhere else?”

Noah flashed a quick smile.

“Hmm. That’s strange. Better do some more homework.”

Noah smacked my arm again.

“What? Is there something I left out? Did you figure out who it is already?”

No smile.

“Um, let’s see.
Everyday Mathematics
. Fifth grade. Clint. Do you know him?”

No smile.

“Have you heard of a Clint at Pennington Elementary?”

No smile.

“That’s weird. Small school. Do you know that there’s not a Clint in the fifth grade?”

Noah smiled.

“There’s not?”

He smiled wider and his arms stiffened, his legs crossed.

“It’s a kid from Pennington named Clint, probably a fifth grader who likes playing with cars, who was planning to go on a field trip to Wheat Ridge Historical Park’s Baugh House. But you say the fifth graders didn’t go to Baugh House this month and that there is no one at your school named Clint. Is that where we are with this mystery?”

Noah smiled.

“Then whose cool camo backpack do I have in the back of my Explorer?”

Noah smiled and sucked in a loud, gleeful sound.

“Shh, you’ll wake up the whole house. I’ve got to go back to work. You think about it and let me know if you figure out whose backpack I have. You should come with me to return it, don’t you think?”

Noah smiled and then grew serious again, staring off at the neighbor’s house.

“And I’ll make sure to tell the creepy guy next door to quit scowling at you or whatever he’s been doing at all hours of the night that’s keeping you awake. Or maybe I’ll rustle up some night-vision goggles and we’ll spy on him tomorrow night. See what he’s up to.”

Noah smiled and closed his eyes, his lids growing heavy. I stayed a few more minutes until he fell asleep, his face precious and innocent, his breathing as soft and sweet as a baby’s.

I stroked his soft cheek, wishing I could stay with him all morning. But I couldn’t. I kissed his cheek and smiled.

THIS WAS THE FIRST
time all night that the boy hadn’t trembled as he slept. The first three times he awoke, he tried to assure the child his parents would come for him. Someday. That didn’t seem to bring any comfort to the boy. He wasn’t sure the tot believed his story at all about how the boy’s father had asked him to collect him at the airport. But he seemed to believe his mother had gotten too busy to pick him up—good guess on his part that she might be self-absorbed, like so many mothers were these days—and would be here soon. He seemed to like the idea that in the meantime they’d play some fun games together until she arrived. But it was the endless supply of M&M’s that seemed to calm the boy the best. Parents underestimate the power of candy when they raise their kids totally deprived of having regular treats. Rewarding a well-behaved child with his favorite candies had always been the quickest way to allay a child’s fear, from his experience. Up to a point. Older children took a bit more convincing.

When they’d first arrived home last night, the child had cried for the first time when he first saw his reflection in the mirror, until he learned the shoe polish he’d put on the boy’s hair was only temporary, just pretend. He’d stopped crying once he saw how easily the color came off between
rolled fingertips. He demonstrated this to the boy over and over, pinching the long locks of hair well after the boy had fallen asleep, the pads of his fingertips covered in bluish black stain, not unlike the ink at the one-hour photo shop where he worked. No one would even notice his smudged fingers, since he had stained fingers all the time. He lay beside the child in the dark, feeling him trembling for hours, sure the boy was too afraid to make so much as a whimper.

In dawn’s first light, the boy looked calm, relaxed, and rested in his effortless sleep. The morning rays stroked the boy’s flawless cheek. He looked angelic, innocent. Yummy. The flash of his bulb did not awaken the boy. He lay nestled against the pillow, his black locks of hair splayed this way and that, his bare shoulder in the well-heated room poking out from beneath the covers.

A cherub, he thought. A tasty cherub.

His camera flashed again and the boy stirred. He stood motionless above the boy’s bed, willing him to sleep undisturbed by his activities. He studied the child’s worry-free face and wondered how the young boy so easily and readily swallowed the whale of a tale he had told him, about his mother not getting all her Christmas shopping done and wanting to be ready by the time the boy saw her, and his father requesting the child stay with him until his mother finished finding exactly what this little tike wanted.

He wondered what miserable kind of life this poor tot had before he had saved him from all of it. How could he so eagerly believe his parents had asked this man to pick him up at the airport because they were too busy to spend any time with him anymore? On Christmas Eve, no less? How long would this child stay so naïve, so fresh? How long would he have before the boy would begin to ask more questions? How long before it was no longer too good to be true?

The cherub snorted in his sleep, which brought a smile to his lips.

He saw himself in this boy’s hauntingly beautiful eyes. Mother, always gone, working. Father, a worthless drunk, predictable only in that he routinely beat his kids. A loveless home where the beatings were the only attention, and a rough shove into a dark closet the only human contact he had ever had. He became morose at the thought and his soft cheeks drooped to a sorrowful scowl. He had been so lonely since his mother’s death seven years ago. So incredibly lonely.

Until this Christmas. It was a great Christmas. With Sammy. Not lonely. The best Christmas since his mother died. No. The best Christmas ever. Sammy was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Oh, he had hosted little visitors before, but not for very long. Sammy was different. He understood him. He’d obey. He’d stay.

He reached down and brushed a strand of the black hair from the boy’s ear, dragging his finger against the tiny, bare shoulder. The sleeping child shivered and he pulled the covers up over him.

Sammy. My Sammy.

Ah, the gullibility of pampered five-year-olds, he thought. How easily the tot believed his explanation that whenever a child moves to a new home, he must receive a new name and his hair must match his new parent’s, even if it was temporary. Black hair had become easy for the boy formerly known as Max, now his precious little Sammy, after two bags of peanut M&M’s. And when he asked the boy about his grandparents, he was delighted when the boy told him he had none except one named Papa whom he’d never met before.

The boy was just like him!

No grandparents, except a man his mother called Papa now and again, when she sat staring at the living room couch and the sprawling form of his father, reeking as if he’d soaked in rubbing alcohol all day. She was too tired to care. He never remembered meeting his Papa, either. So he decided to let the boy call him Papa, even though he wasn’t old enough to have a grandson yet. Papa could double for Dad, which he would become. In time. The boy needed space for now, to learn to trust him. He would treat Sammy as his own. Give him the care and attention he never learned from his own parents, may they rest in bloody peace. He would be different from them. He would protect the child from harm. He would never raise a hand to the boy. Never beat him. Never.

He was so grateful to have found Sammy. He had spent his entire adult life scanning pictures of kids—kids who had loving parents, kids who had lots of attention at home, kids with childhood riches that can’t be bought with money. He could see it in their eyes. Smiling eyes. Only a few had smiles on their faces and sadness in their eyes. A sadness so dark and omniscient it could only be born of lousy parents. Absent parents. A sadness he understood. A sadness that he spent a lifetime trying to reveal in
the darkroom at work in the photos he would develop of that child, hoping someone would notice. But they never seemed to. He cursed those parents along with his own and longed for an opportunity to make a difference in one sad child’s life.

Sammy could be that child, he thought. He could make a difference in Sammy’s life. This could be his opportunity. He would care for Sammy. Be tender to Sammy. Love Sammy. Sammy would soon forget all about his once-blond hair, his parents living on both coasts. The child had described having homes “in the Big Apple and in the Big Orange,” which he understood meant NYC and LA. They were probably divorced, or very rich—bicoastal parents to contend with, and a troublesome nanny.

The nanny.

Nanny Judy is the only person the boy seemed to talk about. To care much about. The trembling must be attributable somehow to him missing her. He wondered if the nanny had the same attachment to this lost child as the boy seemed to have for her. If so, she would be looking for him. She would not give up until she found him.

He would need to work fast.

He touched the boy’s head one last time as he decided it was time to make breakfast for the two of them. As he turned from Sammy’s bed, something caught his eye. He peered out the window above the bed and saw the neighbor boy lying along the second story bay window in the house across from Sammy’s room. It was as if the older boy’s gray eyes were staring at him, watching him, boring through him like a piercing hot poker.

He studied the boy in the picture window and could see his arms pulled into his chest, his body lying supine, bent and unwieldy. He had seen the older boy before—maybe a teenager—sitting in the driveway in his wheelchair, grunting noises that were beyond recognition. He couldn’t speak. At least he didn’t think so. He was retarded or something. Yet he was lying there staring across at him like he knew something, like he saw something with those dead, gray eyes.

He yanked the blinds closed, unnerved by the thought of those eyes. Too much like his mother’s accusing eyes seven years ago. Before the blowflies discovered her. Then the maggots. He recalled the smell that had
lingered on his clothes every day when he left for work. Eventually, he moved into an apartment. But they never found his mother with those gray, judgmental eyes. Eyes that would never land on him ever again. Or Sammy. He would make sure of it. He would protect the child from anyone who judged.

He shuddered, staring at the closed blinds.

He convinced himself that the neighbor boy in the window had no knowledge about what was going on over here and no ability to tell anyone about it, even if he did. Sammy stirred in his early morning sleep. Awareness of Papa’s heavy breathing and even heavier sweating brought him stillness.

He was in the kitchen when Sammy padded down the stairs. “Morning, sleepy head. You’re finally awake. You want some breakfast?”

Sammy straightened his shirt. “Coming, Papa.”

He had adjusted to calling him Papa as easily as he had adjusted to the thought that his parents were simply too busy for him. Sad.

Sammy asked, “There’s a little redheaded girl playing in the backyard next door. After breakfast, can I go out and play with her? Please?”

Papa smiled. So far, Sammy had obeyed every house rule. Dressed. Face washed. Hair combed. Never leave the house without asking first.

“Did you make your bed?”

“Yes,” Sammy said smiling. “Can I go outside?”

Papa’s grin superseded a pat to his knee, encouraging the boy to come sit on his lap. Happy to see the boy’s willingness to please him and be compliant, Papa knew the boy was ready for the next step. He lifted the boy onto his lap and held him close, stroking his small back, and whispering into Sammy’s ear. “Not today. Today’s special. It’s Christmas!”