The Kindness of Strangers (28 page)

“Oh,” he said. A long pause followed.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. And she was. The tingling had stopped.

“No need to apologize. I understand.” She almost believed him. He went on, his voice still warm, if overpolite. “I’ll let you go. I’ll contact you if Mrs. Kendrick’s status changes.”

“Thank you,” she said, too brightly, feeling ridiculous.

“Well. Okay, then. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.” She replaced the phone in its cradle and steadied herself at the kitchen island, unable to take in enough oxygen.

She looked at the clock.

God help her: There were still eight hours left in this day.

Chapter Thirteen
Jordan

J
ordan stared out his hospital window and wondered if he’d die if he jumped from here. He didn’t want to meet with Reece Carmichael and Sarah Laden. He wished he could just go home and have everything be normal again.

He plopped backward on the bed and curled up on his side. Everyone kept telling him that his life wasn’t normal. That no one should have to live like he had. Well, it was more normal than this. More normal than police and social workers and Dr. Ali and Dr. Bryn bugging him all the time. He didn’t want to live in a foster home. How had it all gotten so messed up? He’d ruined everything. He almost wished his life were the way it used to be. At least he knew what to expect.

He sat up and kicked the wall, then stood and paced the room again. If he had to be here, he was glad to be free of all the IVs and monitors. Glad that the ache in his joints had gone away. He felt okay today. Even his old headache had left him, that constant burning behind his eyes. Chronic headache, Ali’d told him. A tricky word, “chronic.” He’d pictured it with a
k,
but it was
ch
. Chronic headache from his low-grade fever. “Low-grade” made him picture the fever sitting at a desk in school, getting C’s and D’s on its homework.

Like Danny Laden. Did he really want to live in a house with Danny? Why couldn’t they just let him live with his mom?

Jordan returned to the window and searched for that familiar tall figure he always expected to see: his dad crossing the courtyard, heading for the doors. And just like his father’s hands on him, Jordan was so sure it would happen that it almost disappointed him in a sickening way when it didn’t. Once it was over, he could relax. Dreading it burned up all his energy.

His heart slipped in that extra beat. He didn’t want to have this meeting with Sarah. He had to go somewhere, didn’t he? But living with Danny? Would it be safer to be in the same house with him, to hear what Danny said? Or as far away from him as possible?

In some ways it would be great to be friends with Danny again. He’d liked those days when Danny had stayed over and they made up monster stories and new endings to movies they’d seen. Danny wasn’t like the other boys at school. Danny never did all that stupid wrestling around or punching for no reason. But . . . Jordan didn’t think they’d be friends again. Not after the things Jordan had said to Danny. He’d tried to get Danny to hate him, so it was a
good
thing when Danny stopped defending him—it meant that Jordan had done Danny-boy a favor.

What if Danny had figured it out? Jordan didn’t think Danny was smart enough to put it together. That was always Danny’s problem—he wasn’t smart enough. And he got even stupider when a grown-up looked twice at him. Probably because his dad had died. Why couldn’t Jordan’s own dad have died, instead of his grandma?

His grandma. Jordan moaned. He never should have tried his plan. He should’ve learned his lesson and remembered that bad things always happened if he told. If he’d just kept his mouth shut, his grandma would still be alive. “See what you did to her?” his dad had said. “You broke her heart.” Jordan missed her. He wanted to go stay at her house now. They’d walk in the woods and look for fossils and bones and neat bugs.

But his grandma had lied to him. His mother had a
brother,
Dr. Bryn had told him. It was bad enough that his mom had never told him this, but somehow even worse that it changed everything about his memories of his grandma—it made the movies of her in his mind all murky and the colors wrong—and she’d always been the safest memory of all.

And he couldn’t figure out why this mattered to him—how would it have made his life any different to know he had an uncle in Seattle that he never saw or talked to?—but it
did.
It made him feel like he’d been tricked and laughed at.

The knock at the door made him jump. “Hey, big guy, how’s it going?” Reece stood in the doorway with Sarah Laden. The sight of her made Jordan dizzy, and he had to blink hard to keep the room from disappearing in the shadows that crowded in. He heard the rain pouring on that day, smelled the eye-watering stink of the port-o-john.

He blinked again and brought the room back into focus.

Sarah smiled. “Hi, Jordan.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then both turned to Reece. Reece directed Sarah to one chair, and he sat in the other. Jordan sat on the bed.

Sarah held a round tin in her hands. When she noticed Jordan looking at it, she seemed surprised to see it there. “Oh! I brought some brownies.” She pried off the lid, letting loose the heavy smell of chocolate. Jordan’s appetite nudged him for the first time in weeks.

She handed him a thick wedge of brownie in a napkin.

He looked at the knobbly texture of the brownie. “What’s in these? Nuts?”

“No, pieces of Heath Bar.”

Saliva flooded his mouth. “Wow,” he said around the mouthful he bit off. Soft, chewy, and still warm in the center.

Reece scooted his chair closer to Sarah’s. “Can I have one, too?”

“Sure.” Reece and Jordan dug in to their brownies, but Sarah just held hers, hardly eating from it.

Sarah talked about how Nate would move into Danny’s room if Jordan came to live with them, so he’d have a room of his own. Jordan tried to listen, when he wasn’t distracted by the jumble of video clips that flashed through his mind: Sarah standing in the port-o-john doorway staring at him as the rain soaked her hair. Sarah yanking him up in her arms and cramming him in with the grocery bags on the van floor. He heard her screaming his name over and over again as she drove. She’d taken one turn so sharply that he’d slid over and thumped his head on the door.

“Jordan?” Reece’d asked him a question and looked worried.

Jordan sat up straighter. He needed to pay attention. He was surprised that his brownie was gone. Just some crumbs were left on the napkin in his hand.

“Do you have any questions for Sarah?”

Jordan thought of a million things, but he didn’t know how to put them into words. And he didn’t think “Could I have another brownie?” was the sort of question Reece meant. He shook his head.

Sarah handed him another brownie as if she’d read his mind. He tried to make this one last, letting each dark mouthful melt into pudding before he swallowed. “You already know Nate and Danny,” Sarah said. “You think you’d have any problems living with them?”

He tried to keep his face blank as he searched hers. Had Danny told her?

“I know you and Danny had a falling-out.” Jordan wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but the chocolate turned to thick paste in his mouth. “I know you
used
to be friends, and maybe you can be again. Danny thinks so. What do you think?”

He reached for his water glass. It took several gulps before he could say, “Sure. Danny’s all right.”

He saw her shoulders lower. “So would you like to stay at our house for a while?”

Jordan turned his water glass in his hand, tipping it to one side, watching the ice tumble into new shapes.

Sarah waited for his answer. Her eyes were so big and brown they seemed more like dog eyes or deer eyes, not a person’s.

Jordan didn’t know what to say. What would his mom do if she found out he
agreed
to go live somewhere else? The gerbil wheel started to spin inside his ribs again.

Sarah leaned toward him and took a deep breath. “Your mother was my friend.” She looked worried, like she was saying something wrong, but she didn’t look at Reece, just at Jordan. “I had no idea what . . . what was happening in your house. But I feel like I got to know you because of all the time you spent with Danny. I care about you, Jordan. And so . . . I want to help you.”

Jordan stared. He didn’t want to say yes. Why didn’t someone just
tell
him what to do? He hated choices. They were impossible. And what would happen to him if he said no? At least he knew the Ladens. He knew he had to go somewhere.

Jordan felt like he was stepping off the high dive. “All right,” he said, surprised by the spinning feeling that rushed into his head.

Reece grinned. “Whew. Thank you, guy. I can breathe a little easier.”

Sarah smiled, too, but Jordan thought she looked scared. He knew
he
was scared. What would his mom do?

“When do I come over?” he asked.

“I . . . I don’t know.” Sarah turned to Reece.

“Probably not until next week. Sarah’s got to get licensed by the state to be a foster mom. We’re going to speed up the paperwork on her, since this is considered an Emergency Foster Care situation. We’ll help her get it all done, but there’s rules we need to follow. Laws. That sort of stuff.” Reece waved his hand as if laws and rules were silly. “And your therapist wants to meet with Sarah. She wants to meet the whole family, with you there, too.”

The gerbil wheel picked up speed. Jordan didn’t like that idea. He’d gotten used to Dr. Bryn. He didn’t mind drawing pictures for her or playing with her houses and figures, but he didn’t want to do that in front of anyone else. He didn’t want to tell Reece that, though, because Reece would tell Dr. Bryn, and then she’d ask him why, and he’d have to try to explain it. He didn’t
want
to understand the things she wanted him to talk about. So instead he asked, “Do I go back to school?”

Reece asked, “Do you want to?”

Yes
, Jordan wanted to say. He wished more than anything—well, actually he wished for a lot of things: that he was at home and his mom and dad were normal, that he still had his cat and his grandma, that he’d actually managed to kill himself—but
almost
more than anything he wished to go back to school and learn new lists of words. But now . . . everyone knew. He knew people would look at him and think about the stuff they read in the papers.

Jordan needed to know something. He tried to think of the perfect angle, the right approach to get the information he wanted. “What if people say bad things about my mom?”

“A lot of people probably
will
say bad things about your mom,” Reece said.

“She didn’t do anything.”

“The way most people see it,” Reece said, “her job as your mother was to protect you. And she didn’t do a very good job. That makes a lot of people angry at her.”

Sarah nodded and looked sad.

Jordan didn’t think the police had all the facts. He tried to decide if that was good news or very bad. He wasn’t sure, but he decided to try for more information.

“It wasn’t her fault,” he said.

“Help me understand it,” Sarah said. “I get angry at your mom, too. If it’s really not her fault, tell me why.”

They watched him and waited. He tried to think of what to say. “She . . . she wasn’t . . .” he wished he knew how to explain. “She didn’t . . .”

Jordan didn’t know how to tell them his mom would stay in her bed with a cloth over her eyes in the dark. When she did that, Jordan knew it was his fault. He
tried
to do what they wanted, but maybe if he did better, she would get out of bed and be his mom again. Jordan would bring her party leftovers and beg her to eat. One time she knocked the food out of his hands, splattering her bedroom wall with red pasta sauce. “Stay the fuck away from me!” she screamed. He backed out of the room, hardly able to breathe, but stopped when she whispered, “Why do you feed me? You shouldn’t fucking feed me.” And she’d turned all mean and ugly, her face changing into someone he didn’t know. “You’d still feed me no matter
what
I did, wouldn’t you?” It was like he’d lost his body—he couldn’t move or defend himself. He just stood there when she slapped him across the mouth and jabbed her finger hard into his chest. “I could burn you. I could cut you. I could do
anything
. And you’d still come sniveling back to me,”—and she’d started mimicking him, in this baby voice that wasn’t how he talked at all—“ ‘Mom, are you okay?’ ‘Mom, please eat,’ ‘Mom, don’t cry,’ ” until she was throwing things. When a lamp crashed into the wall, he’d run outside and hidden in the woods behind the house. He stayed outside until dark, shaking and crying, but when he finally came back, she acted all sweet and nice, as if nothing had happened, just like she did after the parties.

“Jordan?” Reece asked. “You okay?”

Jordan shook himself. “What about my dad?”

“That’s the thing, guy,” Reece said. “We have evidence on your father. But your mom’s not in any of the pictures.”