The Kindness of Strangers (49 page)

Jordan ducked to avoid getting hit with it himself. “Hey!”

Nate chucked the container down the hall, where it hit the wall and split open, showering them with sudsy blue drops. As detergent splattered him, Jordan felt something rumble up through his belly, an unfamiliar sensation that scared him for a minute. It was out of control like that yell earlier. Only when the sound spilled out of his mouth did he recognize it as laughter.

“C’mon!” Nate said.

Jordan looked at him. After what he’d done last night, here was Nate not hating him, not hurting him, saying he could still stay with the Ladens. Fueled by the crazy laughter bubbling up from deep inside him, Jordan jumped up to join Nate at the laundry closet. Jordan snatched a bleach bottle and took off running, splashing the expensive velvet wallpaper. Nate followed, dumping handfuls of powder detergent on the floor.

They ran into the bathroom, where they emptied the medicine cabinet, broke mouthwash bottles, squeezed out shampoo, and scribbled with lipstick and soap all over the mirrors and shower walls. Nate wrote bad words, but Jordan just scribbled and drew heavy
X
s, pushing hard, smashing lipsticks and buckling bars of soap. The whole time that laughter kept coming. It hurt almost, like bad hiccups, but it also felt good.

Laughing hysterically, they tossed rolls of toilet paper back and forth, wrapping it around light fixtures and furniture, trailing it through the hall, the wrecked kitchen, and out the back door, leaving it draped over bushes and statues and the fountain, all the way to the tennis court, where Nate tossed the last empty cardboard roll over the net.

They faced each other, panting. Then Nate started walking, and Jordan followed.

Chapter Twenty-seven
Nate

N
ate didn’t want the long walk to end. He wanted to
stop walking
, sure, but he wanted to kick back on the porch swing with a klezmer CD in his Walkman, not deal with all the high-pitched hyperness that was going to come down when he showed up at home with Jordan.

Sure enough, when Nate opened the front door, Mrs. Ripley was in the living room and saw them first. “They’re back! Safe and sound!” she called, starting a commotion.

“Where
were
you?” Mom asked Nate, coming into the room with Kramble and Ali. Nate could see the blue veins in Mom’s lower eyelids. “I thought
you
were missing, too!”

She hugged him before he could answer. He tried to step away, but she took his face in her hands. When she held his face like that, Nate felt like a giant, so much taller than she was. He tilted his head, pulling away. “Hey, I found him, didn’t I?”

Mom tried to hug Jordan, too, but he did his usual prickly routine, sending out signals as welcoming as a damn cactus. Mom settled for putting her hands on Jordan’s shoulders and saying, “Thank God you’re back. Please don’t scare us like that again.”

Jordan stared at the carpet.

Danny ran down the stairs, then stopped. “Where did you go?” Danny asked. “Did you get lost?”

Jordan paused a moment, then said, “Yeah, I did.”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Danny said. The way he looked down at his shoes made Nate believe him.

“I found him at his house,” Nate said to Kramble, but the unspoken
I told you so
in his own voice made him feel like a brat. Nate had told the police that’s where Jordan would go.

Kramble didn’t seem to notice. He stepped forward, out of the kitchen doorway. “What did you do to your hand?” he asked.

Jordan opened his fist and held out his palm, crusty with blood. “I cut it.” Ali stepped in closer. So did Mrs. Ripley, trying to see.

“Breaking a window?” Kramble asked.

“Later,” Jordan said. “Inside the house.”

“He sort of trashed the place,” Nate said. Jordan looked at him quickly, like he expected them to get in trouble. Nate smiled and tried to get the kid to relax.

Mrs. Ripley clucked her tongue, but Kramble didn’t seem too surprised. “Trashed the place, huh?” He looked at Jordan. “Feel good?”

Jordan shrugged but looked at Nate again, grinning cautiously.

“Can I take a better look at that?” Ali asked. Jordan held out his hand. Kramble stepped away, as if to give them space, which Nate thought was cool. “You could’ve used a stitch or two,” Ali said. “But it looks too late. No big deal. Sarah, you have medical tape? Or Band-Aids? I could butterfly this up for him.”

Danny said, “I’ll get it.” Nate turned to watch him run up the stairs to the bathroom and saw Mackenzie leaning in the kitchen doorway. He shook his head, but, damn, it really
was
Mackenzie. She stood there, in faded jeans and a yellow T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail. He couldn’t help picturing her nude in the candlelight. It freaked him out to even have that thought in the same room with his mother. But he remembered telling Mom that he and Mackenzie hadn’t—which freaked him out even more. He’d told his mom everything when he’d woken her up to tell her Jordan was missing. He hadn’t meant to tell her that part, but it was part of how Jordan had misinterpreted their talk. Nate glanced at Mom. She smiled.

He looked from Mom to Mackenzie, trying to stop the rush of blood to his face. “Hey. Hi. W-what are you doing here?”

“I called for you, and your mom told me what was going on.”

Nate saw Jordan shrink, but Nate was sure Mom didn’t tell the whole story. “Uh . . .” He felt like a moron, standing between his mom and Mackenzie. What should he say? Why was Mom smiling? Why was
Mackenzie
smiling? He thought he’d ruined everything with her.

Kramble ended the painful silence. “I’m gonna put in a call, let them know Jordan’s back.” He left the room.

“I should call Reece!” Mom said. “He’s still looking, too. And I’ll let Bryn know.”

Jordan ducked his head and pulled his hand from Ali’s. “We need to wash that,” she said, wrinkling her nose, as though feeling that sting herself.

Jordan walked into the kitchen and washed the cut himself. Nate followed everyone else. In the back of the small crowd, Mackenzie reached for his hand. “You okay?” she mouthed.

He nodded. “I got in big trouble. For going to your—”

“I know,” she whispered. “Your mom and I talked.”

“Whoa. What do you mean, you ‘talked’?” He glanced at the sink. Jordan had dried his hand, and Ali examined it under the bright kitchen lights. Nate got a glimpse of a deep gash in the fleshy part between Jordan’s thumb and first finger. “What did you talk about?”

“Everything,” she whispered, her eyes sparkling with a “wouldn’t you like to know?” tease.

What the hell did
that
mean?

“Your mom is cool, Nate. We talked a long time.”

Nate felt like they’d been looking at naked pictures of him. But that made him think of Jordan, and just that glimmer of what the kid must feel cross-checked him in the chest.

“It’s okay,” Mackenzie insisted. “She invited me to come over.”

Nate wondered if Mom planned on humiliating him by lecturing him and Mackenzie together. But Mom already knew that they didn’t . . . Oh, shit . . . what was going on?

Ali taped up Jordan’s wound. She made him copy a series of gestures with his hand—making a fist, opening his hand wide, making a thumbs-up sign. “It’s a long way from your heart,” she joked. “I think you’ll live.”

Jordan turned his hand over a few times and held it up with a huge grin. “I got this cut when I broke the statue on the coffee table,” he announced, like he’d just made the winning goal for the Stanley Cup. Nate wondered if this was the first injury that Jordan didn’t have to lie about. He squeezed Mackenzie’s hand.

“All right. I’ve gotta get going,” Ali said. “I’m glad you’re back, kiddo. These little Houdini acts get old. Don’t expect us to be so nice next time.” She scanned the room and stopped at Mackenzie. “You need a ride home?”

“She’s staying here,” Mom said. “Her folks are out of town.”

Nate’s jaw hurt, he dropped it so fast.

Ali nodded. “Okay. See ya.”

“I’ll walk out with you,” Mrs. Ripley said. “I need to get home.” Please. For what? Didn’t her entire social life revolve around whatever crisis-of-the-day the Ladens were having?

Ali and Mrs. Ripley headed for the living room. Kramble and Danny followed.

As they left the room, Nate asked, to make sure he wasn’t hearing things, “Mackenzie’s spending the night?”

Mom’s smile bordered on evil. “Yeah, I’m thinking of giving up the catering and running an orphanage.”

Mackenzie laughed, but Jordan stood up from the table and said, in a hard, cold voice, “I’m not an orphan.”

But he was, Nate thought. An orphan of the living. Nate felt sorry for Mom, who looked like she’d swallowed glass. “You’re right,” Mom said. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny.”

Jordan turned and walked out of the room.

Mom sighed and tugged on her braid, over her shoulder. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Why did I say that?”

Nate watched Mackenzie pat his mother’s arm. Why did he feel as though, in the hours he’d been gone, his mom had built some sort of camp with Mackenzie? “Is she . . . is she really spending the night?”

“It’s too scary to be sleeping in that big house all alone,” Mom said. “I called and left a message at her folks’ hotel, told them she’d be here and to call if they have questions.”

“They won’t care,” Mackenzie said with a shrug. Nate wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had
offered
to stay, after all. “You act pretty weirded out about this,” Mackenzie said to Nate. “Don’t you want me to stay?”

Mom turned around and busied herself with some fake job on the counter. Nate remembered Mackenzie asking him to leave and thought about throwing that back at her. But, really, this was better. He didn’t
want
to break up with her. “No, I want you to stay.”

Everyone came back into the kitchen. Shit, why was Kramble sticking around? Why didn’t he leave when Ali did?

“Nate, you want to go get some sheets and a pillow to make up the sofa bed?” Mom asked. “Mackenzie can sleep down here.”

He left the kitchen, almost grateful to get away and be alone for a minute.

He climbed the stairs and went to the linen closet. As he selected the nicest sheets, flowered ones that his mom put on her bed, he heard a make-your-skin-crawl scratching sound that curled up his toes inside his shoes. Shit, did they have mice? Or was it bats in the wall?

Clutching the sheets in one arm, he poked at a stack of others, expecting to see a small gray body scurry away. Nothing. He tapped the wall. A stronger scratching answered him. Then a thump, like something falling over.

The hair rose on his neck. That wasn’t something small in the wall—that was something big behind the linen closet, which meant it was in Nate’s old closet, now Jordan’s.

Nate opened Jordan’s bedroom door. Everything looked normal, but he heard two more thumps. Nate dropped the sheets. He went to the closet. As his hand closed on the knob, the odor hit him. The unmistakable ammonia sting of rabbit pee.

He opened the door, and a very pissed-off Klezmer blinked in the light. The closet floor was littered with his raisinlike droppings and a pool of the tea-colored urine.

“Hey, buddy.” Nate scooped up the rabbit, even though its paws were wet with pee. He hugged Klezmer to his chest and stared down into Jordan’s closet. A bowl of water sat there, and an empty bowl with dusty crumbs of food pellets in it. The rabbit hadn’t been shut in the closet on accident. Why the hell would the kid do something so mean?

Nate carried the rabbit down the stairs. He wasn’t sure what he would say, but he knew he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t found Klezmer. He took a deep breath and remembered the kid reaching for him in that darkened room, tried to remember how Jordan had seen that act as something other than what it was—and he tried to look at this hidden rabbit through Jordan’s eyes. What did it mean? What had the kid misinterpreted this time?

As he entered the kitchen, Danny looked up and said, “Klezmer!”

Jordan stared at the rabbit with an expression like he’d just been slapped.

“He was in the
house
?” Danny asked.

Nate nodded.

“Where?” Mom asked.

“He was in Jordan’s room.”

Everyone looked at Jordan, who still sat frozen, his mouth stuck in that surprised O. Nate wondered if this was the first time Jordan had been caught without a ready lie.

“What’s the deal?” Nate tried not to sound mad; he didn’t want to send the kid running again. “You knew that Mom and Danny were looking for him. Why would you hide him in a closet?”

Jordan’s eyes shone as if he might cry. He closed his mouth and seemed to struggle to form words. When he did, his voice was so quiet Nate hardly heard him when he said, “I . . . I just wanted him to be safe.”

“Safe?” Mom asked. “From what?”

Jordan picked at the tape on his hand. “You were pretty mad.”

No one breathed.