Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (17 page)

Nothing, however, looked quite as without hope as the house on Ponte Vedra Boulevard where Kade stood out front waving us in.

“Lordy,” Mercedes said. “This where he gon’
live
?”

“Talk about your fixer-uppers,” Flannery said.

It in fact gave new meaning to the term. Sandwiched between a respectable elevated A-frame and a proud three-story, Kade’s curb appeal consisted of overgrown sawgrass and sea oats that screamed for a machete. The driveway we bounced onto was nothing more than hard-packed sand, the path to the back steps a mere trail of wet leaves. Of course, a box on stilts really didn’t require much of a grand entrance.

Kade came to the driver’s side window of the van and grinned like he was welcoming us to a McMansion.

“Thanks for doing this, guys,” he said. “Come on in—I have breakfast ready.”

As the van doors opened and the Sisters and Desmond climbed out, Kade put his lips close to my ear.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “Show me your house.”

He gave me a long look before he said, “Okay.”

I followed him up a long set of steps to the kitchen at the back of the place where Hank was unpacking a single box of cooking supplies.

“I know what I’m getting you for a housewarming present, Kade,” Hank said when we walked in.

“What?”

“Everything.” Her lips twitched. “Did that breakfast I smell come from Sacred Grounds?”

Kade grinned and crossed his fingers. “Patrice and I are like this.”

Everyone chortled but me. The charm that usually delighted me in Kade was so Troy-like I had to leave the kitchen.

The Sisters were crowding out the sliding glass door that led from the tiny living room onto a deck running the width of the house on the beach side. I stayed inside for a minute to get my bearings both emotionally and literally, seeing how the floor rippled like the ocean itself. One wrong step and I was sure I’d fall through the parquet.

“The shower leaks, and I’m having to stage all-out war with the palmetto bugs,” Kade said behind me. “But I got a heck of a deal on the place. Stan said he’d help me shore it up.”

I hoped our HOG friend knew how to install a whole new subfloor. But I nodded, attempted to smile, and joined Desmond and the Sisters on the deck, which was in far better shape than anything else I’d seen. It looked practically brand new, in fact, and provided all anyone really needed with a view like that. I told myself I wasn’t checking to see if Chief was there, but I wasn’t very convincing. He wasn’t, and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or sad.

While the rest of the group pawed through the bag of Patrice’s goodies, I took in the Atlantic, which sparkled no more than a hundred feet away, its tentative early-morning waves ebbing onto the firm sand I’d grown up with. A long plank path led politely to it, seeming almost apologetic, as if it were sorry to disturb the underbrush at all, though its very presence kept people from trampling it down. I could almost hear Owen telling me that sensitive plants grow by the inch and die by the foot. Sensitive the tall sea grass and palmettos might be, but they held the sand in place and kept the beach from disappearing into the sea.

“I say we take a walk before we go to work,” Kade said.

“Do we have to go in the water?” Jasmine said. “I can’t swim, Miss Angel.”

“No swimming involved, Jazz,” Kade said.

“Seriously, you don’t know how to swim?” Flannery said. “I thought everybody did.”

I saw Gigi stiffen. “Everybody didn’t have a mama that sent them to swimming lessons.”

Mercedes uttered an “Mmm-mm.” I was watching Desmond. He hadn’t had a mama who hooked him up with the YMCA either, and in my year as his new mama other things had taken priority. Like breaking his petty-theft habit and getting rid of his nightmares and cleaning up his rainbow of a vocabulary.

Rochelle and Flannery were already down the steps and Desmond was not to be left behind. When Mercedes and Jasmine and Gigi all hung back, something occurred to me with a spasm of sadness.

“You’ve never seen the ocean before, have you?” I said.

“No, ma’am,” Jasmine said.

Gigi scoffed toward the horizon. “I’ve survived without it.”

“Mm-hmm,” Mercedes said. “But we ain’t—aren’t—just about survivin’ here. We’re about livin.’” She looked at me, though whether she saw the sheer awe in my eyes, I couldn’t tell. “I think we been missin’ out on somethin’, Miss Angel.”

“You surely have,” I said. “Come on. I’ll go down with you.”

Mercedes nodded, gaze on the sighing ocean below. Jasmine took Gigi’s hand—who by some miracle didn’t yank herself away—and the three of them somehow managed to get down the stairs and onto the path in tandem. A lump formed in my throat as I followed, but, then, what
wasn’t
making me cry that day? Including Kade at the bottom saying, “This will cheer you up.”

He strode off down the beach with the wind ruffling the hair that matched the sun. I hadn’t seen him step too far out of his lawyerly persona before. Just another stinging reminder of how much I’d missed. He definitely had Troy’s outdoorsy-ness, without the ceaseless competition. Troy would have had everybody organized for a boogie board event by now, and who cared if people didn’t know how to swim?

The nausea started again.

I focused abruptly on my other son, who was chasing Flannery out ahead of Kade. She’d captured her mane with a hair tie but tendrils danced around her head in a halo as she skittered, plover-like, across the sand. Every time Desmond’s endlessly long legs carried him close to her, she darted away with a move my gangly kid could never hope to copy. Still, he laughed, his enormous, handsome grin, even when she neatly dodged him with a series of flips.

“She got gymnastic lessons too,” I heard Gigi say.

That was between squeals as the ocean crept over her feet and Jasmine’s and splashed past Mercedes’s knees. The sheer abandon in their laughter was something I seldom heard, and I stopped to steep myself in it. Although Rochelle didn’t make a sound, she did point toward the sea, where a pair of dolphins stitched their way through the top terrace of waves.

It was like watching a family. Mercedes was right: it was
my
family. Once again the joy was beyond real, and I, too, flung my head back to add my laughter to theirs. But the sound caught in my throat.

Ahead, Flannery leapt just out of Desmond’s reach and charged headlong into the surf. Desmond stopped short with the water to his shins, and even from where I stood
I could see his backbone go rigid. Flannery popped up from the foam, throwing out her arms to wave him in, but he remained frozen on the shore.

I felt Kade’s hand on my arm and only then realized I had taken a step forward.

“I’d let him handle it,” he said.

“He can’t swim. She’s humiliating him.”

“You’ll humiliate him worse if you go over there.”

“I can’t watch.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t.”

I looked at Kade, but his face was serious.

“Maybe I’ll just … kind of … take a walk the other way,” I said.

“Fabulous idea.”

“Just don’t let him drown.”

I went far enough so that I could no longer hear the squeals, or the lack of them, and then I stopped and shaded my eyes to look out over the water. A few breakers lifted to reveal their lacy faces before they curled into themselves. Beyond them the sea had the look of the old-fashioned icing Sylvia used to spread on the cakes she baked for me, all glazed and peaked.

She was the one who had taught me how to love the Atlantic: to dive through its waves and savor its salt and let it carry me, helpless and delighted, toward the shore. While my parents went off to high-class Hawaii and the classy Caribbean, she brought me every summer weekend to this, the middle-class ocean. She always said I had to get some of it on me, which my mother clearly did not do in her Christian Dior swimwear.

Sylvia would point out that the beach looked all the same if you only saw it from the deck of your summer estate. You had to come down here and put yourself in the midst of it to see what was really happening close up. The sand spurs. The horseshoe crab eggs formed into mermaid collars. The cities of shells from the million animals who once lived and thrived in the sea, washed up in a crowd by the surf.

I tore my thoughts from Desmond’s inevitable shame at the hands of a child barely a year older than he was, a child I wasn’t liking much at the moment, and I watched the sea foam gather on my toes and remembered how I always loved plunging my feet into the sand. The warmth and softness were among the few happy reminders of my childhood, before I knew that I was mostly unloved, before I figured out the emptiness in me was called lonely.

Just like Gigi and Jasmine and Mercedes and probably Flannery, I really was alone as a kid, except for Sylvia.

And Troy.

As hard as the fingers of recent memory clenched around my heart, I couldn’t resist the force that sent me beneath it. To the Sunday afternoons when Sylvia shook out the wistful longing for connection with her picnic blanket and sat little Allison and little Troy down to Yankee coleslaw and baked bean sandwiches and all the other things we learned to eat from her New York taste. To the shouts of, “You two go out any further and I’ll knock your heads together!” which Troy and I laughed at as we ventured bravely beyond yet another set of breakers. To the verses of “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” she belted out from the front seat of the enormous Pontiac while we succumbed to sunburned sleep against each other’s shoulders in the back.

I pulled my hands to my shoulders now and closed my eyes. The incoming tide splashed me to the thighs, but it couldn’t wash away those memories. Or the pain that usually kept them safely tucked away in my soul.

A throat cleared softly. I looked up to see Bonner and Liz standing only a few yards away.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt your prayers,” he said.

“You didn’t.”

“I thought you might want to know what I found out about Flannery.” Liz put up her hand. “More like what I didn’t find out, although that in itself reveals a lot.”

“Let’s walk,” I said, and looped my arm through hers. I suddenly had to get moving.

“I checked every list on every website,” she said. “No Flannery Donohue has been reported missing.”

“So maybe she’s not from around here. She did tell me her friend Tango wasn’t.”

Liz shook her head. “These were all national lists, and they include Canada. Unless she flew in from Europe or something, she’d be on one of them if she was reported.”

“So what does that mean? That her parents don’t give a rip that their fourteen-year-old has run away from home?”

“Would you come to that conclusion?” Bonner said to Liz.

She pulled her face into a grimace, not an expression I saw often on those cherubic cheeks. “There are other possibilities. A parent could be looking for her without contacting the police. Maybe they don’t want her to have a record.”

“They care if she has a record but they don’t care that she might be hurt or hungry. Or dead.”

“Parental neglect is one of the main reason kids run. If the parents are into drugs or they’re serious alcoholics they might not even know she’s gone yet.”

“They’re on one heck of a binge, then, because it’s been at least a week, and probably longer judging from the shape she was in the first time I saw her.”

I dodged a crab scurrying sideways toward the water. Liz extricated herself from my grip, while Bonner took my elbow on the other side.

“You want to slow down a little, Legs?” he said.

“Sorry.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “I would love to get her parents alone in a room.”

“That was going to be my next suggestion,” Liz said.

I stopped. “Are you serious?”

“Well, not
alone.
You should probably take Chief with you.”

Bonner choked as if he’d consumed an entire cat.

“Or Kade.” Liz’s eyes began to blink.

I shoved the wind-tossed hair out of my face. “You’re saying I should actually have a conversation with these people?”

“Off the record. As in, you didn’t get this idea from me and I’m not going to be there.”

“Tell me some more.”

Liz took a step closer to me, as if she were afraid the gulls might overhear and carry the news straight to her superiors.

“If Flannery is more than her parents can handle right now, and they see how you are with her, they might be very open to signing over guardianship to you.
Then
I could step in and handle the legalities for you.”

It was my turn to put my hand up. “Whoa. When did I say I wanted to be her foster mother?”

“You didn’t. But that’s the only way you’re going to be sure she isn’t going to land in lockdown or with people who could end up being worse than her parents. Or out on the street again.”

“There has to be some other alternative.”

“Since you’ve already successfully fostered one child, I can guarantee you they’ll give you custody of another one.”

I looked at Bonner. “Am I talking to myself here?”

He put up
both
hands.

“You can’t blame me for thinking you’d be perfect,” Liz said. “But if you want me to, I’ll look through the files and see if there might be somebody else …”

I could feel my eyes narrowing. “But.”

“I just don’t see anybody else being able to look at that child
like
she’s a child once they know that she’s had to work as a prostitute. Meanwhile, you need to find out if she was abused at home. Otherwise I have no choice but to report her as a runaway and then she
will
be arrested—”

“But we don’t even know who her parents are. How am I supposed to find them?”

“From the only person who knows who they are and where they are.”

I looked down the beach where the rest of the group were mere tiny figures against the sun, Flannery among them.

“I seriously doubt that she’s going to tell me,” I said.

Bonner shrugged. “She told you her name.”

“Which could still be an alias. The fact that you can’t find her on any list kind of points to that.”