How Forever Feels (17 page)

“What are you doing here?” Jack's voice, low, almost hostile, made even Maya do a double take.

“I…I—” Blinking incredibly fast, Stella took a step back and swallowed hard. “I'm sorry. I just wanted to talk to you about something; I had no idea…”

She darted a quick and twitchy glance at Maya.

“You couldn't have called first?”

Maya had never seen Jack like this; his jaw so tight, it looked like it might snap with each word, his hands wrapped white-knuckled around Pete's leash and his eyes…yikes…there was a storm she'd never imagined he had inside.

“No, I—” Stella licked her lips and took another step back. “I couldn't…I didn't…I didn't want…”

With her fingernails leaving half-moon gouges in her leather purse, Stella took a second to inhale deeply.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, quiet, but seemingly sincere. “I shouldn't have come.”

Neither Jack nor Maya argued; they both just stood there watching Stella make a run for the stairs, and it wasn't until the door closed behind her that Jack finally turned to look at Maya, his eyes still storming mad.

“Are you okay?”

It took her a second to respond, not because Stella had freaked her out, but because Jack had.

“Yes, of course, I'm fine. Are
you
?”

“Me?” He ushered her and Pete back in the room, then pressed his hand flat against it until it closed. “I'm fine.”

“Good, but I think you just scared the crap out of poor Stella.”

“Poor—?” Jack stopped, inhaled deeply. “What the hell was she even doing here?”

“I don't know, you showed up right after I opened the door so she didn't exactly have a chance to say anything.” She started to sit on the edge of the bed, thought better of it, and moved to the chair at the desk again. “Did you see her face, though? Whatever she wanted to talk to you about must be something important. What do you think it was?”

“How the hell would I know? I haven't known her long enough for her to be talking to me about anything important.”

“Wait. What?” Maya frowned. “She's been with Will for two years, Jack, you must know each other pretty well by now.”

Jack sank down on the bed and leaned over with his elbows on his knees. “The day after I saw you at the pub, that was the first time I ever met Stella.”

Maybe if she blinked hard, it would make his words make sense. Nope.

“How is that even possible? Two years and you didn't meet her until a month ago?”

“Couple times I got stuck talking to her on the phone.” He didn't look up, just shook his head slowly. “But I just couldn't do it. It was hard enough seeing Will, there was no way I could handle meeting her, not after what she did.”

“But what about…I don't know…Christmas? Thanksgiving?
Genie's birthday?
”

“If she was there, I didn't go.” His head kept shaking, slowly, as he flexed his hands, folded them together, then flexed them again. “I didn't tell them that's why I didn't go, but Stella's not stupid.”

“Oh Jack.” Pushing off the chair, she squatted down in front of him, took his hands in hers and squeezed them tight. “You really are the sweetest guy ever.”

“Yeah?” he snorted, staring at their hands. “What about Alec?”

“He's close,” she said quietly. “But you…you've had my back this whole time, haven't you? Even when I thought you'd deserted me, you hadn't. Not really.”

“I'm sorry, Snip.” Easing his hand free, he brushed her hair back from her face, then sighed when she pressed her cheek against his palm. “I wish I could've…but Genie—”

“I know.”

“No. You don't.” He dropped his hand and pushed off the bed, putting as much distance between them as he could in the cramped room. “You don't know what it was like before she saved me.”

“Saved you?” She took a step toward him, but he stopped her flat with a raised hand. “What do you mean she saved you?”

Jack's complexion turned a faint shade of green as he let out a loud breath followed by a couple curses.

“I can't do this. Not here.” Tucking the room key in his pocket, he tossed Maya a ball cap, pointed at her jacket, then Pete. “Let's go get some air. You stay.”

And with that, he marched straight to the door and held it open until she hustled out into the hall. He didn't say another word until they were a good couple hundred meters down the trail around the golf course, and as soon as he started talking, Maya wished she could tell him to stop.

“You've been BAMBOOZLED!”

Joey Tribbiani,
Friends,
“The One with the Baby Shower”

It took Jack longer than he thought it would to start, because he didn't know where to begin. Maya obviously knew he'd been in foster care, but if he had any hope of her understanding this, she needed to know everything, so with one deep breath, Jack jammed his hands deep in his pockets and started at the beginning, or at least as far back as he could remember.

“I was six and a half when the Ministry placed me with the Horbecks. It rained so hard that first night, and when they put me in that little bedroom at the top of the stairs, I just lay there in bed scared out of my freakin' mind.”

He paused, swallowed, and forced himself to go on.

“I remember trying to tell them I'd be fine at home, that Mom left me there all the time so it was okay if she did it again but they wouldn't even listen, they just put me up in that bedroom, turned off the light and told me to go to sleep, that everything would be fine. I don't know how long I was up there, it seemed like forever, but it couldn't have been more than a couple minutes, when their dog Sadie came in, climbed up next to me, and didn't move all night. God, she was huge; Saint Bernard, maybe, I don't know, but she took up almost the whole bed.”

“Jack.” Maya's voice was so quiet, so soft.

“Anyway.” He gave his head a quick shake and forced the memory away with a couple hard blinks. “I don't think I was there very long, a couple weeks maybe, before they moved me over to the Carpenters' place.”

“Do you remember everywhere they sent you?”

“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. He could even recite the addresses and phone number of each place, as well as the names of everyone who lived there and what each place smelled like. “Most of them were okay. I mean, there was a definite difference in how they treated their own kids and how they treated me, but I think that's normal, right, and I wasn't in any one place long enough to dig in and become part of them, you know?”

Of course she didn't know—how could she? Most people had no idea how many kids were out there bouncing from house to house, resigned to the fact that a “decent” family was as good as they were ever going to get. And it didn't matter where the kid came from or what he did, he wasn't
their
kid, he was disposable, and it was a rare foster family that had what it took to keep someone else's kid for any length of time.

“I've never understood why they moved you so much.” She turned her face up to his, peering out from beneath his ball cap. “You weren't a troublemaker, were you?”

“No. A couple times they moved me because I didn't get along with the real kids, but the other times, I don't know. Sometimes the family's circumstances changed, sometimes they moved, and sometimes they just changed their mind and didn't want me there anymore. The last place, though, the Weigerts, they sent me packing when they found weed in my room—can't really blame them for kicking me out.”

“But nine times in six years? Surely the Ministry must know that's not good for any kid.”

“No, but what else can they do?”

She pinched her lips together and exhaled slowly. “Go on.”

The rain hadn't let up even a little bit, but Maya hadn't so much as whispered a complaint about them being out there getting soaked. She just kept on moving, her legs working twice as hard as his to clear the same distance.

“When they pulled me out of the Weigerts' place, they told me I'd be in the group home a week, maybe two, and then they'd have a new place for me, but that didn't happen.”

He almost wished she'd interrupt him so he could put off the rest of it a little longer. She didn't.

“The house I was in was co-ed, girls on the third floor, boys on the first and the general rooms in the middle, and it was pretty full most of the time. So they put me in a room with three other boys and for the first couple of months it was fine.”

He took another second or two to swallow the bile that crept up his throat.

“Just before Christmas that year, they moved two more into our room—Jason Ascough and Bryce Jorcke.”
Just saying their names…

Maya's hand against his arm instantly silenced him. He'd been looking down as they walked, but when he looked up, there were a couple of people walking toward them, close enough that Jack could hear their conversation clearly; they would have been able to hear him, too.

There was a round of smiles and “hello”s as they passed, but Jack made sure there was plenty of distance between them before saying anything else.

“It started with a couple punches every once in a while, not just to me, to the other guys in the room, too, but I was already five ten and weighed about a buck thirty, so I guess it was more fun for them to hone in on the gangly kid whose arms looked like a couple of pencils and who was so easy to knock down.”

He couldn't see Maya's face anymore, because she kept dipping her chin lower until the brim of the cap hid her almost completely.

“The other guys knew if they weren't with Ascough and Jorcke, they were against them, and nobody wanted to be where I was, especially after they watched Ascough put me in a headlock and bash my head into the sink.”

Maya stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at him, her head shaking slowly as tears rolled down both cheeks. God he hated doing this to her, but if there was another way to make her fully understand, he didn't know what it was. Forcing one side of his mouth up in what had no hope of looking anything like a smile, he swiped his thumbs slowly across her cheeks, but the tears just kept coming.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “But I really need you to know this.”

With her bottom lip clamped tight behind her teeth, she barely nodded, and they started down the trail again.

“I told the counselor the truth about that first time.” Jack snorted out a tight, choked laugh. “But that was a mistake I never made again.”

“How often did they do this to you?”

“Enough that I ran out of excuses to give the doctors in emerg.”

He didn't think he hesitated that long, but he must have, because Maya's voice pulled him out of his fog.

“What else?”

“A couple more times I had to get stitches, a minor concussion, bruised ribs, that kind of shit, but mostly it was everyday stuff, you know, a punch here, a trip there, nothing that required medical. But then Erica moved in upstairs.

“I wouldn't even look at her because she had a thing going with Ascough, and I wasn't going to give him another reason to take the boots to me.” Jack rolled his neck a little and forced himself to keep talking. “It was a couple days after my birthday and the two of them got into a fight about something, so to piss him off, she told him she'd let me feel her up on my birthday.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.” Jack blew the word out on a hard breath.

“What did he do?”

“Welllllll…” He drew the word out, trying and failing to make the whole thing a little less horrible. “It was kind of a group effort, that one.”

“Jack.” Obviously she wasn't interested in the lighter version.

“When I got to the room that night, four of them jumped me and held onto me, each one with an arm or a leg, while Ascough let me have it. I tried to fight them off but I had about as much muscle on my whole body as you have in your big toe, and I swear to God Ascough must have been on steroids. Short, but holy shit, he was like a pit bull. And I remember it felt like I had cement blocks for legs, because I couldn't move, but it was just Jorcke and one of the other guys who'd wrapped themselves around each of my legs and were sitting on my feet.

“No one said anything the whole time; all you heard was Ascough huffing every time he threw a punch and then the crunch when he connected with bone. I kept twisting and pulling my arms as hard as I could, figuring if I could get those free I could at least cover my head, but then I jerked too hard to the right while the guy holding my left arm jerked the other and my shoulder popped out of its joint. He let me go pretty quick after that, but the arm was useless to me then.”

“Jeezus, Jack.” She'd stopped walking again and just stood staring at him with her hand over her mouth.

“Yeah, I guess it freaked them all out, because the other guy let go of my right arm just as Ascough swung a bat down on me. I got my arm up in time to protect my head, but he had a helluva swing.” Jack rubbed his right arm where the bat had hit him. “Snapped like a twig.”

“Stop!” Hands covering her whole face, she stumbled back a step, then bent at the waist and pressed her hands against her knees. “I can't…don't make me listen to any more.
Please
.”

“I'm sorry, Snip.” Stepping closer, he set his hand on her back and smoothed it up and down the rain-soaked jacket slowly. “That's it; that's the worst of it.”

When she didn't stand up right away, Jack curled his hands around her shoulders, pulled her up, then wrapped his arms around her and held on while she sniffed against him. The top of her head reached the middle of his chest and that's where she clung, her small fists wrapped tight around his jacket.

“Why? Why didn't you tell someone?”

“I tried that, remember? And all they did was stitch me up and throw me back in the room with him. They sent him to juvie for a little while after he broke my arm, but he was coming back, we all knew that, and none of the other guys was going to do anything to help and I don't blame them. I don't know if I would've, either.”

“But why didn't they put you somewhere else?”

“There was nowhere else for me to go, Maya. At the best of times, there aren't many people who want to foster fourteen-year-old boys, and no one was going to take on a kid like me who'd already been busted with weed and who was either really accident prone or who liked to fight.”

“So what happened?” She eased her grip on him a little but didn't step back, so he didn't let her go.

“They fixed me up in emerg, sent me back to the house, and for a little while everything was fine. Ascough was in juvie and Jorcke wasn't about to do anything on his own, but he was still getting messages from Ascough somehow and was only too happy to pass them on to me.”

“What kind of messages?”

“Stupid shit, like what Ascough was going to do to me when he got out.” He tightened his hold on her for a second. “And we all knew he'd do it, too.”

Maya set her hands flat against his chest, but she didn't look up at him, just pressed the brim of the cap against him and sighed. “There had to be someone who could've helped, Jack.
Anyone
.”

“There was.” Using the end of his finger, he tipped Maya's face up to his. “Burt and Genie.”

Barely nodding, Maya inhaled deeply over a long blink. “Did they know about this? Is that why they took you in?”

“No.” He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb, hating that he'd upset her like this, yet mesmerized by the fierceness in her eyes. “You're the only one who knows; you're the only one who
needs
to know.”

“This is why you are the way you are with them, why you…”

“Yeah. If they hadn't taken me in when they did…” Jack huffed out a breath. “I don't know what would've happened. Even if Ascough got sent somewhere else after juvie, he knew where I was, and he told Jorcke he was just getting started with that bat, and that he was going to make me wish I was dead.”

“Oh my God, Jack. You were fourteen.” The look she gave him then, her eyes so soft, so scared yet so angry, almost crushed him.

“Then the Ministry showed up one day, and I was sure they were bringing Ascough back, and I remember thinking I was going to die right there in that stupid room with all those metal bunk beds and Jorcke standing over me. But then they told me to get my stuff and the next thing I knew I was standing in the Carsons' living room.”

It had been twenty years, and he remembered almost every detail about that moment. Genie smiling nervously in her jeans and cream-colored denim jacket, and Burt standing next to her in his navy sweatpants, his angry gaze fixed on Jack's still-casted arm. In that moment, Jack felt it all slipping away again: Burt didn't want a troublemaker in his house and it would be only a matter of time before he sent Jack packing again. But that all changed the second Burt stepped forward and shook Jack's hand. There was kindness in the man's eyes, a determination Jack had never seen in anyone else's.

Will had stayed perched on the arm of the chair, his foot bouncing up and down like he was going crazy waiting for the adult crap to be done with, and Tammy stood in the doorway to the hall, eyeballing Jack like he was some kind of alien.

The house was clean, the TV had been muted, but one quick glance at the screen, and the theme song from
Friends
lodged in Jack's head and wouldn't leave. There was music coming from somewhere down the hall, sounded like Hootie & the Blowfish maybe, and the smell of meat loaf wafted out of the kitchen, making Jack's stomach growl.

“Jack?”

Blinking past it, he wrapped his arm around Maya's shoulders and turned her around so they were heading back to the hotel.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I don't know why I made you come out here in this.”

“I don't care; it's just rain. You didn't have to tell me all this, Jack. I've always known you had your reasons for being so loyal to them, and yeah, sometimes it drives me crazy, but I'd never ever expect you to be any different than what you are.”

“Maybe, but I didn't want you thinking it was just me being a dipshit and going along with Will because it's Will. It's not even him, it's Genie. She's the one I owe everything to, Will and Tammy are just sort of there by default. I mean, they're great, don't get me wrong, but if it wasn't for Genie, I probably wouldn't have had anything to do with Will after what he did to you, Snip. Shit, if it wasn't for Genie, I never would have walked away from you at that stupid party, but…”