Safe at Home (3 page)

No matter how much worry he’d brought with him across the street.

She was right about varsity, and Nick knew she was. Making varsity, even this way, because somebody got hurt, wasn’t anything like being adopted, and that was something Nick was smarter about than Gracie Wright, something he knew better than anybody.

Better than he wanted to.

It wasn’t just that he’d been adopted once already in his life. It had nearly happened twice.

Nick had always known as much as he was allowed to about how he came to be a foster child.

The grown-ups in his life, the ones who’d taken care of him until the Crandalls had adopted him right after his ninth birthday, told him that when he was older he could find out who his birth parents were if he really wanted to, could get the names of the people who had given up their “parental rights” when he was born.

Nick wasn’t sure what he thought about that or what he’d do when he was older, mostly because he was having enough trouble with being young. He told himself that was something he’d be able to worry about later—as Gracie liked to tell him, his plate was full enough with worry for now.

He just knew that from the time he could really
remember stuff, his foster parents had been Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, Bob and Diane Boyd. He knew there had been another set of foster parents before that, up until he was three or so. But no matter how hard Nick tried, he couldn’t remember them.

The Boyds were older than regular parents—Nick could see that from the time he started preschool in Riverdale. They were more like grandparents, really, when you compared them to the other parents Nick saw at school.

Nick had never called Mr. and Mrs. Boyd Mom or Dad. Instead he’d called them Poppa and Nana. They’d told him that as much as they loved him and would always love him, maybe in a way he wouldn’t understand until he was older—something else he’d know when he was older—they were just raising him until he got adopted for good, by “adoptive parents.”

So it didn’t take Nick long in his life to figure out something: If you started out your life in foster care, there were a whole bunch of different ways they had, a bunch of different adjectives they used, to describe parents.

Birth
parents.

Foster
parents.

Adoptive
parents.

“When will I get adopted?” Nick used to ask the Boyds, probably more than he should have.

And usually it was Nana who would hug him and tell him, “Soon as somebody knows how special you are, the way we do. The way we did the first day we brought you to this apartment.”

Nick kept waiting for that to happen.

And waiting.

And waiting.

Then, when he was seven, he met Mr. and Mrs. Wells.

Nick was sure it was going to happen with Mr. and Mrs. Wells, from the day the Boyds had told him there was a couple that wanted to meet him.

“A
young
couple,” Mr. Boyd had said, “not a couple of old goats like us.”

First Nick met them at the Boyds’ apartment on Elm Street. The next meeting was at what was called a “neutral site,” an expression Nick had only heard in sports before then. In this case, the neutral site turned out to be the Westchester County Mall
up in White Plains, not so far from where Mr. and Mrs. Wells lived in Connecticut.

Next Nick got to spend a whole day with the Wellses, and the day included a trip to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play. When Nick thought back on it now, he knew that was the day he really fell in love with baseball, not just because it was his first trip to a real big-league ballpark, but because it was all wrapped up in how sure he was that he was going to spend the rest of his life as Nick Wells.

Nick could still remember everything about that Sunday-afternoon game between the Mets and the Braves at Shea. Just about every seat in the old place was filled, because the Mets and Braves were big rivals fighting for first place that year. The Mets’ colors were blue and orange, but what Nick remembered the very best was how once he’d come through the turnstiles and up some ramps and past the concession stands and then into the amazingly bright ballpark sun, there was the green grass. It seemed to stretch in all directions, until the bright blue outfield walls got in the way in the distance.

They had tremendous seats that day, five rows behind the Mets dugout. Not only did all the action
seem as if it were right in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch, it was also as if Nick were
hearing
baseball for the first time. Or at least in a way he never had before, hearing the pop of the ball in the catcher’s mitt and the knock of the ball on a wood bat, sounds Nick had never heard in person before. When a hitter really connected on a pitch, it was as if a firecracker had gone off right next to him.

It was a great game, back and forth the whole day, the Mets leading, and then the Braves leading, and the Mets finally tying them in the bottom of the ninth. At that point it became a perfect day for Nick, because the game went into extra innings, and a day that he never wanted to end wasn’t over yet.

Sitting there behind the dugout, trying to keep score the way Mr. Wells had shown him, wearing the Mets cap Mr. Wells had bought for him at one of the souvenir stands, Nick didn’t know what he wanted more, for the Mets to win or for the game to keep going.

The Mets finally did win, in the bottom of the thirteenth inning on a Mike Piazza home run, the Mets catcher having enough left to hit one out
even after catching all those innings. When the ball cleared the left-field wall by a mile and ended up in what Mr. Wells explained was the “picnic area” out there, Nick stood and yelled his head off with the rest of the 50,000 fans.

But even as he did, there was a part of him that almost felt like crying, because the game being over meant that it was time for him to leave, time for him to go back to the apartment on Elm Street in Riverdale.

For a few hours, though, Nick had finally found two places where he knew he belonged:

A ballpark and in that seat in the fifth row between Mr. and Mrs. Wells.

He turned out to be half right.

The next step was supposed to be a sleepover at their house in Connecticut.

Nick never made it to Connecticut, at least not that time.

The night before he was supposed to go, Nick carefully packed his duffel bag. Not just with the clothes he was going to wear, but his catcher’s mitt
as well, because Mr. Wells said they were going to play a
lot
of catch.

And his Mets cap, which he’d pretty much been wearing nonstop since he’d gotten back from Shea Stadium.

As they had left the ballpark that day, people still clapping and cheering and yelling on their way out of Shea and into the parking lots, Mr. Wells had told him not to worry—adults had been telling him that his whole life—that there were going to be a lot of trips to the ballpark like this.

Except that morning he was supposed to go on the sleepover, he could tell something was wrong when he came down to breakfast, could see it in the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Boyd.

Then they sat him down and explained that the Wellses had changed their minds.

Nick didn’t cry in front of them, sitting between them on the living room couch, as much as he wanted to.

He just said, “What did I do wrong?”

Mrs. Boyd hugged him then, though Nick didn’t feel much like being hugged, and said, “Honey, you
didn’t do anything wrong. They just decided they want to adopt a newborn baby, if they can find one.”

Nick said, “Nobody wanted
me
when I was a baby, and nobody wants me now,” and ran to his room.

He cried there, spent the day in there with his comic books inside the world where things came out the way you wanted them to, even more than they did in baseball.

He still loved baseball after that. Couldn’t
not
love baseball. And he still rooted for the Mets. And on TV when they’d show some foul ball landing behind the Mets dugout, he’d be able to pick out almost exactly where he had been sitting between Mr. and Mrs. Wells.

It just wasn’t the perfect memory it was supposed to be. He’d been back to Shea a few times since, and as much as he remembered the magic of that first time, the smells of the place and the sounds of the place and even all the green made him remember something else:

Being sent back to foster care.

• • •

After that, Nick was convinced that he could wait forever and never get adopted. It turned out he didn’t even have to wait a year. A few months later, they used his story on one of the “Wednesday’s Child” segments on Channel 4. Nick didn’t know anything about it until the reporter and the cameraman came to the Boyds’ apartment and interviewed him and Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, but it was some kind of series they ran on boys and girls still waiting to be adopted.

Nick didn’t know what to think about that, because he’d never told any of the kids at his school in Riverdale that he was in foster care in the first place.

But it was summer and school was out, and Poppa and Nana Boyd told him it was a good thing.

They were right.

The very next week, Paul and Brenda Crandall—old but not as old as the Boyds—were sitting in the apartment on Elm Street and having their first meeting with Nick. Then there was another meeting. And a trip to the city to visit the Museum of Natural History with all the dinosaurs, what had
to be the biggest and best and coolest dino exhibit in the whole world.

Nick made it to the sleepover this time, made it all the way to Connecticut.

When the adoption was finalized, after Nick had met with all the social workers and counselors and the nice people from the Administration for Children’s Services, Nick had said to Mr. and Mrs. Crandall, “What should I call you?”

He thought Mrs. Crandall was going to cry as she said, “Mom. And Dad.”

Nick said, “Are you sure?”

She said, “As sure as we’ve been of anything in our lives.”

“It took so long,” Nick had said to her that day.

“For us, too,” she’d said. “But we had to find the exact right boy. And now we have.”

Mr. Crandall had said, “I’ve taught English pretty much my whole life, Nick. And I can tell you something from experience: Story is everything. And now your story is finally going to have the happy ending it deserves.”

“Even if this ending is really just a beginning,” Mrs. Crandall said.

Nick knew by then that they had tried and tried to have a child of their own and never could. Late in life, at least late to be parents, they had decided all over again how much they still wanted to have one.

“We’d given up,” she’d said. “But then one day we decided that you should never give up on your dreams. That’s when we saw you on TV.”

“My dream was just to get adopted,” Nick had said. “But then I sort of gave up on ever finding adoptive parents.”

“No,” Brenda Crandall said. And then she started to cry, and Nick thought he’d done something wrong, said something to make her this sad. He just didn’t know what.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “These are happy tears.”

Then Mrs. Crandall told him he didn’t have to put any words in front of
parents
ever again.

“We’re just your parents,” she said.

Nick had finally found parents.

They just happened to be parents who knew hardly anything about baseball. Instead they were parents who wanted him to be as good in school as he was in baseball.

They tried to understand baseball. They really did, Nick could see his mom, especially, really trying, and he appreciated that she knew a lot more now than when they’d first adopted him, when she basically didn’t know a fair ball from a foul ball.

The first time she’d seen him play a game, she’d had only one question afterward:

“If the position you play isn’t dangerous, how come you’re the only one out there who has to wear equipment?”

Nick didn’t take it personally. He just figured that you were either a sports fan or you weren’t. And the Crandalls weren’t. They seemed to be in great shape for people their age, though. They liked to take long walks after dinner, and both Nick and his dad liked to take bike rides together. That was when the two of them seemed to do their best talking. And sometimes when there was a baseball game on television that Nick wanted to watch and his dad wasn’t doing anything, Paul Crandall the English professor would sit on the couch with Nick and ask him questions.

Just the fact that he was making the effort meant a lot to Nick.

It was why Nick would try to act interested when Paul Crandall would start talking about books, like reading wasn’t his job but his favorite sport. Nick didn’t even try to explain that the only books he really cared about were his comic books.

Comic books were about adventure and about heroes who weren’t afraid of danger or anything else, superheroes who could overcome anything and anybody, no matter where they came from
or what bad things had happened to them in their lives. They could beat the odds and the bad guys and always end up feeling like winners.

Sometimes Nick wished he were living in a comic book world, even now that he had parents.

They weren’t exactly the parents he’d always imagined for himself. Nick had to be honest about that, at least with himself. It wasn’t so much with his mom as with his dad. In Nick’s dreams, his happy-ending dreams, he’d always imagined himself being adopted by a dad who wanted to go outside and throw a ball around with him, who wanted to take him to ballgames and maybe coach him in Little League and watch baseball on television—for fun, not because he felt he had to.

Now he had Paul Crandall, who would rather talk about books than baseball but would shake his head when he’d see Nick with his head buried in one of his comic books.

So this was one more thing for Nick to worry about, that maybe his dad had imagined a different kind of son for himself, one who wasn’t into sports the way Nick was, one who didn’t come home covered with dirt and bumps and bruises.

Things definitely weren’t great right now with his dad, no getting around that. Nick was doing worse in school than he ever had. And the more he struggled in class, the more he only wanted to read comic books, not schoolbooks.