The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (14 page)

Lance went on chatting to William about Natasha and school, as if the boy could possibly hear him. “Adam said you’re a straight-A student. Natasha has a little trouble in school, and now she has to catch up, and a friend is helping her study for a big test.” Close enough.

Possibly, Will’s shrill screeching was dropping in volume. It was hard to tell. I doubted he heard a word Lance said, though the soothing tone might have been coming through. Mostly, I thought Lance was talking for the benefit of the other people in the restaurant, the ones whose eyes I could still feel. They couldn’t hear him. I laid a hand on Lance’s arm and shook my head.

When I told my younger sister we were adopting six-year-old twins, she squealed with delight. Unlike my parents, Marguerite was not ambivalent in the least. Her four children had all spent summers with Lance and me when they were younger, and she had spent a few years begging me for nieces and nephews for
her
to spoil.

When I told her the twins were autistic, the other end of the line grew quiet. I bit my lower lip and waited for her to say something unkind. Margie wasn’t known for having a warm, open mind. Instead, she said, “I’ll give you one piece of advice, then I’ll shut my mouth. My friend Shelby has a thirteen-year-old autistic son. She spends too much time justifying her parenting to complete strangers, because they can’t understand some behavior. Don’t you act like that. Don’t let people you’ve never met parent for you. They probably won’t
ever
understand, and you’ll make yourself miserable if you take them seriously.”

For once, my sister and I were in complete agreement. “We better get used to this now,” I told Lance. “I think we’re going to be sitting under a lot of tables in the next few months, and not only with William.” As we had seen when we first met her, Sara was perfectly capable of a full-scale nuclear collapse of her own. “Those people can’t matter.”

Lance fell silent, and we sat instead in helpless observation while William’s meltdown ran its course. Though it felt like hours later, my watch swore only ten minutes passed before Will’s “Tasheeee”s dropped in volume and his rocking slowed.

The rocking didn’t stop altogether. Will’s rocking almost never stopped. He needed constant propulsion. He turned his head to one side and regarded Lance without blinking. “William,” the little boy said, “are you sure you want to go live with those people? They don’t even have TV!” Then he pushed past Lance and darted for the door.

He would have gotten away from us. His words had stolen my breath, and Lance and I were staring at each other in shocked silence. It was the most he had ever said at one time in our hearing, and he was clearly parroting some adult. We didn’t expect him to bolt, and we didn’t react quickly enough when he did.

But he ran straight into Natalie’s legs as she returned. “Other way.” She steered him back toward the giant structure full of slides and germs. He didn’t go but stood, instead shifting his weight back and forth, lifting one foot off the ground every step. Back and forth, back and forth, a mesmerizing dance that drew all of us to look at his feet. Lance and I rose, and he watched us closely for a minute before returning to his toes.

I finally broke away from Will’s hypnotic rocking and looked at Natalie. Her wide eyes showed me plainly she had overheard Will’s speech. “You know Adam and I wouldn’t say something like that, don’t you?” Her face entreated me to believe. “Kids pass into and out of our care all the time. We’d never say something so damaging . . .”

In fact, I did tend to think she was telling the truth. I knew exactly who
would
have said such a thing, never thinking of the harm she was bound to cause. I glanced out the door, where Merry and our advocate stood, glaring daggers at one another between two cars. Natalie nodded slightly, accepting the shift in blame, silently sharing agreement about the twins’ social worker.

“William.” I got down on my knees and back on the hard tile floor. “Can you look at me? With your eyes?” I accepted a miniscule uptilt of his chin as the best I was going to get. “We do so own a television. We even have cable, since we live in town. You don’t have to worry about missing your shows.”

I knew from Natalie that Will had two favorite programs, and we could expect massive upsets whenever he missed them. After a painfully long minute, his chin dipped and rose, possibly acknowledging my words. It was impossible to tell whether he believed me. Then he trotted toward the play area, where he bounded past Sara, who was stationed on the third step from the bottom of the structure, not sliding at all, but staring all around as the other children flowed around her going up and down.

When Will had clambered past his sister, not paralyzed by the same fear of heights that had gripped her, I finally let myself relax a little. Natalie, though, looked away from Lance and me, staring instead at her own feet, much like Will had been doing. Finally, she said, “It’s hard, letting these two go. I’ve never had to give up a child under circumstances like these. They’ve gone to families, they’ve gone back home, and they’ve aged out of the system, but I’ve never had one leave me for something I did wrong. You can’t help every child you foster, and you’re bound to screw up sooner or later. But I was so sure I could make a difference for them. I have. A little. But mostly, I failed them.

“I forgot him. I
forgot
him. I still can’t believe I forgot him. You have to watch for him taking off when he’s upset. And he was stressed at the pizza parlor. Something set him off in there, and he nearly melted. He got it together, though, and we didn’t have to stop everything. And yet I let myself lose track of him.” She crossed her arms and went on staring down. Finally, she repeated, “It’s so hard to let them go. I can’t escape the feeling there’s something I need to do for those kids. Some outstanding debt to them and I’m the only one who can pay it back.”

What could I tell her?
We’re going to do a good job?
Saying so would feel like telling her we could do
better
than she could, a laughable idea at best. “We’ve been lucky,” I finally said, still groping for words. “We’ve gotten to meet them several times, where most adopting families only get one or two chances to gauge the emotional temperature. We know their first foster mother, Nelly Penobscott, and she still remembers a lot about them. And I know we’re going to be calling you for advice.”

Natalie smiled a little then. “I know,” she said. “It’s not
you
I’m worried about. It’s me. It’s
them.
They’ve been failed so many times now. I thought I could be the one who
didn’t
fail, who gave them stability.”

“Were you thinking about adopting them yourself?”

“Adam’s too afraid of the dad.” The twins’ file was spotty on the topic of paternity, and the father was simply listed as “unknown.” But Natalie, Merry, and Adam all thought they knew who he was, and they were pretty sure he was serving a life sentence for murder. “Whether they go to you or somebody else, they’re leaving us. Losing Will was a last straw. But I thought I could give them some security, let them see how a real mom acts.”

The twins’ mother still lived in Columbus, but the children had been emancipated from her. They had stayed with Nelly Penobscott for almost two years. The mother hadn’t been able to keep them six whole months after they finally returned to her. Neighbors in their apartment complex used to find Will shambling filthy and naked down the hall, and be unable to locate an adult to take care of him. Sara nearly got run over when she took off across the street after a stray cat. When she hit her head on the curb and got a ride in an ambulance, social services couldn’t reach her mother at all. The children were taken the second time for neglect, rather than outright abuse. Then, her drug issues and failures to appear at hearings and supervised visits had ultimately led to the termination of her parental rights.

That was when the children came to live with their uncle and his wife in Muscogen County. But they were no better than the mother, in the long run, though it took two years of back and forth to figure it out. Then they had come to be in Natalie and Adam’s care. “They’ve fallen through the cracks so many times,” she said.

“I follow,” said Lance. “Especially the part about wanting them to see a real mother. I think they got some from Nelly. I
know
they got a lot from you. A year can make more difference than you might think. I don’t talk about this often . . . I’ve only recently started talking about it at all, but I spent a year in foster care growing up.” He went on to give her an abbreviated version of his time with Angelina.

“She sounds wonderful,” Natalie said.

“You remind me of her.”

“Okay, then tell me something.” Natalie turned to watch the twins rather than look at us any longer. “Why don’t you want to foster them? Why are you so quick to want to adopt a pair of kids you barely know who have a condition that’s nearly impossible to explain?”

“Because after I left Angelina, I nearly fell right back through the cracks, just like they’ve already done twice. I skidded home to a mother with severe mental illness, a father who didn’t know how to parent, and a group of friends who were already heading down the wrong path. I’d have never climbed out of that hole if my grandparents hadn’t kited through the year I was fourteen.

“These were Dad’s parents, and they didn’t have anything to do with my folks, probably because of Mom. But they figured out what was going on with me, got me a passport, and dragged me off to Kenya with them. They were jet-setters. Conservationists. They were visiting a sanctuary over there, and they tagged me on because they couldn’t figure out how else to help.

“I don’t know if my brother was too young, or if they thought he was already someone they couldn’t reach. He was never a nice kid. Not that they carried any warm fuzzies themselves. I hated my grandparents. They were cold, distant, and strict. But Kenya! Africa! They didn’t save me. Africa did. It was my dream come true. Here I was, this white kid in a sea of black. It was the first time in my life I stood out because of my skin color. But the people at the sanctuary didn’t treat me differently. I remembered the things I’d dreamed about the year I lived with Angelina, and I came home determined to get back there on my own someday.

“But it was all coincidental.
If
my grandmother hadn’t suddenly decided we were worthy of her time.
If
Mom hadn’t been back in an institution.
If
I hadn’t been failing so badly in school. I didn’t get lost after I left Angelina because I got lucky.

“I can’t do what you and Nelly do. I can’t bring a child into my home only to lose track and never know what happened. I admire what you do, but I can’t be that. I
can
make the long-term commitment.

“It took me nearly ten years to get Noel to say she’d marry me. I’ve got the patience. And I loved her from the first time we met. I know it’s possible to have love come suddenly and stay forever. You haven’t failed these kids. You’ve given them solid ground, and Noel and I can build on it.”

“Pretty words, but wait until you deal with Sara’s night terrors.” In spite of her sarcastic reply, Natalie seemed more relaxed for the rest of the visit, like she thought we might after all be a fit for children she considered her own.

As we were leaving, I realized the vehicle crisis had come to a head. When Lance’s mother burned my car up back in June, she created a manageable transportation hassle. We could drive each other places and swap rides with our volunteers. Natasha could ride in the back of the primate-mobile when we all three travelled, and, rust and rumbling aside, the truck was in decent condition for a vehicle of its age.

But when I buckled Sara into her high-backed booster seat in Natalie’s car and contemplated its width in our little truck, my mind locked. There was no puzzle solution leaving us room to fit two of those chairs
and
Natasha. We needed to replace my car before the children came to our home, and we needed to do it with a vehicle wider than the current one. We needed a minivan.

Dear Nora:

What is the proper etiquette for returning inappropriate gifts?

Overwhelmed by Generosity

Dear Overwhelmed
,

The proper etiquette is to write a thank-you note. The proper action is to place the item in full view the first time the giver comes over, then promptly hand it off to a friend in another country or state, someplace you won’t get caught re-gifting.

Nora

Or for God’s sake, Noel, you could just be grateful and enjoy it.

Love
,

Mom

“Sedan.” Lance glared at the road and gripped the steering wheel harder.

“Is Natasha riding on the roof?”

“We’ll put one of the twins in the middle. Tasha can have a door.”

“I am
not
jamming my hand down in between two hard plastic pincers every time we need to buckle one of those kids in.”

“They can buckle themselves.”

“Will can. Sara still needs help. And before you say it, there isn’t going to be room for his hand between those seats either.”

We had left Rick and Drew to attempt to reconstruct Chuck’s full route and Ace to find a way to keep the big ape from exploiting his indoor area. And now, driving to the dealership, we were still engaged in the quarrel that had filled our house ever since our last meeting with the twins.

Back at the restaurant, I had accepted the practical reality of owning an outsized fuel hog without question. The money would have to sort itself for once. Our choices were clearly a minivan or large SUV, and as far as I could tell, the former far outstripped the latter.

But Lance lived under the illusion we were shopping for a sedan. “Minivans are so
expensive
,” he protested. “And the big SUVs are worse.”

“And you have researched this by, what . . . gazing lustfully at sports cars?”

“
One
sports vehicle, and I was
not
seriously considering it. We need a four-door sedan with a reasonable-sized back seat.”