The Foster Family (25 page)

“What?” Malcolm asked after the kid said nothing for way too long. He knew he was taking his unease out on him, but the word came out terse and annoyed anyway.

“Do you want to choose a different color for the room?” he asked. “Before I start. Maybe it shouldn’t be something I choose.”

“Maybe you should get your ass back in there and paint.” He looked up just in time to see the flash in Kerry’s eyes and the tightening of his jaw.

“And maybe you should hobble your bossy, clueless ass outside and ask Charlie about last night.”

“What about last night?” Malcolm pushed himself upright in his chair, but Kerry was already stalking back to the room. “Kerry!”

“Ask Charlie!” he slammed the door.

“Kerry!”

Nothing. Not a sound. No movement. He was trapped on that stupid chair, both men angry with him, and he had no idea why. His hand automatically sought out the scars and he winced as his fingers brushed over the first one. He’d already picked at it so much it smarted.

“I don’t know what I did,” he muttered. Or was it something he hadn’t done? Something he should have done. Or not done. Or a little of both.

He was so far out of his depth.

D
ID
THEY
think sound stopped at the threshold of my bedroom door? Just because they couldn’t see me, did they think I couldn’t hear them? That maybe it wasn’t obvious Malcolm’s phone conversation with his new BFF the cop was about me? Or that I hadn’t been able to hear Charlie’s doubts about me in his words or about Malcolm in his tone? Did either of them notice the change in Charlie? How lost he was since I’d come that he had basically forgotten he’d more or less just lost his job over me? Had they stopped to think that my being there might be messing with them in ways none of us would be able to fix?

But then, maybe my being there was only a symptom. This slow implosion might be something that started long before I got there and I was just an excuse. It was something that, once again, had very little to do with me.

Maybe it was me who was clueless, overestimating my own importance.

Suddenly, the vibrant green I was spreading on the wall over the placid blue-beige that was there seemed like a lurid smear that didn’t belong. My knuckles tightened around the brush handle and I had to sit down. I plopped cross-legged on the floor and stared at the careful lines I’d cut into the corners and along the top of the white baseboard. It was all I could do to keep from hurling the damn thing at the wall.

“I don’t belong here,” I muttered.

“Hey.” Malcolm’s voice was cold and flat. There was no command left in it.

I turned to look at him, and he stood there, leaning on the doorframe, so flat, so…. It was hard to breathe seeing him like that. The Malcolm I knew, that I gravitated to, knew he was right. The man standing in the doorway was someone else with an entirely different view of the universe than the Malcolm I knew.

“What?” I sounded like I wasn’t breathing, and a tiny flicker of strength flitted through his eyes, like he thought he should do something about my apparent lack of ability to address him properly. I hoped he’d straighten, say something, but the look was gone in an instant.

“You want to look at pictures that mean something, look at these,” he said, tossing a photo album onto the drop sheet covering my dresser. He didn’t wait for a reply but limped away back to his chair, which he swiveled until its back was to the hallway and my open door.

It wasn’t defiance that kept me from opening that book for the next two weeks. He hadn’t made it an order, and I had things to do. At the time, the open paint can had been excuse enough. Then there was supper to make and clean up, and laundry, and the next day was another day to earn my keep as their gardener.

Then I had to go to work, and getting Lissa to accept I was fine was exhausting enough that I didn’t need more stress on top of that. Then Charlie announced he was not giving in to his boss’s demands over the missed day of work. She called almost hourly with appointments he needed to attend, papers he needed to deal with, and he remained adamant that someone named Chad could do it for a few days. He was on vacation. She called to tell him if he missed one more meeting, he was done, and he told her that she didn’t need him to hold her coffee cup in yet another board meeting. Then one morning, he snarled that she could pick up her own damn dry cleaning, and hung up on her, and the household progressed from tense to eggshell-thin walls of civility.

No. Whatever was in that book, I didn’t want to know.

When I came home from my shift Saturday evening and was making a hash of a stew recipe I’d found online, Charlie announced he had spoken to the school, and I was to go there Monday morning to spearhead their garden project.

The small stipend they had given him for the job, he handed to me. “There’s tools in the shed. Use whatever you need.”

I nodded, my gaze reaching all the way up to his chest. Further than I had managed since that night in my bed. Usually I found myself staring awkwardly at his knees.

“Do me a favor,” he added, and I gave him a noncommittal sound in return. “Go in the living room and make sure Malcolm’s feet are healed enough. He thinks he’s going out tomorrow. I’ll finish this.”

I nodded and started to tell him where I had left off in the cooking.

“I got it, Kerry,” he said. Not unkindly, exactly. Just dismissively.

I nodded again and left him to it.

Malcolm wasn’t in the living room. I found him perched on the end of his bed, one foot twisted up so he could see the bottom of it. He was picking at the edge of one of the cuts with a fingernail. The X-ACTO knife he’d bought for me lay on the bed, mostly tucked under his thigh, but the bright yellow of the plastic handle was hard to miss.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” But he stopped, and his gaze flickered up at me and away.

“Mal, what are you doing?” I knelt at his feet and took hold of the foot as he tried to drop it. The cut he’d been picking at was aggravated, and a tiny drop of blood beaded to the surface.

“Nothing. Feels like there’s a sliver, maybe.” But he couldn’t keep his eyes on my face. Once more, he flicked them away, to the knife and back to me and then off over my shoulder, going blank, his expression fading to nothingness.

He wasn’t looking at me, not watching me, so I pressed on the cut, hard, to see his reaction. If there was a tiny sliver of glass in there, he should have winced or tried to pull away. His gaze slowly drifted back to me. Nothing about his void expression changed.

“No sliver,” I said

He shook his head. “No sliver.”

“Maybe you got it out.”

Now his expression did change, and he suddenly looked so much younger than he was. He handed me the knife. “Charlie knows what to do with that.”

“Malcolm—”

His big hand cupping my face stopped my breath and my words.

“I’m barely holding it together here, kid. Can we just agree that the thought happened? The act didn’t, okay?”

I closed my eyes and kissed his palm. “Okay,” I whispered. For a long time, neither of us moved.

“Everything okay in here?” Charlie’s bass voice sent a shiver down my spine, but it set Malcolm to shaking that didn’t stop. I got to my feet and handed Charlie the knife.

He looked at it, looked at me, looked at Malcolm, and back to me. “Did he?”

“No.” I wanted to get past him and out of there. I wanted to leave the house, and for a heartbeat I understood Charlie’s need to flee to the garden. Malcolm was a lot of work.

“Stay with him,” Charlie said, spun on his heel, and was gone.

What was I supposed to do with that? Since when was I the strong one? The one who knew what to do?

I did all I could think of. I went back to my place on the floor at Malcolm’s feet and settled where I could lean on his legs. He sat in silence and stroked my hair for a long time.

“He’ll leave me eventually,” Malcolm said, out of the blue.

“What? No he won’t.”

Malcolm nodded, almost absently. “I’m a lot of work, Kerry.”

I snorted. “No shit.”

The tap on the back of my head was so light. So reassuring, though, because it meant he was still with us, still paying attention and enforcing the rules. Some of them, anyway.

“Sorry.”

He cupped the back of my neck and squeezed. “Some rules should be bendable.”

“Some,” I agreed. I rose onto my knees to face him. “Tell me why it matters so much? Vulgarity aside, why do those little words make you crazy?”

His answering smile seemed distracted and faraway as he cupped my face. He didn’t seem to want more than that. Just contact, so I leaned into his touch.

“Why do you need to know, Kerry?” he asked. “Why does it matter?”

It was curious the way he asked. Not like he expected an answer, exactly. The question was as distracted as his expression, but I answered anyway.

“If I’m going to do the work for you, Malcolm, don’t I deserve to know why?”

I was watching him carefully enough that the flicker of surprise didn’t go unnoticed, and finally, he actually focused on my face. “Always had rules,” he said. He took one of my hands and laid it over his abdomen where I’d seen his scars. “Made my own when I had to.” He pressed my fingers to the worst marks. “Always start in the same place and work my way across. Eventually, it gets bigger than… whatever.”

“Whatever?”

He shrugged.

“You mean whatever made you do it?”

At that, he nodded.

“That’s not a rule, Malcolm,” I said. “It’s a habit. Just a behavior you can change.” I’d had a lot of bad habits once. Nash had been the one to remind me, endlessly, that they were learned and could be changed.

“Well I did change, didn’t I?” Malcolm snapped, shoving my hand and my head away.

I swayed and almost fell, but didn’t. “So what was today?” I was up for this challenge. I could shoot back at him if he opened fire. It was the silence, being shut out I couldn’t handle. “You had a knife and a way to cut yourself no one would notice.”

He glared at me, and I thought for a moment he was going to get up and walk away. I clamped both hands on his knees. “No running, Malcolm. Tell me.” I was so sick of being on the outside. If Charlie was leaving this to me, then damned if I was going to let Malcolm run away too. I just prayed I’d retained enough of the lessons in compassion my foster father had plied me with to be useful now.

“You don’t get to make the rules.”

“I’m not making them. I’m only making you follow them. No lies by omission. Your rule.”

“My rule.” He tipped his head, and I braced myself for whatever he was going to say. “I had a foster father who didn’t know how to say a civil word to anyone. He belittled his wife and called us kids freaks and losers, and every other word out of his mouth was vulgar and ugly. He was an ugly man.” He rubbed his hand over his abdomen. “I believed it all.”

“Why they let people like that use the system…,” I muttered.

“Because they need a place to put us, don’t they?”

I snorted. “Take us away from clueless parents and give us to cruel ones. Because that works.”

“Your parents weren’t clueless, Kerry. Or cruel.”

“Just hella unlucky.”

“They loved you.”

I nodded. “I don’t remember.”

“Anyway.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Charlie should be almost done with dinner.”

“Yeah, probably.” It wasn’t lost on me that he hadn’t really answered the why part of the question. Why today. Why had he thought about this today, after so long?

“We should go eat.”

“Before he decides that’s the sin that makes him leave?”

He looked at me through his lashes. “I sort of hoped I hadn’t said that out loud.”

“Well you did. And it’s about fucking time you did too. What do you think you’re trying to do, bringing another guy into this house when you’re scared of losing the guy you already have?”

“Give him what he needs.”

“What he needs is a boyfriend who sees how miserable he is, not one hell-bent on covering the misery over with sex toys and rules and an artificial family.” And there. It was said. The thing I dreaded: being the putty over the cracks a fool could see in their relationship. And I was a fool, because I could see it. I should be running for my life from this fucked-up house. But they were under my skin and I couldn’t even make myself want to leave. But I had to say it, and that risked them kicking me out.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” Malcolm asked.

I stood up and held out my hand to him. “I think you have no idea what you’re doing.”

“What if I don’t want this to be artificial?” he asked, holding my hand but not rising.

I looked down at him. “First thing you’ve said to me about what you actually want, Malcolm. Have you said anything at all to Charlie about that?”

“How the hell do you tell your boyfriend you need more?”

“You can start by stopping blaming this all on him.” I gave a tug on our joined hands. “Come and eat.”

We entered the kitchen to find the table set, complete with candles and wine and three place settings. The pan of stew steamed on its trivet in the center of the table.