The Kindness of Strangers (52 page)

Nate stared at the sand running through his fingers and didn’t lift his gaze until it was gone, his hands white and silty. Kramble’s face was open, waiting.

“She used to . . . flirt with me. She’d touch me, but she always made it seem like an accident. I . . . I kissed her. And she’d invite me over, tell me to come over anytime. I almost went once. I thought about it all the time, but one day I really . . . almost went.”

Kramble’s face didn’t change, but his voice came out hoarse when he said to Nate, “But you didn’t.”

“But . . . but I didn’t tell anybody. I never warned anybody. And . . . and maybe if I had—”

“Nate. What was happening to Jordan had been happening for years. You couldn’t have prevented it.”

“But I could’ve stopped it earlier, maybe. I could’ve, I dunno. I . . . I knew it was wrong.”

“Nate, how old are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?” Kramble leaned toward him. “She was an adult, someone you should’ve been able to trust. She was a sick woman.”

“But I—”

“Hey,” Kramble cut him off, and said, slowly and distinctly, “You didn’t do anything wrong. The crime was hers, not yours.”

Those words washed over Nate with hot-shower comfort. He was afraid he might cry. Klezmer hopped to Kramble’s shoes and sniffed them, his whiskers quivering.

“You ever told anybody else?” Kramble asked.

Nate shook his head.

“You might want to. That’s a lot of bullshit to drag around.”

Nate felt better already, having said it out loud. Light-headed, almost.

Kramble reached down to pet the rabbit at his feet, but Klezmer shied from his hand. Kramble shrugged and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shaking one free.

“Can I have one?” Nate asked. He
needed
one, almost craved it.

Kramble started to tap out another but stopped himself. “No way,” he said, glancing at the porch.

“She won’t care,” Nate lied.

Kramble narrowed his eyes. “You trying to blow my chances?”

Nate blinked. He knew that Kramble liked his mom, but he never expected Kramble to say anything about it to
him
. Especially not today, not right now. It seemed creepy, after talking about a woman slitting her throat. Nate knew that his cheeks were red. He sat there feeling like an idiot. “You cool with that?” Kramble asked.

Nate stared into the man’s face, but Kramble wouldn’t look away. “I dunno,” Nate said at last. “It’s weird. I don’t have a problem with you personally, but . . .”

“I understand.” Kramble didn’t seem offended at all.

Nate scanned the yard again. Nothing had changed. Ali, Danny, and Mom were on the back porch. Dr. Bryn sat outside the bean tepee. Jordan was inside it. He could hear Dr. Bryn’s voice, just barely, over the cicadas that had begun to scream in the trees. Reece still sat on the bench in the garden. “Reece likes her, too,” Nate said.

Kramble took a drag on his cigarette. “I know.”

“I don’t have a problem with him personally either.”

Kramble raised his eyebrows and grinned, just a little. “That’s good to know.”

Nate watched Kramble take another drag. “Just so you know, she hates smoking.”

Kramble squinted at Nate as if he thought Nate might be bullshitting him. “Shit,” he said under his breath, and stubbed out the cigarette in the sandbox.

“Hey, come on, Danny and Jordan play in here,” Nate protested.

Kramble picked up the cigarette and held it in his hand. He stood up and brushed the sand off his seat.

Nate looked toward the porch again. Mom leaned her head into Ali’s shoulder. Ali hugged and rocked her.

Kramble stood there for several minutes more, as if waiting for some way to end his conversation with Nate. When none came, he wandered into the garden and spoke to Reece.

Nate still sat in the sandbox, the sun beating on his head, his shirt sticking to him. After a while the two men left the garden and walked to the porch. Mrs. Ripley came over to find out what was going on. Eventually Ali took his mom inside. Danny followed them. Later that day Kramble and Dr. Bryn left, and Reece sat on the back porch in the shade.

Nate went once to the bean tepee and bent down to look inside. Jordan lay curled in a ball, hugging his knees, staring straight ahead, his face more empty and far away than in those pictures. It scared Nate. Nate reached in and touched Jordan’s foot. He didn’t respond in any way. “I’m sorry, man,” Nate said. “I’m sorry.” And he was. He might hate Mrs. Kendrick. But he couldn’t even be secretly glad she was dead, because he knew what that felt like for Jordan.

Nate walked away, but he didn’t want to go into the house, so he sat in the sandbox and thought about his dad. He thought his dad would approve of their fostering Jordan, but he also knew that they would never have done it if Dad were alive. There wouldn’t be room. And he didn’t mean room in the house, but that there wouldn’t have been room
inside them,
inside their lives. They wouldn’t have known they were strong enough to do this.

They wouldn’t have needed Jordan.

Danny came outside and sat by the tepee for a long time. But even when he gave up and went inside to eat, and Reece left, Nate stayed in the sandbox. He remembered building sand castles with his dad. Dad got really obsessive and crazy about them, and every summer they had to top one they’d done before. Today, thinking of Dad, Nate stacked buckets, dug moats, and put in flags of dogwood twigs. Klezmer dug a trench in the cool sand under a shaded edge and watched him.

Nate wasn’t sure what he’d do when the castle was finished, so he kept at it, making it complicated and elaborate. Sweat stung his eyes, and the back of his neck burned. He stayed in the sandbox until it grew too dark to see his work and fireflies flitted low in the grass.

H
is mother touched his cheek, and Nate opened his eyes, blinking, to find himself on his side in the sand.

He agreed to go inside, but only after she promised to come get him if she got too sleepy to keep watch herself.

Chapter Thirty-one
Sarah

S
arah sat on the back porch in the cloudy moonlight, barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt. An icy breeze cut through the heavy air, promising another storm. Distant thunder rumbled.

She heard the breeze rattle the bean vines covering the tepee where Jordan still sat. Ali’d crawled in there this afternoon and made sure he was physically all right. She’d finally left, at eleven, after Priah brought them take-out Indian food. Sarah hadn’t eaten.

Her first reaction to Bobby’s news had been the feeling of being swept away in a strong current. She’d needed to reach out and grab hold of something steady and strong before she was pulled under.

That’s what made her cry in the kitchen. That’s what made her throw the cups and break them on the fridge. That’s what made her scream at Reece when he insisted they tell Jordan right away. How could they tell him this? Who had decided that this was her fate—to add to the heaping plate of misery this boy had already been served?

Who had decided that this was his fate—to survive unspeakable atrocities committed against his body and spirit and to recover, to thrive, only to be handed this? It was sadistic, perverted. The worst act of all that Courtney’d subjected him to.

Sarah replayed that scenario in her head, countless times, the six of them at the counter, silent, until Jordan had been the first to speak. The bunch of cowards they were, they’d made him suffer, stand there and squirm. Horrors must have crossed his mind, because he’d finally asked, “Are they letting my dad go?”

It shocked them out of their shock, in a sense. And then Reece finally said it: “Jordan, your mother committed suicide last night.”

The look on Jordan’s face haunted Sarah. His first expression had been unabashed, raw fury. But it had vanished under his mask, and he’d walked out the back door.

Another rumble of thunder and blast of wind made her shiver. Nate’s sand castle shone blue in a flash of lightning.

“I will do everything in my power,” Courtney had promised, looking Sarah right in the eye, “to keep him safe.”

Sarah remembered saying, “You can’t. You know you can’t.” Was this Courtney’s way to prove Sarah wrong? She hugged herself in the wind, her braid pulling loose.

If someone else had killed Courtney, in an accident, a fight, Sarah knew that some secret, awful part of her would exhale with relief. But for Courtney to end her life herself seemed yet another betrayal of Jordan. She’d let him believe she was trying to regain custody of him. She hadn’t even left him a note, an explanation. Just another set of lies ending in an act that had shocked and humiliated him.

“Sarah?” The quiet voice startled her. Jordan stood outside the garden gate. He looked like a little ghost, so pale and fair in the moonlight. Another flash of lightning illuminated his tortured face, and Sarah stood and walked down the steps to him.

When she reached his side, he whispered, “I hated her.”

His expression made her skin contract, as if it were suddenly two sizes too small to hold in the rest of her. “That’s okay.” She tried to remember how Bryn had coached her. “You can feel whatever you feel.”

“But . . .” he looked so lost. She ventured to put an arm across his shoulders, but he practically bristled, so she let it drop. He moved close to her side but kept his own arms locked across his chest. The wind rippled their clothes like sails. In the next flash of lightning, Sarah saw the highest castle tower slump over, blown by the wind. A dogwood twig sprang free and flew across the yard. Both gates rattled. She looked at Danny’s tree, bowing and waving in the wind. The robin’s nest would be demolished.

“I hated her,” Jordan said again. He moaned, his whole body trembling. “I wanted her . . . to die.” He sucked in a sob, in a hiccupping gasp. “I wished she would.”

Sarah took his face in her hands and felt his jaw tighten, his shoulders brace. “Jordan, you didn’t make it happen, no matter what you wished. She did this herself.”

He pulled his face from Sarah’s grasp. “She said she’d try to get better,” he spit out. “But she lied. She never wanted me to come back.”

The first raindrops stung her face.

“But I didn’t want to either,” he said. “I didn’t want to live with her again. Not really. I just said I did because . . . I
should’ve
wanted to, but I didn’t. I never did. And now, and now—” He hiccupped another sob. “What’s going to happen to me?” he whispered as the rain let loose in earnest.

His hair was plastered down in his eyes, and she remembered him standing in the rain at the end of his driveway, that day both of their lives had changed. She wondered which day would stand out as darker for him, ten years down the road.

She looked into that pained, hopeless face and recognized what he was feeling. His world, too, was being swept away, as hers had been in the kitchen those million years ago this morning. She’d needed something to reach out and grab hold of, and she’d had it. Her children, this home, this family.

She couldn’t help herself—she reached and pulled him to her in a hug. Far from the stiff recoil she expected, he clung back to her with an intensity that stole her breath. He muffled his sobs with his face buried in her neck, his arms tight around her shoulders, wrapping his legs around her waist, climbing her, even as her own legs folded and she sank to the ground. She held him, the rain pelting her back, her cheek to his drenched hair, wishing she could absorb him, to start all over again the way he deserved.

Over his head she squinted through the rain. Nate’s tree roiled in the wind, the branches waving like tentacles trying to catch her attention, the entire trunk bending and thrashing. Jordan’s tree didn’t bend but leaned, in danger of breaking. But right now she could stake the boy or his tree, not both.

She held on to Jordan.

Danny

D
anny saw that they’d let the frosting get fudgelike and cool in the pan, but he didn’t want to say so. He didn’t want to break the mood. He would sit here with his elbows on this countertop forever. Mom and Nate and Jordan all leaned there together with him, the magnificent cake between them. Everyone was silent, and Danny recognized that they all knew that night of the storm was the end of one part of the story and the start of the next.

They’d gone to Michigan to escape the chaos after the funeral—news trucks driving down the street taking pictures of their home and reporters shouting questions at Mom whenever she went outside or to or from the van. Reece and Bobby had urged Mom to “take the kids and get out of town.”
The kids.
Already Jordan was included in that statement.

One day in Michigan, Jordan had found a whole field of raspberries. And he’d filled bucket after bucket to bring to Danny’s mother. And Mom had accepted all he brought her, that day and the next, and brought every berry back home to Dayton, the aroma in the van almost overwhelming. She hadn’t been able to use them all in a year, but she didn’t throw a single raspberry away.

And every time they used raspberry preserves, like today on the wedding cake, they told that story. And they told how Danny and Jordan had eaten the berries right off the bushes, not even bothering to
pick
them, just bending over and pulling the berries off with their teeth. Once they’d looked up, and not fifty yards away a brown bear was doing the same thing.