When Somebody Loves You (11 page)

Aside from the fact that he looked haggard and disheveled, Michael appeared to be fine. She wasn’t so sure about the boy. His size told her he could be anywhere from ten to fifteen years old. His eyes, however, said he was closer to fifty. She’d seen that kind of anger before. She’d also seen the despair. While she didn’t recognize the child, she recognized the dark, threadbare jacket he was wearing and knew he was the one who’d thrown the brick.

She glanced from him to Michael. Both looked ready to chew nails.

“Helen,” Michael said, “keep an eye on my friend here, would you? And you,” he added to the boy in warning, “don’t forget, we have a deal.”

“I ain’t your friend,” the boy snarled, meeting Michael’s gaze with defiance. “And I said I’d wait. So I’ll wait.”

“Fine. Don’t give Helen any trouble.”

The small slumped shoulders moved in what passed for an affirmative shrug, then he turned his scowl on Helen.

Decked out with a flashy new pink hairdo and a wildly painted blouse that she’d worn loose over black stretch pants and spike heels, Helen suddenly had a captive audience. The boy, it seemed, reacted to shock tactics, and a geriatric punk rocker definitely represented a shock. As Michael ushered January into her office and closed the door behind them, the child was sitting spellbound while Helen offered him a cup of instant hot chocolate and pattered about some obscure rap group only a kid or a woman like Helen would know about.

Looking marginally the worse of the two, Michael slumped into the chair opposite January’s desk and dragged his hands over his face.

“You okay?” she asked, easing a hip onto her desk in front of him.

He let out his breath with a weary puff and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his widespread knees. Looking tired and troubled, he reached out and sandwiched her leg between his hands. With a slow caress, he ran his palms up and down the length of her calf. The touch wasn’t sexual. She sensed instinctively that he simply needed to hold on to someone. Without questioning why, she was glad she was there for him. She also sensed that whatever was bothering him had less to do with the thrown brick than it did with the brick thrower. She could see it in his eyes. The child affected him. Deeply.

Intrigued, she asked again, “Michael, are you all right?”

He studied her leg for a long moment before he met her eyes. “Yeah. I’m fine. That little footrace just made me realize I’m getting to be an old man.”

She smiled. “Hardly.”

“Tell that to my body, toots. It’s screaming bloody murder for the beating I just put it through. The little hellion runs like a damn deer. If he hadn’t tripped over a garbage can in the alley, he’d be in Denver by now.” He grinned crookedly, making a stab at masking his feelings, which she suspected were dark and brooding. His eyes betrayed the forced lightness in his tone.

She glanced through the glass wall to Helen and the boy, then back to Michael. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Better yet, you’re the expert. Why don’t you tell me?” His voice was suddenly harsh, all pretense of levity gone. “Tell me what happens to make a kid hurl bricks through windows and talk like a gutter rat when he should be shooting baskets in his backyard and swiping cookies from his mom’s cookie jar.”

She remained silent, knowing he didn’t really want an answer but an ear. He needed to talk. Even more, he needed her to listen.

He flipped off her pump, slumped back in the chair, and flattened her foot on his thigh. His touch was intimate and familiar as he closed his hand over her foot and held on as if she were the link between right and wrong.

She tried to fight the softening taking place deep inside her. The children had always needed her. A man never had. Yet this man needed her now, and Lord help her, she wanted him to.

“His name is Toby Walters,” he said with that same weary anger. “He’s twelve years old, and he’s never slept under the same roof for more than a year at a time since he was five. You know why he threw that brick through your window? He was aiming at my Jeep and missed.” He laughed, but without humor. “Without laying it out in so many words, he told me he’d tried to break the Wrangler’s window for the sole reason that he resented the statement it made sitting by the curb. To Toby, it shouts success, independence, and power. All things that at some subconscious level he’s come to realize he’ll never have.”

Michael’s gaze was deeply troubled when he lifted it to hers. “How did he grow to the ripe old age of twelve and decide there isn’t any hope?”

Damn her stupid heart, January thought. It was aching for him. “And you, Michael,” she asked, forcing herself to meet the anguish in his eyes, “how did you grow to the ripe old age of thirty-nine and not know that the streets are full of kids like Toby?”

He looked away. “I know all about kids like Toby. I’ve just never
known
a Toby. How did I let that happen? How did I let myself become the kind of person who writes about life, but never actually gets involved in it?”

Fighting the urge to slip off the desk and fold him in her arms, she studied his dark head for a long moment. “He got to you good, didn’t he?”

Michael rolled his eyes heavenward and shook his head. “When I caught up with him, I had to tackle him to slow him down. He fought like a marine. He was so small, and so damn scared . . . and so determined to be tough.”

“And . . .”

“And I told him I wouldn’t turn him in to juvenile hall if he’d talk to me.” He snorted. “Toby told me to take a flying— Well, let’s just say he told me what I could do with juvenile hall. So I bribed him with food. He was damned near starved to death.”

January looked from Michael to the boy and understood what was happening here.

Toby’s face was not a face you could easily love. To date, it appeared that no one had ever tried. At first glance his defiant, angry glare inspired fear, not affection. At second, it commanded a reluctant, distant sympathy that one so young could have become so hard. Yet as she watched him, all blustery indifference and foul mouth in the outer office, she took one long, searching look into his haunted, hollow eyes and melted. Michael had evidently done a little melting too.

“What now, Hayward?” she asked, watching him closely.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. If we just let him go, the next time he decides to wreak a little havoc, someone might get hurt. What are his other options?”

This was the tricky part. She slipped her foot out of his hands, retrieved her pump, and settled behind her desk. “What does he want to do?”

“Who knows. The only reason he’s even here is because I told him I’d pay him to tell me his life story.” When she grinned, he shrugged. “Whatever works, right? The way he’s got it figured, I’m just one more person using him. That’s something he can relate to.”

She studied his face for a long moment. “And what do you want to do?”

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t ready, she guessed, and decided to give him a little more time to think it through.

“Did he tell you where he lives?” she asked.

“With a cousin who has a bad habit of locking him out of the apartment when he leaves, which is often and for long stretches at a time.”

She could see he was struggling between wanting to wash his hands of the whole dirty mess and trying to deal with a conscience that was telling him it was time to get involved.

“One phone call and I can have him off your hands,” she said. “Human Services wouldn’t hesitate to place him in an emergency foster home.”

A muscle in his jaw worked hard before he tightened his lips and shook his head. Then he put voice to the private war she’d suspected he was waging. “I’ve had it so damn easy. All my life, I’ve had it easy. Peter Pan man, that’s me. Fairy-tale childhood, fairy-tale career. I’ve got no worries, no problems.” He scrubbed his face hard with his hands, then laughed grimly. “I can think of one time, one lousy time, that I’ve ever stopped to consider that what I was writing might affect someone’s life other than mine, and that it might hurt them. It was a damn long time ago, and afterward I was so disgusted with myself, I decided I was never going to let something as sentimental as sympathy ever keep me from telling the whole story.

“But you know what happens to a man who makes decisions like that?
I’m
what happens. A man who views life and doesn’t get involved in it is what happens. And you know what else? It’s a hell of an awakening at this stage in my life to find out I’ve still got a social conscience rattling around inside me.”

Again he shook his head, as if accepting his decision but not knowing whether he liked what he was about to do. “I want to help that kid.”

She listened, stunned, as he then told her what he wanted to do.

“Michael, this is crazy,” she finally said. “Please think about what you’re suggesting. I could expostulate for hours on the subject of abuse and neglect. I could quote you statistics that would make your mind rebel. I could give you odds—bad ones—on your chances of pulling this off. Even if we could get the court to agree, you have no idea what you’re letting yourself in for.”

“Then it’s past time I find out, don’t you think?”

She met his gaze levelly. “Why?”

“Maybe it’s time someone other than you took on the task of saving the world.”

She leaned back in her chair and studied him carefully. “If you’re doing this to impress me, you’re going to hurt that boy more than help him. If you’re doing this to make yourself feel better about the fact that you had it good and he hasn’t had anything but bad, you’ll hurt him even more.”

He looked, momentarily, like she’d slugged him in the solar plexus. “Low blow, January, but maybe I deserved it.”

Rising, he strode across her office and stared distractedly at the degrees framed on her walls. “I can’t even be insulted. I haven’t ever given you reason to believe there are anything but self-serving bones in this body, have I? A man on the make, that’s how you see me.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s all I’ve ever shown you. Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been. But you know something, Counselor?” He turned slowly to face her. “There is something about you that makes a man think past his own needs and makes him wonder about others. You rub off, January. You never do anything halfway. You commit completely. You make a man care. You make
this
man care.”

The compassion and determination in his eyes touched a part of her heart that no man had ever touched before. With great effort she ignored that, ruthlessly focusing her attention on his proposition. He was a fool, she thought bleakly. But he was a sincere fool, and his mind was made up. The lawyer in her, however, offered one more chance at getting out. “You’re absolutely sure you want to do this?”

He nodded.

She let out a deep breath. “Let me make a few calls.”

Half an hour later, she had the necessary information on Toby. A couple more calls and she was his new court-appointed attorney. By the end of the hour, a messenger had delivered a copy of Toby’s file, compiled over the years by the Department of Human Services.

It read like a bad movie. Deprived of even the most basic and elemental love by a mother who had deserted him as a toddler, robbed of a childhood by unethical foster parents intent on making money off the system, and finally neglected by the cousin who offered a home for the sole sake of a monthly welfare check he received on Toby’s behalf, Toby had at last reached out for help.

“How does this happen?” Michael asked, his face a mirror of his anger.

January shrugged. “The system is overextended. Social workers are overworked, and they can’t get an accurate read on everyone out there who’s on the take. For every one hundred caring foster homes, there’s the one bad one that slips through the cracks. Toby was unfortunate enough to be placed in some bad ones, and then with his cousin.”

According to the file, Toby was heading for big trouble. The brick wasn’t his first attempt to cry out against a system that had failed him. January had intimate knowledge of those cries. Trying to make sense of her father’s abuse, then attempting to deal with his death alone, she’d cried out several times herself. Like Toby, she’d fallen in with a bad crowd and repeatedly gotten into scrapes with the law. Like him, her cries had gone unanswered until one overworked and underpaid social worker with a heart the size of Texas had looked past the anger and seen the pain. With her help January had turned her life around.

She watched Toby through the glass wall as he sprawled in feigned boredom in a chair. Toby didn’t realize it yet, but Michael might just have the answer to his cry—
if
they could pull this off.

Twenty-four hours later Judge Lawton, his hawkish features set in a grim scowl, addressed January. “I don’t have to remind you that what you’ve proposed is highly irregular. I am granting your requests and temporarily going along with your recommendations on the basis of your past performance and on your endorsement of Mr. Hayward and his family. In the meantime Human Services will be monitoring Toby’s case closely and keeping me apprised of the situation.”

They’d done it. They’d actually pulled it off. January breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, your honor.”