The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain
Page 28
Chapter 5
Craig brought Zach home from school that afternoon. "Only after your homework is done," he told the youngster as they came inside together from the garage. "Paws is allergic to kids who haven't done their homework."
"Really?" Zach asked, walking to the dining table and setting his backpack on it. He looked over at Kara for the truth. Fascinating, how quickly kids picked up on such subtleties of personality.
"No, not really," she told him. "But Ms. Faber said you need to do a better job of turning your homework in."
"Oh," he said, dropping his eyes. He pulled his ID tag from around his neck and sat down to sift through his backpack, withdrawing a notebook from it. He began to open the notebook, but spotted a paper across the table and reached for it curiously. Craig, in the kitchen, noticed right away, but it was too late; Kara, at the computer, saw it, too, and one hand flew to cover her mouth—but he already had it in his hands. The birth certificate… They had intended to put it away before he came home.
"This paper has my name on it," Zach observed, intrigued. He read a little further down the page. "It has my birthday, too. And your names are on—wait… This says you are my parents!" He looked up at them, full of hope.
"Yes, it does," Craig admitted.
Zach looked from one of them to the other. "So…you believe me now?"
Craig stepped into the dining area and pulled a chair out for himself, turning it backward and sitting with his arms crossed atop its back. "We need to talk about that, Zach."
Kara joined them, forming a triangle with him and Zach around one end of the table. Zach frowned. "You still don't?"
Craig sighed. "I don't know what to think, Zach, except that someone lied about you to the State of Washington. And not recently—when you were born."
Zach looked back down at the paper. "It has my whole name on it. It says I was born at home. It says you're my father and mother!"
"It's a birth certificate," Kara explained. "We picked it up this morning so we could find out who your real parents are."
The youngster slammed his fist on the tabletop. "You are my real parents! It says so!" He was angry, but not defiant—just trying to get through to people who ought to be able to make sense of something so obvious. Craig respected his tenacity.
"I could believe we're your parents, Zach," he confessed, "just from looking at you. You said it the other day—you're left-handed like Kara and you look like that picture of me when I was your age. And if I were anybody else, I might believe it because this birth certificate says it's so. Even the school says it's so. But I know for a fact that we've never had a child. Even with the doctors' help, we couldn't have children. So this birth certificate has to be wrong."
"And look at this, Zach," Kara said, pointing to a line on the birth certificate. "I've been trying all afternoon to find out who this person is—Della Apton. See where it says she was the midwife? That means she helped me have my baby. But I've never met anyone by that name. And I can't find anything on the Internet about a midwife named Della Apton. Also," she said to Craig, "while you were picking Zach up, I called the state's midwife association and asked them about her. They couldn't find any record of her."
"Nothing, huh?" Craig put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. A dead end, at least so far. He looked at Zach again, then at Kara. Their expressions were surprisingly similar, a look of staunch certitude blended with concern in the eyes of each.
He took a deep breath. "Zach, you want us to be your parents… All right, then. Look, at the very least, you're related to us. So you're part of our family until either we figure out what's going on here and get you to your real family, or else in a few days we have to call Child Protective Services, and they'll probably put you in a foster home until your family can be found."
Zach turned to Kara with a measure of trepidation. "I don't want to go somewhere else. I want to stay here."
"It's not that simple, Craig," Kara pointed out. "They'll look at his birth certificate first. They'll just bring him back to us. And what happens then? Do we get charged with trying to abandon our child? Does the birth certificate make us de facto parents? At the least, we would look bad, trying to dump our own child on the state."
"The birth certificate," he sighed. He had been doing that a lot since Thursday night. "Right, that's a problem." He slid the certificate over to himself and read through it for the twentieth time, then looked back up at the youngster. "Zach, I don't like this turning into an us-against-you contest. We don't want it to be like that."
"No," Kara concurred. "You're a really great kid. We like you a lot. We just can't figure out who said you're our son when we've never had a son. Why would anyone do that?" She paused. "Does that make any sense to you?"
The youngster nodded. "I guess. But I just know you are my mom and dad. I can tell. I knew it when I first got here." His eyes rested on that birth certificate again.
"So there's our problem," Craig said. "All three of us want to know why someone told your grandparents and the State of Washington that you're our son." There was no need to mention that his grandparents could be the culprits; he would not accept that idea readily. "So I suggest we work the problem together—me, Kara, and you. We'll help each other until we find some answers. Deal?"
"Deal," Zach agreed. "I want to know why I had to grow up without you. I like you guys, too."
Craig lifted his eyebrows at that comment and glanced over at Kara. She bit her upper lip as she considered Zach.
"We'll need to be ready for whatever we might find out, though," Craig warned. He thought it best to begin preparing the youngster for disappointment. "What will you do, Zach, if you find out we're not your parents, that somebody lied about us and you have a family somewhere else?"
Craig could see the youngster thinking through that possibility with reluctance. "I would be sad. But I would want to meet them," he answered. "Could I still come and visit sometimes?"
"I think we would like that," Kara said immediately.
Craig nodded his agreement. "And what if we can't find your family, Zach, and we have to call CPS after all? They would ask you a lot of questions, probably put you in a foster home. Maybe they would bring you back to us. More likely, they would find out the birth certificate is wrong and send you somewhere else. Could you be okay with that?"
Zach looked down at his hands in thought. "If they let me come back, I would be okay with it. Otherwise, I don't know." He looked back up at Craig. "But what if we find out you are my parents?"
Craig frowned. That question again. The youngster so desperately wanted them to be his mom and dad. "Zach," he said, "I can't…" But the youngster had answered Craig's questions, and now he waited. "All right. You know—I think I'd like having you around."
"So would I," Kara added.
Zach let out a slow, relieved breath. His eyes turned to Kara, then back to Craig.
"But you would have to do chores," Craig warned him.
"Like what?"
"I don't know. We'd figure it out. Maybe taking care of Paws, to start with. And you'd have to do your homework every night. Like right now."
Paws barked at something outside. "Yeah, better get to it," Kara encouraged. "Paws is waiting for you, and it sounds like he's getting impatient."
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