“Thanks, Mom,” Rush says, head bowing. He feels warmth rising in his chest. Maybe he’d misjudged her, or maybe …
His mom says, “Well, I won’t keep you long, I just …”
“Mmmmm,” Rush hums without thinking, and when he hums, magic rises in the room and weaves into his voice.
“Need money,” his mother says.
Rush feels a jolt of cold rush through him and looks up fast. His mother has her hands clasped over her mouth. Her eyes are wide, like she is shocked by her own words.
Rush steps back and bumps against the door. “Why-did-you-really-come-here?” The words come out of him in a sing-song voice, even though he doesn’t mean them to. The magic rises around him, and it’s warm and enveloping even as he feels cold.
His mother drops her hands, and in the same weird sing-song voice says, “Captain Cody, Lean, Schoolboy, Doors and Fours.”
“What?” Rush blinks, utterly confused.
His mother throws her hands over her mouth again.
From the top of the stairs, Deanna says, “They’re street names for opioids.”
A clock in the house rings the hour, and no one moves. Rush shakes his head in frustration. What did he expect? Returning to his senses, he grabs the doorknob. The music of magic hums, or maybe he hums, he’s not certain, but when he says, “You need to go, Mother,” the words come out almost a song.
Hands still over her mouth, his mother walks out as though in a trance.
Rush follows her, shutting the door behind him. He stands on the stoop as she makes her way down the walk, with each step the music of magic fading. By the time she reaches the sidewalk proper, the music is gone. Stopping in her tracks, his mother turns and spits out, “You’ve always been ungrateful.”
Rush feels more tired than he did hiking hungry and aching through the Jotunheim forest. “I know,” he says.
The car that’s been idling pulls up to his mother with a screech. She gets in beside Justin and they drive off. His mother doesn’t look back at him once. He notices in an odd detached way that the car is riding low, like it’s got something heavy in the trunk and back seat. He huffs to himself. Could be a body, he doesn’t know, and isn’t sure he cares. He just feels numb.
He sits down on the stoop and wraps his arms around himself. In only a t-shirt, jeans, and socks, Rush is cold, but he can’t bring himself to go in. He’s known her all his life. Why’d he think she would change? Embarrassing him in front of people, asking him for money—she’s done much worse, so why does it hurt so much this time? He groans, and the groan becomes a hum, and he knows the answer to that question, too. Because this time, he’d hoped for better.
He hears the door open behind him. Deanna comes out and sits down next to him in the cold. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Not your fault.”
“I wish … I wish …” she whispers, but doesn’t finish.
From next door comes Katerina’s voice. “Come on, we’re late!” and a child’s scream and sobs.
Rush looks to his left and sees the woman carrying one boy and dragging one more behind her to her car waiting in the driveway. Both kids are crying as Katerina loads them up. When she’s done, she goes to the driver’s side, and looks up to the sky as though saying a prayer.
“That poor woman …” says Deanna. “Raising two kids alone.”
“She should have thought about how hard it would be before she popped out number two,” Rush snaps, and he’s being generous … you shouldn’t knowingly go into single parenthood.
Deanna sniffs and says tightly, “Well, Rush, the arrival of a second child is hard on relationships and that’s when couples are most likely to split. In Katerina’s case, though, the boys are her nephews; she didn’t want them going into foster care. Her sister and brother in-law have troubles similar to your mother's.”
Rush feels like his chest is made of lead, but can’t bring himself to say he's sorry. A snowflake drifts past Rush’s nose, and then another. Sighing, Deanna gets up. She pats him on the shoulder fondly, and he wonders what he did to deserve it.
* * *
Ten hours later, Rush is wondering if Jeff’s final words were going to be, “She’s going to be caught in the blizzard of the century! You have to shovel out the house!”
Saving her from a mob hit would be more heroic, but he’s hopeful that this is the deed that sets him free to go solve other issues that have arisen … or rather, not arisen. He huffs and scoops a load of snow over his shoulder.
Anthony, Andrew, and Rush are shoveling the driveway—the snow blower ran out of gas an hour ago—and Bianca is standing on a ladder, sweeping snow off the roof. It’s getting colder, it’s dark, and the snow is over two feet on either side and not letting up.
“I don't think we’re going to be able to keep shoveling Katerina’s drive if we want to keep our drive clear,” Andrew says. Rush had been insisting that they “try, you know, to be neighborly.” In reality, he feels guilty. He spent a few months in foster care; the family wasn’t unkind but being taken out of his school and away from his neighborhood friends had been disorientating, and hearing the tales of some of the other kids who had been shipped from home to home had been frightening. He understands what Katerina is doing for her two ungrateful nephews.
“Jeezus …They were only expecting four inches earlier,” Anthony exclaims.
Panting, Andrew says to his brother, “Do you think it’s one of those magic users messing with the weather?”
Anthony shudders. “Wish they could send them all back to Asgard, and Alfheim, and wherever.”
The world is snow silent, and there is no magic in the air. “It’s not magic,” Rush says, feeling distinctly uncomfortable at Anthony’s announcement even though other, decidedly more powerful people, have said similar things and worse. Maybe it’s that the fear isn’t completely misguided. The magic spreading virus is new; in adults, it doesn’t seem to cause any problems, but the jury is out still on its effects on children and developing fetuses.
Both boys look at him. One of Anthony’s eyebrows lift and the opposite eye narrows. “How would you know it’s not magic? Humans don’t feel it.”
Scooping up a load of snow, Rush says, “I’ve been around it enough.” The world knows he’s been to Asgard and Jotunheim.
“Huh,” says Anthony, pausing to cast a curious glance at Rush.
The sound of a car engine makes them all turn.
“It’s Katerina. She’ll never be able to park in her driveway,” says Andrew, and goes to wave her into their drive behind Rush’s car.
As she gets out, Rush says, “We tried to shovel you out but …”
She waves a hand. “No, no, no! I’m so glad I don’t have to park on the street.” She seems ridiculously grateful as she hauls the two kids out of the backseat. She smiles at them all, but extra wide at Rush. He smiles back and hums, hears magic, and feels Lewis’s curse breaking.
* * *
“My window is broken!”
Katerina’s voice from the foyer brings Rush down the stairs from breakfast the next morning. Her two little rug rats are running down to the basement, while Deanna says, “What window?”
“My car window,” says Katerina, putting a hand in her thick hair. “They stole my CD player, and my emergency cash … but I’m most worried about the window. I can’t drive around in Chicago in winter with a broken window … ”
He hears Deanna say something about Katerina calling her office and borrowing her car, but Rush is already out the door, humming as he goes, a bad feeling in his stomach. He sees the driver’s side window broken in, the shards of glass in the snow, hums a few notes under his breath … and suddenly he just knows. He tears off down the snowy street in his running shoes, with snow and slush slipping in around his ankles, cold burning in his lungs, and doesn’t stop running until he reaches the apartment complex he spent most of his life in. It’s only a little over a quarter mile from Jeff and Deanna’s place—strange how it ha
d seemed like a whole other world when he was a kid. He’d felt so abandoned when they’d left.
The three-story buildings are shabbier than he remembers. The aluminum siding is dirty, the roofs look like they need repair, and the cars in the parking lot look old and one is on blocks. He races to the building where he’d once lived and manages to reach the door just as someone is coming out. They don’t ask him questions when he bolts up the stairs. He doesn’t have to knock when he reaches the landing above—the door to the old place is open. Rush barrels in and finds it empty, of course.
Maybe it’s because there is almost no furniture, only a bed with an old mattress stripped of sheets in the single bedroom, but it looks smaller than he remembers. Jeff’s place had had the same layout, and he and Deanna had twin boys—no wonder Deanna had insisted they move just before they had Bianca. They’d wound up moving so close, but it had seemed like a million miles when Rush was eight. For a while he hadn’t seen them, and then around the age of twelve he’d bumped into Jeff and the kids at Frontier Park while riding his bike, and then he kept bumping into them on purpose. In high school he’d taken to crashing on their couch … Deanna never protested … he’d thought it was because Jeff had insisted, but now, thinking of her patting him on the shoulder, he wonders if maybe she just didn’t mind.
Rubbing the back of his neck, he hums to himself, remembers the way Justin’s car set low, and knows, in his gut, that his mom and Justin broke into Katerina’s car. He also knows he has to also set it right.
* * *
Katerina’s voice cracks over Rush’s cell phone. “We just got to the mechanic. Are Diego and Roberto still behaving?”
“Sure, they’re fine,” Rush says, lifting Roberto, who has just face planted in the snow by the back of his coat.
Somehow, “setting it right” had wound up with him babysitting Katerina’s two nephews. Deanna almost did it but Bianca caught Rush just before the deal was settled and said, “You can’t let Mom babysit those boys! They’re crazy, and haven’t you noticed how tired she’s been lately?”
It was true. Deanna had seemed a bit slower lately. Rush had countered, “Why don’t you babysit them?”
“Because I’m going back to school and so are Andrew and Anthony,” Bianca snapped.
So here he is, and really, how hard could it be?
“I peed!” cries Diego, the three-year-old.
“It’ll help keep you warm!” Rush says.
“What’s going on? Is everything all right?” Katerina asks.
“Everything is fine,” Rush says. And really, in the grand scheme of things, it is. It’s not like they’re starving to death, being shot at, or facing six armed, man-eating, gorgeous spider women.
“Okay, okay …” He can hear Katerina exhale on the other end of the line. “Thank you so much for this, it means so much to me! I have to go, they’re calling my name.” The line clicks off, and Diego cries again. “The pee is making me cold!”
“We just put your suit on fifteen minutes ago,” Rush protests.
Diego sniffs up at him.
Rush sighs. “Okay, we’ll go inside and change.”
“Nooooooooo!” screams Roberto.
“I have to go inside! Now!” Diego cries. “I’m freezing.”
“Okay, Diego,” says Rush.
“Noooooooooooo!” howls Roberto.
Diego joins the chorus. “Nowww!”
“Snow! Snow! Snow!” chants Roberto.
The rest of the afternoon doesn’t go any better. Rush has tossed a stuffed ball across the living room for a half an hour, and is so mind-numbingly bored that he thinks he might be drooling, when Katerina calls again.
“They still aren’t done with my car,” Katerina says. “I’m so sorry.”
“Not a problem,” says Rush, taking the ball from Roberto. There are plenty of mind-numbing boring moments in the service, too. He can handle boredom. Although it seems to have a different quality when you’re babysitting. It’s as though—
“Throw! Throw! Throw!” Roberto says.
—you don’t have any mental space.
“Thank you so much,” says Katerina. “They eat dinner at six.”
“What time do they go to sleep?” asks Rush, and realizes he may sound a little too hopeful.
“Never,” Katerina whispers ominously.
“What?” says Rush.
“Throw! Throw! Throw!” Roberto demands. “Throoooowwwww!”
“Go get it, boy,” Rush says, tossing the Thomas the Train ball across the room. His lips purse, wondering if Katerina will be offended that he’s treating her nephew like a dog.
“He’s making you throw the ball, isn’t he?” she murmurs. “He can do that for hours. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Rush says as Roberto scampers back, carrying the ball in his mouth. Now would be a perfect time to chat her up, but he doesn’t think he can talk in sentences more than three words. Roberto drops the saliva-stained plush ball in Rush’s lap and laughs. “Throw!”
“Bedtime?” Rush asks, and he hears the demand in his voice.
“Seven-thirty for Roberto, eight o'clock for Diego,” Katerina replies.
Rush’s eyes go to the clock. Hours.
“But I’ll be home before then,” Katerina says, sounding desperate.
“Mmmmm …” Rush hums and knows somehow she’s wrong.
“Throw!”
“Gotta go,” he says. He hangs up the phone, throws the ball, wipes his chin in case he is drooling, and then realizes he has no idea where Diego went to.
At eight o’clock, Katerina is stuck in traffic and Rush is realizing why she’d had the ominous tone in her voice when she talked about the boys’ bedtime. Roberto is jumping up and down, laughing and shrieking in his bed. The boys share a room, which Rush thinks is a dumb idea, until he suggests that Diego leave the room so his brother’s trampoline antics won’t keep him awake and then Diego starts screaming, too. “Nooooooo! I’m not going!” and Roberto’s happy laugh turns into a wail. Rush isn’t a savage. He gets that the kids are just kids, and the boys probably have some weird separation anxiety going on, but he’s losing his mind.
For a moment, Rush thinks he’s going to run out the boys’ door, hold it shut, and let them scream, but the thought of Katerina, she of the cute dimples, seeing him like that, absolutely destroying any possibility of not having to beg Lewis to undo her curse, makes him keep it together. Mostly keep it together. He lets out a whine … a musical sort of sing-songy whine. The decibels of the boys’ cries lower, and he feels magic in the room. Encouraged by the magic, relative quiet, and desperation, he starts singing, “Hey, little boys, we’ve had fun, go to sleep and Rush’ll get you a Gatling gun,” to the tune of some lullaby he thinks he heard once.
The boys stop crying and blink at him.
It’s a life raft, obviously, and no matter how corny it is, Rush is hanging on.
“Diego and Roberto, it’s time to sleep, you’re gonna have dreams of army jeeps.”
“More,” Diego whispers.
Rush gives them more … the words flowing to him in the magical music swirling around the room. The boys close their eyes, and within minutes, are out like lights with Rush crooning, “Tomorrow’s gonna be super fine when you wake up with brand new Beretta M9s.”
He stops singing and the magic fades, but the boys don’t wake. Backing up, he quietly closes the door, and then raises his arms for joy.
Humming to himself, enjoying the magic and the otherwise blissful silence, he heads downstairs, straightens up the disaster zone that is the house, and then prowls over to an ancient stereo system on the bookshelf. It has a record player, a double-tape deck, and a CD player. The top is shiny and free of dust, and it occurs to him that Katerina actually uses the ancient device. Lying on top of the record player is a CD case. Rush picks it up, and his brows hike to his hairline. Rod Stewart Best Of. Not a favorite.
He hears the front door click, and a second late
r, Katerina barrels into the house. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
Sliding over to the foyer, Rush puts his fingers to his lips.
Katerina’s dark brown eyes get very wide and her mouth falls open.“They’re asleep?” she gasps.
Rush grins triumphantly.
She puts her hand to her mouth and looks like she is about to cry. “Oh, my God! How did you do it?”
He shrugs, and he swears her eyes get misty. “Let me pay you for watching them,” she says, reaching into her purse.
His smile melts thinking about his mother breaking her window and stealing her CD player. Rush holds up his hands. “No, no! It’s okay … I … no.”
Katerina looks at him strangely.
“You can’t pay me, it would … uh … offend my honor,” he babbles, not wanting to admit his mom’s involvement, or how he knows his mom’s involvement.
Taking off her coat, Katerina lifts an eyebrow, and then laughs, and says, “Can I at least offer you a beer?”
She’s a hero woman, she’s generous, and she likes him. Rush smiles. “Yes, ma’am, you can,” he says.
She walks past him and up the stairs to the kitchen, and he watches her go. She’s dressed casually in jeans and a fitted sweater, but the view from a few steps down is good, real good. Rush taps the side of his thigh, feeling heat under his skin and Lewis’s curse busting apart like the snowman he’d tried to make in the yard with the boys.
A few minutes later they’re sitting on the couch, and Rush has confessed that if the tissues in the bathroom don’t come out of the box quite like they’re supposed to, it’s because Diego took them all out to make “snow.” Tipping her beer up to her lips, Katerina laughs, and Rush hums … and with the magic weaving its way into the room, he can feel her laugh is real, and that she likes him. He feels good, really good, like he’s growing. Because of Jeff, he’d narrowly avoided the allure of the neo-Nazi wannabes at his school, and because of that, Rush had gone on to make two of his best friends ever—Park and Harrison. It’s occurring to him now that having his default setting to “all women are evil,” he might be missing out on awesome people. His eyes slip over to Katerina.
Once Upon A Kiss: Seventeen Romantic Faerie Tales Page 36