An Unexpected Addition

by Terese Ramin

  “You gotta come see what we found in the dig!” Mike tugged at her arm, willing her attention with his enthusiasm.

  “It’s huge!” Bele bounced, one-legged, at her other elbow, equally enthusiastic, his hands holding his crutches spread wide to demonstrate dimension. “A bone this long at least You have to call the University of Michigan—”

  “Nuh-unh,” Mike objected. “Michigan State.”

  “U of M,” Bele repeated firmly, pale palms flashing wide for emphasis against the darkness of the rest of his skin, as remarkably single-minded in this as he was in all things. “We found a really real dinosaur this time, not just some old cow bone and—”

  “And Risto says,” Mike interrupted, referring to the Finnish exchange student who’d spent the past ten months living with them while taking classes with Li at the high school, “that if it’s not a dinosaur, then it might be from a woolly mammoth or a saber-toothed tiger or maybe even an eohippus that migrated all the way up here from New Mexico, but Bele ‘n’ I think it’s too big for that—”

  “And even if it’s not an eohippus or anything except something regular like a murder victim,” Bele picked up the thread of the conversation from Mike, almost physically yanking it back to himself, “you still have to come see, cuz it’s super important and we’ve never dug up anything like this before.”

  “Something regular like...?” Speechless, Hank stared at the youngsters, one fair and the other dark, too far removed from his own boyhood to remember the gruesomely delightful turns of a young boy’s mind. The long-time cop in him keened instantly at the word murder; it took real effort to get him to back off this time and remember these were not his everyday bad guys he was dealing with here. But this was the second time in less than ten minutes he’d been caught by this family casually mentioning something about dead bodies. Hell of a good thing he didn’t work homicide then. And thank God Megan’s mind had never wandered down such macabre corridors when she was eight—so far as he knew.

  But then he probably wouldn’t know, gone as often and as long as he’d been, would he?

  “Of course I’ll come see,” he heard Kate say. “But dead body or dinosaur bones, manners first.” She turned to him. “Mr. Mathison, have you met my sons Mike and Bele? Boys—” She turned back to them. “This is Megan’s father, Mr. Mathiso—” Arrested in mid-word, her focus sharpened on Bele’s crutches, sank to his left leg, which Hank noted with shock ended a few inches below his knee. “Where’s your leg, Bele? You haven’t lost it again, have you?”

  Bele made a face at her. “Mo-om. I only did that once and it wasn’t my fault Mike hid it.”

  “I did not,” Mike said indignant, “It was right inside the window seat where I put it. And anyway, you wouldn’t give me back my baseball glove and I needed it.”

  “I didn’t take your old glove and it wasn’t yours, it was Li’s old one and they were going to play me, not you if you hadn’t taken my foot and—”

  “Boys.” Exasperated, Kate stepped in and brought them back to the point she’d sidetracked them onto. Much as she loved them, there were moments when she wanted to squash them both like tomato slugs. Insects by day. angels only in sleep, she’d laughingly told one of the other nuns at the Red Cross hospital they’d set up in El Salvador, observing a pair of scruffy but angelic looking noninnocents con yet another journalist into the purchase of something the “angels” had undoubtedly just swiped from the reporter’s pack. “We found the prosthesis, you both got your own baseball gloves, we’re done with it, but it doesn’t explain where your leg is now—”

  “I have a sore on my stump,” Bele said matter-of-factly. “I need a new leg.”

  “A new one?” Kate asked dismayed. “It hasn’t even been four months yet, has it? Did you try a lighter stump sock?”

  Bele nodded. “It’s still too tight, and it’s too short, too. I’m growing.”

  “And to think we once thought too much coffee would stunt your growth.” Kate sighed.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Bele said, affronted.

  “Maybe you should start.”

  “No way! It’s disgusting.”

  “My tennis shoes are too small for me, too,” Mike put in, not - to be outdone—and because it was the truth. His feet had been triple-E width since birth. “And Bele’s old ones are too skinny for my feet, even if his foot is longer than mine. I tried them on.”

  Arms akimbo, Kate eyed them with mock exasperation. “Weeds,” she pronounced, then grinned and ruffled Mike’s straight white-blond hair and brushed a hand over Bele’s shortshaved wiry black curls. “Feed ‘em, water ’em and ignore ’em and they grow like brush fire.”

  “Mom.” Mike rolled his eyes and leaned away, after first reaching up to tap her face with annoyed affection.

  “Mo-om.” Bele looked up at her with don’t do that in his voice and love in his eyes.

  Back of her wrist to her forehead, Kate moaned with melodramatic sadness, “They don’t need me anymore. Sigh, sob.” They laughed and she grinned. “Okay. I’ll call Dennis and make an appointment to get you fitted for a new socket and pylon, Bele, then while we’re in Ann Arbor we’ll do shoe shopping. Right, Mike?”

  “And lunch at Arby’s?” Both boys, in near unison, grinned at each other over this neatly laid trap.

  “We’ll see,” Kate agreed dryly. She jerked a thumb toward the house. “C‘mon, Bele, I want to take a look at your leg, make sure it’s clean ’n’ all. You’ll have to use your crutches till it heals—”

  Agile on his crutches as any other child on two legs, Bele danced out of reach, shaking his head. “Nuh-unh, you don’t have to. Meg already washed it and put stuff on it Come on, Ma,” he said, impatient and imploring. “Before Grisha finds our bone—”

  “And steals it to figure out how to test for age or something,” Mike finished.

  Unmatched sets of white teeth flashed first at each other, then at Kate, the grins of young boys filled with the possibilities of an entire summer stretched out before them. Eagerly they awaited Kate’s laughing nod, then swooped away, looking back only once to make sure she followed.

  It might have been his imagination, but Hank thought he discerned Bele moving a little faster to keep up with Mike, saw Mike unconsciously measuring his steps to match the sweep of his brother’s leg; crutches and feet hit the ground in perfect time, matching the unbidden plummeting of Hank’s heart to his stomach. What, how, who, when—questions he couldn’t keep up with zipped past the back of his throat without touching his tongue; only one held any clarity amid the numbness in his brain: how could they...he was only a little boy and they were so...how could they just...

  Accept?

  Wait a minute. His mind did an unexpected double take. Megan took care of Bele’s stump sore? Megan? His Megan? Willingly?

  Four steps across the drive in front of him Kate turned and looked back, pale eyes clear as the sky, full of a knowledge and understanding he still didn’t grasp and had never wanted to possess. But all she said was, “Coming, Mr. Mathison?”

  Incredulous and...curious as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything less. Hank went.

  Chapter 3

  “It happened not long before he came to us,” Kate said without preamble when Hank caught up with her. “He’s from a tiny village in southwest Zaire. His family walked three hours to the river for water. He was very young, maybe four. A water skin got away from him. He walked into the river to catch it and a crocodile took his leg.”

  Hank’s heart twisted, sinking in his gut. He’d seen worse things happen to children during his time in Colombia and Bolivia; the only way to deal with horrors he couldn’t stop or control had been to look past them, harden himself, not get involved. Here, because of Megan, he was involved by default—even before he’d known there was a Bele. He couldn’t—didn’t want to—look away. He had to say something, but what? No matter how badly you wanted them to be, words were never adequate to tragedy. “That’s terrible.”r />
  Kate shrugged, matter-of-fact. “At the time, yes. Now it’s inconvenient sometimes, not terrible. Ask him. He’s got the coolest left foot in the third grade and he can do anything on it the other kids can do on the ones they were born with and more things on one foot than they’ll ever be able to do. The croc could have killed him. Instead it made him special.”

  “But ” Hank began and subsided. He was way out of his depth, his element and the range of his control here. “But Megan?” he asked finally, painfully, hating himself for needing to question his daughter’s abilities. Hating himself for not knowing as well as he wanted to what her capabilities were. “She...took care of Bele’s leg and you don’t need to...” He hesitated, neither wanting to belittle his daughter nor indicate the depth of his inability to trust her to do the right thing on her own. “She’s only a kid,” he said lamely. “What if she... You don’t need to...check on her work?”

  Kate looked up at him, surprised. She didn’t intend to sound sanctimonious; Lord knew, with all the mistakes she made with her kids—past and present—she had as little right to sanctimony as anyone. A trace of it crept into her voice anyway. “Every kid’s got a story she wants somebody to listen to, Mr. Mathison.”

  “You think I don’t know that, Ms. Anden?” Hank snapped. Nothing stung worse than truth. “I haven’t exactly spent my life with my head in the sand when it comes to—”

  “Mr. Mathison, please.” Kate held up a hand and Hank chewed his anger into silence. “I didn’t mean to imply...” She hesitated. No, that wasn’t quite true. She probably had meant to imply exactly that. “I shouldn’t have said...” Another pause. No, that wasn’t true either. Somebody had to speak out of turn sometimes; if it had to be her, well... “I’m sorry. I can be rather, er...” She made a face. Confession might be good for the soul, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it. “I’m a little, um, self-righteous sometimes. It’s not an attractive feature. I’m working on it, but I still have a tendency to react first and think later. sometimes. I do apologize.”

  Astonished not only by her directness but by her willingness to recognize and accept her own flaws, Hank stared down at her. “That must have hurt.”

  Kate nodded and made another face. “You’ll never know.”

  His anger faded abruptly. Caught off guard he grinned. “You might be surprised.”

  “Probably not as much as you’d like me to be,” she returned

  Hank laughed. “Touché.”

  They stopped in the grass a hundred feet shy of the mound of earth Kate and Tai regularly salted with broken clay pots and sharks’ teeth and had long ago christened the Stone House Burial Mound and Archaeological Dig and exchanged wary grins. Common ground stood between them, ready to be claimed. Years of conflict peered over their shoulders, whispering caution in their ears. They looked at each other through curious eyes, and the fizz neither wanted to feel or recognize—that neither wanted reciprocated—tingled dully in the nerves of their right palms, hung like an itch out of reach between Kate’s shoulder blades, sank like a hungry growl in Hank’s belly without cause or reason.

  Too busy gently brushing clay from the bone in the dig to be aware of adults in the midst of adult hankerings, no children appeared to rescue them from each other, nor from awareness and uncertainty.

  A man who’d always had a knack for not wanting what he couldn’t have and for taking what he wanted without regrets, it unnerved Hank to find himself desiring something—someone—he didn’t plan to take. To find himself aching, drawn to step closer to Kate. To be near enough that loose strands of her long apricot hair reached out in the trace breeze to wrap around his fingers and cling to his hand seemingly to invite him nearer still. He threaded the web of coarse silk between his fingers and watched Kate’s face through eyes hooded with self-loathing and desire.

  Nervously Kate ran her suddenly dry tongue over her lips and watched him back. This sinking, quavering, butterflies-in-herstomach, no-holds-barred, this-is-it thud of her pulse was beyond her ken, a sensation she’d never before experienced. She didn’t want this, didn’t know what to do with it, could read the be careful plainly printed on Hank’s face and had no idea how. She also experienced a surge of heat and feminine power, a feline urge to stretch and taunt—a soul-deep fear that if she did, she’d suddenly find herself hip deep in a quagmire and sinking fast with no anchor rope to haul her back.

  She flicked a skittish glance toward Mike and Bele, too far away and too up to their elbows in muck to be of any use, then returned her gaze to Hank. She shut her eyes and tried not to feel the primitive thing emanating from him. Felt his fist tighten in her hair.

  A modern woman to the soles of her toes, Kate realized that if she wanted to be rescued before the unknown closed around her, she’d have to do what she always did and rescue herself.

  She sucked in a deep breath and did so. “You don’t like me, do you, Mr. Mathison?” she asked. It might do them both good to be reminded of where they’d always stood with each other.

  Knocked unceremoniously out of the moment, Hank loosed her hair and blinked at her. The bile of self-disgust rose in his throat, mingled with the irritation and restlessness of an unwanted craving left unsatisfied. How did she do that? he wondered. Take a moment and twist it out of reach so easily. And why did he care that she had?

  He swallowed and raised his guard, refusing to let the tightness in his shorts govern him. He’d come here to save his daughter, not to assuage his own loneliness with an ex-nun mother of seven. “This isn’t about you, Ms. Anden, it’s about Megan. Period. For what it’s worth, I don’t feel I know you well enough to either like or dislike—”

  “I didn’t invite you to dance, Mr. Mathison,” Kate interrupted with some asperity. “I asked you a question. You came to me because of your daughter. The sooner you and I get things clear between us, the sooner we can get past them and help Megan.”

  Hank’s mouth thinned without humor, his eyes hardened. “No, Ms. Anden,” he agreed with contempt—whether for her or for himself, Kate couldn’t tell. “I don’t like you. But I’ll work with you. For Megan.”

  “Why?” Her mother had often rebuked her over how easily Kate’s tongue raised blisters on other people’s hides. Chided her about goading a person with her why’s until she’d managed to rub the blisters raw.

  But she had to go on, had to press until the other person gave her the answers she needed. Whether she wanted to hear them or not.

  She repeated the question. “Why, Mr. Mathison?”

  Hank’s mouth twisted at her stupidity. “She’s my daughter. I love her.”

  “No.” Kate shook her head, impatient. There was an answer here someplace, she could feel it. An answer about Megan. “Don’t get me wrong. You loving Megan is great, but it’s not what I meant. What I meant was, why don’t you like me? Is it just me the concept, me the blunt goody-two-shoes ex-missionary-ex-nun and you’ve got a thing about ex-missionary-ex-nuns, or is it because of something Megan said—maybe an idea she planted. A point of view she has that’s maybe a little...” She hesitated. This was the man’s daughter she was talking about, after all. “A little skewed?”

  Light dawned slowly. This wasn’t, as he’d assumed, about Kate, but about Megan. And about how Megan reported and interpreted things. About Megan doing her damnedest to...what? Play him against Kate since a long time before he’d had his first chance to witness her doing so at breakfast this morning.

  His first reaction was anger at Kate, to choose not to believe ill of his daughter.

  His second reaction was to understand that this was the sort of thing he’d suspected all along but chosen to ignore in the face of other drains on his energies where Megan was concerned. Another symptom of the dysfunction that existed between him and his daughter.

  He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. It’s been so long the specifics escape me.”

  Kate nodded thoughtfully, and hands in the pockets of her jeans, turned and moved once more
toward Mike and Bele’s dig. “And a lot of the reason I’ve never particularly cared for you has to do with things Meg’s told Li and Li’s told me, with stray comments Meg’s made when she’s here—the fact that she’s always sneaking over here. I mean, teenagers are pretty territorial, so why would a kid prefer to have somebody else’s stuff around her instead of her own, if nothing’s wrong at home? And you didn’t know—she didn’t tell you—about Bele and she’s pretty much been his mother hen since the day he arrived.”

  “I see.” He had nothing else to say. Nothing to feel but the same sense of deadness he’d felt the day Megan had called, hysterical, and he’d arrived home to find Gen lying near death in the shower with the hot water running cold around her. The two most important people in his life were also the two he’d always known least well.

  “In all this time has Megan ever told you anything about what she does when she’s here?” Delicacy wasn’t her forte, but she could try.

  Hank shook his head. Admission hurt. “No. She’s always been a...private kid. And she’s been coming here so long, maybe I forgot to ask, or she didn’t answer or I didn’t want to ask because I knew we were a long way apart, but never realized how far. I wish...” He shook his head. “No, it’s too late for wishing on what’s been. Here and now is where we start from. So....” Grimacing, he hunched into his shoulders, then straightened and puffed out an uncomfortable breath, grabbing the bull by the horns. “So,” he said again, decisive this time. “What can you tell me about my daughter?”

  They reached the boys before Kate could fill him in on more than Megan’s history with Bele, beginning less than eighteen months after the death of her own mother. It was both too little and almost too much.

  She told him how his daughter had been there when she’d taken the call from the nuns in Kinshasa, relaying the message that Bele’s mother had died in childbirth the year before, that his father was dying and had requested the sisters contact Kate—who’d worked at the mission years before and knew the family well—and ask her to adopt Bele.