by Beverly Bird
Still, it hurt. It hurt more than anything that had happened yet. Because he’d given his best to this kid since he had found him again, and even, for the most part, before he’d lost him. He’d been a little impatient back then, often too busy, but he had tried his damnedest not to let the Wallace genes take hold. A lot of times he’d done it self-consciously, and sometimes he’d faltered, but damn it, he’d tried. But neither Jannel nor Sugar Joe, not Sarah nor Mariah’s influence at school could change the facts. Bo had Wallace genes through and through. Maybe he’d just been born knowing that everything good in life had its price, and that the things that looked good at first glance usually weren’t when you stared at them a little longer.
Bo waited. When Adam didn’t go on, he came slowly, in fitful starts and stops, to the log. He sat gingerly, keeping good space between them.
“Well, you know, it just seemed too good to be true,” he complained.
Adam flinched. “It was.” But suddenly, he wasn’t thinking of the promise he’d made Bo any longer. He was thinking of Mariah again.
For once in his sorry life, he had believed. He’d believed in her. For a brief moment in time, his own Wallace genes hadn’t shone through. He’d let himself believe she was exactly what she seemed to be. So good. So perfect. So right for him.
Sucker. Fool.
“So what happens now?” Bo asked, dragging his attention back to him, and Adam realized that the boy’s voice quavered. “Are you gonna just take me away, anyway, whether I like it or not?”
He had to think, couldn’t think. He needed desperately to say the right thing, but no words would come. Then he heard his own voice and he was shaken, because the words came on their own, good ones, right ones. “How about a compromise?”
“I don’t get it,” Bo muttered warily. “What’s a compromise?”
Honesty, Adam thought. And sometimes it required half truths. “I can’t stay here anymore, pal.” It’s not the same place. It’s not the place I thought it was. He’d never thought he’d be able to stay indefinitely, but he’d believed it had been a good, patient spot for a respite. Now he could no longer tolerate the smells, the sights, the sounds.
“It would be really hard for me to do that,” he went on hoarsely. “So how about this? Why don’t you come back to Texas with me for a certain period of time? Like two weeks or maybe a month. Why don’t you come back with me and just see what it’s like?”
“Then what?” Bo asked, his eyes narrowing in a suspicious Jake look.
“Then you can come back here and visit.”
“You’ll bring me back?”
Half truths. “I’ll make damned sure you get here.” He’d get Jake to bring him, if he had to.
Bo’s jaw dropped. “That’s a bad word.”
Get used to it. I’m going to be a bastard at times. I’ve lost things I didn’t even know I wanted. “Sorry.”
“S’okay, I guess. You just surprised me.” Bo paused. “Just two weeks? That’s all I have to do?”
“If that’s all you think you can handle.”
“What about school?”
And that brought another flashing image of his teacher. Adam’s gut clenched and twisted. “We’ll decide after you come back here for a visit. After we see how you feel about everything. I don’t think there’s any law that says a kid can’t take a couple weeks off.”
“Ma’s going to cry.”
“Ma—oh.” Sarah, he thought. He still wasn’t used to that, but he knew better than to correct him. “Maybe,” he said finally, cautiously. “But I think she’ll feel better if she knows you’ll come back pretty soon.”
“So what if I stay there two weeks and I hate it? What if I don’t want to go back a second time?”
Adam raked a gloved hand through his hair. The kid was good. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I don’t have an answer for that yet. I guess we’ll just have to see when we get to that point. If we get to that point. You could really like it there, you know.” He wished suddenly he hadn’t given him the two-week option. A month would be better. Maybe in a month Bo would forget everything he had left behind. Maybe, then, Dallas wouldn’t seem so bad.
Who the hell am I kidding? Bo was leaving a family, a real family, and he wasn’t gaining much at all.
Bo dragged a toe through a small mound of snow. Something was still bothering him.
“What?” Adam prompted.
“Do I have another ma there, too?”
Adam lost his breath. “No.”
“I don’t? Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know.”
Bo was staring at him, stricken and confused. Adam searched for more words, and once again they came like gifts placed kindly and generously in his throat. “Bo...Noah, I mean...you did have one. That’s how you got here, to Pennsylvania. She decided she didn’t want to live with me anymore, and she left and she took you with her. She came here. But then she probably had some kind of trouble, because she asked Sarah and Sugar Joe to take care of you for a little while. And they did. They did a real good job, too. They took care of you until your mom could come back or I could find you. I just got here first, that’s all.”
“How come it took you so long?”
“Huh?” That one left him dizzy.
“How come it took you so long to come? I must have been here forever.”
“There were a lot of places to look for you.” Adam forced himself to breathe. “And I had to go through every one. I looked every day. Every single day. It was all I ever did. The most important thing in the world was finding you again.”
Bo digested that. “It’s that big out there, huh?” There was fear and false bravado in his voice now. It still stumped Adam to think that the world he knew, the one he had lived in every day for thirty-eight years, was so alien to his own child now.
“Well, yeah,” he said softly. “I guess it is.”
“Do you have a fast red car?”
His heart thumped. “No. That was your mother’s. But your uncle has a fast yellow one.” If he hasn’t self-destructed again and totaled it in the weeks I’ve been gone. That was always a possibility.
“Can I bring Bear?”
Adam jolted back from his own hellish thoughts. His eyes burned again. And this time he couldn’t quite blink back the tears. “Sure.”
“Okay. Then, I guess I’ll go on the compmise. You know, just to see how big it really is out there.”
“Of course.”
Bo got to his feet and trudged out of the woods. After a moment, Adam got up to follow him.
Chapter 19
Mariah was gone when they got back to the house. Matt was sitting in the kitchen, shoveling down a bowl of hot soup. Both boys’ cheeks were apple red. Adam wondered how much of it was from the cold and how much was guilt.
Sarah hovered over Matt, touching him again and again, brushing his hair back, plucking a piece of unseen lint off his shoulder. She brought Bo some soup, as well, almost visibly trying to restrain herself, but then she cried out softly and hugged him, holding him so tightly and for so long that the boy finally began to wriggle.
Her eyes brimmed with tears as she looked up at Adam. “Thank you. Thank you for bringing them back, for...insisting.”
Thank you? He was tearing her life up six ways to Sunday, he thought, and there wasn’t a thing he could do any differently. Adam shook his head, unable to answer.
“Would you like something warm to drink, Mr. Wallace?” she went on. “Cider? Coffee?”
He shook his head. He’d already turned down the soup. He had a hunch that nothing was going to thaw the strange cold inside him.
“Well,” Joe said finally. “What’s the plan now?”
“Are you gonna make me leave tonight?” Bo piped up, and his voice trembled.
Everything inside Adam, every instinct and all his love needed desperately to take Bo back to the motel with him. He wanted to sit in the chair there watching over him all night, needed to sta
re at him steadily and relentlessly while he slept, so that he could not possibly slip away again. Even if he didn’t run, someone in the settlement was stealing kids.
And then he thought of those wretched, jaded, distrustful Wallace genes. “Are you planning on running anywhere again?” he heard himself ask Bo.
The boy’s face colored even brighter. “Uh-uh.”
“Promise? Here’s the thing...Bo.” It was getting past time to straighten out this name business, he realized. He glanced quickly at Sugar Joe and saw the man nod silently, slightly. “If I let you stay here tonight, it means I’m trusting you. I’m trusting you to be here tomorrow when I come back. You’d have to give me your word.”
Matt muttered something like, “Two cold out there, anyway.” Joe gave him a gentle warning shot to the back of the head.
“Yeah,” Bo mumbled.
“What?”
“I said, yeah. I’ll be here.”
“Do you want me to keep him home from school, then?” Sarah blurted, understanding finally settling in on her. Tomorrow would be the day.
“Please,” Adam said shortly. “I’ll be back around eight o’clock.” And it would kill him to wait even that long. He had virtually nothing to pack, nothing to keep him busy at the motel. He needed to get on a plane and go. Now. The need practically screamed through his blood, but he had never been of the mind that yanking a bandage off all at once hurt any less.
He ruffled Bo’s hair and hunkered down until he was eye level with him. “Eat your soup and get warm, then grab yourself a good night’s sleep. You’ve got quite an adventure waiting for you tomorrow.”
For a brief moment, something avid, a kind of universal boyish excitement, touched his eyes. Then they slid away from Adam’s. “Yeah.”
Adam stood again, nodding at Joe. “Thanks for everything.”
“We’ll see you in the morning, then.”
As he let himself out, Adam thought that Sugar Joe’s voice had sounded thick and pained, also.
This should have been the happiest night of his life, or at least the last four years of it. Instead Adam felt like weeping.
He was halfway up Ronks Road, on his way back to the motel, before the insidious little voice in his head started whispering again. Lizzie Stoltzfus. Michael Miller.
He made a growling sound under his breath. It didn’t matter. Those kids weren’t his problem. He’d solved his own problem, would pick his son up tomorrow and go home. His heartache, his tenor, was over. Simon Stoltzfus, the voice murmured. Simon’s wasn’t. I’ll set the gol-darned barn on fire if I have to.
Adam slammed a fist against the steering wheel and pulled off the road.
Ah, what a day it had been. He needed to leave this place. He wanted desperately to get back to everything that was familiar, and he hoped to the settlement’s God that he’d find some peace in that. He needed to get away from all the betrayals, both old and new, and make the best of a world that was never going to be perfect.
But Lizzie Stoltzfus and the others were still missing.
It wasn’t his responsibility. Mariah had never actually laid that whole mess upon his shoulders, no matter that she had obviously planned to do so. His stomach twisted. He turned the wheel of the car hard and headed back the other way.
It wasn’t his responsibility. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to look for those kids. His plate was full right now, and he had more to handle than he honestly thought he was capable of. A nightmare was over, but a new one was blooming, because somehow he was going to have to get Bo to embrace an alien world that had once been his. He couldn’t give Lizzie Stoltzfus anything, because he had nothing left to give.
But he knew who could, and he knew how to get it done.
For Simon, he told himself. And for the other fathers who didn’t know that their kids were safe and sound tonight, but who had found it in their hearts to buck their deacons and help him, anyway. He told himself he was doing this because he, of all people, knew that fathomless ache, that hole in the soul that came from losing a child.
He, at least, had known that Jannel had taken Bo. He hadn’t really feared for Bo’s life, hadn’t worried that physical harm would come to him, that he might be cold and wounded, frightened and alone...at least not until tonight. And tonight had been hell.
He stopped the car in front of Mariah’s house and got out. He made his way up the sidewalk slowly at first, then he found himself jogging. He reached the door and hit his fist upon it like a battering ram. And at the last possible moment terror struck him, that he would find her in that nightgown again. And he thought that if he did he would turn tail and run, and Simon Stoltzfus could be damned.
But then the door cracked open and her face peered out at him, her eyes red and swollen. And though her hair spilled, though she stood in stockinged feet, she still wore her dress, her apron. Adam opened his mouth and was stunned when he heard his own voice, because the words weren’t what he’d meant to say.
“You know, I think I could live with your ulterior motives for bringing me here. I don’t give a damn why you called me. You did it. That’s all that matters. But why did you wait?” He heard Sarah’s voice again, pounding in his head, echoing. Finally... finally...finally. “How long, Mariah? How long did you have that milk carton before you actually contacted me?” It had been her, he realized anew, but with full impact now that he was addressing it. She had called ChildSearch. And she’d hadn’t seen Bo in any godforsaken farmers’ market. She was his teacher.
Lies, he thought. All lies, right from the start. And he’d been too blind to see the almost obvious glare of them because she had captivated him with her sad violet eyes and rare smiles.
Mariah didn’t answer. Her eyes were wide and grief filled now. She seemed to be gasping, but no breath came out.
“How long?” he roared.
She jumped back from his voice, trembling. “Five weeks.”
He stared at her, stunned. “Five?”
“Ab-b-bout that. More than a month.”
“How could you do that to me?”
“I didn’t even know you, then!” she cried.
“How could you do that to anyone?” he shouted.
She cried out in panic when he reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders. He lifted her bodily and set her back from the door, stepping inside and slamming it hard behind him again. He thrust a finger in her face and realized almost distantly that it shook. He was as enraged as he had ever been in his life.
“You sit here in your ivory tower, so sweet, so precious and pure, and the whole time you’re dishing out pain!”
She blanched. “No.”
“It doesn’t matter that it was me. ChildSearch puts a lot of pictures on a lot of milk cartons. They weren’t just of my own kid. And I know every one of those parents. Damn you, they’ve cried in my office. They’ve wept into my phone. And you knew. Whoever it was, whether it was my kid or someone else’s, you arbitrarily decided those parents should suffer for five more weeks! Who gave you that right, lady? Through all this Amish hogwash you’ve fed me, I guess you just plain forgot to mention that someone appointed you to be God!”
A tear spilled over. He watched, enraged, as it tracked down her cheek. And he realized almost distantly that Jannel’s perfidy had been bad, but somehow this was worse. This was a nightmare on so many levels.
“How dare you?” he breathed again.
Her heart was hammering so hard she thought she might faint. She opened her mouth, needing to make him understand. Because she had never dreamed, hadn’t even dared to pray that he would come here one last time, that she might have the chance to explain. But now that he had, now that she did, his words, his accusations echoed in her head and she couldn’t say a word.
Because he was right. She gave a small pained cry.
“Cut it out,” he growled ruthlessly. “Don’t act all heartbroken and try to guilt me out. You did this! You brought this upon yourself and a whole lot of other people besides
!”
Say something, she pleaded with herself. “N-noah. I waited b-because I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing for Noah. For B-Bo.”
“It wasn’t your decision to make! You had no right!” His voice crashed into the quiet, pretty room.
No, Mariah thought helplessly. She hadn’t. And at least a part of her had known that all along. Still... “It wasn’t as though he was in California!” she protested. “It wasn’t as though your wife had just taken him to some other part of the country! She’d changed his whole life, Adam! He’d become Amish! I couldn’t see him wrenched cruelly away!”
She knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. His face mottled. For a wild moment, she thought he might even strike her. But of course he wouldn’t do that, not Adam. He was too inherently honorable, and in the end he was too strong to let anger completely take him.
He jerked himself away from her, stepping back, turning around so he wouldn’t have to look at her. When his voice came back again, it was deathly quiet. “I’ve got a news flash for you, Miss Fisher, and for the rest of your settlement. Your way isn’t the only way. And a whole lot of us don’t even believe it’s a good way. Some of us think it’s a sick, obsessed way. And some of us think the best thing that could happen to a kid would be to get free of it as quickly as possible.”
Mariah swayed. “I—”
He didn’t let her finish. Now that he had come inside, he realized that he couldn’t tolerate being in her company even one more moment. The betrayal. He couldn’t stand looking at the floor in front of the hearth, where he had made love to a woman who didn’t even really exist. Another woman who didn’t exist. He felt bile push up in his throat.
Simon Stoltzfus.
“As for the other,” he interrupted, his voice flat now, “as far as those other kids are concerned, it’s not my help you need. I suggest you call your local authorities. Or NCMEC—the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That’s who you need, not ChildSearch. Or you need the FBI. This isn’t a case of non-custodial parents taking off with their kids. It’s not a simple kidnapping, if it’s happened four times. You’ve got a big problem and you need the law.” He opened the door.