by JoAnn Ross
“She’ll be here soon,” Ethel, the camp owner, assured him. Round as an apple, with pink cheeks to match, she was the most optimistic person Johnny had ever met. But not that fake kind of cheeriness adults put on when they didn’t know how to talk to kids. He’d figured out right away last year that she was the real deal.
“Maybe she missed the bus. Or got moved again. To a different home.” Maybe she wasn’t even in Oregon anymore. He and Angel had been moved to different towns over the years, but did the system allow them to be moved out of state? Or maybe she’d gotten adopted and no one had bothered to tell him because they thought he might run away again.
“No.” Ethel shook her head. “Angel’s on the list. Fred called a few minutes ago and checked to make sure.”
He wasn’t used to people actually going out of their way for him, so even something as simple as making a phone call caused a lump in Johnny’s throat. Since he had no idea what to say to such an act of generosity, he just jammed his hands in his back pockets and kept looking down the treelined gravel road.
There were about twenty kids left. All standing with him, all waiting for the bus that probably wasn’t coming. Although Johnny figured they had a lot in common, he didn’t talk to any of them. Nor did they talk to him. Oh, yeah. He wasn’t the only kid who’d developed a force field.
“There, see?” Ethel put her arm around Johnny’s shoulder and hugged him against her fluffy side as the yellow bus, smaller than the earlier ones, turned the last corner and came into view. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“She might not be on the bus.”
She clucked her tongue. Not in a disapproving way, but he knew he’d disappointed her with his negativity. She might not be such a Mary Poppins if their situations were reversed. But he couldn’t be mad at her. Not when she wore the aroma of oatmeal cookies, the way he’d always fantasized a grandmother should smell. Whenever he’d allow himself to think about such things, which wasn’t very often, because remembering how his own grandmother had tossed Angel and him into the grinding wheels of the system only made him madder.
Then the red braking lights lit up, the accordion door opened with a squeal and a hiss, and five kids burst free of the bus, Angel among them.
She shrieked when she saw him standing there and, ignoring the caseworker who tried to grab her arm, ran straight toward Johnny, threw herself into his arms, and clung.
“I was so afraid you wouldn’t be here,” she said against his neck. “Some mean girls on the bus said you might not come.”
“Never happen,” he assured her.
“But what if you got adopted, like they said maybe happened?”
Like that was going to happen in this lifetime. “Then I’d make sure the family adopted you, too,” he assured her, even though the first thing he’d learned about the system was that kids weren’t in any position to control anything about their lives. “They may keep us apart. But they’ll never separate us. We’re a team.”
“Like SpongeBob and Patrick Star,” she said.
“Scooby-Doo and Shaggy,” he said, putting her back on her feet. She’d grown since he’d last seen her. She also was beginning to look a lot like their mother.
“Ariel and Flounder.”
“Frodo and Samwise.” He continued the game.
Her small brow furrowed again. “Who are they?”
“They’re hobbits. From Lord of the Rings.”
“Oh, that’s a movie, right?”
“And books.” Johnny’s favorites. He’d dragged them from placement to placement for the past three years. “But you’re probably not ready for them yet. Though the movies are great. Maybe you could rent them.”
“No.” Curls bounced as she emphatically shook her head. “Mrs. Young—that’s my new foster mother—doesn’t let us watch movies. She says they invite the devil into your mind.”
Johnny’s jaw ached. Realizing he was clenching his teeth tight enough to break them, he took a deep breath. If he showed anger, they might send him away, blowing this once-a-year chance to be with his sister.
“I had foster parents like that when I was about your age,” he said.
The husband had been a minister, the mother a professional foster parent. They were like Buck in that they believed in never sparing the rod. There were a bunch of kids, all fosters, all crowded into a small, stuffy attic room in bunk beds.
One kid, who was six, used to cry like a baby into his hard, flat pillow every night. He also wet the bed. Although Johnny and one of the older girls used to try to get his sheets washed and dried before he’d be found out, whenever they were caught trying to cover up, all three of them would be punished.
There were still nights, when he was lying in the dark, that Johnny could hear the sound of the plastic under-sheet as the little kid had tossed and turned and cried.
“Do they ever hit you?”
“No.” Another shake of the head. “They’re mostly nice. A lot nicer than my last family. And we are allowed to watch some DVDs. Like VeggieTales. Oh!” She clapped her hands. That’s another team! Larry and Bob! Bob’s a tomato and Larry’s a cucumber, although sometimes people think he’s a pickle.
“They tell adventure stories about the Bible. Mrs. Young says they’re morality plays, whatever those are. They’re really funny. I especially like the parts when Bob hates what we learned today and Silly Songs by Larry. This is my favorite song, because it has my name in it.”
As they got into the line headed into the lodge to get their name tags and cabin assignments, she began belting out “Pizza Angel,” a stupidly silly song that seemed to be about Larry the cucumber impatiently waiting for a take-out pizza delivery. Which didn’t make any sense to Johnny, but he was happy his sister appeared to be happy in this latest placement.
The check-in process was surprisingly fast and efficient, which made Johnny think that the state foster-care system would run a lot more smoothly if Fred and Ethel were in charge of things. They were given plastic name tags, two camp T-shirts, a camp debit card that allowed so much a day for extras, their room assignment, and a paper map to their cabin in under twenty minutes.
“There will be cookies in the community rec room here in the lodge in an hour,” Ethel announced. “Where we’ll introduce this year’s staff and all get acquainted.” Her smile, as her gaze swept over the campers, lit up her apple-cheeked face. “I don’t know about you, but I’m so excited at what we have planned! This is going to be the best year ever!”
Johnny viewed the skepticism on many of the faces. It didn’t take long for them to figure out that most of the time when adults said something like that, it was going to turn out to be a big fat lie. But he knew that Ethel believed what she was saying. And that unlike so many people who drifted in and out of the campers’ lives, she really was going to try to give the kids a good time.
Last year, coming off a really bad placement, he hadn’t bothered to try to enjoy himself and had spent much of the time brooding. It was only afterward he’d realized how much Angel had fretted about him, which had kept her from having the fun she deserved.
She was a year older, which meant she’d probably be even better at sensing his mood. So he’d have to go along with the program, even if he had to fake every minute of the next two weeks.
The log cabin their counselor led them to turned out to be one in a circle of five, set in the woods, close enough to the waterfall that he figured, once all the kids shut up, you might be able to hear the water pouring over the rocks at night. Two bedrooms and a shared bath connected to a main living room where wooden shelves were filled with books and puzzles and board games. A map that was a duplicate of the one they’d each been given and a bulletin board listing a schedule of daily events and meal menus were on the pine-paneled wall next to the door.
The other room had four kids in two sets of bunk beds. The oldest kid, who reeked of cigarette smoke, looked about Johnny’s age, the youngest closest to Angel’s age. Johnny knew, from last year,
that Ethel would have goofy games planned for everyone to learn more about one another. Which was when he figured most every camper lied.
Their bunk beds were made of pine logs that matched the walls and covered with dark green sheets and blankets that had Indian designs on them. The window, with curtains that matched the blankets, looked out onto the forest.
“Are you going to take the top bed?” Angel asked.
“Yeah. Since I’m older, it makes sense.”
“I like being up high. It would be like being in a tree house.”
He started to say it could also be dangerous, then realized that although he might think of her as his baby sister, she wasn’t really a baby any longer.
“Sure. It’s yours.”
Instead of looking excited and scrambling up the ladder to claim her bed, she just stood there, small white teeth worrying her bottom lip.
“What’s the matter?”
“I thought maybe we could sleep together. Like we did last year.”
He’d let her climb into his bunk after she’d claimed to be afraid of the dark. Although he hadn’t wanted to delve into the problem, Johnny suspected that fear might have come from lingering memories of their mother locking them in the closet.
“You don’t have to worry. I brought along a battery-operated night-light,” he assured her.
“That’s not it. I’m a big girl now.” She tossed up a small, pointed chin. “I don’t mind the dark anymore. I just like sleeping with you. The way we used to sleep with Mom in her bed.”
To protect them from Satan, Johnny remembered. The problem was, they hadn’t gotten all that much sleep, with his mother waking them up every few minutes all night long to make sure they hadn’t been taken in their sleep like the sister they’d never known.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because, like you said, you’re older than you were last year. So am I. And I don’t know if it’s right for us to be sleeping together anymore.”
She stuck out her bottom lip in a pout he recognized too well. She was an expert at playing to his emotions, which was one more reason he couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t won herself a permanent home. He couldn’t imagine any family not wanting Angel if she played her cute card.
“I don’t know why not,” she complained. “You’re not going to have sex with me.”
“What?” He realized he’d shouted when she flinched. Damn. Crouching down in front of her, he took both her narrow shoulders—clad in a pink Ariel T-shirt—in his hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell.”
“Th-th-that’s okay.” But it wasn’t. He could see the tears swimming in her eyes.
“No. It’s not. I was wrong.” He took a deep breath and felt as if he’d just jumped into an ocean filled with man-eating sharks. “Where did you hear about people doing that?” He managed, just barely, to keep his tone from revealing the churning in his gut.
“From when I was at the Worths’.” Her voice was small and trembled, which only multiplied his guilt. “In Salem, before they moved me to Bend.”
Ice was running in his veins. At the same time he was sweating like he’d been running for hours across the desert, and there was a roaring in his ears, like a freight train.
“Did anyone there, at the Worths’ house, ever touch you?”
“Mrs. Worth spanked me sometimes. For not cleaning up my room good enough, and not being fast enough getting ready for school, and once I broke a plate while I was doing the dinner dishes. That made her really mad because it was part of a set.”
Okay. That was enough to make him hate his sister’s foster mother with a white-hot flame that burned away the ice. But punishing Angel for an accident wasn’t what he was worried about right now.
“I mean, did anyone touch you in a private place?”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “Not there. She just spanked my bottom. And she slapped me on the face a couple times. Because I’d been bad.”
Johnny was torn between fury that anyone would slap his baby sister and relief that she apparently hadn’t been molested by some sick perv.
“So how do you know about . . .” Hell. He might think about sex most of the time lately, but Johnny couldn’t say the word out loud to his baby sister. “Sleeping stuff?”
“Brandon—he’s Mrs. Worth’s son—used to sneak out of his room at night to sleep with one of the older girls in our room. He was seventeen and Della—that was her name—was fourteen.”
“He did that while you were there?” It wasn’t uncommon. He’d witnessed the same thing himself more than once. He’d even had an older girl at one of the homes try to get him to have sex with her last year. But this was his sister, dammit! Who somehow seemed to have stayed openhearted and vulnerable, even after nearly a lifetime in the system.
“Uh-huh.” Her voice was muffled as she pulled her pink shirt over her head and exchanged it for the official camp one, which depicted the lake and falls with a big rainbow arching over the scene.
“Della had the bunk below mine, and it was dark, so I never saw anything. I just heard them.” She tugged the camp shirt over her stomach and smoothed it down. “Sex must hurt.”
Hell. He was not prepared for this. “I think it’s different when you’re grown-up.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “I don’t think I ever want to grow up if I have to have some boy putting his thing inside me. And one of the other girls said Brandon peed inside Della, which is how boys put babies inside girls.” Her face scrunched up even more. “That sounds really icky.”
Okay. That was it. He was so over his head here, Johnny decided it was time to change the subject.
“Well, it’s a long time away before you’re a grown-up, so you don’t have to worry about it now. How about we get unpacked, and then we go back over to the lodge?” he asked with a huge helping of fake enthusiasm.
“Okay.” She’d always been so agreeable. Which, he feared, could also make her a target to creeps like Mrs. Worth’s asshole son. “Do you think Dr. Tiernan will bring dogs this year?”
“Maybe.”
“I hope so,” she said brightly as she began pulling colorful T-shirts and shorts from her backpack. “They were my favorite part of camp. Next to being with you.”
As she smiled up at him, Johnny vowed that somehow, whatever it took, he was going to keep his little sister safe.
28
Charity was out on the porch when Gabe showed up at the house. She was not alone. Her mother, looking as if she’d been shopping for safari wear on Rodeo Drive, was with her.
While Charity wore what appeared to be her usual uniform of jeans and T-shirt, this one reading A Vet Is a Dog’s Best Friend, the older woman’s khaki silk shirt sported little wooden-button-tabbed epaulets. Her fabric belt was a leopard print that matched the frames of her oversized sunglasses, and her cuffed shorts showed off legs that a woman half her age might have considered killing for.
Instead of going with more practical running shoes, as her daughter was wearing, she’d opted for the type of brass-studded brown leather sandals a gladiator might have worn. Her auburn hair had been pulled back into a ponytail that stuck through the back of a black Prada baseball cap.
“Gabriel!” He was enveloped in a fragrant cloud as she hugged him, air-kissing both his cheeks. “It’s so lovely to see you again!”
“Good to see you, too, Mrs.—” Damn. He’d forgotten which of her many husbands’ names she was currently going by.
“Oh, call me Amanda, darling.” She patted the side of his face as she backed away. “Having a handsome Marine call me Mrs. makes me feel like I’m ready for a nursing home.”
“Hardly.” Since she was not so subtly fishing for a compliment, he gave her a slow male perusal, from the top of her bright head down to her toes, tipped in a grass green lacquer, which Gabe thought looked kind of weird, but guessed must be in style since he doubted that this woman had ever had an unfashionable
day in her life. “You look terrific.”
“Thank you.” She flashed a satisfied smile. “I do try. To be perfectly honest, I feel like moping beneath the covers and feeling sorry for myself, but decided that the least I could do, since I was in town, was to help lift the spirits of those poor children out at the camp.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he agreed, trying to imagine Charity’s mother roasting marshmallows over a campfire.
“Mother’s going to be doing makeovers,” Charity revealed. “Here, let me take this little guy out to join the others.”
She held out her hand for the leash. When their fingers brushed, Gabe felt a familiar zing. Damn. He was in danger of, as Cole used to like to say whenever one of their team would tumble into the lust pit, becoming toast.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Charity, which he did, but Gabe decided to go along with her, just to check out the other dogs in the day care. The mutt wasn’t all that bright. What if he tried to pal up with some huge, badtempered dog that could eat him for lunch?
Which didn’t turn out to be the case. The moment he was let into the yard, he took off racing across the emerald green grass toward the polar bear, who let out a huge woof in recognition and immediately fell over, like a tree chopped down by a logger’s ax. And stayed that way, letting the bliss-crazed mutt jump all over him.
“They’ve made friends,” Charity said what he could tell for himself. “The night he stayed with me. And Mom says that your dog wore Peanut out by insisting on wrestling for nearly an hour last night.”
“He’s got energy.”
“And spunk,” she agreed. “Which he’d have to have to survive all he appears to have been through.”
Gabe couldn’t disagree.
“So,” he said, oddly feeling like a parent must feel the first day leaving a kid behind at kindergarten, as he walked with her back toward the house, “your mother’s coming along?”
“Yeah, it was a surprise to me, too. And you don’t have to worry,” she assured him. “All the dogs have been personality tested before being allowed to join the group, but even if any other one did decide to bother your dog, Peanut would defend him.”