by Loree Lough
“Gas. For your clunker over there. So you can crank up the a/c on your way back to whatever rock you drove out from under.”
Mike stomped toward the Cadillac. Then, leaning out of the passenger window as Joe backed away from the porch, he snarled, “This isn’t over.”
She met his defiant glare with one of her own and repeated, more slowly this time, “Tick. Tick. Tick.”
Relief washed over her as the car made its way down the ribboning drive. When the last of the dust settled, she took a deep breath. They wouldn’t be back. She knew it like she knew Angel Acres was hers: cows, guest cottage, and fences.
She could hardly wait for Dusty to get back. If this trip to the city didn’t roust out Jesse, he’d be even more despondent than he’d been yesterday; maybe knowing that he was largely responsible for the good news she’d share would lighten his load, a little bit, at least.
After putting the rocking chairs back where they belonged, Grace picked up the water bottles and headed for the kitchen. Tonight, they’d have pot roast with all the fixin’s. If Dusty didn’t find Jesse—and it would be a miracle if he did—he’d need a good, hearty meal in his belly. He and Mitch and the boys didn’t need to know it would be a celebration of sorts for her.
The roast was on the stove and the cake in the oven when she called Molly Logan’s room at Taylor Manor. Her mood brightened considerably when a nurse said, “She’s out on the tennis court, laughing like a teenager.”
Next, she called Gavin. Last time they’d talked, he told her the cast was coming off this week. If he could drive, she’d invite him to supper . . . one more pleasant distraction in case Dusty came home with bad news.
Half an hour later, his mood was hardly jubilant when he told her they’d hit a dead end in the search for Jesse, again. Then his cousin arrived and the boys started milling around the kitchen, setting the table, pouring milk, adding chairs for Mitch and Gavin.
Watching the roast, potatoes, and carrots disappear as they chatted amiably reminded her of the nature documentary she’d watched on Animal Planet one night. A parade of giant ants in a Brazilian rain forest devoured leaves and twigs and grass, leaving nothing but dry dirt in its path.
Dusty’s cell phone rang as she put the pot in the sink to soak. Hopefully, the caller wouldn’t keep him long; she wanted to get his reaction to her grandmother’s recipe for chocolate fudge cake. When Grace walked back into the kitchen, the boys and Mitch and Gavin were oohing and ahhing over the treat. “Coffee’s hot. Or I can pour you a glass of milk,” she said, pointing to his plate.
“No time for dessert,” he said, grabbing his keys. “That was the hospital. Jesse’s on his way to the OR.”
29
The waiting room was crowded with pacing boys and a limping Gavin. Nothing Grace said seemed to calm them as they waited for Dusty and Mitch to come back with a report on Jesse’s condition.
Until she suggested that they pray together.
It was Montel who agreed first. “Can I say the prayer?” he asked.
“Of course you can,” Grace said.
The boys gathered round, and, without being asked to, bowed their heads. Grace found herself fighting tears, because not long ago, not one of them knew the Lord. But look at them now, she thought as, eyes closed, they folded their hands.
“Sweet Jesus,” Montel said, “watch over Jesse. He ain’t nothin’ but a skinny white boy, Lord, and needs all the help he can get, pullin’ through this. When them doctors get done with him,” he continued, “he’p us to know how we can get him better, fast. . . .” He paused, and in the silence, the boys looked up. He was smiling when he finished with “. . . ’cause it’s about time he learned to pull his weight around Angel Acres.”
Like a Gregorian chant, their soft amens filled the waiting room.
And then Dusty joined them. He looked tired, so very tired, that Grace just wanted to gather him up and rock him to sleep. “Where’s Mitch?” she asked instead.
“Getting coffee and sodas,” he grated. “You guys okay to hang with us here for an hour or two, ’til Mitch can take you and Grace home?”
Home. He’d called Angel Acres home!
Axel piped up with, “We can stay as long as you do.” He looked at Grace and wiggled his eyebrows. “Ain’t like the teacher is gonna write us up for bein’ late for class.”
“No,” she countered, matching his grin, “but I could put you to work, doing chores around the schoolhouse. . . .”
“Well,” he drawled, “we done stacked the firewood for the woodstove, Miz Sinclair, an’ swabbed the outhouse, too.”
“So good to know you were paying attention to my mini-lecture about the settlers,” she said.
Montel seemed restless and edgy. “So what happened to Jesse?” he wanted to know. “Did he run out in front of a car or somethin’?”
Dusty looked at Grace and shrugged. He had hoped to avoid that question, his posture and facial expression said.
“The Los Toros de Lidia got hold of him,” Dusty said. “Near as I can figure, pride is as much to blame for what landed him here as that bunch; if he’d told them he was still healing from that beating he took before he came to us, they might have delayed the ‘beat in.’ ”
“What a blockhead,” Nick said. “He was actually gonna go through with a gang initiation?” He shook his head. “I know he’s just a dumb kid, but that dumb?”
The rest of the boys grumbled their agreement as a nurse stepped into the waiting room. “He’s asking to see you,” she said.
Dusty nodded. “On my way.”
“Not you, sir . . . the young lady.”
“Me?” Grace didn’t understand. She probably hadn’t exchanged two dozen words with the boy since he moved in. Why would he—
“I believe he said your name is Grace?”
She looked at Grace. “If you’ll just follow me. . . .”
“Tell him we’re pulling for him,” Guillermo said.
“And praying,” Nestor added.
Dom crossed both arms over his chest. “And that if he talks to any of those Bulls again, I’ll kick his butt, myself.”
“You okay, going in alone?” Dusty wanted to know.
Smiling, Grace shook her head. “Going in alone,” she quoted. “You make it sound like I’m with the S.W.A.T. team, on my way to talk a hostage-taker into surrendering.”
Dusty bobbed his head. “All right. Okay. But I’ll be right outside. In the hall. If you raise your voice, for any reason, I’m in there. Got it?”
“Got it.” She looked up into his handsome face, hoping that things would work out so that she could keep on looking into it, every day, for the rest of her life. Then she followed the nurse into the ICU.
“Two minutes,” the woman said, “and not a second longer. He isn’t even fully conscious yet.”
“Do you mind telling me what the doctors had to do? So I’m sure not to say anything I shouldn’t, I mean. . . .”
“Epidural and subdural hematomas,” she said.
“Blood clots? Where?”
“There were blood clots in his abdomen, stomach, and brain. And a rib punctured his left lung. The team also had to insert steel pins in his femur and humerus.”
“The team? How many doctors were involved?”
“Wow,” the nurse said, “let me see.” She began counting on her fingers. “Miller’s with orthopedics, Harrison is a neurosurgeon, I think Mendell is a vascular surgeon, and—”
“Sorry I asked,” Grace said. “Guess he looks pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good guess.”
“So what’s the prognosis?”
She shrugged. “They’ve done all they can for him, surgically. Now we wait. And hope.”
“And pray.”
Another shrug. “If that works for you. . . . Long as he doesn’t develop an infection, or pneumonia, or pick up MRSA, he should be out of here in a week. Two at most.”
“Guess I’ll get in there.” Two
weeks in the hospital. Grace had no idea how Dusty would pay for that. But knowing him, he had a reserve set aside, just for such emergencies.
The nurse sat at her tiny desk, with a clear view of Jesse on the other side of the glass wall, and began pecking at her computer keyboard. “Two minutes,” she said without looking up.
“ ’Zat you, Grace?” Jesse whispered.
With tubes and cords running every which way, he looked like the creation of some mad scientist. “Well, look at you, Skippy.” Thankfully, the steady beep-beep-beep of the monitor told her some things were functioning normally. “Wide awake and free of the ventilator already. That’s a good sign. A very good sign!”
The corner of his mouth lifted in the slightest hint of a smile. “Skippy?”
She patted his hand, but didn’t let go. “Don’t ask me why, because I don’t have a reason!”
“Closer . . . ,” he rasped.
“What can I do for you? Big Mac? Starbuck’s frappuccino? Remote control for the TV?”
Another tiny smile again, and then, “I want you to know, in case something goes wrong, that—”
“Jesse Vaughn, let’s have no more of that kind of talk, do you hear? You’re going to be just fine. The boys asked me to tell you they’re praying for you. If you take your time and do what the doctors and nurses tell you to, you’ll be home again in no time.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly. “They hardly know me. Why do they care?”
“Because they see what I see: A sweet, warm human being, hiding behind an angry tough-guy façade.”
Eyes closed, he nodded. “Anywa-a-ay,” he slurred, “you need to know I didn’t tell them anything.”
Who? she wondered. And what hadn’t Jesse told them?
And then she knew: Los Toros de Lidia.
His breathing calmed, and she thought he might have fallen asleep. “May the angels watch over you, sweet boy,” she whispered, pressing a soft kiss to his forehead.
He spoke so suddenly that it startled her, and Grace straightened.
“They don’t know where you are,” he said on a sigh. “They asked, over and over, but I swear to you, Grace, I didn’t tell them.”
“Jesse,” she blurted. “You mean to say . . . you let them do this to you . . . to protect us?”
“Partly. It was s’posed to happen. ‘Beat-in,’ y’know? But then. . . .”
His voice trailed off as a furrow formed on his brow. “Are you in pain, Jess? Let me call the nurse.”
“Give it a minute,” he ground out. “If it doesn’t pass, you can get her.”
The nurse looked up just then and held two fingers in the air. Then she mouthed, “Time’s up” and used her thumb to motion “Out.”
“I have to go now, Jess, so you can get some rest. But before I do, I have to tell you . . . I think you’re the most heroic boy I’ve ever met. Why, I don’t know many men who would do what you did.”
The minuscule grin again. “Dusty would.”
“Yes, I believe you’re right. But he didn’t get his start at being a superhero as early as you did. Just imagine what you’ll be like when you’re his age!”
A serene expression relaxed his features, and he nodded slowly. “Will you come back, Grace?”
“Only if you promise to work hard to get better.”
The only sound in the room was the high-pitched bleep of the monitor. Until the nurse said, “Miss . . . you’ll have to leave now. . . .”
“All right,” she told her. Then she leaned close to Jesse and added “Well, what do you say?”
“Promise.”
She kissed his cheek again. “I’m gonna hold you to that.”
Jesse nodded once, then drifted off to sleep.
Please God, she prayed, heal him, inside and out . . . and make sure you don’t forget his big, protective heart that was broken by his parents—the two people in the world he should have been able to trust above all others.
30
He left the boys alone in the barn to practice the CPR tactics he’d taught them, and headed for Bayview to visit Jesse. After what had happened to the kid—and hearing the EMTs and doctors talk about how close he’d come to dying out there in the street that night, Dusty decided his boys would learn as much as their punkin’ heads could hold.
Using the manuals he’d studied to earn his SAR certification, he badgered them like a drill sergeant. Over and over, they practiced stitching cuts (using scraps from his old leather jackets). Again and again, they splinted one another’s arms and legs, fashioned makeshift crutches from boards and branches, memorized how to take a person’s blood pressure using an old-fashioned tube-and-bladder cuff, and did the math to determine pulse and heart rate.
They took to it like squirrels to sunflower seeds . . . once he got them started, they couldn’t get enough. If—God forbid—an urgent situation cropped up at Angel Acres, they’d be more than equipped to handle themselves. Would they get nervous those first couple of times? No question about it. But practice makes perfect, he’d told them; the more often they play-acted emergencies, the more prepared they’d be for the real thing.
Dusty shook his head as he walked into Jesse’s room. Grace, God love her, had insisted that the boys bring cards every time they stopped by, so many that the entire wall beneath his TV looked like a collage. She’d picked flowers from her gardens, and, using empty butter tubs and milk jugs, spaghetti sauce jars and soup cans for vases, covered every flat surface with blooms. Mylar balloons floated here, stuffed animals sat there, and books and magazines were scattered across his tray table.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” the boy said, grinning, “but it’ll be good to get out of here, just so I can get rid of all this stuff.”
“It is a little excessive,” he agreed. “Want me to tell her to back off a little? Maybe take some of it out of here next time she—”
“No way! That would only hurt her feelings. She’s only doing it to make me feel special, and, well. . . .”
“Loved?”
Jesse blushed. “Yeah.” He shrugged his good shoulder. “I know she means well. And I appreciate it. Honest. It’s just. . . .”
“Good incentive to do your part during physical therapy, so things will get back to normal?”
“Yeah,” he said again. “So what’re the guys doing?”
Dusty told them how he’d been teaching them CPR and all that went with it. “Mitch is going to bring some of them this afternoon, and the rest will come with Grace, tonight.”
“Well, that isn’t very smart.”
Dusty chuckled. “What isn’t?”
“Letting her take the night shift. Wouldn’t it be better if she came in the daylight, instead of Mitch?”
“You know, that’s an excellent point. And I’m going to see about making that switch, just as soon as I get home.”
“So you rode the Harley over here?”
“Yep.”
“Can’t wait ’til I’m well enough to take another spin on that thing. Didn’t think I’d like it, but hoo-boy, was I wrong.”
Dusty understood, perfectly. “It’s addictive, I’ve gotta warn you. . . .”
“One habit I wouldn’t mind having. Once I’m better. And old enough for a license. And have a job to pay insurance. And buy my own hog.”
He said he wanted a red one, not black like Dusty’s. But the helmet would have to be black. “One of those sit-on-top-of-the-head kinds, because they look cool.”
“True enough.”
“If you think so, why don’t you have one?”
“Because an older, wiser friend pointed out that if I ever got in an accident, I’d better hope I land on the top of my head. That’s the only place you get any real protection with one of those.”
“True enough,” Jesse quoted, nodding. “Never really thought about that before.”
“So how’s it going with your exercises?”
“Miserable. I hurt everywhere.”
Dusty wasn’t surp
rised; there weren’t many places on the kid that the Bulls hadn’t banged up. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
“Not if you don’t mind me sayin’ ‘none of your business’ if it’s none of your business.”
He returned the boy’s smile and sat on the pink plastic chair beside the bed. “Who do you suppose chooses the color schemes for hospitals?” he wondered out loud.
“I hear ya,” Jesse said. “Puke green walls, pink chairs, black and yellow tiles on the floor. Somebody color blind, I’d bet.”
Laughing, Dusty sat back in the chair, rested an ankle on his knee.
“So what’s this burning question?”
“How did you end up all the way down the block at Gonzo’s place that day?”
“Saw those guys out there, lyin’ around like they didn’t have a care in the world. Lookin’ cool and tough and in charge, y’know? I saw a news thing about gangs, heard some of ’em say they’re like family. That they have each other’s backs. And I thought to myself, maybe that’s what I needed. To belong someplace. To be a part of something.”
Dusty nodded. He’d heard it all before—from cop friends who specialized in gang violence. He wondered if Jesse understood that once you’re in, there are only two ways out . . . head first, or feet first. “Feel the same way now?”
Eyes wide, Jesse shook his head, then winced. “Ow,” he said. “I keep forgetting they messed up my neck.” Then he looked at Dusty. “They said the beat-in was a test. To see if I deserved to be with them. ‘Gotta know you have what it takes to stand up to the enemy.’ That’s what Gonzo said.”
“Why didn’t you tell them you’d just gotten out of the hospital?”
“They didn’t ask.”
Dusty read the look on his face: I was afraid to tell them. He understood that; from everything his cop pals had told him, they delighted in torturing the weak. It explained why, during other initiation methods, new recruits were required to rob a store at gunpoint. Beat an innocent civilian senseless. Rape a woman. Kill somebody. Senseless violence that had one purpose: prove your machismo. Cross the leader or one of his favorites, they’d all find out sooner or later, and be victim to the same cruelty.