Crocus

by Amy Lane

  “But, Cheryl—”

  “We need to leave.”

  And then she turned and walked out of the house. McDaniels followed her, pausing at the entryway and looking around.

  It was like he saw them, for the first time, as they were. A family, awakened out of bed, to have a hostile stranger try to take away one of their own.

  He took a deep breath and looked suddenly older. “This was… badly done,” he said after a moment. Then he sagged deeper into himself. “I’m sorry. I’ll… I’ll try again.”

  And then he left.

  Christiana waited until the front door closed and turned back around to Elton. “Wombat Willie, I am pretty damned impressed!”

  Elton smiled and turned his head—but Aaron saw the wobble of his lip too.

  “Well done,” Aaron said quietly. “Guys, since we’re up, do you want to start waffles and coffee—”

  “And hot chocolate!” Christi said, and although she sounded almost desperately cheerful, Aaron appreciated the effort. She paused on her way to the kitchen and gave Aaron a careful hug. “Don’t worry. He’s coming back.”

  Aaron closed his eyes. “I couldn’t go after him,” he confessed, needing that comfort more than he wanted to admit. “We… we started out running together, you know?”

  Christiana’s hug grew stronger. “Yeah. I know. He just needed some space.”

  Aaron nodded and kissed the top of her head. “Yeah.”

  “Here. You go sit down and talk to Elton. Me and the guys’ll make waffles. We can all take a minute to wake up, because geez! It’s not even seven yet? Holy Christ! Those people had better apologize with chocolate.”

  Christi stomped to the kitchen, and Aaron found the nearest chair at the kitchen table and sank down.

  “I’m so sorry,” Elton said, head in his hands. “So sorry. Larx has been trying to get me to talk to my parents, and I finally tried the night before last. Dad got mad and hung up and… I had no idea he could get that mean.”

  Aaron grimaced. “Well, I think it’s a good thing they live a long way away,” he said diplomatically. “You and Olivia seem to be getting your world together, you know?”

  Elton nodded glumly, leaning forward to rest his chin on his hands. “We had plans today,” he said, seemingly at random. “There’s this… this outpatient depression clinic in Auburn. Since that’s like an hour and a half away, we were thinking of getting, like… like a long-term hotel room there. It’s a two-week course. We were going down to meet the doctors and stuff and check out options”

  Oh. Wow. “Did Larx know about this?” Aaron asked, hurt.

  “Only a little. He looked it up and suggested it to her so she could say, ‘Jesus, Daddy, get out of my life!’ Then I moved in a couple of days later and said, ‘Babe, look! They’ve got classes on pregnancy and depression and what kinds of meds you can take!’ And then we let her think about it.”

  Aaron couldn’t help it. He had to laugh. “Jesus, Elton. You guys are pretty Machiavellian.”

  Elton rolled his eyes. “I think I flunked that class, whatever it was. But she was going for it. She… she wanted help. I was going to ask my parents for money—”

  “We’ll pay,” Aaron said, absurdly moved. Going to his parents had to have been hard in the first place.

  “Yeah, but, you guys. You’ve given me all the stuff. I wanted to give you something too.”

  Aaron gave into temptation and ruffled Elton’s hair, seeing how Larx could love all the kids and still have a soft spot for his own personal few. “You… you should have seen yourself,” he said softly. “I’m not sure about your dad, but I’m proud of you. Anybody who loves you should be proud of how you stood up for people you cared about. I see why Olivia’s so smitten. Why she wants to try so hard. You’re way worth it.”

  Elton gave a watery little smile. “Thanks, Aaron. I mean, I know you’re, like… like my girlfriend’s dad’s boyfriend, but that’s the nicest thing a dad has ever said to me, and I’m going to take it.”

  “Stepdad,” Aaron corrected gently. “You said I was her stepdad. And Larx’s husband. Let’s use those words, okay?”

  Elton looked at him and smiled gamely. “Those are good words. I like those words. Maybe you should say them to Larx, you think?”

  Aaron frowned. “Has he said anything?”

  “No.” Elton looked away and started picking at a splinter on the unfinished table. “But I was thinking, you know. I kept trying to call the people in the mental health place, and I would say ‘Olivia’s boyfriend,’ and I got no love. So I said ‘the father of her baby,’ and they talked to me some more. But if I said ‘I’m her husband,’ that would have got their attention right quick. And then, these last few weeks, running with Larx, I kept thinking of you as his husband. ’Cause—and no offense, but you guys aren’t… you know. My age. I mean, boyfriend, right? Kellan has a boyfriend. You got something more.”

  Aaron regarded him with raised eyebrows, the ornery part of him wanting to protest. He wasn’t too old to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, was he? What about a man-friend? What about a lover?

  But lover sounded too personal to say in front of his children, and man-friend too impersonal for the guy who’d spent the last few months being a stepdad to the same kids.

  And a boyfriend was someone who could run out that door and never come back.

  Larx would come back—Aaron had no doubts.

  But he needed a better name.

  SNOW FLOWER

  DAMMIT! WHEN had Daddy gotten so damned fast?

  Olivia struggled to catch up with her father, cursing everything as she went. She cursed her jeans, which chafed, and her tennis shoes, which weren’t her running shoes, and her denim jacket, which bound up her shoulders. She cursed her pregnancy belly, because at four months it was like a hard grapefruit in her abdomen, and she could feel the way it sucked the wind from her body, and she super super cursed that all she’d had on her way out the door was a handful of saltines and a swallow of milk.

  And then she thanked God for Elton, who had made her eat that much, because when his father went super fucking ballistic, she would have thrown up without them, and that would have really sucked.

  But as much as she cursed, she kept most of it internal so she had all her air for running.

  Right up until the two-mile split, with Aaron’s house—which was now her house—on the right and the rest of the loop straight ahead, when she watched Larx and Dozer take the loop and disappear into the dark shadows of the predawn gray. God, she wasn’t going to catch them—not running like this, she wasn’t.

  Making a sudden decision, she veered off to the right, through the old chicken yard, past the fenced-in pool, past Berto, who was smoking quietly in the early morning peace, through the sliding glass door, and up the stairs.

  Once she got there, she started throwing her clothes off, pulling her running clothes from the clean clothes hamper and blessing Elton once again for doing laundry when she’d been taking her first shower in three days. God, without Elton this place would fall apart, and damn, if she hadn’t been planning to become a more functional human being again.

  She clattered down the stairs, pulled her running shoes on, and grabbed her soft poly zipper hoodie from the hook by the door. Realizing she probably had fifteen minutes to spare, she turned around and grabbed the entire package of saltines and a bottle of water, then trotted outside so she could stare at the forestry road with Berto.

  Larx should be coming around the corner in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.

  She kept moving as she came to a rest by Berto, jogging to keep warm. Berto had turned on the space heater by the garage, and she appreciated the warmth it threw out as well.

  “I didn’t think you were running today,” Berto said on a steamy exhale. Elton had bought a vaporizer and oil for him at a dispensary two weeks ago, so the house didn’t reek of pot, and Berto was humbly grateful for the cannabis dosage that didn’t get him high, just settled h
is nerves.

  “Well, shit went down,” she said, grimacing slightly. “Poor Elton—I thought he was exaggerating when he said his parents sucked.” She shoved a saltine in her mouth because she didn’t want to think about that.

  Berto let out a soft bark of laughter. “That’s too bad. I miss the crap out of my folks.”

  She regarded him curiously in the growing light. He and Jaime were, for the most part, quiet roommates. Olivia had, for the past two weeks, started making them breakfast in the morning, because they’d arrived with cold cereal and not-quite-spoiled milk. Jaime had started looking at her with worship in his eyes—not a crush, so much, but she apparently made his world better, and she was running with that. Berto had been grateful—but, well, quiet. She often gave them rides to her dad’s house so Jaime could join the general chaos going to the high school, and Larx could drop Berto off near work. Tane brought him home, and something about the way he looked when he walked in the front door and Olivia or Elton were making dinner and Jaime was doing homework by the table made her think that being put into a housemate situation was one of the best things to happen to their little family of two.

  “You said they moved back to….” She wasn’t really sure—just “back.”

  “Colombia,” he said with a shrug. “For a while things were really bad there—drugs everywhere, gangs. Then the government started paying people to grow food instead of cocaine. Weird how that fixed things.”

  Olivia nodded, surprised. “So they moved back?”

  Berto shrugged. “They wanted us to come, but me and Jaime, we grew up speaking English.” He gave a faint smile before inhaling. “Didn’t say it was good English.”

  Olivia laughed, liking him. “So you stayed and took care of your brother. That’s nice. Me and Christi—I mean, she’s sort of perfect, so, you know—”

  “Hate her,” Berto said promptly, making her laugh again.

  “No—love her. But….” She sighed. “Hard to live up to.” Broodingly she ate another saltine.

  Berto nodded and burrowed down deeper into the lawn chair. He’d managed to find one of her dad’s old sleeping bags, and she felt bad, suddenly. He’d come all prepared to camp out and meditate, and here she was, intruding on him with her bullshit.

  “I know what you mean,” he said, after a silence that had her rethinking her plan to wait for Larx. “The living up to. Jaime—he’s smart, he’s good with books. I… I was nothing but a thug, you know? I stayed so I could be a thug.” He let out a bark of bitterness and inhaled again. “But then my crew, they were all, ‘Hey, Roberto, he’s pretty smart. Maybe he’s smart enough to work for us!’ And I realized, you know? Me choosing to jump down the toilet, that’s one thing. I wasn’t going to bring him with me. This?” He gestured to his battered face. “If I have to look like this my whole life so Jaime can have a good life like he deserves? It’s okay. As long as I didn’t bring him down with me.”

  Olivia swallowed hard, thinking of all the reasons she’d put off therapy.

  Pride—pride at being able to take care of her own shit, without help from anyone—that was the number one thing.

  Olivia—she was the oldest. She’d helped Dad pull his shit together when the single-father thing had seemed too big. She’d kept Christi from losing her shit during the dark year, when it was just them and Mom, and Mom had only fed them sometimes. She’d been the one to make things less bad when they got to see Dad, because he wanted so bad for them to be okay.

  Was that when she’d gotten into the habit of putting a good face on shit?

  When their mom sent them to school in yesterday’s clothes and no food and told them to pray really hard to see if God wanted them to eat?

  And then Larx would pick them up from school on Friday and take them wherever they wanted to eat, and buy them clothes and bubble bath and fancy girl toothpaste so they could spend three nights and two days feeling human again before going to a place where their mother told them they were abominations and just didn’t deserve to be loved.

  There were so many things she’d never wanted her father to know.

  He’d guessed—he’d guessed and he’d fought like hell, and he’d gotten them out.

  She’d never thought about it before—not until word had trickled down about the girl who’d been lost in the snow—but she and Christi were lucky their dad was such a good guesser and such a good fighter for what was right.

  Poor Dad. Fighting so hard to make her better. Fighting so hard to make his kids okay. Hurting Aaron must have seemed like the worst thing in the world he could have done.

  “Pride,” she said softly. “Pride can do horrible things to us, you know?”

  Berto nodded. “Yeah. But being nice, doing the right thing—that’s brought me….” She saw it start small and grow and grow—a great peaceful smile taking over his face as he closed his eyes and turned them up to the breaking day. “This,” he said softly. “It’s beautiful here. You and Elton are good people, and you care about Jaime if I fuck this up. I get to play with your dad’s dog whenever I want. And I just watched a sunrise in the mountains.” He opened his eyes and turned off his vaporizer. “That’s pretty awesome.”

  “Berto?” she asked, feeling some of his hard-earned joy seep into her own soul. “You know, we could get a cat or a dog here too. Would that be okay?”

  His smile was almost as sweet as his brother’s. “Either one,” he said, biting his lower lip. “I’d be happy with either one.”

  “Me and Elton might be staying down in Auburn for a couple of weeks. I’ve….” She took a deep breath. “I need to see a doctor, about my depression, you know?”

  Berto nodded, no judgment whatsoever. “That’s bad. Can’t feel like crap when you got a baby on the way. Need to be there, you know?”

  Her throat grew tight. “Yeah. And Elton deserves a better me and….” Oh, this was so true. “I sure would love to enjoy the sunrise like you do.”

  That smile appeared again. “It’s a good thing,” he said.

  “It really is. When we come back, we can visit the shelter.” She thought of a dog or a cat, of the four of them taking care of it, of Berto and Jaime being cousins, rejoicing in the baby too. Maybe not forever. She would want to go back to school eventually, and Colton really was a tiny town.

  “That would be wonderful,” he said, and impulsively she bent and kissed his cheek.

  “We can be family,” she said quietly. “Would that be okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  And right then, before the moment could get awkward, she heard the dog bark behind the trees.

  “I’m gonna go catch up,” she told him, handing him the saltines. “Think about what kinds of dogs you like—if we see one in Auburn and he likes us, we’ll bring one home.”

  “That’s easy,” Berto said, shrugging. “Good dogs. The kind that will get along with Dozer and play with Jaime. A dog you can run with when your dad can’t go.”

  “The perfect dog,” she agreed, and jogged off the porch. “We’ll be home by ten, Berto, so we can get to Auburn by one—see you then!”

  She caught Larx as he was rounding the bend, and he stopped abruptly, did a little dance-steppy thing to get his rhythm back, and kept going. His face was wet, and he paused to wipe his cheeks on his shoulders.

  “You followed me?” he asked, voice clogged, more winded than he should have been.

  “Aaron tried—he couldn’t make it past the door.”

  “Shit.” Dozer frolicked ahead of them, because the run was one of many of his favorite things, but Larx’s word made even Dozer’s happy snuffling into something dark and sad.

  “It’s okay, Daddy. You’ll get home. He’ll be waiting. He understands.”

  Larx shrugged and shook his head, for once out of words of encouragement or understanding or even just words.

  Olivia owed him some.

  “So,” she said, pulling back her pace a little so she could talk. “So, when Mom just fucking bailed on us even
though we were living in the same house, I told myself over and over again that it was okay. I could take care of us. I was twelve. If she bought rice, I could cook it. I couldn’t do my own hair, but I could do Christi’s, and we would be just okay, and it would be fine.”

  “Livvy—”

  “No, Daddy. Let me finish. The thing is, I kept saying that. Even when I got depressed. I kept thinking I had to be okay. I had to make me okay. So when I came home last summer and it seemed all right, that was like… like a sign. If I could just do the things that made me okay, I’d be okay, and I’d have a handle on this and nobody needed to help me.”

  “Baby….”

  “Yeah. I was stupid. We all need help.” She was winded. She could admit it. “I’m walking.”

  He slowed to a walk immediately, no questions asked. Because he was just her Dad.

  “Anyway—so there I was, being all ‘Olivia is an island,’ and then I got knocked up and….” She dragged in a breath. “All I can think, all day every day, is that I’m going to fail this baby as bad as Mom failed us. Every goddamned minute. It’s…. It’s my biggest terror. And today—today, Elton stood up to his dad, and you almost hit him—”

  “Not a good moment,” Larx said dryly.

  “No—but you had someone. We had lots of someones. It wasn’t just me in there looking at those people. It was this whole… menagerie you forged, because you’re you. And then I came home, and Berto’s there, and all he wants is a dog. Just a fuckin’ dog—maybe a cat. And the sunrise. And I think, Berto knows where it’s at. He accepts help. Every day. And he’s grateful. And he gives back the best he can. So I need to accept help. I need to talk to someone about how it felt to… to have to cut off my hair because Alicia couldn’t be bothered to brush it, or how she wouldn’t let us bathe, and we were outgrowing our clothes. And not you. You were doing everything. Everything. Just like now. You’ve been doing everything. And just like I had to let Elton take my burden, let me heal, let me make my own decisions, you gotta trust Aaron, okay?”