“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “Alice, I’m one bad accident away from landing back in a wheelchair. Or in traction for weeks in a hospital, hooked up to tubes, trying to stay alive. Right now I’m healthy, but every day that I have the ability to roll out of bed and stand on my own two feet is a win. You’ve got your health. You’ve got a good brain. I don’t care how dark today looks, you’ve got everything it takes to build a great future.”
The cell phone beside her vibrated. Every muscle in Alice’s body stiffened as she sent a worried glance at the phone. He knew exactly what that pop-up message meant. It was the top of the hour and she’d set her alerts for a regular update. Her body cringed as she scrolled through whatever garbage had just been posted about her.
“What would happen if you quit reading that?” he asked. “Cancelled the alert? Deleted the social media apps?”
She shook her head and continued scrolling. “I need to know what is being said about me.”
“Oh yeah? What would Jane Austen say about someone so obsessed with what strangers thought?”
For the first time since he arrived, the corner of her mouth lifted in a bit of humor. “She’d whap me with a parasol and tell me to snap out of it.”
They shared a momentary laugh, but she sobered quickly. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get over this,” she whispered. “It’s really, really bad.”
She looked like a broken flower as she sagged in the garden. There was no magic cure for what had happened to her, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to prop her up.
“Some scars last a long time,” he said. “You might not ever get over it, but trust me . . . there’ll come a time when it won’t hurt anymore.”
She turned a curious look at him. “Are you speaking from experience?”
If sharing a bit of his rotten childhood would help, he’d do it.
“Growing up, I spent a lot of time in foster care,” he said, and he immediately had Alice’s attention. She probably never knew a kid who was raised by the state. She probably had no understanding of how most foster parents were in it for a monthly paycheck rather than any genuine love for damaged and abandoned kids. Jack ran away from three lousy foster placements before he got lucky.
“My mom died when I was eleven, and my dad did his best. He took me golfing and tried to keep on top of my infusions, but he was a pretty bad alcoholic. Things spiraled down quickly after my mom died. I cycled through a bunch of lousy placements, but I finally landed with a really great foster family when I was thirteen,” he said. “Mrs. Shipley had three kids of her own, but I still got my own bedroom and she promised I could stay until I graduated from high school if I wanted. That’s unusual in foster care.”
Jack desperately wanted to stay with the Shipleys forever. They lived in a clean neighborhood. There wasn’t yelling orswearing and he didn’t have to worry about anyone stealing the spending money he got from the state. They went to church on Sunday, had family dinners every night, and everyone treated each other with respect.
School was still rotten because he tended to get bullied at any new school, but it didn’t matter because each day he got to go home to the Shipleys. Besides, the only time things were really horrible at school was between class when hundreds of kids poured out of classrooms and hustled through narrow hallways. He was using forearm crutches in those days. That, plus the backpack filled with books, made him slow in the hallways, which drew bullies like sharks sensing blood in the water.
“Kids could be pretty brutal to someone who is different,” he said. “One time a bunch of kids had me cornered and shoved me into a hallway locker.”
To this day he hated the sound of a slamming metal locker door. Alice’s golden-brown eyes widened in horror. Not that he liked seeing it, but at least she wasn’t dwelling on her own problems, so he continued. “It was three against one, and I couldn’t even resist because fighting them might have started a bleed.”
The lock on the door automatically engaged as soon as the door slammed shut, and he was trapped. It was pitch-black and stank like gym shoes. He yelled and kicked, but all he heard was laughter as the boys ran away.
He started crying because the side of his head throbbed from slamming against the back of the locker, and throbbing was a sign of big trouble. If he didn’t get an infusion immediately he’d end up back in the hospital. It felt like forever, but it was probably only a few minutes before someone heard his pleas for help and got him out.
“I ended up in the hospital for a month after that,” Jack said. By now Alice had quit weeding and put her phone down. “Brainbleeds are life-threatening for a hemophiliac, so they kept me in the hospital for around-the-clock monitoring. Mrs. Shipley seemed to handle things pretty well. She visited me almost every day. Brought me cookies and comic books. One time she brought me a little medallion of Saint Jude, the patron saint who was supposed to look out for sick kids like me. What I didn’t know was that during that time I was in the hospital she had asked the social workers to find me a different foster home. The accident freaked her out. She was okay with managing my disease if it only meant helping administer my shots a couple times a week, but the accident was another layer of responsibility and she didn’t think she was cut out for it.”
Jack tried to pretend like he didn’t care when Mrs. Shipley drove him back to the foster agency, but inside he’d decided that he was through with foster care. The foster parents were either in it for the money, or people he couldn’t trust. When he saw her the following year at junior high graduation, he turned and walked the other way. He never spoke to Mrs. Shipley again.
“Why are you telling me all this?” Alice asked.
“Because I want you to know that no matter how bad it gets, you can get up and face another day. I didn’t have what it takes to be a professional golfer. That dream died and I had to shore myself up and figure out what to do with my life. It was better than crying into my soup and telling myself that life wasn’t fair. If this stupid scandal stops you from getting tenure, you’ve got a good head, and good health, and a whole wide world of opportunities out there.”
Alice breathed a heavy sigh. “I’ve trained all my life to be a college professor. If that’s closed, I don’t know what to do.”
“What about that Saint Helga lady? Can’t you still make some hay out of her?”
Alice shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, but not very convincingly. “It turns out the Roost is a lot older than anyone thought, butsearching for the real Helga seems impossible. So far all I’ve been turning up are dead ends. All the court records got burned up in the 1698 fire, and I don’t know how to prove she even existed.”
Maybe the graffiti on the window would be a dead end, too, but he’d let Alice make that call.
“I found something about Helga in the Roost. I thought you’d like to see it.”
That got her attention. Her posture straightened, and a flicker of curiosity softened the weight of her expression. “I’d like that.”
And he liked seeing her cheer up. “Good! I’ve got meetings with the Tuckers for the rest of the day, and it will be too dark to see at night, but come by tomorrow morning. I think you’ll be impressed.”
