James’s jaw was a hard line. She could see sweat had already formed along his neck. The effort of notmoving was a lot more taxing than most people might think. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face as he saidno.
“You leave,” he added. “If there’s a delay then I can make it to the pit myself. You run out the back now.”
His words were surprisingly resolute.
Rose was more so.
“You’re too tall and you’ve been cramped in there for too long, so you’re probably going to lose time just trying to stand and get out,” she said. “You need momentum as soon as possible. So I’m going to give it to you.”
Rose wrapped both of her hands around James’s arm that was closest to her. It wasn’t enough to trigger the weight shift, but it was enough to get James to slightly turn his head finally.
His eyes were a mix of green and brown. There seemed to be some gold in there too, blurring the line between.
It was nice.
“You don’t need to do this.” His voice was deep and low but sounded louder than the men trying to break down the door.
“But I am,” she said. “Now, I’m going to count to three and on the wordGowe’re going to throw ourselves as fast as we can into that pit.”
James was silent for the briefest of moments.
“What if there’s no delay and this thing blows sky-high the second I’m off it?” he finally asked.
Rose knew it wasn’t a smiling occasion, but she couldn’t help it.
“If that happens, then I promise you, we won’t know it.”
The gravity of her words probably didn’t have timeto sink in. Or, maybe they did. Whatever weight they held for James, he seemed to make a decision after that.
It timed almost too well with the toolbox and chair that had been propped against the office door finally clattering to the ground.
They were now at the true now or never.
Those hazel eyes with their gold in-between hardened.
“OnGo,” he said.
Rose nodded.
Then she counted down from three.
* * *
JAMES’S ADOPTION HADbeen a quiet one. He had been seven and in foster care for three of those seven years. He’d known his biological parents, but in the last little while had grown to think of them more as simply people he visited once a month in a small room at the department of human services. If anything, it was his social worker, Ms. Bell, that he had grown a deep attachment to over the course of their time together.
So when her sister had offered to take him in when adoption was finally put on the table for him, James had felt some excitement. He would still get to see Ms. Bell all the time.
It was a silver lining that he clung to through his parents’ rights being terminated, through his visits stopping, through the rocky year of waiting for the courts to catch up to him, and even when he told the judge he was ready to be the legal son of the Keller family.
They were good, nice people and he would have a good, safe home.
But then Ms. Bell went and moved out of state for her husband’s job.
It was only as they watched the moving truck pull away that the then-seven-year-old James thought he finally understood what a sinking feeling in one’s gut really felt like.
A part of him felt like he had given up his biological mother for the maternal love of Ms. Bell, only to realize that, at the end of the day, she had been doing her job.
Now the job was done, and Ms. Bell had moved on in both the literal and physical sense.
