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“I miss you,” she told her sister. “We’ll find a time and a way to see each other.”
Analiese hung up. She had chosen her life path, and she wasn’t sorry. Still, somehow, she was alone and turning forty. And now the man who would best understand how she felt, a man who himself would never marry and have children, was playing peekaboo and refusing to get close enough for a conversation.
Wasn’t that for the best anyway? Since he was the man she most wanted and could never have? Self-pity was closing in fast.
“Time for a long walk.” She got to her feet and went to find the right shoes.
* * *
Shiloh knew her mother was sick, really sick and not just giving-up-sick. But now that Belle was feeling a little better, she was messing around in the kitchen, trying to act like a regular mom. Unfortunately there was nothing regular about the way she wiped crumbs to the floor and then didn’t have the energy to sweep them up. Things were better when Belle just stayed in bed. At least that way Shiloh could clean on her own schedule.
That was why she and Dougie were outside now. She’d had to get away before she said something really mean. After sweeping the floor she’d grabbed him and abandoned the apartment.
“Are all those kids gone yet?” Dougie asked.
From behind a row of shrubs Shiloh had logged the activity at Covenant Academy while Dougie tried to outrace squirrels. When chimes had sounded all the students had filed in, but Shiloh had seen plenty first. These kids didn’t look like the ones at her school in Ohio. She knew the difference between jeans that had faded from constant wear and the designer kind that had been artificially faded by women in India or Bangladesh who got paid, like, three cents an hour and used chemicals that would cause birth defects in their unborn children.
These kids came from homes where they could probably choose a different supersize television to watch every night. These were kids who had to decide between a Porsche or a Jaguar when they passed their driver’s test.
“Yeah, they all went inside.” She hoped she didn’t have to see them again today.
“I’m bored.”
This was Shiloh’s cue. This was garbage day. Early that morning she’d scoured recycling bins in the neighborhood behind the church to find magazines, and now she had two that might interest her brother. Ranger Rick, which had a funny-looking fish on the cover, and a Scooby-Doo! magazine, which was really more like a comic book.
The problem was she wasn’t in the mood to help her brother read. Dougie could read okay, but after almost every sentence she had to fight him to sit still and keep going. If she could just figure out how to help him read while he was running, he might catch up with the other kids in his grade.
If they ever went back to school.
“Let’s take a walk and figure out what kind of trees we see. I have some paper. We can make a list, maybe collect some leaves off the ground.” She vaguely remembered doing something like that in third grade, but earlier in the year when leaves were still in place on branches.
“I don’t know nothing about trees.”
“Anything. You don’t know anything.”
“If you know I don’t know nothing, then why do we have to go?”
She socked him on the shoulder. Hard. “Listen, Dougie. In case you didn’t notice, I’m not having fun here either.” She thought about yesterday and the way she’d felt when her family’s whole story had been laid out for everybody in church by Reverend Ana. Sure, the lady minister had done a good job of making it seem like what had happened to them could happen to anybody, but Shiloh had still felt like a bug pinned to a board. On display whether she liked it or not.
Dougie rubbed his shoulder. “I can hit back!”
“You’d better not. That’s the only way I can get your attention. And now we’re going to take that walk, whether you want to or not. I know the names of a lot of trees, and I’ll tell you.” She hoped that was true.
“Can we get ice cream?”
“Of course we can’t.”
He shrugged, as if to say I tried.
“I’ll just go inside and get the paper. You stay out here, okay? Don’t go anywhere. Promise?”
He rolled his eyes. She waited until he grudgingly held up his right hand. Right hand meant a promise, and Dougie knew if he broke it, Shiloh would never trust him again.
She took off for the stairs at the side of the building that led right to the third floor without having to go inside and maybe run into people who wondered why she wasn’t in school. Her father was off looking for work, and once she carefully avoided the four steps that didn’t look safe and went inside, she saw her mother was sleeping again. She tiptoed into the room she was sharing with Dougie and got the paper and a pen. She wished she had tape so he could tape the leaves on the paper, but tape cost money. Maybe Dougie could trace around them.
If he would just sit long enough to do it.
Outside again she turned the corner where he should have been waiting and saw him in the distance instead, near the big parking lot behind the church. Frowning, she went to lecture him and slowed when she realized he was chatting with a man. The man wasn’t exactly a stranger. He had sat beside her in church yesterday. She rarely forgot faces anyway, but his was interesting enough to be memorable.
He was tall, large, but not overweight. He had dark hair that curled just a little and skin that either tanned perfectly—unlike her own—or was naturally that color. Yesterday she had noticed his eyes, a deep chocolate brown that managed somehow to convey a lot of feeling. He hadn’t known who she was, but she thought maybe as Reverend Ana told the family’s story he had guessed. He’d tried to make her feel welcome by sharing his hymnal and smiling warmly, as if to encourage her to stay beside him.
Now he was smiling at her brother, listening as Dougie chatted a mile a minute, either giving away their family secrets or explaining that while most people were descended from Adam and Eve, Dougie himself was descended from space aliens. He’d gotten that from some television show when they’d still had money for cheap motels. Half the time she thought maybe he was right. Space aliens would explain a lot about her brother.
“Hello again,” the man said when she joined them. “You and I met yesterday. Or almost. I’m Isaiah Colburn.” He held out his hand, and she grudgingly took it and told him her name.
“This is my brother, Dougie, and he was supposed to wait for me over there.” She nodded back toward the church.
“You didn’t say I had to stay in that exact spot! And you found me, didn’t you?”
She glared at him. “After I looked.”
Isaiah laughed. “I have an older sister, and she still gets upset if I’m not doing exactly what she thinks I ought to.”
“Well, I’m in charge of him.”
“And doing a fine job from what I can tell. Dougie was very careful not to cross the street.”
“It’s like trying to keep a hummingbird on a leash.”
He laughed again. “You’re living here now?”
“I’m sure you figured that out. We’re that homeless family.”
“Not anymore.”
“Not for two more weeks anyway. Unless Dougie here blows it.” She glared at her brother again.
“Reverend Wagner said she’s going to try to find you a better place?”
It took her a moment to figure out he meant Analiese. “Yeah, she’s okay. But I don’t think everybody is as nice as she is. I don’t think the rest of them want us here.”
“Are you guessing?”
“Educated guessing. We make people remember that the thing that happened to us could happen to them.”
He whistled softly. “Good insight, Shiloh.”
“It’s not worth as much as a month’s rent.”
“I know this has been a tough time for you and your family.”
“You could say that.”
“He just did,” Dougie said.
She was surprised her brother had actually been listening. Dougie was usually off in his own little world.
“I notice you’re not in school,” Isaiah said. “Are you going to register today?”
“School’s a waste of time. I’m teaching Dougie. We’re about to take a walk and look at trees.”
“I’m a big admirer of trees. That sycamore there?” Isaiah pointed to a tree closer to the parish house with a few yellow leaves clinging to its branches. “It’s special because of the bark. All trees have to shed or stretch their bark to grow, but the sycamore’s bark is rigid and it can’t stretch. So it splits open and that’s what gives the tree its mottled appearance.”
“What’s mottled?” Dougie asked.
“Different colors. Want to go look up close?”
Shiloh hadn’t known what kind of tree that was and frankly hadn’t cared. But now she trooped along, and more surprisingly, so did her brother, who suddenly seemed interested.
Isaiah lifted a yellowed leaf off the ground beneath the sycamore and gave it to Dougie, talking about the shape, using his hand to explain what palmate meant. “Squirrels like these trees because the branches twist and turn, and that helps them feel safer from predators. Without the leaves you can see the branches better.” He pointed up.
“How do you know so much?” Shiloh asked.
“I spend a lot of time outdoors when I can. Trees interest me.” He inclined his head. “What interests you?”
“A roof over our heads?”
“What else? When you aren’t worrying, which is rare, I know, but what interests you both that has nothing to do with your situation?”
The question was so direct and so, well, interesting, that she couldn’t tell him to shove off. He seemed to really care about her answer.
“I like to run,” Dougie said. “As fast as I can, and I’m fast. I really, really am.”
“I just bet. Do you like sports?”
“He wouldn’t know,” Shiloh said. “Running’s free, and you can do it anywhere.”
“So you can. And it’s good practice for everything else, too.”
“If bad guys come, I can get away,” Dougie said.
Isaiah looked sadder, but he nodded. “Well, I was thinking more of baseball and football. That kind of thing.”
“I like to fish. My dad fishes, and he used to take me with him when I was really little.”
Isaiah nodded again, as if Dougie’s words were somehow profound. “And you, Shiloh?”
The question should have been easy, but it wasn’t. She had packed away everything that interested her, like the boxes from their home that went into a storage unit until they couldn’t afford to pay the rent anymore. Now all those things were probably gone forever, her childhood toys, the quilts her grandmother had made. Gone. And with them anything she had once liked to do.
She could see he understood that she wasn’t just being stubborn. She had given up being interested in anything other than survival.
“I think you like to read,” he said.
“Shiloh gets magazines out of the recycling,” Dougie said. “For her and for me.”
“That’s the best kind of recycling,” Isaiah said. “What magazines do you like?”
“Whatever.”
“Everything, in other words.”
“I guess. I like news. It makes me feel better.”
“Because you realize things could be worse?”
She nodded, just a little. She was surprised how much he understood. “I hate People magazine. Those kinds of magazines, you know? Those people have no idea how good they have it, and they’re always whining.”
“You don’t like whining.”
“If I say yes, I’ll be whining.”
He laughed, a deep laugh like his voice, and she knew it was genuine. She liked Isaiah Colburn, although of course, he was a stranger and that meant he was still suspect.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Are you here to volunteer or something?”
“No, I came to see Reverend Wagner.”
“She won’t be here today. It’s her day off. I have her cell phone number, though. She gave it to me and told me to call anytime.”
“Then she thinks you’re special.”
“She would be wrong about that.”
“Probably not. But you’ve saved me from going inside. I’ll come back another day.”
“Are you her friend? Or do you need counseling or something?”
He took a moment to answer. His expression changed as he seemed to sink somewhere deep inside him. “Both,” he said at last.
“Nobody calls her Reverend Wagner. At least nobody I would like. She’s Reverend Ana.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“I guess she’s a good friend to have. She’s been nice to us.”
“She would be.” He said goodbye and did a fist bump with Dougie, then he extended his hand to her once more.
“Think about school,” he said. “Whether you like it or not, it’s the only way out, Shiloh. And deep inside you’re too smart not to see that.”
