Forever Promised (47 page)

Shane
:
Closure

M
IKHAIL
’
S
face was white and tautly drawn, and his hand in Shane’s was icy, the grip so hard and so bony Shane was pretty sure he’d be bruised the next day.

Shane’s grip back was much the same, and he wasn’t sure what his face looked like.

He was too busy looking at the girl in the morgue.

“She….” Mikhail struggled with the words. “She was coming back to us.”

“Yes.”

She’d called them the night before, her voice sounding slurry and high, with the shrill pitch of desperation in it. She’d seen the fliers, she said. They were everywhere. Were they true? Could she come home?

“God, yes, sweetheart. We’ll come get you—just tell us where you are.”

“Downtown. By the shelter. But I’ll come to you. I don’t wanna be here no more, Shane. Just wanna come home.”

The thought of her out there in the rain had spurred Shane and Mikhail out. They went to Loaves and Fishes first, and asked, and were told a girl matching the picture—only much thinner, much more strung out, much less healthy—had been hanging around for the past month or two. She’d been selling herself and using, and they’d been worried for her.

Mikhail literally grabbed Shane’s hand and dragged him from the place, back into the car, to wander the streets until they saw her.

They saw the flashing lights of the ambulance pulling away first.

Shane had been told the victim of the hit-and-run would be taken to the morgue at Mercy San Juan—but to give them a few minutes to clean her up first. It wasn’t pretty.

And here they were. And here she was.

Her face was thinner. Her teeth were yellow. Her lips were cracked. She had sores on her cheeks, and her fingers were blistered from whatever she’d used to inhale.

But all of that, and Shane thought Mickey might have reclaimed her, made her whole, from force of will alone, just like his mother had done for him.

The shyness, the sweet hope that had looked out from her dark eyes was hidden. Forever.

“She was coming back to us?” Mikhail said again, his voice a child’s voice, a pleading voice. One Shane had never heard before. This girl had reduced him to the child he’d sworn he’d left behind, the lost one, the angry one, and Shane could only hope he’d be enough to reclaim Mickey from the storm detritus when the wave of grief had passed.

When they’d asked to see the body, the doctor asked them who they were to the victim. When Shane told him, the doctor bent his head and then left and came back.

He had one of the fliers with him. Mikhail had taken the picture—she’d been brushing one of the horses at The Pulpit, and when he’d called her name, her thin, dark face had relaxed into a rare, whole smile. Her eyes had held hope that day. They’d held animation, and humor, and all of the things Shane and Mikhail had loved.

The flier was crumpled, and the stains around the edges were still bright red but turning brown from the air.

“She had this in her hand when the car hit,” the doctor told him. The doctor, a middle-aged man with eyes sunk into a nicotine addict’s wrinkles, didn’t show any animation, but then, he didn’t have to. The fact he’d brought the flier said more than it needed to about compassion in silence.

Shane nodded now and brought Mikhail’s hand up to his mouth and kissed it.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “She was coming home.”

Mikhail swallowed audibly.

Gulp it down all you want, Mickey. It’s going to come up and eat you whole if you don’t let it out.

“Then we shall have to bring her home,” Mikhail said, and the look he turned to Shane was absolutely naked with implicit faith. “Can you do that? Can you make it so she comes home?”

Shane nodded. It was four in the morning, and his eyes burned with tired and his heart burned with grief, but he knew who to turn to. “I’ll call Deacon,” he said softly. “I think we can bury her ashes at Promise Rock.”

“Not….” Mikhail swallowed again, because his voice was breaking. “Not the place where the weddings are,” he said, his breathing ragged. “The outside of the rock, where it’s all fields, wherever you look.”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “We’ll take her home and set her free.”

Mikhail made a sound like a hurt kitten, and Shane decided that dignity could fuck itself. “C’mere,” he demanded. “I need you.”

Mostly Shane needed him to break so Shane could pick up his pieces, because that’s all Shane could do right now, pick up the pieces, be there for him. Otherwise, Shane was fucking useless, fucking useless and impotent, and if he couldn’t comfort Mikhail, then he had nothing to shore him up, nothing at all—

Mickey threw himself into Shane’s arms and Shane crushed him, and they broke together and mourned. Their sobs echoed in the cold room with the still and silent girl and the smell and metal tang of death.

I
T
TOOK
a couple of hours for Shane to get the information and make the arrangements for cremation and a marker. At seven in the morning, he called Deacon and asked him the favor.

Deacon said yes, yes of course, and shouldered his part of the funeral arrangements like a student shoulders a backpack.

There was nothing to do after that but go back to Promise House and tell the children.

Halfway home, Mikhail spoke up, surprising him badly.

“I would like to tell Missy,” he said quietly, and for a moment, Shane’s mind reeled with all of the very bad things that could happen. “You may be there,” Mikhail told him, interrupting all sorts of worst-case scenarios. “But do not worry.” In the stillness of the car, Shane could hear him breathe through his nose. “I think I will make you proud of me.”

They were on the freeway, so Shane could grab his hand. “Every day,” he said hoarsely. “Every moment. Everything you do. I’m proud of you.”

Mickey squeezed back. “You are very foolish,” he said simply. “But I think I shall not tell you that very often. My soul could not bear it if you didn’t believe the things you say.”

Shane had to blink very fast to keep from crying again, and they were calm and collected when they made their way into Promise House fifteen minutes later.

“P
ATIENCE
,
children,” Mikhail said as they walked in. All twelve of the kids, the other three counselors, Kimmy, and Lucas—
everybody
was gathered in the living room when they came in. All those expectant faces looked up, and Shane could see Mikhail’s performance cloak bearing him up with presence and acceptance as he spoke. “We will give you all the details eventually, and Shane and I must speak to Melissa alone. Before we do that….” His composure slipped. “Shane?”

Shane stepped up and put his hand on Mickey’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said simply. “Sweetie—LeLauna—was killed in a car accident last night. We….” The flier, covered in blood and crumpled, still rested in the pocket of his big black waterproof jacket. “We have reason to believe that she was coming home to us. When she called last night, she wanted to come home.”

He looked out at the people in his house, the eight boys and four girls in his charge, and watched as various stages of grief and disbelief spread through them all. He was responsible for this, he thought wretchedly. He had to help them through this. How as he supposed to do that? What was he to them?

His sister caught his eye before he could spiral into that sort of self-doubt, and he remembered himself.

“Mr. Winters at The Pulpit says we can bury her ashes at Promise Rock. We’re putting together a date and a time for that. Everybody is required to go, people. There’s no dodging out on this one. All those things your counselors tell you about dealing with the pain—this is what it’s all about.” He realized that might sound a bit harsh, so he dropped the power speech and went for the real. “It’s going to hurt,” he told them honestly. “It’s going to hurt for a while, in unexpected ways. This isn’t a big high school where we know someone by name and nothing else. Sweetie was a friend here, she was a sister. She wasn’t outgoing—I know that. But everyone in here, at some moment, said something to her, looked kindly at her,
was
something to her that was important. She was coming home, people. This place was her home.”

That was all he had. He was done. He looked out and saw kids holding kids and rocking, counselors with hands on shoulders and on defiantly turned heads. They would be grief-stricken and mourning for a long, painful time, and he allowed himself one bitter thought: would Sweetie have done this to them if she’d known the wreckage she’d leave behind?

Then he saw Missy whirl on her heel and Mikhail go stalking after her, and he strapped on his mental greaves and his titanium loincloth for whatever was coming next.

Missy didn’t even bother to slam the door shut, and Mikhail made no pretense of not following her into her room. The place was a dump. Missy had been looking more and more despondent in the past month, and the room was filled with dirty clothes and dusty bottles of beauty products she had ceased to use. He didn’t have time to dwell on those things (or on the smell of mustiness that meant they really
had
to help the girl clean up her act), because Mikhail dove right into action here, and he was not taking a breath before a furious deep-end swim.

“Where are you going?” Mikhail demanded. Missy had one of the reusable shopping bags and was shoving dirty clothes into it, as well as some personal trinkets of her own.

“Where do you think?” she asked bitterly, turning a pinched, angry red face to him. She hadn’t worn makeup in months, and her complexion was spotty, and right now her nose was swollen and her eyes were puffy. She looked nothing like the self-assured little vamp who had stomped past three runners on a miserable August morning. “It’s not like anyone here liked me anyway, but look! Look what I did! I killed her! The girl’s name was
Sweetie
, for sweet fuck’s sake, and I’m the bitch that killed her. My life is fucking over. No one can love me after this.
No one!
”

“You’d like that to be true, wouldn’t you?” Mikhail snapped. “That would be wonderful. You have blown it, you are sixteen, your life is over, and you don’t need to try anymore. Mission accomplished, life over, you can go and waste it now, and nobody will expect anything different, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right—look at me now! I’m a fuckup! I’m a bitch and a whore and now the world can just get off my back and—”

“And what? And watch you walk into the sunset and sell yourself for filth? You think that’s what we will do? You think it will be heroic?” Mikhail’s voice cracked. “Because I tell you this—I tried it. Yes, you think you are the inventor of self-hatred, but I
tried
this plan! I got high, and I got fucked in alleyways, and you know what? You will love this. This will make everything right in your small world. Yes, I
too
was responsible for someone’s death. How does that make you feel? Do you want to go out and kill yourself now? Because I did!”

“Yeah, what stopped you?” Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl, and Mikhail stood right there in her face, on his tiptoes, because she was taller than he was, chest to chest.

“My mother tied me to a bed while I detoxed, and then, when we found my friend dead with a needle in his fucking arm because he got selfish and shot everything we had, she held me while I cried. And I had to
live
with that. I had to
live
with what I did. And what was I to do? I could not get high. I could not hit my mother—
again.
What was I to do?”

“I don’t know, Mikhail!” she shouted. “What am I supposed to do? You won’t look at me anymore.
Nobody
will look at me anymore! I fucked up! I was a fucking cunt and I fucked up! But I didn’t want her to die! I didn’t want her to run away! I just wanted everyone to stop looking at her and see
me
!” Her voice broke then, shattered messily into a thousand blood-spattered pieces, and Shane found he was rocking back on his heels, in awe at what Mickey had just accomplished.

“Well, I am looking at you,” Mikhail shouted back. “
I
am looking at you! And I see a young woman who fucked up. But
I
fucked up.
I
hurt someone I didn’t mean to. And you know what I did?”

“No,” Missy said on a sob. “No. I have no idea. I’m stupid. I’ve always been stupid and ugly—how am I supposed to know how you fix something like this?” Her shoulders shook, and her head was drooped, and for the first time in sixth months, Shane saw, really saw, the hurt child in the body of the bitter, angry woman.

Mickey saw it too. Maybe Mickey had always seen it, but he wasn’t going to let that child hide one more time.

“You cannot fix it,” he said softly, and to Shane’s surprise, Mikhail moved his hands up to the girl’s arms and stroked in comfort. “You cannot fix this, Melissa. But you can live with it. You can look yourself in the face and say, ‘I have done this. But it is not all I will do.’ Can you do that? Do you have the strength to do that?”

“Noooooooo…,” she wailed. But she collapsed into Mikhail’s arms as she said it, and he held her, rocking her like the child she’d never been allowed to be.

A
FEW
days later, Martin drove through the rain to Promise House, specifically to talk to Shane. Shane was expecting him—Jeff and Collin had bought the boy a plane ticket and flown him to California expressly for the funeral service. Shane didn’t even want to think about the strings they had to pull or the people they had to beg to get that done, but here the boy was, looking nothing like the defiant, pissed-off asshole who had spent less than a month here three and a half years ago.

In fact, he looked very, very much like a young man.

Shane had an office of sorts—it was also the library, lined with eight of those cheap plywood shelves that were stuffed full of paperbacks (many of them with questionable sexual content, but Shane wasn’t picky)—and it held file cabinets full of the independent study packets the kids used to make up units at the continuation school. It also held a desk, and office supplies, and a computer, and a little schoolwork table, as well as big comfy chairs, because sometimes the kids wandered in and pulled a book off the shelf and just settled in to read in the quiet while he was working.