Waiting for Christopher (21 page)

“Nope.”

Feena, who hadn’t spoken, who had stood stunned and useless beside her friend, remembered something Delores had said. She forced herself to ask about it now. “She mentioned this cousin in Atlanta.” Her hopes were rising like a foolish sun. It was either that or start crying again. “Do you think they went there?”

“Maybe. They didn’t leave no forwarding address.” The woman half smiled. “Just a mess of beer cans.”

“Did they all go together?” Delores had said she’d leave if she got a job. Feena called back the sweaty determined face, the dreamy young voice. “Did Christy’s father go with them?”

The woman’s smile was more like a grimace, the face you make when a Band-Aid’s pulled off. “That wasn’t his father, honey. And I doubt that lug could travel past the nearest bar.” The woman looked hard at the two girls over her daughter’s shoulder. “What you want to know all this for, anyway? You social workers or something?”

“No,” Raylene told her.

“Was he crying?” Feena asked.

“Who?”

“Christy,” Feena said. “Christy, her little boy.”

“I couldn’t say, honey.” The woman stared past them out the door. “Listen here, Lisa Ann. Didn’t you say you finished sweeping that walk? Looks to me, you finished before you started.”

The thin girl moved away from the door. “Mo-om,” she said, stretching the word into two syllables. “Give it a rest.”

The woman shrugged, continued. “That little kid? He coulda been laughing or crying, all I know. They left in the middle of the night.” She paused. This time there was no smile. “That kind always do.”

When they had knocked on all the other neighbors’ doors and learned nothing new, nothing to pin the slimmest of hopes on, Feena and Raylene left Bide A Bit. They walked, wordlessly, as if they’d arranged it ahead of time, toward the old boat. They reached it just as the sun had found the stern and was poking long streamers of light through the cabin’s louvered doors. They sat inside, facing each other across the table, the bags of new clothes and toys between them.

Neither girl spoke, and the only sound was the water, nibbling at the sides of the boat. Raylene pulled a shirt out of one bag, ran her finger along the grinning elephant on its front. “They found that other baby,” she said at last.

Feena looked up, pretending an interest she didn’t, couldn’t feel.

“It was in the paper. Mama showed it to me while you were getting dressed.” Raylene stopped her finger iron for a minute, smiled bitterly. “I got so excited about seeing Toffee, I forgot to tell you.”

Feena said nothing.

“Turns out, it wasn’t kidnapping at all, or not exactly. Turns out, the kid’s dad took him. Anyway, he’s home again.”

“Good,” Feena said, on automatic. “That’s good.” She turned her attention to the other bag, pulled out some books, the shovel and pail. “I never should have taken him back,” she said now, staring at the toys in front of her, not at Raylene. “I should have gone to the police. That would have been the right thing.”

“Right? This mess has gone way past right and wrong.” Raylene sounded tired, numb. “The police and the fixer-uppers don’t have all the answers, either. They make mistakes, too.”

“But what if she’s still hurting him?” Feena studied the pail she’d chosen, the octopus hugging a starfish. She squinted, focusing on that cartoon hug. “What if she doesn’t stop smoking? What if she—”

“What-ifs work both ways.” Raylene had started ironing again, her hands passing back and forth, back and forth, over the tiny shirt. “What if it’s the beginning instead of the end? What if it’s the best for everyone, starting over like this?” She brushed under one eye, forced herself to look hopeful. “What if Toffee’s mom has gone and done what you said? What if she’s found that second chance? Grabbed it and kept on running?”

Feena sat still, head bent. “I can’t stop thinking about him, Ray. I can’t stop picturing him in my mind.” She lifted her eyes to Raylene’s now, but held tight to the pail as if it might jump out of her hands. “You know how patient Christy is? How he’ll sit where you tell him? Well, I keep seeing him, his hair in his eyes, his mouth moving like water the way it does. I see him just sitting there, waiting for you and me to come back and get him.”

“I hope he thinks about us some.” Raylene’s voice was husky, lower than usual, and Feena saw the shine in her eyes. “But I hope he doesn’t wait.”

“No.” Raylene was right; Feena knew that. You couldn’t spend your life looking behind you, waiting for someone who’ll never come back. “Do you think he’s too young to remember?”

“I remember a song my grandmother used to sing.”

“So?”

“So I wasn’t much older than Toffee when she died.” Raylene waved a mosquito away, forgoing the usual execution-style swat. “I don’t know a single word. But I can still hear the music, and I can still feel the feeling. I figure that’s the kind of remembering Toffee might do.”

“Is that enough?”

“I don’t know. But sometimes a little is better than nothing at all. I mean, maybe there’s no such thing as a fresh start. Maybe you can’t live without hurting some. I keep thinking about that book you ‘borrowed’ from me.”

Feena couldn’t laugh. She couldn’t even smile.

“Remember what Janie says when she and her man get caught in that flood? When he asks if she’s sorry she ever met him?”

Feena thought back to the scene where the two lovers are huddled inside a tiny sharecropper’s shack while a hurricane screams outside. How differently Jane’s and Janie’s stories had ended, one finding her lost love, the other living on memories. Was it asking too much for Christy’s story to have a happy ending?

“She says she’d rather wake up to the sun, even if it’s only for one day, than be fumbling around in the dark her whole life.” Raylene slipped the shirt back in the bag. “I had more time with Christy than I did with my sisters. I’m not sorry.”

“But what about Christy?” As waves mumbled underneath the deck and the sun shifted its bright attentions from the door to the window, Feena tried to see into the future. Numb with the loss of the little boy she’d known for weeks and loved for years, she wondered where Christy would grow up, who he would become.

“A few days, Ray. That’s all we gave him.”

“Days of peace. Space to breathe.”

“But it wasn’t real.” Feena remembered the duck and the decoy, shook her head. “It was make-believe, way too short to last a lifetime.”

“We did the best we knew. My guess is, it was the best he ever had.”

Maybe it was, Feena thought. Maybe love, real or unreal, short or long, was better than none. And maybe Christy would remember those precious days, those few spins of the planet when she’d held him in her arms. But more, so much more it ached, she wanted the rest of his life to be easier than its start.

Another part of Raylene’s book came back to her, the part where Janie talks to the tiny seeds as they’re carried off on the wind. She whispered the words to herself now, like a charm or a prayer. “I hope,” she told Christopher as the future plucked him up and whirled him away from her, “I hope you land on soft ground.”

A book isn’t a book without readers. And those who take the time to read a book before it’s published are among the most precious resources a writer has. This time around, I am especially grateful to Marc and Robin Jacobson, Amy Ehrlich, Norma Fox Mazer, and Marion Dane Bauer. Thank you, one and all.

I wrote
Waiting for Christopher
to tell a story, Feena’s story. A character popped into my head, and I was off and running—that’s how all my books begin.

In order to write Feena’s book, though, I had to do research on abused children, real children who need their stories told, too. I learned that abuse is a vicious cycle and that most abusive parents were once abused children. The key, of course, is to prevent abuse before it happens, to teach new mothers and fathers to be effective, loving parents.

But sometimes it’s too late for prevention. Sometimes a child’s safety or life is at stake. What should you do if you see a child in danger? First, I hope you’ll educate yourself about child abuse. The website of Prevent Child Abuse America (
www.preventchildabuse.org
) is a good place to start. Second, to get help in your area, use the national hotline established by Childhelp USA: 1-800-4A-CHILD.

Louise Hawes
has written over fifteen books for readers of all ages. While living in the northeast, she received two New Jersey Writing Fellowships and the New Jersey Author’s Award. She is a founding faculty member of the nation’s first MFA in Writing for Children program at Vermont College. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and journals in the United States and Canada.

Relocated to North Carolina, Louise currently lives in the Chapel Hill area. Her other books for young readers include
Rosey in the Present Tense, The Vanishing Point
, and
Black Pearls, a Faerie Strand
. For more information about the author, visit her website at
www.louisehawes.com
.