He led me into a large room and I stopped in the doorway. It was like entering the grade-school version of Pimp My Room. A wooden bunk bed lined the wall. The bottom bunk was a full-size mattress and a slide attached to the top bunk. Jacob had his own television and toys. Toys were everywhere.
A picture frame on Jacob’s dresser caught my eye and made it impossible to breathe. Jacob continued to talk, but I tuned him out as I picked up the frame. I rushed out the words, unsure I could say them without my voice breaking. “Do you know who this is?”
Jacob looked at the picture and then returned to the Bat Cave on the floor. “Yeah. That’s our mom and dad.” He said it so casually, like everyone had a picture of them.
I sat on the bed and ran a trembling hand over my face. My mom and dad. This was a fucking picture of my parents and they looked … happy. I sucked in a breath, but it sounded more like a sob.
“Jacob?” said Carrie. “Dessert is on the table.”
Jacob jumped up and then hesitated. “You coming?”
I blinked rapidly. “Yeah, in a sec.” I kept my eyes locked on the picture.
My brother hurried out the door and I tried hard to shove down the pressure building on my chest. Men don’t cry. My parents. Men don’t cry. Fuck. Men don’t cry. I wiped at my eyes. I missed my parents.
“Are you okay?”
My head shot up; I’d been unaware that Carrie remained in the room. “Yeah. Sorry.” I motioned with the frame before putting it back on the dresser. “Where did you get this?”
“Joe contacted Habitat for Humanity and asked if they had pictures of your parents. We felt it was important to keep them a part of the boys’ lives.”
I took a deep, shaky breath and faced her. “But not me.”
Carrie immediately looked down. “Please don’t take my boys away from me. They’re my whole world and … and I can’t live without them.”
Joe walked into the room and placed his arm around her waist. “Carrie.”
She shook like a damn leaf in a hurricane. “We’ll give them everything. Everything. Whatever they want. I swear to you, they’re happy here and I love them. I love them so much my heart hurts.”
I tried to reach for the anger that had propelled me forward over the past couple of months, but I only found confusion. “They’re my brothers and you’ve kept them from me. What did you expect me to do?”
Carrie began to sob. Joe pulled her into his chest and rubbed her back. “We were scared they’d choose you over us. That we’d lose them. Now, we stand to lose them regardless.”
Joe whispered something into Carrie’s ear. She nodded and left the room. He scratched the back of his head. “Thank you for what you did for Jacob. You transformed this entire family.”
Family. Why didn’t he use razor blades and rip me open that way? “You have a nice way of showing your appreciation.”
“And we were wrong about that.” Joe knelt by some Legos on the floor and absently dropped them, one at a time, back into the container. “All Carrie ever wanted was children. We tried for years, but Carrie has a medical condition. She had surgery to try to correct it, but it created scar tissue.”
Unfortunately, I understood scar tissue.
“After she came to terms with the fact that we’d never hold our own natural-born child, we decided on adoption. We met Keesha through a friend and she convinced us to look into foster care. We attended classes, but never really planned on doing it until we met your brothers. Against everything we learned and were told, Carrie and I fell in love with them.”
He continued to plunk one Lego piece on top of another. “After a few months, we decided to adopt. We had to prove to the court that no one else had claim to them, which we thought would be easy, but it turns out that your mother had living relatives.”
My eyes narrowed. “Mom and Dad were only children. Mom’s parents died her first year of college. Grandma and Papa died six months apart from each other when I was ten.”
“Actually, your maternal grandmother is still alive, as well as your mother’s brothers and sisters. She ran away from home to go to college. According to our findings, your mother had a … less than tolerable upbringing.”
Besides to turn my world upside down and confuse me more … “Why are you telling me this?” And why hadn’t my mom told me herself?
Joe shrugged. “In case you want to know that you still have living blood relatives. And to make you understand that we spent two years negotiating and fighting to keep your brothers from a place your mom ran away from. We won, only to be faced with our greatest challenge … you.”
Just when I thought my life couldn’t be more fucked up, Joe found a way to do it. He stood and assessed me—the way Isaiah did when he decided whether or not he was going to take a swing. “We’ve been wrong in how we’ve handled you and your relationship with your brothers. In our defense, you had just hit your foster father when we first took on your brothers. The system labeled you emotionally unstable and we were concerned about your influence on the boys, especially when we saw you bouncing around to several different foster homes. At first, we kept the boys away from you in order to protect them.”
“And after the system began to figure out I wasn’t the problem?”
“Then you scared us.” He stared at me and after a second continued, “When you announced your plans to seek adoption, I had people dig deep to find information on you, to use against you in court.”
Joe came closer to the bed and propped an arm on the wooden beam. “What you did to help those children in your previous foster homes was honorable, and what’s happened to you is deplorable. Noah, my wife and I were wrong about you, but we weren’t sure how to stop what we started without hurting our chances of keeping the boys.”