I blew out a long exhale, which made both Fred and Sean look up at me, then down at the floor guiltily. I walked in and knelt down in front of Sean to meet his eyes. “Are you all right?”
He nodded and even managed to smile a little when I rested my hand against his hair.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I never should’ve made us go to school.”
“We didn’t make it to school,” Sean said.
Freddie glared at both of us. “It would’ve been fine if Seanie hadn’t mouthed off.”
“I didn’t!”
“I said that’s enough with the blaming,” Alice said. “You both did right in protecting each other and that’s the end of it.”
I lifted the peas to Sean’s cheek and reached for Freddie’s hand to bring it up into the light. One of his knuckles looked more swollen than the others. “Move your fingers?”
He wiggled them and winced, but said, “It’s fine.” He pulled his hand from my grasp and down into his lap, then hissed again as Alice went at his cheek gash with a new swab.
I leaned my head down until Freddie looked at me. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged and then winced away from Alice.
“You’ll want to take care of Michael,” she said, still entirely focused on Freddie’s face. “He’s locked himself in the bathroom upstairs.”
“Is he hurt?” I asked.
Freddie shook his head. “Don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
Seanie nudged Fred, who scowled but didn’t say anything more. Seanie moved the peas to his hand and said, “He’s afraid of a van.”
“Press vans,” Freddie said.
“He says it’s not.”
Freddie elbowed Sean for speaking, then scowled and muttered, “He’s such a baby.”
Alice and I exchanged glances. Freddie was probably right about the van, but something was off. He was being uncharacteristically bitter as it was, but he was never, ever hard on Michael like that. I ran up the stairs to the bathroom, lifted my hand to knock, then changed my mind and sat down in the hall, leaning back against the wall by the door.
The strangled whimpers and sniffles coming from Michael echoed around the bathroom and broke my heart a little. He always was the softest of us—the one we all tried to protect at every turn. I sometimes wondered how he had survived all the months of our father’s abuse with his sanity intact. Perhaps it was because of Freddie, who either stepped up to take the brunt of it or hid Michael away. I had hoped that Michael wouldn’t have to hide as much once Dad was in jail.
“I believe you,” I said, loud enough for Michael to hear.
The noises from inside the bathroom stopped altogether, and then I heard him shuffle closer, heard the latch tap against its casing as he leaned back against the door. Someone knocked at the front door downstairs, and Alice cried, “Who is it?”
“Grocery,” was the muffled reply.
“Who’s at the door?” Michael asked, a shade of panic in his voice.
“Alice called for grocery service,” I said. “You don’t have to go to school for a while. We don’t even have to leave the house.”
“How long?” he asked, then hiccupped and blew his nose into some tissue.
“Until it all dies down,” I promised, though I wasn’t sure how long that would take. I wasn’t sure what Dad would do next. He definitely wouldn’t be happy about Alice being our guardian. And there was still the severed hand in our bin. So many things that could all go so wrong. But for now I supposed I could promise Michael anything I wanted.
“You really believe me? About the van?” It sounded like he was speaking right up against the corner of the door and doorjamb. The image of that made me smile.
“You’ve never made up a story like that in your life. I believe you.”
I heard the lock click and stayed very still as Michael pushed open the door a few inches. Our eyes met and he brushed a wad of tissues under his nose before crawling out next to me. His little eyes were puffy and red, and his cheek looked swollen, like maybe he hadn’t been spared a knock or two during Fred and Sean’s street brawl. I lifted my arm up, and Michael’s expression crumpled as he crawled under. He didn’t fit on my lap anymore, but he still tucked the top of his head under my chin.
“Tell me about the van?”
His voice was muffled, like he had the wad of tissues right in front of his mouth while he spoke. “It was black and followed us all the way home from school.”
“Do you think it was a van from the news station?”
“It wasn’t!” He sat up in a panic, and the anguish in his eyes nearly killed me. “You said you believed me!”
I tried on my most reassuring grin. “I do. But I need to know why you think it wasn’t. Tell me what happened.”
Michael took his time to think things through, as he always did. “There were only two people in the van,” he started. “They hadn’t any cameras. They just stared at us while we were walking. And when I ran ahead, they followed me and pulled along the side of the road in front of us so I’d have to walk by them.”
I waited for him to gather his next thoughts.
“And I recognized one of them.”
“From the people gathered out front?”
Michael shook his head. “He was the one who said Alice wasn’t our auntie last night.”