I wasn’t sure I had, though, and I also wasn’t sure I would have spoken in such a reassuring way to, say, Verona. But Julian looked so worried, and he wasn’t truly an employee. He was something else.
“She said she’d shoot him,” he said, still fretting.
We could hear Oakleigh stomping back and forth upstairs, doing what sounded like primal scream therapy while wrecking a dresser with a hand ax.
“I’m sure she would, if he were right in front of her this second, and she had that gun. They all mean it in the moment. But the moment passes, a thousand times out of a thousand and one.”
“What about the thousand and first time?” he asked.
“You read about those cases in the paper.”
“Should we—should you go up there?”
I shook my head and sat down by Julian to wait comfortably and billably on the sofa until Oakleigh wore out her fit upstairs. The cops did not concern me. I had yet to meet the Atlanta cop who’d spend more than five minutes on any assault charge where the weapon was a kitty cat. When they came, I’d file a report about the breakins to have them on the record. Especially the guns. I didn’t like the guns. I liked them even less in Clark Winkley’s hands. A divorce this volatile, having either of them armed was a bad idea. There was always that thousand and first case. But at least the upstairs noises were abating.
“See? She’s calming down.”
“People don’t act like this,” he said.
“Sure they do,” I told him, and was relieved that my protectiveness for the kid stretched only so far. I didn’t want him genuinely frightened, but I also couldn’t let his rosy worldview stand unchallenged. “All people have it in them. Don’t ever get divorced, Julian.”
He chuckled, a nervous noise, releasing tension. “I’m not even married.”
“That’s the only surefire way to avoid it,” I said. And then, because he’d asked me the impossible—what we would do when Hana was found—I added, “Making a family is a dangerous business.”
He looked up from the kittens at me, clear-eyed. “If you mean us, it’s not the same thing as this. Not at all. We’re looking for a little kid.”
Damn, but the boy was direct. I considered him, poker-faced. Hana would be nothing like the blank slate of a baby, nor would she be a television ten-year-old. Real, live preteen girls were time-consuming, irksome, and difficult at best. I knew, because I’d been one. The specific one we sought had a complicated history. Did he think she would run and hurl herself into our arms, as delighted as a rescue dog? We weren’t Kai. We weren’t anything to Hana. I was invested because I saw myself, my own childhood, in her, but she wouldn’t see herself in me. She wouldn’t have a thing in common with sweet, sheltered Julian. I had a hard time imagining what his childhood would have looked like, and I was an adult.
“When you were growing up, did you have family dinner?” I asked him.
His eyebrows knit. “Well, we had dinner.”
“At a table?” I said. “With all three of you there, and you talked about your day or your plans for tomorrow?”
“Yeah, but it’s normal to have family dinner.”
“Mm-hm. What did you do after?” I asked.
“After dinner? I don’t know,” he said. “We read or watched TV. Me and my mom liked board games. What? That’s not weird.”
“Do you think that’s what we’ll be like? You and me and Hana? Tuna casserole and Pictionary after?”
“No,” he said, but then he added, “Not at first.”
In those three words, I saw a whole imaginary future, cheery, tinged with pink, unfurling in his imagination. It bore no resemblance to what was forming in my mind: a lurching Frankenstein’s family, cobbled from dead pieces. The kid hadn’t seen a lot of ugly—his reactions to Oakleigh’s fit proved that. He was not prepped for Hana, or for After, for a We. To be fair, I wasn’t either, but at least I had a realistic grasp on Now.
“Julian, we might not find her at all. Even if we do, she’s not going to be some Brady kid in pigtails. She—”
“I know,” he interrupted, sparking to my tone. “I wasn’t raised by Care Bears, Paula.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, light, trying to head off his temper. “But I’m guessing little birds show up to clean your dishes?”
“No, they don’t,” he said, even madder. “And my mom doesn’t wear pearls to do the dusting, and”—he faltered, and his eyes got all glossy—“Didn’t, I mean. She didn’t wear pearls. We were just regular.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was a bad line of questioning for a kid who’d lost his mother so recently. Kai had chosen good parents—they might even have been great ones, if they hadn’t gone and died on him. “I don’t mean to upset you, but what you’re calling regular is actually lovely and quite rare.”
My words were meant to soothe him, but they had the opposite effect. A fat tear spilled down one cheek, and he set the kittens off his lap.
“You think I can’t handle this? You think I’m too soft? Or too dumb? What?” His voice was thick and loud.