God help me I wanted to shy away from the responsibility when Sean and Emma came to me with their suspicions. Craig was suicidal. Craig was being beaten. I stared at them, told them that was a serious thing to say. They just looked at me with their end of the road faces, truth faces.
I didn't want to deal with that. Craig was Albert's responsibility and Angie was mine and I liked it that way. That was the status quo. I didn't want to upset the status quo.
And honestly what was I supposed to do? No one even knew where he was. Toronto was a big city. It was a big world. When people didn't want to be found they had a way of not being found. How could I find him? This kid who I used to see once in a while, a hi and bye. Now I was supposed to rescue him from trauma and abuse?
But I was it. Craig had no other family to speak of. His mother was dead. His grandparents, both sets, lived thousands of miles away. If they were even alive anymore. I knew Julia's parents were alive. But Albert's? I had no idea. He had one aunt on his father's side who lived in Florida. This left him with precious few options. He had a step-father or Children's Aid, that was it. It staggered me to think how alone he was.
Still, I didn't want to do anything. I had my comfortable life with Angie, seeing my friends from time to time, jaunting off on beautiful get-away weekends with my latest fling, some dark haired beauty who vaguely resembled Julia.
But Angie piped up, wide-eyed, describing the results of the violence she'd seen on Craig. I closed my eyes and thought of Julia. It was more for her than for him that I was willing, finally, to help. Or to at least try. It was what she would have wanted. I had to honor her memory at all costs.
Driving around, past the train tracks and into downtown and back again. Sean looking worried in the seat next to me. I thought I knew where the night was going to end. We'd be sitting in a police station describing Craig to a thick jowled, bored faced cop. Kids sometimes ran away, it happened.
I hadn't bargained on the cemetery or Craig's intense face as he stared at her gravestone, traced the letters of her name with the tip of his finger. Things kept hitting me in different ways. Julia had been the love of my life, my wife, my everything. The mother of my child. My partner. But for Craig she was more. His loss was greater than mine.
He jumped at the sound of my voice, and I realized the face I'd been seeing on him all week was a lie. It was a mask. This was the true face. Anger and fear and terror. Eyes wide. Muscles tense. Seeing him like that, the emotions going so fast, I could believe it. The beatings, the suicidal thoughts and actions, I knew it was true.
Here was a kid that needed help. It was achingly obvious. And I stepped toward him, motioning Sean to stay back. This was between me and Craig, because like it or not I was all he had.
I had to hack through all his defenses, years of defenses. I had to get him to trust me. I had to provide shelter and safety and a sense of security. I had to build a relationship with him because at that point, staring at each other across Julia's grave, we didn't have a relationship.
It seemed impossible. He was so old, 14 at least. He had been other people's responsibility for so long that I didn't know how I could just step in. Every step I took toward him he backed up. He jerked away from every attempt to touch him. How could I reach him?
Black sky stretching above us. There seemed to be no way. He was hurt and hurting and distrustful and he had a right to all of those things. I shouldn't have let him slip so easily into obscurity when Julia died. But I was overwhelmed with my own grief. I knew Craig was grief stricken, too, but I couldn't deal with it. I could barely deal with myself. I could barely dress myself some days. Going through the motions. I'd never known what that really meant until Julia died. Then I understood how empty the motions were, how the point to any and all actions was lost. I had just wanted to curl up in the mud and die, too. Angie kept me from that brink. For Angie I got up, went to work, put one foot in front of the other because I had to, there was no choice. I was too far in the hole to realize that Craig was in a hole, too.