Esme
I suppose it seems silly for a woman to say this, but all I ever wanted was to be a mother. A modern woman should think of having a career first, then a husband once she's established, then maybe having a child down the line. If there's no child, that's fine, too. We're no longer human incubators, but people who are just as deserving of careers as men.
Of course, a woman deserves all the opportunities in the world, and I wasn't going to deny that, but none of that was for me. I wanted exactly what my grandparents had: a husband and a house filled with babies. A simple dream, so small that I didn't think there was any reason to believe it wouldn't come true.
But fate often has other plans. I found Carlisle easily enough, and he loved the idea of me being a stay-at-home mother to our children. I was pregnant within just a few months of the wedding, with the son we had both secretly wanted. Suddenly all I could think about were baby names. Michael, Jacob, Paul, Seth, Benjamin . . . the names spun in my mind until I was nearly delirious with happiness. Carlisle and I couldn't agree on the name, only that we wanted a nice, normal one, unlike our own. Our names had been terribly old-fashioned when we were born, and were even more so now.
Even then, I knew something was wrong. Oh, the tests came back fine, and every ultrasound showed a strong and wiggly fetus, but a woman knows when it isn't right. I loved my son, but I could never quite get used to the idea that he would one day be separate from me, a person in his own right. I didn't think about his first smile, or his first steps, or how he would feel in my arms. I didn't imagine him saying his first words or think about whom he would resemble more. I was utterly incapable of thinking of him other than as an image on a screen.
My water broke at 1:30 in the morning, and I remember greeting it not with joy, but with fear. How could I protect my child if he was no longer a part of me? While the other women on the floor screamed for the pain to end and the baby to arrive, I did everything in my power to keep my child within my body. Birth cannot be denied, though, and Samuel Edgar entered the world at 10:42 that morning. The name Samuel was a last-minute choice, something we hadn't previously considered, but which felt right when I first saw him.
I held my child for less than four hours. Long enough to nurse him once, and take a million pictures that we would never be able to bring ourselves to develop. That evening, I noticed blood in his diaper. By midnight, he was hemorrhaging out all of his orifices, the bleeding rapid and uncontrolled.
Doctors rushed him to the NICU, where he underwent transfusion after transfusion, but nothing helped. By three a.m. of his second night on earth, Sammy was dead, victim of a disorder that had never been determined. We had donated his body to science, in the hopes that some other child could be saved through what was learned from its study. That, and the fact that neither one of us could bear the thought of seeing such a tiny casket.
There had been no evidence that Sammy's problem was genetic, certainly nothing on either side of the family, either, but I wasn't going to take that chance. I knew that Carlisle was more than willing to try again, but I had my tubes tied as soon as it was medically possible. There were a million ways to fulfill my dream of being a mother, and having a biological child was only one of them.
So, like hundreds of thousands of couples before us, we put in our names to adopt a child. Not just any child, though: a healthy, white newborn. The same thing ninety-five percent of those other couples were asking for. And, like the rest of those couples, we found out it could be years before we got our baby, if we got one at all. Years of empty arms and longing for what might have been.
It was only by chance that a social worker mentioned the possibility of becoming foster parents. We wouldn't get to keep them, but our house would finally have the children we had always craved. She assured us that fostering wouldn't hurt our chances of adopting when the time came. It all sounded so very simple. After all, I had more than enough love to take in dozens of children, children who just needed love and time in order to heal.
I had to smile at the naïve girl I had been. I had been raised in upper-middle-class privilege, insulated and surrounded by people just like me. I had never known anyone who had been more than spanked or grounded. Like most foster parents, Carlisle and I had no idea of what we were getting into.
How do you explain a child who is physically ten years old, has more sexual experience than the average thirty-year-old, and is emotionally at the age of a two-year-old? Welcome to the world of traumatized children. Suddenly, I was the one everyone was staring at in the grocery store, while my child writhed around on the floor and made noises that didn't even sound human.
The twelve-week training course we were given did very little to prepare us for the reality of children who hated us, and who would do just about anything to return to the homes where so much harm had come to them in the first place. By the time we had been fostering for six months, I had dealt with kids who hurt themselves, lied, stole, manipulated us and everyone around us, set fires, tried to kill the dog, deliberately wet the bed or peed on walls, and a million other behaviors so bizarre that I had never even considered someone would do it.
It certainly wasn't the beautiful family I had imagined, but I wasn't about to give up, either. Carlisle and I learned to think smarter and always stick together. There was a point where we had alarms on bedroom doors to keep one of our kids from trying to sexually molest his foster siblings, a lock on the fridge to keep another one from gorging at night until she threw up, and trying to monitor a pair of seven-year-old twins who had to be watched constantly to keep them from walking (or running, as the case often was) straight into danger.
That's not to say that things were always bad. There was something wonderful about changing the life of a child, teaching them that not all adults would hurt them. To see dull-eyed, mute babies smile for the first time, to watch them learn to snuggle against your body and reach for you rather than cringe away. The older kids presented a greater range of problems and higher emotional walls, but those walls could be broken down brick by brick. Sometimes it took a while, but I saw improvement in almost every child we had.
But they weren't mine. Sometimes I kept them for a few days or weeks, sometimes months. We had Marcus for more than a year, though he was our longest foster. Eventually, though, they all went on. Some to other foster homes, some to adoptive placements, a few to group homes or other settings that provided more supervision and help than we could provide. The luckiest ones back to the homes they desperately missed, to parents who had hopefully sorted out their lives and were now able to care for their kids. I missed them dearly, but I knew that letting them go was part of what I had signed up for.
Then we got the call we had been waiting for. The waiting child wasn't an infant, but a three-year-old boy who had lost both parents within days of each other. We had been warned that the boy was very ill himself, and might not survive, but he pulled through in the end. Because he was orphaned, he was legally free to be adopted immediately, and the papers were signed within a few months. By Christmas, Edward Anthony Masen had become Edward Anthony Masen Cullen.
Edward (and even at age three, it was never Ed or Eddie) was exactly what we had been waiting for. Cute, giving, and immensely talented, he made the wait worth it. There was no way we could have ever loved a biological child, even Sammy, more than we loved him.
As much as we did, though, we wanted more. I had always imagined a house full of kids, and even if it seemed that way with foster children some days, I wanted Edward to have a permanent sibling, preferably a girl this time. We tried to get permission to adopt three different foster kids, but it fell through every time. Leah was placed with her grandparents, Tanya reunited with her birth parents, and Angela was adopted by the same people who had her younger half-brothers. It seemed that we would never get our daughter, no matter how hard we tried.
Then, in an odd twist of fate, Carlisle was called to a small institution to evaluate a young patient for surgery. While there, he learned that the place served children up to age sixteen, and that for the most part, the kids had been surrendered to the state by their frustrated or uncaring parents. Their problems ranged from true mental illness, to anxiety disorders, to more severe issues that made them dangerous to society as a whole.
The staff was surprised by his asking if any of the children could be placed with adoptive parents. For the most part, they could, but there was little interest in children other than babies, and almost none in children who had been institutionalized. Still, they gamely supplied him with the files of the kids whom they felt had the best chance of making it in the real world.
Reading those reports taught me more about what red flags to look for than a thousand classes could have. We decided from the start that we would not take a sexually aggressive child, or one who stood a chance of hurting Edward. Other than that, we felt capable of handling just about anything.
The child that most caught our eye was a little seven-year-old girl. Mary Alice, but she insisted on just Alice. She had been at the hospital for just over a year, and in foster care for two years before that. Ever cheerful and always in motion, Alice was a favorite of the staff, admired for her gentle and giving ways. Her picture was typical, but even the too-big clothes and institutional haircut couldn't disguise the girl's beauty. Both Carlisle and I returned to her file over and over, supposedly reading the doctors' notes, but mostly just staring at her. She was the one, despite her problems.
What had been so difficult to even start with the other girls happened like a dream with Alice. She was understandably shy at first, but when we kept coming back, she warmed to us eventually. Soon she was sitting at the front window all morning long on days we were supposed to come visit, wanting to be with us at all times.
I contacted her birth parents, who gave their blessing to us adopting her. Her mother cried when we met, begging me to do more for her little girl than she had been able to. That was the pity of a lot of the kids who ended up in foster care or hospitals. Someone out there loved them. They might not know how to care for them, but they did love them deeply.
Alice came home two weeks after her eighth birthday. Edward, too, was eight, and we considered it a sign that things would work out well. And they did. That's not to say that parenting Alice couldn't be a challenge, especially considering that she was still a little nervous around Carlisle, but her bubbly personality more than made up for any issues she might have had.
I had my boy and my girl, and that should have been enough. Only it wasn't, and I kept searching the faces of the children who came in and out of our home, looking for . . . something. Something that would draw me to the child, the same way I had been drawn to Edward and Alice.
When we finally found Rosalie, she wasn't exactly what we expected. After all, how many kids can say they almost got their adoptive father arrested within a few hours of arriving at the house? That screaming fit was the first of many, a dark warning about life with a child who was not only abused, but about to hit puberty. Worst of all, she and Edward despised each other from nearly day one. Carlisle and I went back and forth about whether or not to proceed with the adoption or let her find a better placement. She had been placed with us as a foster only, and we had never broached the subject with her, so there would be no disappointment if it didn't work out.
Still, I saw a loneliness in her eyes that mirrored what I had seen in my own. Whether she knew it or not, she was longing for a family of her own, to have some stability in an otherwise chaotic life. I knew then that we couldn't send her back. We still might not be able to adopt her, but we vowed to hang on to her until a better adoptive placement was found. Parental rights had been terminated two years before, so there was no hope of her birth parents coming back to claim her.
It was right about this time that I discovered the joys of the internet. There were message boards and chat rooms devoted to adoption and fostering and I found myself drawn into their world. Suddenly, I knew other people who had children with the same difficulties mine did. Like veterans, we traded stories about behaviors and meltdowns, understanding instantly what the others were going through. With their help, I was able to reach Alice in new ways, and her memory loss and blanking out became much less frequent.
I had been with my group for several months before I summoned up the courage to bring up Rosalie's situation. They were familiar with all three of my kids by now, and everyone had an opinion. Some were against it because she was older than both Alice and Edward. Don't disrupt birth order, they warned, it tends to lead to trouble. Edward was the first child, and the oldest by a few months, and he should be allowed to stay that way. No point in creating friction between him and Rosalie.
Others said to go ahead and make the jump. Her chances of adoption by another family were extremely slim, and, since we were willing to keep her until another placement was found anyway, we might as well make it official.
The best advice I got, and I used it over and over, was to take a step back and look at the situation with an objective eye. Look at Rosalie and her behaviors. If they never got any better, no matter what we tried, could I still live with her, day in and day out?
It was a tough question to answer. Rosalie lied constantly, whether it was in her best interest or not. They weren't the usual lies, ones that attempted to get her out of trouble. No, she would lie about what she had for breakfast, claiming it as pancakes when it had really been oatmeal. Things that just made no sense at all. I tried punishing her for lying, rewarding her for telling the truth, and just ignoring the behavior entirely, but nothing seemed to make a dent.
She was also still having tantrums, though they seemed to be lessening as time went on. It was those little improvements that made me feel like I was reaching her, and that I couldn't give up.
But the worst part was her relationship with the rest of the family. Or, more accurately, her lack of a relationship with us. She acted as if she was little more than a tenant to us. We provided her with food, clothing, and a place to sleep, and in return, she acted like a dutiful daughter might. On the surface, at least. Underneath, she was simmering with resentment at the intrusion we had created in her life. I was at a loss for what to do to help her. The old adage was being proven true: little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.
Again the internet saved me. My new friends online encouraged me to look into attachment disorders, something I had never even heard of. The issue was that Rosalie's ability to trust us, and thus bond to us as a daughter, had been severely damaged, if not destroyed. The problem wasn't that she wouldn't bond to us, it was that she couldn't. They encouraged me to run, not walk, to the nearest attachment therapist.
As I went through book after book on attachment and bonding, I realized that every symptom described Rose perfectly. My sweet girl was far more damaged than I had realized. Social Services refused to pay for attachment therapy, since she was already being seen by a regular therapist. Carlisle and I ended up paying for nearly everything ourselves.
But it was worth it. It took months to see any change at all, but slowly she began to trust us, then make the first efforts at bonding. That's not to say it was easy. For a period she actually seemed to get worse, as the reality that she might have to let someone in sank in for her. For weeks, there wasn't a polite word in the house, nor one spoken at anything resembling a normal volume.
We were incredibly lucky. Over the years, I had seen parent after parent come to our boards with children just like Rose or worse. Some of them healed completely, as she had. Some healed partially, and bolted the second they hit eighteen and could no longer be legally kept back. The worst cases ended up in juvenile hall or residential treatment centers until their eighteenth birthdays. Then they went to the streets, or on to prison. Before Rose, I would have never considered that children so young could be so damaged, but it was true. What were we doing to our babies?
After what we had gone through with Rosie, we figured she would be our last formal adoption. We had three permanent children, and sometimes six or more foster kids. Carlisle was assuming more and more responsibility at the hospital, and it seemed that we had enough on our plates.
Then we got an urgent call from the head of Social Services. Sue Clearwater, one of the most dedicated foster mothers I had ever met, had been killed in an auto accident, and there were five children in urgent need of placements. We agreed to take the oldest boy, Emmett, and found ourselves all waiting up at midnight for our newest arrival.
At age fourteen, Emmett was already six feet tall and close to two hundred pounds. Edward actually backed up and stepped behind me when his giant of a foster brother stepped out of the car. Alice seemed less ill at ease, and quickly ran up to greet him with a hug. He hugged her back, allowing her to take his smallest bag for him.
When he walked towards us, I could easily see that he was really still a child. His gait was lumbering and uncertain, the walk of someone who isn't used to his huge new body. He drew up in front of us and mumbled his way through the obviously well-coached speech. "Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate you being willing to take me so late at night." His dark eyes never left the ground.
From that small beginning, I would have never believed that he would turn out to have the personality he did. Within two days, he had become the joker of the family, relentless in his pursuit of getting a laugh. Alice, who was generally shy around men she didn't know, climbed straight onto his shoulders, enjoying the world through her new, taller vantage point. For the first time since Rose had joined us, our house was filled with laughter again.
Then there was Rosalie herself. From the second their eyes met, there was a connection between them, an intangible tie that had yet to be broken. She was just fascinated by his personality, and his inability to hold onto his fear or pain. Within three days, she had accepted him in a way she had never accepted Edward, or even Carlisle. Within a week, I knew he was never leaving.
Much to our surprise, Emmett's adoption was the hardest of the four. Whenever possible, Social Services will try to place a child with family members or siblings. The sheer size of the McCarty family made finding a home willing to take all of them impossible, but they wanted him to be with at least one other member of his family. Carlisle and I discussed it, but trying to adopt even two at once seemed like too high of a hurdle to jump. Rosalie still needed constant attention at times, and it was an uphill battle to get Emmett caught up in school.
We didn't give up, though, and the adoption finally went through. We had to make promises to let Emmett keep in touch with his siblings, something we would have done anyway, but in the end, he was ours. That had definitely been the end of us adopting. We still fostered, but I stopped looking into the face of each child placed with us, wondering if they would be the next one to stay.
Gradually, we settled into a routine. Edward and Rose still fought, but without the viciousness that marked their first few weeks together. Alice was delighted to have a big (and I mean big) brother in addition to Edward, whom she referred to as her "heart twin." Two boys, two girls: the large family I had always dreamed of. It seemed that the bad times were behind us.
Then I got sick. At first, my aches could be explained away as the result of playing too rough with the kids, or working too hard in the garden. I was exhausted all the time, but I was raising an infant and three toddlers, in addition to the four-pack that we had adopted, so everything was easy to ignore.
Eventually, though, it got to the point where I could barely stay awake, no matter what I tried. When I fell asleep during a play that Alice was in, I knew I had to see the doctor. Actually, I had known for quite a while, but I was afraid to admit it. They had never been able to completely rule out a genetic component Samuel's disorder, and I had a lingering fear that whatever had taken his life would eventually take mine. Even though it was probably something as simple as mild anemia, I couldn't force myself to get checked.
Only it wasn't just anemia. My general doctor had me hospitalized, where I underwent dozens of blood tests, MRI's, and three spinal taps. No one would say it out loud, but I could see it reflected in everyone's eyes. Cancer. I was going to leave my children motherless for the second time in their lives.
When I finally got the MS diagnosis, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I wasn't going to die, but how was I ever going to live? Would I be using canes? In a wheelchair? Bedridden? There was no way to know for sure.
We told the kids as soon as I could do so without starting to cry. It was a good thing, too, because Alice cried enough for all of the kids. Her emotions were always close to the surface, and she threw herself into my lap in anguish.
The rest of the kids sat in a stunned silence while she sobbed. For once, even Emmett had nothing to say, his shoulders hunching in as he stared at us. I would have given anything to know what was going through his head at that moment.
Rosalie sat with her mouth opening and closing a few times as she tried to figure out what to say. Abruptly she stood and stormed out of the room, slamming several doors behind her. After putting so much work into our relationship, I knew that this was going to set us back terribly.
Edward came to sit close, cuddling up at my side. He put an arm around me and pressed his head to my shoulder. Even with Alice still making noise, I could feel him trembling slightly. I shifted over to kiss him on the cheek. "It'll be all right, baby, I promise."
His green eyes told me that he didn't believe me, but he did his best to mask it. "I know."
Emmett eventually vanished, muttering excuses about finding Rose. I wanted to keep him with me, but my lap was full, and Rosalie needed him, too. I nodded at Carlisle, and he went to go get both of them.
That wasn't the worst part, though. Two weeks after my diagnosis, we got a letter informing us that, due to my health, we were being shut down as a foster home. All four children would be put in alternate homes by the weekend.
We raged and complained, of course, pointing out that nothing had really changed with my diagnosis, except we had a name for the symptoms that had been plaguing me for months. I was just as capable of caring for the children now as I had been before.
It was no use. Friday afternoon, I packed my little one's bags and sent them away, hoping that their new homes would love them as much as I had. The only thing I had left to hold on to was my own kids. Their adoptions were legally binding, and no one could take them from us.
It felt strange that, after more than a decade, we only had the four children, and they were all we would ever have. Though I had been sure we weren't going to adopt anyone else, it still rankled that the decision had been taken out of our hands.
But now we had Jasper. Jasper! To my horror, I realized I was late for our daily meeting. He always expected me at ten, and now it was eight minutes past. I hurried out of the bedroom, praying that Jasper was still on the stairs.
Sure enough, there he sat, his expression turned inward and forlorn. I sat two steps above him. "Sorry, I lost track of time."
"S'okay." He turned his body to the side and laid his head in my lap. "I thought you forgot me." The words were soft and fearful.
"Never." This was our time together, a routine we had forged for when the rest of them were at school. We would sit on the steps for however long Jasper liked, his head in my lap. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we didn't; it was his choice. Always his choice.
The rules of our encounters were pretty simple. Jasper didn't want to be pushed in any way, didn't want his face touched, and didn't want to be kissed. Of course, being Jasper, he didn't actually tell me any of this, but I knew him well enough by now to know when he was clamming up, and how to figure out which one of my behaviors had upset him.
"It's pretty out this morning." Jasper didn't pick his head up when he spoke. The words themselves meant nothing, but they did signal to me that today was going to be a day when we talked.
"It is. You might even be able to do without a jacket if it stays sunny." I ran my fingers in circles on his neck and shoulders. There was some name for that sort of massage, something I had forgotten almost as soon as I heard it, but I had used it on most of the kids at one point or another.
After we had adopted Alice, we had run the gamut of doctors, from MD's to alternative practitioners, and everything in between. One of them had suggested massage as a way to bond us and help calm her. The human body was designed to enjoy being touched, but most of my kids had had such negative experiences with it that they learned to flinch away from even the gentlest hands.
This specific touch was supposed to help calm and realign someone's nerves. I don't know how much of that I believed, but Jasper tolerated it well. Carlisle had tried it on me a few times, and I had to admit that it felt pretty good. The trick was to run your fingers in small circles down the lines of his neck and arms, moving the tension down and out of the body. It sounded odd, but I couldn't deny the results.
After his beating and head injury, Jasper had been evaluated over and over by dozens of specialists, each trying to figure out what parts of his body and brain had been affected. As part of the routine testing, his reactions to pain had been checked using minor electric shocks, to see if he had nerve damage or not. The results had been rather confusing.
According to the test, Jasper was almost completely insensitive to pain. He hadn't seemed particularly upset by the test, even when it was explained to him that it was going to hurt, and had only signaled pain when the shocks were at their highest level. On the other hand, he absolutely couldn't stand to be lightly touched. A feather or soft cloth would cause him to cringe away, his body tense.
The following report had been filled with medical terms so obscure that even Carlisle hadn't understood them. What it basically boiled down to was that Jasper's nervous system was both over- and under-stimulated. He was used to pain, to the point where it didn't affect him much anymore. He was also used to normal touches, probably from his foster siblings. But it had been so long since he had been touched lightly and gently that his body actually perceived it as terrible pain.
Naturally, no one bothered to give Carlisle and me a copy of the report until Jasper had already been in our home for a week and a half. No wonder he shied away from either one of us trying to touch him: we were hurting him and he was too afraid to tell us so.
It was easy to try massage on a small child, much more difficult on a teenager. Which was why I was so pleased with our new routine on the stairs. Apparently he found me much less threatening from that position. Or something. I never really knew what was going through his head, only that something always was.
For the first two days, I had just let him run the show, allowing him the choice of when to get up and barely touching him. On the third day, I had asked if it was all right to rub his back, and was pleased when he nodded uncertainly. The first couple times he had tensed instead of relaxing, but now he seemed to expect it, and was always waiting eagerly right at ten.
Jasper sighed contentedly, and closed his eyes. For a minute, I actually thought he had fallen asleep. I knew he was having trouble with that again, undoubtedly as a result of his upcoming birthday and legal emancipation. He wasn't going to sleep until two or three in the morning, too busy pacing the room like a caged tiger. Even Emmett had complained about it, which meant it was bad.
From that point on, Jasper had confined his pacing to the hallway, slinking into Emmett's room only when he was on the brink of collapse. It wasn't healthy at all, but there wasn't much we could do. Jasper needed to get used to taking care of himself, even if he was proving to not be very good at it.
"So, aren't you going to ask?" Apparently he wasn't asleep after all.
"What is it I'm supposed to be asking?" I knew, of course, but I wanted to hear him say it.
"If I'm going to stay or not. Everyone else asked, but you haven't yet." His voice was utterly unreadable, but he turned his head to the side so I could rub the back of his neck.
I complied with his unspoken request, buying myself a minute to think. I wasn't sure what the correct answer to his question was. Did he want me to ask because he wanted me to reaffirm that I wanted him and cared what happened to him? Or was he just irritated that everyone kept asking the same question, when he had no real answer to it? Would asking do more harm than good?
I brushed the hair out of his eyes. "Are you going to stay?"
One foggy eye flickered open. "Do you want me to?"
"Very much." Please, God, let him believe me. When I ran my fingers through his hair like this, I could feel the thickly welted scar the surgery had left on the left side of his head. It wasn't visible, covered by his hair as it was, but it was easy to feel. "I would love for you to stay."
"Maybe I will, then." He straightened up, his blue-grey eyes staring into mine. "Maybe not, though."
Instinct told me not to push the issue. He was trying to get a rise out of me, and I wasn't going to play into his control games. "I hope you do."
He didn't have much to say to that, and closed his eyes again. I leaned back and thought, not for the first time, about how much it was going to hurt if he vanished on me. Jasper was a handful on a good day, but I couldn't help but love him.
Suddenly another thought occurred to me, one that made me snort with laughter. Carlisle and I had had a plan for naming our kids. No old-fashioned names. Just about anything else would work, but definitely something either classic or modern. So who did we adopt? An Edward, an Alice, a Rosalie, and an Emmett. Some of the most old-fashioned names I had ever heard. Now we had a Jasper, who just added to our odd name group. I didn't think I had ever even met another Jasper.
"What's so funny?" Jasper sat up, his greater height putting us nearly at eye level.
"Oh, Carlisle and me. We thought that when we had kids, we were going to give them all normal names. We didn't like our own because they sounded so . . . old. Now we have five kids, and none of you guys have a name any less old-sounding than ours." As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I could have kicked myself. Jasper's name was all he had, and even if I hadn't intended it that way, my words might have sounded a little insulting.
If was insulted, he didn't act like it. "Jasper was my grandfather's name. On my mom's side, I mean. Franklin was my grandfather on my dad's side, and it was my dad's middle name, too."
It always surprised me when he shared anything about his previous life with me. Most of the time you would just assume that aliens had dropped him on our doorstep, already seventeen and fully formed.
"Is that why you picked Sam for the baby?" He was tentative now, lost in unfamiliar territory.
"We called him Sammy, and yes. Samuel is classic, not too trendy, but not out of date either." I was surprised that he would bring this up at all. Every one of our kids knew the story, of course, but since Sammy had come long before any of them joined the family, they didn't feel connected to him at all.
"It's a nice name. Not too popular, but still easy for people to remember." He scooted up the two steps so we were side by side. "I'm sorry about your baby."
The sweet awkwardness of his words nearly brought tears to my eyes. "Yes, I'll always miss him. But I understand now why it had to happen. If I hadn't lost Sammy, I wouldn't have adopted or fostered any children. They would have just been mine biologically. Then I wouldn't have this family, the one I was meant to have."
For a second, we sat there, both of us deep in thought. Finally Jasper muttered, "Yeah, I guess bad stuff happens for a reason sometimes."
There was no good way to reply to that, not without knowing what bad thing he was referring to, so I said nothing. If we wanted to talk bad things, he could write a mile-long list, starting with his father's death and ending with his latest PTSD diagnosis. In lieu of making a foolish comment, I patted his knee affectionately.
He stood up, apparently uncomfortable with the personal direction our conversation had taken. It was the signal that our time together was over. That was fine. The first time I had come across him sitting on the steps, he had only put his head in my lap for a few seconds, before abruptly jumping up and running back to his room.
I loved this time we had together, even if it only lasted a few minutes each time. Except, of course, for the one time he fell asleep on me, and we ended up sitting like that for over an hour before he startled back awake. He didn't run this time, though, just looked at me with a strange smile touching the corners of his mouth. "You're a good . . . lady."
My heart hammered against my ribs. For the briefest of seconds, I had been sure he was going to say 'mom.' From the surprised look on his face, I think he thought he was going to say it also.
I smiled at him to ease the embarrassment of the moment. "Thank you, Jasper, that's kind of you to say."
Three . . . two . . . one, that goofy smile of his appeared like magic. Over the past few weeks, he had gone from almost never smiling to smiling every time someone smiled at him. He still had a long way to go, but I couldn't be more pleased with his progress. His head cocked, and he continued to look into my eyes. "I learned a new song; want to hear?"
"Of course." I had been surprised with Edward for being so thoughtful in getting that guitar for Jasper, but not nearly as surprised as I had been when I found out how well he could play it. He knew an amazing variety of songs, and could pick up a new one in a matter of a few days. He didn't quite have Edward's talent, but talent like Edward's is a one-in-a-billion chance.
"Okay, I'll go get the guitar." He bounded up the stairs, obviously pleased because I was. Jasper was still a little unsure in the house, but he loved making people happy.
I sat down in the living room, waiting for my impromptu concert. I had things to do today, but how could any of them be as important as what Jasper was doing, right now?
When he came back downstairs, I noticed again how normal his gait was. His limp seemed to come and go these days, worsening when his mental state did and nearly disappearing when he was feeling good. It was one of those things that I wasn't sure if I should bring up to him. He was so self-conscious already that it seemed sort of mean to draw any attention to his physical issues.
"Okay, here we go."
As soon as he started to play, I recognized the tune, an old country melody. Not just any melody, though, the song that had played at my wedding. Each chord brought back a different memory of that night. The hopes, the dreams, all the new beginnings that I thought I would have.
I sat down next to him, totally absorbed by what he was doing. "Can you sing it?"
He nodded without looking up. "Sure."
Trust Jasper to be difficult without even trying. "Will you?"
Another nod and he started over. Two bars, then three, and he drew in a soft breath before starting. "Natalie Wood gave her heart to James Dean. High school rebel and the teenage queen . . ."
He was very good. There was a whispery quality to his voice, but the notes were clear and true. Jasper didn't rush or fumble for words, just sang softly. He seemed to be as lost in his thoughts as I was in mine.
"I want to be loved like that. I want to be loved like that. A promise, you can't take back. If you're gonna love me, I want to be loved like that."