Thanks to my beta Loracj, and many thanks to those who've taken the time to review. They are appreciated very much. I am a review whore, heh.
Chapter three - no return policy
"He's not a criminal mastermind. He's a kid that has no one and nowhere to go."
"What is it about this kid?"
"He couldn't stay there, Sandy, they were going to kill him."
"Ryan's going to stay with us now."
"I never knew you to be an impulse shopper."
The yellow beam streaming in from the full moon outside did nothing to help Kirsten fall back to sleep. Of course there was her husband, peacefully slumbering beside her. Damn Sandy and his ability to sleep through any crisis. Damn him for not even seeing this as a crisis. She was hot and sticky, and her mind was crowded with visions of guns and doctors and police talking gravely to Luke's parents, so she gave up, roused herself and glanced at the neon lights glowing from the nightstand. She had been asleep for precisely two hours. Two hours since they had arrived home, Seth and Ryan in tow, both shaken and exhausted but physically intact at least.
How and why Ryan had ended up at the party with Seth was still a mystery. Sandy had insisted firmly that they would all discuss it in the morning. Kirsten had been so shaken by the whole race to the hospital after Ryan's phone call that she hadn't the energy to argue.
Kirsten slipped into the bathroom and switched on the light. She didn't even attempt to shut the door behind her quietly, her irritation with Sandy's continued sleeping threatening to erupt from inside her. A minor pang of guilt pricked at her as she heard him stir and turn over in the bed, but still she turned the tap on fully and allowed it to gush noisily into the sink. She splashed the cooling water across her cheeks and patted her face dry with a towel. Returning the bathroom to darkness, she padded across the bedroom and studied the thermostat on the wall. It was so damned hot in the room she was certain the air conditioning was either broken or not working to full capacity. Sandy rolled over again, muttering quietly.
"Honey.."
Kirsten swung around to face the bed.
"I'm sorry, Sandy, I didn't mean to wake you."
Except that she had meant to. Not consciously of course, but she did need to try and reconnect with her husband; to try and explain her anxiety, and to make him understand how she felt.
Sandy pulled himself up slowly and flipped on his nightstand lamp. He rubbed the palm of his hand wearily over his eyes then studied his wife. She stood, arms tightly folded across her midriff, staring out at the pool house.
"Can't sleep?"
She shook her head, the motion short and brittle.
"They're fine, both of them," he prompted. "We can't protect our kids from everything."
"Luke's not fine."
Sandy at least had the grace to nod in acknowledgement. Kirsten pressed on.
"Besides, Ryan's not our kid. Seth is our kid. Our son."
Her emphasis on Seth's name made Sandy wince.
"What are you saying?"
"I'm just saying it's our job to protect him."
"And?"
"And we're doing a lousy job now that Ryan's here."
Sandy didn't want to get into this now, he really didn't. Not now, in the middle of the night after the last evening's events, and certainly not when he had a heavy session in court the following morning.
"Hon, can we discuss this tomorrow? I'll get home early, we'll throw some tuna on the grill, send the boys to the movies, huh?"
Kirsten's icy response would have frozen a lesser person than Sandy Cohen to the spot.
"You want to send them out again. Together. After all that has happened this week? Sometimes, Sandy, I really don't understand what goes through your head."
Wide awake now, Sandy gave up all notion of a good night's sleep and propped himself up on his pillows.
"I think you're overreacting."
"Overreacting?"
The look on his wife's face finally shook Sandy to frustration.
"You think this is all Ryan's fault! The poor kid wasn't even there!"
"A boy was shot tonight, Sandy, a boy the same age as our son. A boy in his class. And shot by a kid Seth was introduced to by Ryan. How am I supposed to react? You may be able to brush it off and go to sleep without a worry, but I'm scared for our child."
Words were still forming on Sandy's lips as the door slammed behind his retreating wife. If she thought he was going to follow her and beg forgiveness for bringing this kid into their home, then she could think again. She had made this decision as much as he had and he wasn't going to be made to feel guilty for it. He flattened his pillows with his knuckles and slammed his head back down, tugging the covers back over his shoulders. He might not be able to sleep, but he'd do his damndest to pretend he was.
Moving shadows scattered weirdly deformed circles across the ceiling of the pool house, the reflections of the moon on the water of the infinity pool refracted through the glass. A breeze filtered through the open door and flapped the blinds idly.
Ryan noticed none of it. He lay on his bed, still fully clothed, smears of blood across the leg of his jeans and across his shirt. He pulled at his wrist cuff, tugging the leather, worn and soft, tight against the bone of his wrist, his fingers looped underneath, twisting it around and around until angry red lines appeared on his flesh. Seth liked to tease him, pester him about where he could get one for himself. Seth had decided a wrist cuff was the symbol of cool. For Ryan it was a symbol of home.
His mom, Trey, Theresa. Hanging out on the hot and dusty streets when school was out. Games of pool at the back of Trey's bar of choice. Making out on the backseat of Arturo's car when he wasn't around. Sometimes he was so homesick, he got a physical pain in his stomach, deep inside. The only way he could get rid of it was to run a really, really long way along the beach, when he had to focus so much on breathing and moving his legs one in front of the other that he couldn't think about anything else.
About his mom, wherever she was.
About Theresa, walking to school without him every day, wondering where the hell he'd gone.
About Trey, languishing in the penitentiary.
He picked up the shiny new cell phone Sandy had purchased for him shortly after they'd asked him to stay. It had almost all of the fifty dollar credit that Sandy had purchased. The only times he'd used it had been to respond to inane text messages from Seth and tonight's call from the hospital. Who would he call, after all?
His fingers ran over the keys as he debated. Theresa's number was as familiar to him as her freckled and tanned face. He'd called her that night for perhaps the thousandth time. Even now he couldn't understand why she hadn't answered. There was always someone at home at Theresa's place. If it wasn't Theresa's mom or Theresa herself, it could be one of her many aunts who all lived in the neighbourhood. There were always a few of them in the yard, sitting on folding chairs spouting Spanish back and forth between them. Arturo was often there, working on his car, and sometimes even Eddie waiting for Theresa to finish her after school job in the local Hispanic store.
The knot inside him got tighter as he thought of them all, their lives meandering along without him. Did Theresa miss him? Had she tried to find out what had happened to him? Did she still care? Had she ever?
He threw down the phone in irritation. Even if someone answered now, at two in the morning, they wouldn't be too happy. Besides, Theresa would most likely berate him for not calling her before now. What good would it do anyway? She couldn't help. It wasn't like he could go back to Chino and live with her.
He got up from the bed and pulled open the door of the pool house.
They met in the kitchen, each startled by the other's sudden appearance.
"Ryan, I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting you to be up…in here…so late."
Kirsten's voice was flustered. Unconsciously, she pulled her robe around her more tightly.
"I couldn't sleep," Ryan replied bluntly.
"Me neither," she said, half smiling. "I was going to make cocoa. Would you like some?"
"I guess…" Ryan answered warily.
It was a long time since he'd had cocoa. Cocoa was reserved for early evenings at those summer camps he'd been sent to as a little kid; the ones funded by child services for kids from deprived backgrounds who'd likely spend the summer on the streets getting into trouble if they didn't have the camp to go to. To be fair, they'd been fun, but he'd never let Trey know that. Trey had told him they'd be full of wusses and that he'd catch something horrible from the other kids if he got too close. Trey didn't have to go as he'd been considered old enough to fend for himself. Only now did Ryan realize that Trey would have loved to have been able to go. Three meals a day, an outdoor pool, endless games of baseball and soccer and a bed to sleep in that Ryan didn't have to worry about being woken from in the middle of the night by yelling and screaming and his mom stumbling drunk along the hallway. .
He sat on the stool and watched Kirsten as she busied herself with the saucepan and carton of milk, silence settling awkwardly between them. He fiddled again with his wrist cuff.
"I'm sorry," he said suddenly, catching her off guard as she stirred the powder into the steaming liquid.
"It's fine," she answered, trying to brush it off like it was no big deal that her son had been present at a shooting. The catch in her throat betrayed her and Ryan wished he'd kept quiet.
She placed a mug in front of him and changed the subject onto what she hoped would be safer ground.
"So how did your date go with Marissa? Or your evening with her, anyway," she added lamely, remembering that Ryan had insisted it wasn't an actual date.
Ryan considered. Visions of the evening flashed before him. Eating the cold mac and cheese as they talked about her parents, their feet cooling in the water, the tussle into the pool, the flirting. And there had been a lot of flirting. In some warped way, he owed Seth a debt of gratitude. Despite his resolution to keep things simple, he knew that if Seth hadn't interrupted them with his panicked phone call, he'd have kissed her. If Trey was here, he'd have laughed hysterically at his little brother and made coarse comments about keeping it in his pants. Ryan was well known in his neighborhood in Chino for having no ability to resist a hot girl. Trey had rescued him on more than one occasion from the clutches of an older jealous boyfriend. And there was no doubt about it, this girl was hot, really hot, and he could feel himself falling for her more each minute. It was probably just as well that he'd called her about Luke and that she'd come rushing to the hospital. With any luck, they'd get back together and Ryan wouldn't have a choice about whether or not to date her. But the thought upset him all the same.
"Ryan?"
Kirsten was still waiting for an answer, so he dragged himself back to the here and now.
"Sorry, um, yeah, it was nice…"
Kirsten raised her eyebrows in an amused query.
"Nice?"
Ryan blushed. "Well, we had a good time until…"
"Until?"
"Until Seth called," he finished, bowing his head apologetically.
"Oh," nodded Kirsten, "so that's how you ended up at the party. I thought maybe you'd taken Marissa."
Ryan shook his head quickly.
"Uh, no, Holly's house," he said by way of an explanation. He sipped at his cocoa, hoping he wouldn't have to elaborate more about what had gone down at the party.
Kirsten nodded, understanding.
"Well, Sandy said we should leave it all to the morning, so why don't you take that cocoa back to the pool house and try to get some sleep…"
She didn't mean it as an order, but Ryan nodded quickly and slipped off the stool. He had disappeared before she had even finished rinsing the saucepan.
In the morning, there was no sign of Kirsten. The lecture from Sandy was short and sweet. After he'd established the chronology of events, he told both boys in no uncertain terms that if either of them was ever in a situation like that again, then their first call must be to him or Kirsten and NOT to each other. Seth and Ryan listened soberly and nodded, Seth even managing to stay quiet through his father's whole speech.
After he'd dispatched them both to their respective rooms, Sandy leaned against the counter top and tugged at his tie anxiously. He hoped they'd both listened and understood. He hoped they would both manage to get through the summer without any more incidents. If they couldn't, Sandy wasn't sure that Ryan would still be with them come September.
Back in his room, Seth busied himself making a "Days of Summer" mix cd.
Back in the pool house, Ryan made another resolution.
tbc