Jubilee's Journey (Wyattsville #2)(66)

“I don’t think—”

“Jubilee’s a sweet child; I think you’d love her.”

Anita shook her head sadly. She had a faraway look in her eyes, one that Mahoney found impossible to read. They spoke for more than an hour, but she didn’t budge an inch.

“If I wanted kids, I would have had them years ago,” she said. “It’s too late to start now.”

Before he left, Mahoney suggested Anita sleep on the idea.

“With something this important, you don’t want to make a decision you’ll regret forever,” he said.

She rose from the table and dumped the remainder of her coffee down the drain. “I’ll think about it, but I seriously doubt I’ll change my mind.”

As Mahoney left the building he reached into his pocket and pulled out the last of his antacid chews. He also doubted Anita would change her mind.





Ethan’s Gift



When Mahoney left Anita’s apartment he couldn’t stop wondering what angry words had torn the two sisters apart. Anita’s bitterness was so thick you could almost see it seeping from her skin. Surely, he thought, there was some way to reach inside and find the heart that had long ago stopped caring. Maybe if Anita met Jubilee—saw the child, heard the lilt of her laugh, and felt the touch of a tiny hand in hers. Even as he considered the possibilities, a nagging voice in the back of his mind kept asking, Is that what’s best for Jubilee?

Mahoney knew he was far too involved in this case. It was no longer a situation where he was trying to locate a missing aunt. He had segued into trying to piece together broken lives. He needed to stop, take a breath, and think things through.

He’d planned to visit Olivia and tell her of his conversation with Anita, but once he did that—once it was an established fact that Jubilee’s aunt was unwilling to lay claim to her—Jubilee would be put into the system. It was what it was. Through no fault of those who ran it, the child welfare system was without a heart. When a child was freefalling through life the system was the safety net, a paper-thin layer of protection that prevented them from splatting against a concrete bottom. It provided a home, food to eat, and a place to sleep. Period. Once in a while a kid got lucky and ended up with a family who cared. But that wasn’t an everyday occurrence; it happened once in a while. A very long while.

Mahoney didn’t need to close his eyes to see Jubilee’s face. It was right there. For a fleeting moment she was visible in the rearview mirror. He thought back to the image of a bewildered Paul stretching his arm to curl his sister inside. She was not an unwanted child; she was loved.

In that instant Mahoney knew he was not ready to give up. Right now the situation seemed impossible, but he would find a way. He had to. At the end of the block, he made a U-turn and headed for the ferry.

Tomorrow he might have to be the bearer of such bad news, but tonight he would simply be a father. He would spend time with his own children and hold them to his heart with a prayer of thanksgiving.

Almost a full two hours before he normally arrived home, Jack Mahoney walked through the front door of his house and called out, “Honey, I’m home.”

There was no answer.

“Christine?”

Still no answer.

He walked through the house, a house that was usually filled with noise and laughter—so much noise, in fact, that he often wished for just such a silence. But today, on a day when he was hungry to hear the laughter, to be smack in the middle of all the noise, there was nothing.

He snapped on the television and dropped down on the sofa. Images moved across the screen and spoke words, but what those words were he couldn’t say. Jack Mahoney’s thoughts were elsewhere. He looked at the clock. Five-forty. He would have thought Christine would be starting dinner by now. Peeling vegetables, setting the table, fussing about the kitchen, doing whatever it was she did to make the nightly dinner seem such a momentous event.

He stood, walked into the backyard, and looked around. There were no kids anywhere. Not next door, not two houses over. Even the troublesome twins who lived cattycorner were missing.

Mahoney shook his head. How sad, he thought. All these nice yards and no kids playing in them. He returned to his spot in front of the flickering television, then sat and watched the minutes tick by.

It was five minutes before seven when Christine and the kids burst through the door in an explosion of laughter. She looked over at Jack. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“But you never come home this early.”

“I’ve been home for over an hour-and-a-half.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Christine said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to—”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” he answered and left it at that. There was no reason to start explaining something that was almost unexplainable anyway.

Jack followed Christine into the kitchen and listened as she and all three kids spoke at the same time. “It was so much fun,” Jack Junior said. “I got to ride on the Ferris wheel.”

“I wasn’t tall enough,” Chrissie pouted. “I had to go on baby rides.”

“Oh, I wish you had been with us,” Christine said. “The whole neighborhood was there, even the twins.”

Only after several minutes of listening to the fun they’d had at the Saint Vincent’s festival did Jack remember Christine mentioning it weeks earlier. At the time it was something he was too busy to care about, but today he found himself wishing he’d been there.