Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(70)

Foster thought for a moment. There was so much she could say, so much she didn’t want to. She settled on the latter, giving the standard response. “I’m good. We’ll find him.” She could see the worry settle on Mike’s face, but she looked past it.

“I have no doubt,” he said. “Hey, when you come back through, I’ll introduce you to those half-soused parents up front.” He leaned in. “In fact, there’s a single dad in there who . . .”

She chuckled, then punched him lightly on the arm. “Get away from me.”

He gave her a playful wink. “Glynnie would have.”

“I know.”

As she stepped off the patio onto the grass, she could hear him still laughing as she approached the swing.

“Hey, Toddie.”

The boy looked up, his long face brightening. “Aunt Harri. You came.”

She sat down on the other swing. “Sure I did. You’re one of my favorite people. And ten’s a big birthday. Double digits.” She looked over at the boys running in the yard. “Why aren’t you over there?”

“I was. It was stupid, so I stopped.”

The two swung at the same lazy pace for a while, watching the boys play and squeal and gleefully run amok. She wouldn’t push him.

“I don’t see Jamie. Where is he?”

“In his room. He’s always in his room now. Because he’s thirteen . . . and weird.”

She took comfort in the fact that the family was getting help. Mike was doing the right thing. “I’ll stop and say hello before I leave. So how have you been doing? How’s school?”

He stopped swinging, twisted around to face her, the chains crisscrossing. “I don’t want to talk about school.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know why she did it?”

Foster felt the air leave her lungs, rapidly, all in a rush. The earnest ten-year-old’s eyes stared at her without blinking, nailing her to the spot. He didn’t have to say who “she” was or what “it” was. “She” and “it” would be all they’d ever have to say to have everyone affected understand. But what did you say to a kid about the loss of a mother who’d taken her own life and left him behind?

Maybe this wasn’t her place. In fact, she was sure it wasn’t. She glanced over at the back door, hoping Mike was close by and she could signal him over, but he wasn’t there. “The question” was hers to grapple with here on the swings with Glynnis’s boy.

“Sometimes you don’t know why,” she said. “Sometimes you find out too late that people are suffering in some way.” Her eyes held his, those light-brown eyes filled with hurt and uncertainty. “Sometimes they can’t talk about it, so there’s nothing you can do to help them.”

“So I’ll never know why?”

“You might not. That’s the hard part.”

“You didn’t know?”

She tried taking a breath, but there was nothing there. She shook her head.

Todd twisted back. “Maybe it was me and Jamie? We fight a lot over stupid stuff. Like when he swiped my mitt and then hid it in the basement behind the washer. Maybe if we didn’t do stuff like that, she—”

Foster reached over and stopped him from swinging, turning him around to face her. “Listen to me. Toddie? Listen. Nothing. Nothing you did or said caused your mother pain, you hear me? She loved you both so much, every hair on your heads, inside and out. That’s the truth. What happened was not your fault. It was just a tragedy, a very sad thing that happened.”

“Like with Reggie,” he said.

For a moment, the mention of her son’s name stunned her. “Yes. Life is hard sometimes, Toddie; it just is. Terrible things happen, but good things happen too. All we can do sometimes is hold on for the good things and reach out to the people who love us.”

“Like you?”

She held his sharp chin gently between thumb and index finger. “Like me and your dad, Jamie, your grandmother, your friends. All of us are here for you. Always. Your mom would want you to be so, so happy, especially today. She’d want you to be okay. So will you try? Just a little?” She got a tentative nod. She smiled. “I’ll try too. But if you ever need to talk, if it all gets too big, you can always call me. Promise you will?”

“I will. Your number’s in my phone.”

“Good.” She tousled his hair. They went back to swinging in silence. The boys on the grass had given up on the football and were just rolling around on the ground.

“What if there aren’t any good things?” Todd asked.

“There are,” she said. “There’ll be lots of good things.”

The chains on the swings squeaked as they swung back and forth. There was the smell of the grass, the cleanness in the autumn air. Inside adults laughed and joked around, the sound of it breaching the screen door. The entire world moved, went on with what it was doing as a little boy who’d lost his mother came to terms with it on a squeaky swing in a backyard on his birthday.

“She hurt too much to stay for my birthday,” he whispered. “It was nothing I did.”

Foster could feel her eyes begin to fill but fought it back. “No, Toddie. I promise you it was nothing you did.”