Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(139)

Gia seemed to adapt. She was his girl, and she didn’t seem to care one way or the other where she saw him, as long as she was with him. She’d grown too big to sit on his lap, but she held his hand and talked to him. She wrote him letters of her own, sending him pictures of her horse and their new kittens, and Kodi, who had taken on care of the kittens as well. Pip had died; Lilli had found him curled in his basket one day, stiff and cold.

Isaac’s life was changing while he wasn’t living it.

From the day he’d arrived in Pennsylvania, he’d ended every letter to Lilli with two words: I’m sorry.



The 2,736th Day



Isaac came out of the Springfield Greyhound station on a hot, muggy, brilliantly sunny July afternoon and met a long line of Harleys parked at the curb. His feet were on Missouri soil. Missouri concrete, actually. But Missouri. Seven years, six months, and four days since he had last been in his home state. His homeland.

He had been assigned a parole officer in Springfield, and he’d need to check in soon, but he had a couple of days before he had to think about that. Right now, Show was walking toward him, and his brothers were all standing in a line. He realized he didn’t know them all, but he didn’t let himself think about that, either. He’d get to know them. He embraced every f*cking one of them, even the strangers. Len was there; he’d been released a couple of weeks earlier. He embraced Len first.

They were both home. They were both whole. As whole as they ever could be.

When he’d greeted and hugged the line of men in Horde leather, Show turned to the curb, and the men separated so the Isaac could see his old Fat Bob, with his kutte lying over the saddle. Show lifted the leather and held it up, and Isaac turned and slid his arms in. He remembered a day once before that he’d reclaimed this leather after he’d despaired of ever wearing it again. He wasn’t supposed to wear it now, not while he was on parole. Neither was Len. But for this ride, right now, f*ck it.

Show put his meaty hand on Isaac’s shoulder. “Can you ride, brother?”

Isaac smiled. “One way to find out.” He walked around his big, beautiful bike and stared down at it, wondering. Could he? Had the years of hard prison life—the fighting, the attacks, the brutal guards, the bad meds, just his f*cking age, past fifty now—had that life left him this thing? But then, looking at his beautiful, badass bike, feeling Missouri under his boots, standing with his brothers, he knew. Yes, it had. He could. He swung his leg over the saddle, ignoring the twinge in his back. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared.

He strapped on his helmet and then slid on his Ray-Bans. The world looked suddenly brighter.

“You good?” Show asked, strapping on his own helmet.

Isaac grinned like he hadn’t grinned in seven and a half years. “Let’s ride, brothers. Let’s ride.”

As they flew down the interstate toward home, he could feel the scales on his heart and soul loosen and begin to break away. Somewhere under there, deep down below the crust of loss and bitterness and despair that was his prison life, he felt a small flutter of something still alive. The buffet and roar of the wind in his face, the tang and the grit of the road, all of it brought his senses to life. When they took the off-ramp that would bring him home, his heart began to beat with real vigor. And when he saw the sign that bid him a cheery Welcome to Signal Bend, he laughed, loud, shaking his head with it.

Lilli was just around the corner. Gia and Bo. His wife. His children. His family. His life.

Home.

Just around the corner.



LILLI



“Bud, come talk to me.” Lilli combed Bo’s dark hair back from his forehead.

“Helpin’ Parrot.” Bo had really clicked with Parrot, one of the current Prospects. He had a lot of patience for the watchful ten-year-old and let him hang around with him in the clubhouse and ‘help.’

“I know. But I need to talk to you. You can come back and help Parrot again in five minutes.” She held up her hand, her fingers splayed. Bo looked at his watch and nodded. He let her take his hand, and they went outside to sit on one of the picnic tables in the July sunshine.

Bo was comfortable in the clubhouse, and had a fairly good tolerance, by his standard, for its chaos, but even here he didn’t connect much. He had a hard time understanding people and never really got in on the joke, even with other kids. He and Loki were not even two years apart in age, and Cory and Lilli had sort of expected them to be close. When Bo was a preschooler, he’d seemed totally normal, if a little slow to speak, and had been great with Loki the toddler. But Bo began to pull inward when he was around four, and Loki had eclipsed his social development quickly once they were both school age. Now Loki—a loud, energetic kid who had both a quick, charming laugh and a fiery temper—didn’t have much patience for the older, quieter Bo, who would rather play on his computer or draw mazes and fractals in one of his hundreds of sketchbooks than throw a ball or run a race and, when he talked at all, sometimes said things that were better left unspoken. He got along better with Nolan and Parrot than he did the kids closer to his own age.

He’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome almost four years earlier. He didn’t have the tics and quirks a lot of children on the autism spectrum had, and Lilli had been reluctant to see that his differences were in his way—they weren’t in his way at all when he was home. He didn’t mind being touched, as long as he knew and was comfortable with the person doing the touching. He liked and sought out hugs from his family. He didn’t rock or hum or flail when he got stressed, and he almost never yelled or lost control. For him, when he was over-stimulated or stressed, he sort of stopped. Lilli called it ‘hitting his pause button.’ He became almost entirely unresponsive. At first, his fugues had terrified her; her mother had often gone into similar states during her depressive phases. Now, understanding, she’d simply say, “G—Bo’s hit pause. Let’s turn it down.” And she and Gia would make his world a little saner until he could come back.