The Lost Saint(16)

“Are you on your way home?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”


“What? But Jude was here. Why aren’t you coming—?”

“I need to go. It’s the last call for my train. I’ll explain later, but I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

Anger surged inside of me. Dad was gone all the time, and I’d thought it was because he was desperately looking for Jude—looking for a way to make our family whole again. But maybe it was us he was trying to stay away from? Why else wouldn’t he come home now? Right now when we needed him most.

“Fine. Just don’t forget where you live in the meantime,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I’ll come home as soon as I can.” Then he called to someone else on his end, “Yes, that’s my bag. I’m coming.” He cleared his throat and spoke back into the phone again. “One last thing, Gracie. You are not, under any circumstances, allowed to go looking for Jude on your own.”

I made a scoffing noise. It would have been a laugh if I hadn’t been so upset. I just found it funny and annoying at the same time that Dad would say the same thing as Daniel. Like they thought I wasn’t capable of not going out and looking for Jude.

“Just don’t, Gracie. You aren’t prepared for what you might find.…” He sighed heavily into the phone. “And we’ve already lost one child. Your mother would never survive if you left us, too.”





LATER




Mom was asleep on the couch when I finally went inside, the evening news playing in the background. I didn’t bother to wake her and went straight up the stairs. I was more than exhausted, drained of everything, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I was halfway to my bed when Baby James started crying in his room. It was a whimpering, frightened whine, growing louder and louder. I pushed his door open and looked in on him. He sat in his toddler-sized bed, rubbing his eyes. With the light from the hallway, I could see big, fat tears running down his red-splotched face.

“It’s okay.” I dropped my backpack in his doorway and scooped him up in my arms. “It’s okay, Baby James.”

“Not baby,” James said through his sobs. He was only two and half and was already starting to resist his family pet name.

“You’re right. You’re a big boy, huh?”

James nodded and cuddled close into my shoulder.

“Did you have another bad dream?”

“Yuh.” He trembled in my arms.

“It’s okay.” I curled up with him in his tiny bed and brushed my fingers through his brown curls. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll protect you … I promise.”

James smiled through his tears and patted my face. Within a few minutes his breathing became heavy and deep. His eyes closed, and he fell fast asleep with his fingers wrapped around a fistful of my hair.

I watched his chest rise and fall, thinking about everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, knowing that something terrible was trying to tear apart my little world. The crimes of the city were spreading to my hometown. Jude had been here, staring in at our little brother with his silver, glowing eyes. I didn’t know Jude’s intentions, and I didn’t know how he was connected to what had happened at Day’s or at the school, but all of this made it feel like the sky was about to come crashing down on us at any given moment.

I thought about what Daniel had said about his believing that I could be a hero. And I wished beyond all wishes that he were right—that I had the ability to keep the promise I had just made to James. I wished I really were capable of protecting everyone I loved.

I glanced over at my backpack in the doorway, remembering my Trenton application tucked inside of it. James snored slightly next to me, looking innocent and helpless, but what would he be like if I hadn’t been here to quiet his cries?

And that was when it hit me: even if I beat out April and Katie, even if Trenton decided to let both Daniel and me in, I still couldn’t go.

Any possibility of my going to Trenton, or to college at all, had been destroyed the day Jude ran away. What with my dad always gone looking for him, and Mom’s manic-depressive state. And wouldn’t Mom just get worse when I went off to school? Who would watch over Baby James? A part-time housekeeper wasn’t the same as a mother or a sister. And how could I leave Charity with all this to deal with on her own? She was the smart one in the family—practically all she ever did was homework—and it wouldn’t be fair if I ruined her future by taking off just like Jude.

Trenton was everything Daniel wanted, and everything I couldn’t have.

And I hated Jude for taking it away from me.





CHAPTER SIX


The Way We Were



SATURDAY MORNING




I woke up stiff and sore from a cramped sleep in James’s toddler bed around four thirty in the morning. I slipped out of his room, hoping he’d sleep another couple of hours, and crawled into my own bed. But I tossed and turned, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t block out the dream that had woken me in first place.

What was strange was that I had dreamed of a happy memory: the weekend Daniel, Jude, and I went fishing with my dad at Grandpa Kramer’s cabin about five years ago. Daniel had been living with us at the time, and I dreamed about how he used to tease me, and how I’d eat up every second of his attention. And how Jude had declared that he was happy that Daniel was part of our family now—and how he hoped that was the way it would always be.