Bones by the Wood (24 page)

With that, Carlos shook hands with them both and then climbed back into the van and pulled away, heading back to the border.

Dizzy had been awake for more than twenty-four hours.  First, he wanted, needed, to reassure himself that Thea and Josh were okay, and then he planned to collapse onto the nearest horizontal surface and sleep forever.

Thea stood at the door of the clubhouse long after the swirling cloud of dust thrown up by the departing bikes had dissipated and fallen back to earth.  The bright autumnal afternoon wasn’t particularly cold, but Thea hugged her arms around herself to ward off a chill that had little to do with the weather.  She jerked when she felt a hand on her shoulder, but it was only Nut, reminding her that she had to come back into the real world, rather than waiting in limbo until Dizzy and the others returned.

The clubhouse was quiet, too quiet, now that the men had left.  Thea had become used to the constant hum of conversation punctuated by occasional bursts of peals of laughter or shouts for attention.  Now only the women and Nut were left.  The quiet was so pervasive that it seemed that people were reluctant to talk, as if for fear that a whisper might be heard as a shout.  Thea paused just inside the closed door and listened to the lack of noise.  She felt the urge to scream, yell, to tear her hair, anything to break the somber blanket that was smothering the room.  She needed to do something, anything, before the normalcy drove her crazy.

She saw Annelle crossing the room to her, but couldn’t make her brain switch into a gear that cared.

“You look like a woman in need of somethin’ to do.  Come on, hon.  We’ve got a whole pile of mattresses to blow up and make up.  Those boys are gonna need ‘em when they get back.”

“They’re gonna come back, Nell.”  Thea knew that Annelle didn’t have a crystal ball.  She just needed to hear someone else support the positivity she was desperately trying to cling to.

“They’re gonna do their best to, hon. You can’t ask for more than that.”

Thea allowed Annelle to lead her over to the kitchen to collect the boxes of inflatable mattresses and the electric pump.  She began to shake off the incipient morbidity as she threw herself into the logistics of clearing space for her and Annelle to work, and, once they were finished, of reorganizing the space so that the mattresses could be laid out.  Alex and Lyla joined them in their efforts and they worked solidly without exchanging many words.

By the time they had finished and were turning their attention to feeding the people that had been left behind, Thea was beginning to feel a little like herself again, enough at least to ensure that Britney and Lucy didn’t take advantage of her brief period of inversion to shirk the need to make any efforts beyond ensuring that their nail varnish was applied perfectly.  She was glad that Dizzy hadn’t seen how affected she’d been by the heavy weight of the reality they were facing.  She’d tried to be casual, almost blasé in front of him.  It wasn’t in her makeup to sit around weeping and wailing.  She picked herself up, dusted herself off, and got on with what needed doing, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have moments of weakness.

The noise of the electric pump working to inflate the mattresses had rent through the oppressive peace, and as if the noise had given everyone permission to raise the volume levels again, conversations had risen and someone had put some music on to fill the empty air.  It still felt to Thea, though, that it was a strained joviality.  The complete absence of the patches, enhanced even more by the dissolving haze of stale cigarette smoke, brought into stark focus the brotherhood, the family, that she had been drawn into in the past couple of days.  She was determined to do whatever she could to protect and support it, but she felt helpless.  She was stuck at the clubhouse without the talents or the skills to realistically assist them.  They were riding out into a situation that they might not come back from, and she was helping Annelle fry chicken.

They served the food.  It was a much more controlled feeding than when the men were present, and without their joking and arguments, the near silence fell again as people busied themselves with eating.  Thea had set Josh up at a table with some food, but she paused before she left the kitchen with her own plate, just watching him for the moment.  He was sitting on his own.  Since she’d brought him to this place, Thea thought she could count on two hands the number of waking minutes he’d been left alone.  Usually one of the guys was paying attention to him in some way, challenging him on the Xbox or just talking to him.  Now they were gone, and he had no one except her.

“I feel so useless.”  Thea almost didn’t realize that she’d spoken aloud.  The words scraped out of her throat since she’d hardly spoken for hours.

Annelle was the only other person in the kitchen.  She came to Thea’s side.  “You’re doin’ exactly what you should be, making sure the thing they’re fightin’ for is here when they come back, givin’ them somethin’ worth protectin’, worth comin’ back to, in the first place.”

“Is that what this is?”   She looked up at the older woman.  “Nell, I got no idea what I’m doin’ here and I’m so scared of fuckin’ things up for
him
.”  Thea looked back out at her boy tucking into his food.

“You’re doin’ your best.  And that’s all any mama can do.  What’s goin’ on between you and Dizzy,” Annelle chuckled at Thea’s visible shock, “or not goin’ on, whatever, that’s for the two of you to sort out.  You’ll find a way to do that and keep your boy at the center.  You don’t know how to do it any other way.”

“I wish I had your confidence in me, Nell.”  Thea sighed. 

She saw Josh looking for her and pushed herself to move, out of the kitchen and into crowd, such as it was.  Annelle followed her and they both dropped into seats at Josh’s table.  They ate in silence for a while.  Thea couldn’t find the energy to come up with a neutral topic of conversation and that fed the disappointment she felt with herself for ignoring Josh while she turned inward on herself.  He didn’t know what was going on and she couldn’t explain it to him.  She wouldn’t tell him of the horrors of the threat that had brought them to this time and place, and he couldn’t and shouldn’t have to grasp the concept of the threat that was hanging over them.  She could only hope that Dizzy and the others were successful and that the black cloud would pass before it intruded too far into their lives.

“Mama, are they gonna be okay?”

Thea blinked while the words registered in her brain and arranged themselves into sense.  “What do you mean, bud?”

“Everyone’s so serious, and everyone else has gone.  They’ve gone somewhere dangerous or everyone wouldn’t be so quiet.  But they’re gonna be okay aren’t they?”

Her boy was a lot sharper and more observant than she was giving him credit for.  “I’ll be honest, bud, I can’t promise.  But I hope they will be.”

“Will they be gone long?”

“I think they’ll be back tomorrow.”

Josh ate some more, but he was obviously lost in thought.  Thea’s appetite had completely deserted her, but she forced herself to chew and swallow a couple more bites, if only for appearances’ sake.

“Is Mr. Diz....Dizzy... Is he, like, your boyfriend?”

Thea actually choked on her mouthful of chicken and had to cough until her eyes watered to dislodge the piece that had stuck in her windpipe.

“What makes you ask that?”  Thea coughed, flicking her eyes to Annelle.  Annelle seemed to be holding back laughter, which edged Thea’s shock towards the realm of anger.

“’Cause we’re here.  ‘Cause you both watch each other when he’s not busy bein’ busy.”

“You’ve... erm....you’ve been pretty observant there, bud.”

Josh only shrugged in response.  Thea looked to Annelle, begging silently for help.  Annelle only shrugged.  Oh fucking brilliant, she was on her own with an unpinned hand grenade of a question that she had no idea how to begin to answer. 

Not that the situation had ever seemed likely to arise, but Thea had always planned that if she was going to enter into a relationship, she would carefully introduce any man that was going to share their life to Josh.  She’d been so adamant about that, that in ten years she’d never met anyone that she qualified as worthy of such attention.  This weekend so far had been entirely the polar opposite of that plan.  It couldn’t have been more different from that plan if she’d tried.  Unless maybe if Josh had woken up and found Dizzy in bed with them the previous night.  Oh Jesus God, Thea hoped that wasn’t the case.

Thea pushed her plate away.  There was no way she was going to be able to eat now.  She might actually be on the verge of throwing up everything she already had eaten.  “I don’t know what to tell you, bud.  We’re not, but we might be, maybe.  How would you feel about that?”

The microcosm of the lockdown, the reason for it and the effort required to end it, was pushing her and Dizzy down a track at a faster pace than Thea had ever imagined moving.  She needed to step back and get her priorities in order.  If Josh didn’t like Dizzy, in any way, she needed to put the brakes on.

Josh gave a little one-shouldered shrug.  “He’s alright I guess.  Kinda cool.  I like his friends.  Shaggy an’ Scooby’re way sick.”

“That means they’re good, right?”

Josh rolled his eyes at her.  “Yeah, Mama.  That means they’re good.  They’re a lot of fun.  They make me laugh and they show me cool stuff and they don’t treat me like a kid.”

Thea had to physically bite her lip to suppress the urge to remind Josh that at ten years old he was indeed still a kid.

“Would you mind if we got to know him a little better?”

Josh gave that quick, one-shouldered shrug again, his eyes cast down at his food.  “I guess not.  Do I have to call him ‘Dad’?”

“No, he’s not your dad.  You don’t have to call him that.”

Josh looked up, and his expression was heartbreakingly hopeful.  “Can we come back here so I can hang out with Shaggy and Scooby?”

“Maybe.  I think we might get invited back.  But we can’t be here all the time.  This is their place.”

“What about Crash and Sint...Sant...Sinatra?  Can we go visit them sometime?  They’re fun, too.”

Thea didn’t want to lay the possibility of a visit out to Louisiana before Josh just yet, not until they men had come back safe and whole.  “Maybe.  I think they’ll be comin’ back here sometimes, too.”

“Will Dizzy be comin’ to live with us?”

“No, it’ll still be the two of us in our place.”

Josh looked down at his food and pushed what was left of it around the plate a few times.  Thea was beginning to think that she’d handled this in the worst way possible and didn’t even dare look at Annelle.  She sat and waited and watched the top of Josh’s head and waited for him to speak.  Eventually he looked up, straight into her eyes.  “I think I’d like you hangin’ out with Dizzy some more.  He makes you smile.  You don’t smile much.”

Thea was stunned.  “I... I.... I do smile.”  She stuttered, made breathless by the horror that her son thought she wasn’t happy with their life.

“Not like you smile at him.”

Okay, that was a little better, maybe. She could probably deal with that.  “Anytime you don’t like what’s goin’ on, bud, you just say so and it’ll stop, okay?”  Making that promise scared Thea half to death.  There was potential for a lot of pain for her in that promise, but she was fully prepared to commit to it for the sake of her son’s happiness.

“Okay.  Hey, can you teach me to play pool like you promised?”

She almost had whiplash from the change in the gravity of the topic.  “Sure, er... I just need to make sure everything’s cleaned up...”

“I’ll do that, hon.  You go spend the time with your boy,” Annelle interrupted.  Thea fought the urge to scowl, not that she wasn’t grateful to be given a reprieve from organizing everyone, but she could have used Annelle’s input a little sooner in the conversation.

Thea’s appetite didn’t want to recover, so she took her plate back into the kitchen and scraped the food she hadn’t eaten into the trash.  When she came out she crossed paths with Annelle, who was coming in with hers and Josh’s dishes.  Thea gave in to the urge to scowl a little, but didn’t say anything.  It wasn’t the time or the place, and quite frankly it wasn’t any sort of discussion that she wanted the other girls listening on.