He continued pretending to read the magazine on his lap. "No, I don't." His voice was flat.
"Oh, excuse me." She might have known his male pride wouldn't let him admit to that. "You were never afraid when you went to the doctor." Most likely, the doctor was afraid of seeing you. You probably snapped his head off and questioned his every move.
"No, I never went to the doctor." Casie reached out to him. He let the magazine drop to the floor and took her into his arms.
Now he was claiming to be invincible. Liz remembered all the bouts of cold and flu that had abounded in her household when she was growing up. "I suppose you were never sick?"
"No, I didn't say that. I just never went to the doctor."
She saw his annoyed embarrassment and realized her blunder. Liz, when will you learn to keep your mouth shut? "Oh. I'm sorry." She touched his arm to emphasize her point.
Griff's expression softened a little. There was no way she could know anything. He couldn't blame her.
"I didn't mean to pry. There's no shame in your parents not having enough money to afford to take you to a doctor. You're lucky that you never got seriously ill."
Gently, he removed Casie's hands from the button on his shirt that she was trying to pry off, "Let's just say that the money was more important."
Liz looked at him incredulously. "More important than you?"
Bingo, he thought wryly.
The inner door to the doctor's office opened a crack at a time. Two little girls squealed and scurried out of the way. A young nurse wearing white slacks and a tunic with a bright yellow happy face-pinned to it peered around the door cautiously, apparently hoping to avoid any unforeseen collisions.
"Casie Foster?" The nurse looked around the semifilled wafting room.
Griff rose instantly. "That's us."
The wall was back up again, Liz thought as she stood up next to him. For a moment there, she had thought she was finally on to something. The nurse's entrance couldn't have been timed any worse than if Griff had preordained it.
He might have won temporary reprieve, but she wasn't going to be put off for long, Liz told herself. He had raised too many questions in her mind for her to back off now. Was that why he was so reserved? Because his parents hadn't cared enough about him and his sister? Had they rejected his love so callously, so completely, that he felt it was safer not to love at all? She had to find out. If she didn't, how could she make him see that it was different with her?
* * *
Bellowing indignantly at the top of her lungs, Casie was pronounced in the pink of health.
"She doesn't like being handled," Griff noted to Liz as Casie cried in reaction to the doctor's thorough exam.
''Seems to run in the family." Liz gave him an innocent grin when he shot her a look.
"Depends on the handler."
Liz's grin grew broader.
To celebrate the successful outing, Griff offered to take them out to eat.
Liz was stunned and pleased by this uncharacteristic gesture. He was really coming out of his reclusive shell, she thought. Her pleasure abated a little when he brought the three of them to eat at a local fast-food restaurant in the mall.
"You really are the last of the big-time spenders," Liz said with a laugh as they picked out the shortest line to stand in.
"To go out to a fancy restaurant, we'd have to leave her with a sitter." He nodded at Casie.
She looked down at the child, who was trying to wiggle out of her stroller. "And you didn't like the idea of leaving her with a stranger," Liz guessed. She laughed. "You certainly have come a long way in the last month, Foster. You were more than willing to leave her with a stranger then."
"You mean you?" She nodded in response. "That was different. I had my back against the wall. I didn't have much of a choice then."
"Next," cried the harried-looking attendant behind the register.
Liz nudged him. "You're on, Foster."
"What do you want?" he asked. He heard the attendant sigh impatiently at this conference.
"A garden salad, diet dressing and a diet soda."
He let his eyes skim over her frame. She was wearing jeans and a pullover. They accentuated her best features just as well as the beaded gown had. The word perfect came to mind.
"Diet? You get any thinner and you'll waste away."
"If I don't watch my body, you won't." Her eyes laughed gaily.
"You two gonna order or make eyes at each other?" the attendant wanted to know.
"I don't know," Liz murmured, still looking at Griff, "how much does the second choice cost?"
She was really something else, Griff thought. This time the assessment was made with a growing warm glow of pleasure.
"Lady, there're people waiting behind you." The teenager jabbed a bony finger impatiently into the air, pointing behind her.
She flashed the teenager a smile and turned to Griff. "I'll stake out a table and let you handle this."
"That's a first. Hey—" Griff swung around "—what do I get for the kid?" he called after Liz.
"Get her some French fries. She'll have fun squeezing them," Liz answered as she threaded her way through the crowd.
Dragging a high chair with a clown face on the tray in her wake, Liz finally found a table near the entrance for the three of them.
It took Griff several minutes to find them.
"If you were any farther out, you'd be sitting in the middle of the mall," he complained as he deposited the tray on the table.
"Look, finding a table today is no mean feat. In case you haven't noticed, this place is absolutely crawling with last-minute Christmas shoppers." She circled her hand in the air and hit a passerby. The woman gave her a cold look. "Sorry." Liz let her hand drop.
Griff didn't bother trying to hide his grin. "Why not try using just your mouth and not your whole body when you talk?"
He placed the paper container of French fries on Casie's tray. She immediately turned it upside down and seemed to take great glee in watching the shower of fries hit the tray, table and floor.
"Speaking of Christmas," Liz began as she bent down and picked up the fries closest to her, "what are you planning to do about it?"
Griff poked a hole in the plastic cover on his soda. "They won't let me abolish it, so I guess it'll go on as usual."
"You know what I mean."
"Liz, don't give me that much credit. I never know what you mean." Not waiting for her to answer, he unwrapped his hamburger and began to eat.
She wondered if he was just goading her. "This is Casie's first Christmas and I just wondered what you were going to do."
He shrugged. "I hadn't planned on anything."
She stared at him. "Hadn't planned on—? Haven't you gotten a tree?"
"No tree."
Liz's mouth dropped open. How could he not have a tree? Even he couldn't be that insensitive. "You can't be serious."
Griff raised his eyes and looked at her for a long moment. "Why?"
"Why?" she echoed incredulously. "It's practically her birthright to have a Christmas tree. Didn't you have a tree every Christmas?"
"No, I didn't." Granted, he was taking liberties with her question. There had been Christmas trees in some of the houses he had stayed in. But they had been for the foster parents' children, never for him. And the families he had stayed with had never made him feel as if he was anything but an outsider.
For a moment, she hesitated. The look in his eyes warned her to stop. But her overwhelming need to know about him pushed her on. He couldn't keep locking doors every time she knocked. "I want to know," she said softly. "Now."
He dropped the hamburger on the tray, his appetite gone. "Know what?"
"About you." Liz put her hand over his. "About your childhood." He pulled his hand back and she tried not to show him how much that hurt.
"I didn't have one."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I didn't have Christmases or birthdays, or toys. Just beatings, endless chores and a parade of strangers the orphanage found to take Sally and me in for money."
"You didn't have any parents?" she asked in a hushed voice.
The laugh he uttered was bitter. "Not even when we lived with them. Not in the sense you mean. My father was too drunk and my mother too frightened of him and of living to keep us." Anger rose in his eyes. "Satisfied?"
She shook her head slowly, fighting back the tears at the images that his words evoked. Now she understood. Everything. "No. Not until I can give you both your first Christmas."
"Look, Christmas is for children "
He didn't want her pity. He didn't know what had possessed him to tell her all of that just now. Maybe it was a need to open up, just this once, to expose to sunshine the wounds he always carried with him. Maybe then they would finally heal. And she was sunshine. But right now he cursed her for it, for making him so vulnerable, for stripping him of his shield.
She saw the look in his eyes. He was withdrawing again. She'd be damned if she'd let him this time. "And we're all children at bottom."
"Some more so than others." His meaning was clear. He meant to hurt her because she, with her probing, had hurt him, had made him hurt again. The memories always accomplished that.
She leaned over and wiped a tiny dot of ketchup from the corner of his mouth. "No argument," she said with forced brightness. "Now finish eating, we've got a lot of shopping to do."
He was grateful the subject was dropped. But he didn't like the topic it was exchanged for. "Now?" He looked around. "Liz, there are hundreds of people around."
"Maybe thousands. That's what makes it fun." She snapped the lid back down on her unfinished salad. "You've got to be introduced the right way." She curled her fingers around his hand and pulled him to his feet. "C'mon, you've got a lot of catching up to do."
"I don't suppose that telling you that I don't want to catch up would do any good."
She took Casie out of the high chair and placed her in the stroller. "Not in the slightest."
"I didn't think so."
He knew he should protest harder, that if he put his foot down, she'd have to listen. But he didn't want her to listen. He needed to be forced. He couldn't do it on his own. He wanted her to pull him into that crazy fantasy world that always seemed to surround her. Just this one time.
For the next three hours, she indoctrinated him just as she had promised. She dragged him from store to store, sometimes to buy something, sometimes just to "sample the ambience." With effort, they snaked their way through the walls of pressing bodies and harried shoppers. The toy stores were particularly crowded and represented a real challenge. But they managed. And throughout it all, though he'd never admit it to her verbally, he was enjoying himself.
"Now what?" he groaned when she pulled him over to a long, winding line in the center of the mall. The carousel with its horses stood dormant, in silent deference to the oversize, white-haired, round-bellied elf in crimson who was sitting before a camera and having his picture taken with an endless procession of children.
"Now," Liz announced, "Casie gets to have her picture taken with Santa Claus."
"She doesn't even know who Santa Claus is," Griff protested.
He was tired, and his arms ached from the packages he was carrying. But his words weren't delivered as forcefully as they might have been. She was right about this. She was right about everything. He found himself enjoying this noisy madness, enjoying having someone to do it for. To share it with. The years of solitude he had spent had been filled with only emptiness. He felt full now. And happy.
Liz listened to his protest the way she seemed to listen to everything else he said, he observed. Not at all.
"She will eventually,'' Liz assured him soothingly, "and then she can look back at this picture. It'll give her memories."
"She's too young for memories."
Liz nudged him to move up as the line snaked its way forward another foot. "No one's too young to start having memories."
She was right about that, too. His memories were filled with fear and pain and rejection. He didn't want that for Casie. Or himself any longer.
But the line was awfully long.
"Maybe we can come back tomorrow," he suggested.
Liz stood firm. "Don't try to weasel out of this, Foster. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. It'll be even more packed than this. Besides, you still have a tree to buy and decorate."
He groaned. "C'mon, Liz, there isn't enough time for all that."
She ignored his appeal. "There is if you work it right. We'll pick out a tree after this and I have a wonderful box of ornaments I can give you. Hand painted. They were my grandmother's." They gained another few inches on the line.
"Why aren't you using them?" he asked suspiciously.
"I am. She believed in a very big tree and she was always making decorations for the family and herself. Thirty years' worth of decorations adds up to quite a lot of decorations."
A performer, dressed as Humpty Dumpty, danced by to entertain the children. He stopped to hand Casie a candy cane made out of red and white pipe cleaners, tipped his hat to Liz and scampered on.
"I've always felt bad that her decorations couldn't all be fully appreciated." Liz took the "candy cane" away from Casie just as she tried to pop it into her mouth. "I know Grandma would have loved you to have them."
Griff tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the gap that had been formed in front of them. Liz moved the stroller up. "What makes you think that?"
Liz grinned up at him. "She adored stubborn cops with silky mustaches that tickle."
He loved seeing laughter in her eyes. And yes, he admitted to himself, he loved her.
Giving in to the sudden impulse that overtook him, Griff leaned over, cupped her chin in his hand and kissed her, right there in the middle of the mall, on line to see Santa Claus.