Riding Tall (20 page)

Mackenzie didn’t have any words. He wanted to kiss Joe, wanted to
show
him what he couldn’t say, but he was pretty sure if he moved forward, Joe would pull away. And Joe had pulled too far away from him already.

And with no answer to his question, Joe was turning away anyway. Mackenzie reached out desperately and grabbed his shoulder. “It’s not a big deal! It isn’t. It was stupid, I guess, since I know you’re not feeling too secure about it all. I get that. I screwed up. But it was a
little
screwup. This is
not
a big deal.”

Joe was looking at a tiny tear on the corner of his glove as if it held the answers to every question in the universe. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Not a big deal. Okay.”

“Jesus, Joe!” Mackenzie wasn’t sure whether to get angry or start laughing. If Joe would just look at him, they could laugh together, but with the absence of eye contact, the anger was starting to win. “You’re going to act like a wronged princess? Seriously? I kissed an old friend. Not because I wanted to, but because I wanted to help him out.
You
, though? You’ve turned our lives upside down. I fooled around with a guy for sixty seconds, but you’ve made a long-term commitment to a whole other family, something that’s going to last… I don’t know, maybe last
forever
… and you think you have the right to act like
I’m
the one who screwed up? Go fuck yourself, Joe.
You’re
the one messing this up!”

The glove was still fascinating, apparently, but Joe managed to at least nod. “So we’re admitting it’s messed up?”

And suddenly Mackenzie wasn’t angry anymore, but he sure didn’t feel like laughing, either. “It’s… it’s a rough patch,” he said, and the words sounded as empty coming out of his mouth as they’d sounded when Will had said them the night before.

“I can’t give you what you want, Mack.” Joe said it softly, like an apology. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but there’s just too much else. The kids
need
me. You know.”

“What I want? I want
you
, Joe. The big, glamorous city life? I can do without that. I’m not sure I even
want
it anymore.
You’re
what I want.”

Joe nodded. “Yeah. But there’s not much of me left. I don’t know if there’s enough for… enough to give you what you deserve.”

“You don’t get to make that decision. No way.” Mackenzie could hear the desperation in his own voice, but it didn’t seem to register on Joe. “We’ll figure this out. We’ll rearrange things, get into a routine. All the stuff we’re supposed to be doing, we’ll do it. It’ll work.”

For a minute it seemed like Joe was going to argue, but instead he turned quickly and climbed back onto the horse. “I have to get stuff done,” he said. “You should get back to the house before you freeze to death.”

Well, Joe was still concerned for his health, at least. That was the only consolation Mackenzie had as he watched his cowboy ride away from him.

Chapter 15

N
ICK
WAS
gone by the time Joe got back to the house that afternoon. Not surprising, of course. Not only had he used up his last chance of getting any money out of Joe, but the place was in chaos. Mackenzie was out, and Joe refused to let himself think about where he was; Griffin was still there, so Mackenzie wasn’t gone for good. The bandage was still being ripped off slowly. So Ally and Lacey were in charge of the house, and that was the problem, really. They could handle Austin and Savannah,
or
they could handle Kami, but all three were simply too much for two teenagers.

It was too much for Joe too, but at least he’d had his vacation of shoveling shit and riding around in the freezing cold. Now, he was back, and it was time to deal with a five-year-old boy
and
an eleven-year-old girl, both in tears, while the nine-year-old girl was curled up on the couch with her hands over her ears. “Why don’t you take the little guys out to play in the snow?” Joe suggested to Ally. “Bundle them up, though, ’cause there’s a nasty wind.”

Ally was only too happy to accept the idea, and Lacey didn’t even give her token protest about leaving Kami. That was a bright side, Joe reminded himself. Lacey was still talking about maybe getting her own place and moving Kami into it. The more difficult Kami was here, the more clear it would be to Lacey that she couldn’t look after the girl on her own.

“You just making a point, Kami?” Joe asked after the other kids had left. Kami was slumped in a corner of the living room, clutching one of Austin’s dolls, with tears running down her cheeks. Joe hadn’t asked for details, but he figured the doll was the source of the conflict. Fighting over toys, in a house that was full of them. “You trying to let Lacey know you want to stay here in the land of peace and joy?”

Or, it occurred to Joe, maybe Lacey would think this was evidence that Kami should be living in a home without other kids, if she was fighting with Austin here. So there went his silver lining. He started tidying up the mess in the living room, keeping half an eye on Kami but not giving her any direct attention.

He tried to ignore the voice telling him to let Lacey go. If she and Kami were gone, even if they left Savannah behind, Joe’s life would go back to almost normal. Without Kami, Joe would have some energy for the things
he
wanted. Without Kami, maybe he’d have a chance of fixing things with Mackenzie. He’d have to work his ass off, of course, because he’d absolutely screwed things up on that front, but at least he’d have a prayer. Except for the part where he’d be doomed to a lifetime of guilt and worry, a man forced to admit he hadn’t learned from his first or second mistakes with Kami. He’d left her in an abusive home, he’d taken too long to get her out of the fire, and if he let Lacey take her, he’d be letting this poor, innocent girl suffer for the third time around.

“Motherfucker,” Kami said. Her voice wasn’t all that loud, but the word was clear. It was pretty much what Joe had been thinking, but it was weird to hear it come out of Kami’s mouth. “Whore. Fucking faggot. Hell. Fuck you, cocksucker.”

Excellent. Now the girl was possessed.

“Kami?” Joe said cautiously. “Those aren’t good words.”

“Shit.”

Well, they could agree on that one, at least. But Kami didn’t seem angry. “Bitch. Goddamn cunt.”

Joe was actually curious to hear what she came up with next. He was pretty sure she’d run through the whole list of really bad words.

And maybe she agreed, because her voice was a little quieter when she said, “Asshole.”

Joe needed a strategy. He needed to know why this was happening and whether it was likely to happen again. At school, around Austin… hell, even around Mackenzie would be bad. Lacey and Savannah would probably think it was funny. Joe hoped they hadn’t trained Kami like a parrot.

“Fuck you, cocksucker,” she said, looking straight at Joe.

Good, she was starting to repeat herself. Maybe she was winding down, albeit on a particularly unpleasant note. Had she picked that particular insult on purpose, or was it just chance?

“Fucking faggot,” she said.

Nice. She
was
possessed, and the demon was homophobic. Joe dumped his armful of toys into the storage box and picked up the afghan Savannah had been hiding under. If Kami was looking for attention, he needed to not give it to her. If this was something else? He had no idea what to do if this was something else.

“Fucking cocksucker needs to mind his own goddamn business, not go poking around in other people’s families.”

It was the longest sentence Joe had heard from Kami since the fire. And it didn’t sound like something she’d have come up with herself. He turned to look at her. Her eyes weren’t focused anymore. She looked the way she did when she was listening to something, but there was nothing for her to hear. At least not in the room Joe was in.

“If you go running over there one more fucking time, I will beat the shit out of you, you fucking cunt. I’ll teach you who’s in charge around here. I’ll go over to the fucking Sutton
ranch
, and I’ll burn the goddamn farmhouse to the ground. You hear me, bitch?”

Joe couldn’t move. Kami was reciting from her memory, and it was pretty clear who had spoken the words the first time around. Joe was hearing a dead man’s words. He was a witness to the life the Walton girls had lived before the fire, the anger and fear they’d had to deal with. Kami was eleven, and she’d heard these words. Hell, Lacey was only seventeen, and he was pretty sure they’d been
directed
at her. Joe had known something was wrong, but he hadn’t done anything about it. He’d left the girls in that hell.

He still had the afghan in his hands, and he moved slowly toward Kami. He didn’t care if she hit
him
, but when she was upset she sometimes hit
herself
, and he needed to be sure that didn’t happen. “Kami,” he said gently, although he was pretty sure she was too far away to hear him. “It’s okay, Kami. That’s over. That’s never going to happen again. Okay?” He touched her shoulder, just the faintest whisper of fingertips at first, then a little more as she didn’t respond. “You’re safe here, sweetie.” He eased around behind her and wrapped the afghan over her thin shoulders. He was probably acting more to comfort himself than to help her, but she didn’t object when he slowly, carefully picked her up and carried her over to the couch.

Thin as she was, she was still bigger than Austin, and it took some arranging to find a way for her to be in a position he assumed she’d find comfortable. Finally, he managed it, his hands locked together to form a sort of basket for her to sit in, his cast hopefully not digging into her anywhere. Her muscles weren’t rigid, exactly, but she wasn’t relaxed, either. She’d allowed him to arrange her limbs, but she hadn’t surrendered all control over them. Fair enough: a little control was probably a precious commodity in this girl’s world.

They sat like that for a long time, no more words, and finally Kami sighed, and her whole body just melted, sagging down as she relaxed. She shifted a little, snuggling in like a kitten, and let her head fall onto Joe’s shoulder.

She fell asleep, eventually, snoring softly into his neck, and Joe let himself relax, easing back against the couch cushions and slowly unlocking his hands so she was leaning on his body and the end of the couch instead of relying on his arms. His broken wrist was complaining about the abuse, but he ignored it. He was pretty sure he hadn’t done any actual damage, hadn’t shifted the healing bones out of alignment or anything, so it was nothing he needed to deal with.

When he heard the outside door open he thought about carrying Kami upstairs, away from the racket of incoming kids, but he figured the jostling was more likely to disturb her than the sound was. And for some reason, the sound didn’t come.

He cautiously turned his head and leaned back a little, enough that he could see through the living-room doorway to the hall and a bit of the kitchen. Mackenzie was at the counter, unloading something from fabric bags. He didn’t know he was being watched, and Joe took advantage of the opportunity to feed his starving eyes. The way Mackenzie looked, the way he moved, the fact that he was right there, in Joe’s kitchen, cruising around like he
belonged
there… it just felt
right
. But how could it last? And how was Joe going to make himself function when Mackenzie was gone?

When Mackenzie finally looked over and saw Joe, he looked startled, and maybe not entirely pleased. He set down whatever he was working on and almost reluctantly walked to the living-room door. His expression softened when he saw Kami curled up on Joe’s lap. “She okay?” he whispered. “The kids were outside, and they said she was upset.”

“Are they staying out there to hide? I don’t want them to freeze to death.”

“They were heading for the hayloft, going to hang out in Savannah’s fort. It gets pretty warm in there.”

“Hay’s a good insulator.”

“And Kami?” Mackenzie asked again. “Is she okay?”

Joe sighed. Not an easy question. “I think I need to find her another psychologist. She’s got the one for her brain… like, the educational stuff, helping her learn, whatever. But she’s remembering stuff from before the fire. Nasty stuff. The dad was….” Joe huffed out a breath and tried to make his shoulders relax, but his muscles didn’t cooperate. “I should have gotten them out of there,” he said. “They shouldn’t have had to live like that.”

Mackenzie sighed and sank down on the arm of the couch. “How many times are we going to talk about this, Joe? The
neighbor
thing is nice and everything, but you guys did what you were supposed to, right? You called the cops, you called the social workers, you gave the kids a safe place to stay when they needed it. What else were you going to do, storm over there and kidnap the kids? End up in jail? The system failed, yeah, but you aren’t the system.” Mackenzie shook his head. “You need to let it go.”

Joe nodded. He couldn’t stop feeling guilty, but at least he could stop boring Mackenzie with endless conversations about it. “I’ll try to find a counselor,” he said instead. “Someone with experience in trauma, or recovered memories, or… I don’t know. Somebody who can help her.”