The Journey Home (10 page)

The strain in Will's voice when he said this surprised Joseph. Joseph had liked the kid instantly. He was easy to like, with his floppy hair and crooked smile. His commitment to the cause was definitely his most endearing quality, though. Joseph had gotten nowhere near enough of Will's story out of him, but as their time together grew, it seemed that Will's devotion to getting Joseph home increased exponentially. He was taking this personally and would no doubt consider it a huge failure if they didn't achieve their goal.

For the first time, Joseph wondered what would happen to Will if they ever did find Joseph's wife. Would Will stay for dinner and then get in his car to return to his place with Steve and Karen and his four
foster siblings? Did he have other expectations or other plans? Was Will scouting out someplace for himself as they made this journey? When Joseph reached his destination, what could he do to help Will reach his?

The road began to change about a quarter mile later. A small downtown shopping district emerged, brick buildings with elongated awnings and flowering bushes on hip-high wrought iron planters.

“This what you had in mind?” Will said as he slowed the car to accommodate the heavier traffic.

“Yeah, this is just what I was looking for. Let's walk around a bit.”

Will found a parking space adjacent to a shop with an orange awning. They walked toward the shop, saw that it sold dresses, and kept walking down the block.

“Do you and your wife do stuff like this?” Will said as they looked into the window of a bicycle store.

As he had with each of Will's prompts, Joseph considered this. “I don't know. Maybe. This doesn't feel strange, so I guess there's a chance.”

The next store sold athletic shoes. Its window displayed dozens of sneakers, some looking aggressively high tech and others looking expensively casual.

“Oh man, they have the new Mega-Trainers,” Will said, pointing. Joseph followed his finger and his eyes landed on a pair of white shoes with a thick black sole that seemed better suited to a car. There were tendrils of silver rubber reaching up toward the laces.

“You like those?”

“This is the first time I'm seeing them in person. I've been reading about them online for months. This is
the
shoe of the moment.”

Joseph looked down at the boy's shoes, assuming that Will had once coveted them as much as he did the Mega-Trainers. The sneakers had some of the same markings as the new shoes, but the leather had become nearly worn through at the right pinkie toe.

“Do you want to try on a pair?”

“I don't know; they'll probably just crush my soul.”

“No, come on. I need to see these up close. They'll look different on your feet than they do in a store window.”

They walked into the shop and Will gave the clerk his shoe size. The clerk seemed impressed that Will wanted to try the Mega-Trainers, which probably meant that the sneakers were ludicrously overpriced. When Will tried them on, he sighed, as though he'd just stepped into a warm bath.

“Molten armor,” he said.

“What's that?”

“That's how they describe these shoes. ‘Molten' because they fit your feet like they were made just for them and ‘armor' because you could dance on a bed of nails when you had these on without feeling a thing.”

Will stood and took a series of long strides across the store, pivoting sharply and making a darting move as though he were on the field of play before walking back to his seat.

“I'd better get these off before my heart breaks,” he said, reaching for the left lace.

“Leave them on,” Joseph said.

Will looked at him, confused.

“Leave them on. I said I'd pay for gas. This is like gas for your feet.”

“Hey, good line,” the clerk said.

“Pass it along to the shoe company. Maybe they'll give us a discount.”

Will stood. “You're gonna buy these for me?”

“You need ‘em and they look good on you.”

“Geez, really?”

Joseph put a hand on Will's shoulder, something that suddenly seemed much easier to do than it had seemed the other night. “You're driving me all over the place waiting for me to have some kind of breakthrough. I really think I can do this little thing.”

“Wow, thanks.”

The shoes didn't make as much of a dent in Joseph's wad of cash as he expected. The clerk threw in a sticker that meant nothing to Joseph, but seemed to please Will, which made the entire purchase seem like more of a bargain.

They continued their trek down the block, with Will making several sudden lunges forward or fast side-steps. “Yep, these shoes are incredible.”

Will seemed more boyish since he put on the sneakers. It was as though the shoes that had literally given him more bounce in his step had done so figuratively as well. It was entertaining to see. Joseph wondered if something in one of the shops on this street could do the same for him.

They browsed an electronics store and bought some almond bark at a chocolate shop. At a music store, Will saw a new release from a band he liked, approached it quickly, and then turned back to Joseph, pointing and saying, “Not asking for it. Not asking.”

The store after that featured a wide variety of goods made from recycled materials. They found hats made of burlap coffee sacks, drinking glasses made from wine bottles, serving bowls made from old vinyl records, and sculptures created from found objects, among dozens of other things. They'd been alone in the store when they entered, but as Joseph examined a tote bag made from old magazine covers, he heard a burst of laughter behind him. He turned to find four women joking with one another as they looked at the merchandise. He could only see the face of one of them, a brunette with wavy ringlets who appeared to be in her late twenties.

Then the woman whose back was directly toward him moved to a display on the other side of the store. She moved behind the display quickly, but not before Joseph caught sight of her. Fair, creamy skin with high cheekbones. Tiny nose, slim eyebrows, full lips, and gleaming blue eyes. Slender neck that gave her a sense of regality, and thick, lustrous, shoulder-length black hair that gave her a sense of uncommon warmth. Though the woman was no longer visible, he could see her face in a variety of poses: enraptured, compassionate, surprised, delighted, thoughtful, and sorrowful.

Compelled more than he had been since he
awoke, Joseph stepped quickly toward the woman, who'd bent to examine a card at the bottom of the display. She looked up at him when he approached and her eyes met his. Her
brown
eyes. Which offset her olive complexion. The hair and the cheekbones were the same as he'd envisioned a moment earlier, but this woman looked different in most other ways.

“Hi,” she said when Joseph stood five feet from her, his momentum stopped suddenly.

“I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“Nope, just me.”

Joseph began to back away, feeling incredibly foolish. “Sorry. Very sorry.”

“No problem.”

He turned to seek out Will, directing the teen toward the door. They passed the woman again and she smiled at Joseph. He tried to return the smile, but he was relatively certain it came across as more of a cringe.

“I saw her,” he said when he and Will were back on the street.

“Where? In there?”

“Just now.”

“Then why are we standing here? Shouldn't we be, you know, reuniting the two of you?”

Joseph shook his head quickly. “No, no; she wasn't
in
there.”

Will struck his signature head-cocked, hand-in-pocket pose. “You want to start this conversation over again?”

Joseph started walking back in the direction of the car. “I got a quick glimpse of a woman in the
store. For some reason, I turned her face into another face – my wife's face. It was so familiar; I can't believe I forgot it for even a second.”

Will stopped and pointed back toward the store. “But it's definitely not the woman in there?”

“No, she looked nothing like her.”

Will's knee bent, a half version of “the pose.” “You do realize you're confusing the hell out of me, right?”

“I saw my wife while we were in the store, but my wife wasn't in the store. A woman there had some of her features, and the rest just filled in.” He closed his eyes and allowed the face to take over his vision. “I can see her again. I can finally see her again.”

“I don't suppose you can see her holding a piece of mail with her address on it, huh?”

Joseph opened his eyes. “No such luck. But this is good. She's with me now, more than she was before. We need to get on the road again.”

“Okay, which way.”

Joseph followed the planes of his wife's face, hoping for a clue. “I have no idea. I've seen her, though, Will. As beautiful as I knew she would be. She's out there. Let's go find her.”

. . . The baby was playing with the peas on his high chair tray. Antoinette smiled, noting that she was fairly sure that not a single pea had made it into his mouth. Batting them around the tray and onto the floor seemed so much more interesting to the little boy. When he got older, she'd let him know that it was inappropriate to play with his food and that eating it was actually much more fun. Not now, though; he seemed to be having too much fun.

Antoinette kneaded butter and flour together to make the
beurre manié
for the chicken stew she'd been simmering. “This will help flavor and thicken the sauce,” she said to the boy, who she noticed had managed to mash some of the peas on the tray. He was now examining the pulp on his right palm with extraordinary interest. “I use different thickening techniques,” she said with a grin she could not have suppressed under any circumstances. “Sometimes I'll use cornstarch, sometimes arrowroot. It all depends on the recipe. This approach is the most elegant, though.”

With a few rapid shakes of his hands, her baby
boy had managed to fling the crushed peas back onto the tray. Now he was using his index finger to create lines with them.

“Are you telling me that you'd like to make pureed peas with me? I was planning to sauté them with onions, but a puree could be nice, also.” She knelt down next to the high chair so their heads were at the same level. “What do you think? Should we mash them with some cream and cinnamon?”

The baby cackled and ran his fingers through the green mass he'd created. He then reached his hand toward Antoinette's mouth. She let him feed her some of the pea mash, which he seemed to enjoy doing.

“Umm, delicious!” She pretended to consider the taste carefully. “We might want to add a little more salt, don't you think?”

He waved his arms wildly again, which Antoinette interpreted as “And maybe a little white pepper.”

“Very good point! Proper seasoning is an art and you already understand it. I knew that my baby was a genius.”

She stood up to finish the meal. Both sides of the family – eighteen people in all – were coming over today to celebrate her sister Rachel's birthday. That meant multiple entrees, four different side dishes, an elaborate salad, and the chocolate cake with raspberry filling her sister had specially requested. Antoinette had been cooking since seven this morning. She knew she would be exhausted tonight and hoped that Don would offer up one of his luxurious foot
massages, but right now she was working with the energy that she always felt whenever she was preparing a big dinner party. Her son had been with her for most of the work, sometimes in his high chair, sometimes crawling around on the floor, often in her arms. Throughout it all, she'd described everything she was doing to him, looking forward to the day when he would become her talented assistant in the kitchen.

Having a baby had turned out to be so much harder than she and Don expected. She'd even begun to believe that it would never happen, though her heart broke every time she allowed herself to think that. Now that her beautiful little boy was here, though, she knew that the wait had delivered its reward. When she'd held her son for the first time, she didn't think she had ever seen anything so perfect, and she still felt that way – even if at the moment her perfect child had green mush in his hair. She'd let him get as messy as he wanted right now; they would be taking a bath together in a few minutes anyway.

An hour and a half later, everyone was seated around the elongated dinner table. Don raised his glass, and everyone joined him, except the baby who was too busy trying to stuff a slice of bread up his nose. Yes, she had work to do with this one about the proper appreciation of food. It was going to be difficult to give him this lesson, however, if she giggled through the entire thing, and, above everything else, the boy knew how to make her giggle.

“I'd like to wish my sister-in-law the happiest of birthdays. Somehow all the women in this family
look younger every year. I'm not asking how it happens, but I did want you to know that I noticed.” Everyone laughed and Rachel thanked Don and told him that he'd just earned an extra night of babysitting from her. Glass still raised, Don turned toward Antoinette. “And to my remarkable wife, I want to offer a toast to the wonderful food she's made for us today. Hannah, you never cease to amaze me.”

Cheers went up around the room, but then ended quickly, as people set out to fill their plates. Antoinette knew there would be little conversation for the next fifteen minutes or so, other than the occasional comment on the meal. They would linger at the table for at least an hour afterward, catching one another up on the events of the week or the news outside their doors, but while they ate, they said little. Antoinette took that as the ultimate compliment . . .