Money has continued to trickle through Alex’s careful management into Miranda’s account. Every week, he comes up to their door—usually choosing a time that they’re not there or asleep—and slides another receipt under their door. This week, Miranda finally managed to catch him.
He was already on the steps when she threw open the door and came running after him. “Wait!” she called. “Alex?”
He stopped on the steps, though it was raining quite hard, and glanced up at her. “Afternoon, Mrs. Spiller. I thought you were at the store.”
“I bet you did,” she said grimly. She grabbed his wrist and dragged him back up the stairs and into the apartment. She closed the door shut and locked it, then turned and folded her arms over her chest.
“Yikes,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets. “I’m in trouble now, aren’t I?”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked him, brandishing the paper. “Where are you getting this money from? What do you want from us?”
“Ma’am—”
“No, don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” she said. “I found that ‘contract’ with you and Evan. What are you putting in his head? He’s only eleven years old, he’s not going to be working for anyone—”
“Ma’am, I just—”
“I told you not to call me that!” Her voice cracked, and she put her hands over her face.
Alex’s heart twisted, and he took a step toward her. “Look, Mrs. Spiller, I promise you, there’s no strings attached to any of this. I just drew up that contract with Evan because he needs to feel like he’s helping, but it’s not real. He owes me nothing, and neither do you.”
Miranda lowered her hands and stared at him. “But why?” she whispered. “Why are you helping us?”
Alex gazed back at her, unable to make any reply, but the answer was in his eyes. I stepped close to Miranda and made sure that she remembered what he told her the last time he had come—“I was a foster kid, too.”
In the silence that was full of all the things they couldn’t say, Miranda looked into the kitchen and suddenly laughed. “You know, I think it’s helping,” she said. “He got an ‘A’ on his civics test—first time he’s studied for anything in months.”
Alex raised his eyebrows and followed her gaze to see the test in question proudly displayed on the fridge. “That’s awesome,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty. “Hey, can I borrow a pen?”
Miranda watched, a little dubiously, as Alex wrote out a congratulatory note and stuck it to the fridge with the cash and the test. “So you really just want him to focus on school?” she asked. “You’re not going to ask him to do—anything else?” Her hesitation was filled with all sorts of imagined horrors.
“Trust me, I don’t want him anywhere near the shit I have to deal with,” Alex said grimly. Then he glanced up and grimaced. “Uh, sorry.”
Miranda shook her head with a wry smile. “I heard a lot worse from my husband. Just don’t use that kind of language around Evan, okay? He doesn’t need any encouragement.”
“I hear you.” Alex looked back at her and gathered up his courage. “Look, you’re a great mom to that kid. If I were him—” That was the closest he could come to saying what he really felt, but Miranda understood.
She put her hands on her hips. “You’re staying for dinner,” she said.
He looked up, surprised. “Oh, no, ma’am, I couldn’t.”
“Call me ma’am one more time,” she said, and he held up his hands, laughing. “You’re staying, if I have to tie you to a chair. The least I can do is get you a good meal.”
Alex hesitated. “It’s a sweet offer,” he said, and he was very tempted. “But it’s also a really bad idea.”
“Why? Because people are watching me? People have been watching me for months, I’m almost used to it.”
“No, because people are watching me,” Alex replied. “What I’ve been doing—it’s not going to get you in trouble, I don’t think, but it’s made some people mad at me, and I just—I need to be careful.”
This vague explanation, carefully crafted to be not too alarming while still being honest, failed at the first at least. Miranda frowned at him, some of the same worry that she felt for Evan spiking in her chest. “Are you in danger?”
Alex couldn’t say no, though he wanted to reassure her. “I just have to be careful,” he repeated.
Miranda’s eyes narrowed, and she took his hand and pulled him into the kitchen, pushing him to sit down at the table. “All right,” she said. “Tell me what you’re doing. I deserve to know where all of this money is coming from anyway, don’t I? Tell me.”
Alex would have said no, out of the impulse to protect her, but while I might have felt the same impulse a while back, I know Miranda a bit better now.
“Tell her,” I advised Alex. “It will do you good to have at least one person who knows your plan, and she can handle it.”
He took a bit more persuading from both of us, but finally Alex laid out the whole plan. By the time he had finished, Miranda was white as chalk, but her hands were quiet on the table. And all she said was, “Do you think you can do it?”
Alex considered her, and himself. He smiled. “Yes, I think I can.”
“If just the wrong person finds out…” she whispered.
Alex got to his feet. “Which is why I can’t stay. But it’ll be fine, Mrs. Spiller. I’m being very careful, and I’ll be fine.”
He started for the door, but he couldn’t resist reaching out to touch her shoulder just lightly as he went by. Miranda, having learned from Evan just what that simple gesture must have meant to him, suddenly jumped to her feet and threw her arms around his neck.
“You make sure of it, you hear me?” she said into his ear as he stood stiff and shocked in her embrace. “You make sure that you are fine. Because I have a lot of dinners to make you to pay you back for this and I’ll be very angry if you miss even one of them.”
Her voice wavered through all of this; her grip did not, and she didn’t even think about letting him go until he tentatively rested his hands on her shoulders. When she stepped back, there was a little bright light in his soul that hadn’t been there before.
“I’ll be fine,” he said again, but it was not the casual dismissal that it had been before. Having someone who cared whether or not he was fine made his own safety more of a consideration for him. He will be more careful, now. “And I’ll be back.”
And he left, making sure that there were no familiar faces in the parking lot before he stepped out from the shadow of the stairs. Before he got into his car, he turned his face to the rain for a moment, letting the drops fall on his face.
Protection is an odd thing. It seems so straightforward: a job for the strong which benefits the weak. And yet strength and weakness are relative and can be found in many places. It is Alex’s position and his cunning that make him able to protect Miranda, but his desire to do so arose from a lack in him, an emptiness that he never actually expected her to fill. That she might in fact do so, that even in the smallest way he might feel the kindness and love that he has always longed for, makes him stronger.
It seems that we all have some form of protection that we can offer others.