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Mama’s bent over clearing creeping Charlie out of the strawberry patch when the side screen door of the Lodge smacks open and Jake emerges into the late morning, rumpled and weary-looking and squinting in the sun. She sits back on her heels and watches him for a bit as he pokes around the side yard, kicking pine cones and shuffling his sneakers in the dust. He looks tired, sad, like whatever it was he was doing these past three days holed up in his room it sure wasn’t sleeping well.
Mama sighs. Barclay’s at least been making sure Jake eats, even if he ain’t been up to joining everyone else for mealtimes, and she knows he’s been in the springs at least once because he left his slippers out by the side of the water last night, where she found them this morning when she came out to tend the garden. But he sure don’t look well.
Jake drifts himself over towards the gate to the garden, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, and Mama can’t help the way the sight makes her heart twist, stirring something hot and fearsome down in her chest. She’d kill a man for any one of the folks who live at the Lodge, wouldn’t even stop to think about it, but Jake’s special even taking that into account. He’s grown by Sylvan standards and most of the way there by human ones, but Jake’s her baby and always will be. She’d do damn near anything for Jake. Seeing his sweet, bright face all twisted and downcast sets off a sharp sense of wrong in her, the same kind that sparks when she catches sight of an Abomination, the kind that says it’s her job to put things right by any means it takes.
She tugs off one of her garden gloves and pushes her sun hat back off her head, scrubs her fingers through the hot tangle of her hair as Jake fiddles diffidently with the latch on the garden gate. “Well, come on in then,” she says, as he starts a little and glances up all wide-eyed at her. “Plenty weeds need pulling if you’re itchin’ for something to do.”
One side of his mouth quirks up in a crooked little not-smile and he slips through the gate, latches it behind him like her and Barclay taught him.
“You want some gloves?” She didn’t bring an extra pair but she’ll toss him hers if he wants ‘em, god knows Madeline Cobb’s no stranger to getting her hands dirty.
Jake shakes his head and comes to kneel down next to her, gets himself situated. He hesitates a second, straightens way up and cranes his neck to look all around through the high wire fence that keeps the deer out of the garden. When he’s satisfied nobody’s watching he tugs the leather cuff off his wrist and shoves it in the pocket of his grubby jeans, blinking his liquid black seal eyes in the sun.
Shit, so it’s like that. Mama’s heart twists all over again as Jake reaches out and digs the blunt black claws of his flippered hands into the dirt, tugging up a clump of weeds and dropping it into the bucket on the ground between them. Jake’s hardly ever in the mood to be anything but human-shaped, doesn’t swap as soon as the coast is clear the way some of the Lodge folks do. He told her once that his sylph form feels like somethin’ he’s all but grown out of on Earth, like shoes that don’t fit me, Mama. It’s only when he’s feeling real torn-up or small or sad that he wears his seal pelt out in front of God and everybody like this.
Mama reaches out and brushes her fingers over the short, silken fur at the nape of his neck, watches him stare determinedly at the creeping Charlie. “You ‘bout ready to talk about it?”
Jake sniffs, doesn’t look up as he rips his way through the weeds. It’s a bad habit they never could break him of, the way he pretends he’s not crying or doesn’t want to no matter how hard he gets hit in that tender heart of his. “It’s nothing. It’s just dumb.”
“Life most always is, baby," she murmurs, still petting the back of his neck like she can soothe away what ails him.
Jake snuffles and scrubs his forearm across his face. He’s wearing the ratty t-shirt he got when he was fifteen, him and Keith and Hollis, when the three of them broke that record for most times down the Thunder Avalanche or whatever that dumb goddamned waterslide was called. It’s closed now, that park, and the t-shirt’s worn so thin it’s got a couple spots where his fur pokes right through the fabric, and she can’t help remember how proud he looked when he came home on his bike that day versus how miserable he looks right now. For a second she thinks real serious about tracking Hollis and Keith down and eating their hearts for hurting her baby, ignoring for a moment that they’re just dumb kids too, same’s Jake is.
Jake shakes his head, still working determinedly to clear the strawberry patch of its burden of weeds. They’ve let it get out of hand, she knows, but this past hunt was a bad one and before that, well, the hole in the roof wasn’t gonna fix itself. Just ain’t enough hours in the day, some days. Mama tugs her hat back up and goes back to pulling alongside Jake, just working in silence for a long while until he feels ready to talk. If he doesn’t ever, well, then maybe at least being out in the sunlight doing something simple and safe will do him some good.
“Hollis is — they’re so dumb,” Jake says finally, with what from him passes for vicious emphasis even if it would probably sound like petulant hurt to anybody who didn’t know him like Mama does. “And Keith said the meanest shit, Mama, just — "
Mama's head comes up and her eyes get narrow. "Mean like what kind of shit?" she says carefully, cloaking the razor-sharp teeth of her anger in blunt, gentle concern.
Jake shrugs roughly. "Like if I like Owens so much maybe I should just go be a . . . a fuckin' cop," he says, wounded and baffled, "Like how if I'm a chickenshit maybe I should go bake cookies, like . . ." he breaks off with a hurt, hiccuppy kind of sound.
Mama grinds her teeth down hard for a second, she knows that's a dig at Barclay that Jake's trying not to let her know Keith made, and she doesn't want to twist this all around and make it about how much she wants to kick the little delinquent's ass right now, not when what it needs to be about is her boy's broken heart. "Folks get mean when they're mad, sometimes," she says, like she ain't prime example number one of folks.
"Well it sucks," Jake says, all heart on his sleeve, "And he didn't need to be mad, neither one of them did, I wasn't trying to leave them, I just . . ." he subsides into a sad, hurt huddle, plucking at the tangles of weed under his fingers.
Mama waits for him to finish the thought. All either her or Barclay could get out of Jake when he came back from town three days ago is that they had a fight, the three of them. The shape of what actually happened is still hazy, slowly taking form from Jake's words like a carving rising up to the surface of the wood, but she knows if you push too far and too fast you can mar the work beyond salvaging, so she just waits.
“Owens is, you know, is always kind of hassling us, and following us around,” Jake says finally, “And telling us to keep it reined in, and they’re sick of it — and I, I am too, I hate it just as much as them, only they wanna . . . they wanna start doing the really crazy stuff, like illegal stuff, just to say fuck him.” The words tumble out of him in a quick, hurt jumble as he yanks on a weed so hard the top snaps off in his hand. “And I told them I wouldn’t do that, that I can’t, and they didn’t even — they just got, they just got mad.”
Mama takes all of that in without saying much, even though her anger’s still boiling in her like a kettle. Not that she gives a fuck what Zeke Owens wants or says, or disapproves particularly of the kids wanting to stick it to him. It’s just the way Jake hunches his shoulders that does it.
“I’m not like them, Mama, I can’t get in that kinda trouble.” He mumbles. “If I get in trouble then —”
He doesn’t say it, doesn’t have to. If he gets in trouble with the law they could all be in trouble, her and Barclay and everyone else at the Lodge, and Jake never needed that explained to him, that’s something he figured out all on his own when he still was just a kid.
‘Course Jake got hauled in and sentenced to capital punishment when he was thirteen goddamned years old because he climbed the wrong fence, so he knows as much about being in trouble as Hollis and Keith combined will ever learn.
Mama swallows the lump in her throat and shucks her gloves off and holds her arms out, and Jake shoves the weed bucket aside and leans into her and closes his eyes like he’s still that kid, thirteen and half-starved and scared out of his rabbit-ass mind.
“I thought if you cared about someone you were supposed to listen to them.” He says plaintively.
She sighs and strokes the fine white curve of his head and neck, wrapping her other arm around his shoulders and hanging on tight.
“If everyone had that figured out like you do we’d be in a hell of a lot better shape,” she says.
Jake sniffs. “The worst part is . . . like, I wasn’t trying to leave but if they’re gonna not listen, if they’re gonna treat me being worried like I’m just some dumb scared kid and not even try and understand why, then . . .” He swallows convulsively, “Then I guess I did leave. Or they left me. Or whatever.”
“I guess so,” Mama agrees quietly. “And I know that hurts like hell.”
“Yeah.” Jake leans on her for a very long moment. “I wish —”
He doesn’t say what he wishes, but she knows anyway. God only knows she did her fair share of wishing she could show people what she really was under the shape she wore, too, once upon a time.
He makes that sad, hiccupy noise again. There’s a wet patch on her shirt that she knows he’s trying hard to pretend isn’t there. “But I’m scared it wouldn’t even matter.” He adds in a tiny voice. “Like. If they don’t care now, maybe they wouldn’t care even if they knew.”
Mama sighs, makes a noncommittal noise and cradles his head. Jake’s right about one thing, he is different from Hollis and Keith. Different from her and Barclay, too. He’s never gotten mean-scared like some folks she could name, never let the things life’s done to him make him too sharp or guarded or anything but what he is, gentle and wild and beautiful and tender and brave. He’s better than those dumb small town hooligans by a goddamned country mile, but part of that is he doesn’t seem to know he is, has always trusted the two of them to be just as good as him when it counts.
Mama hasn’t got that kind of faith in humankind most days, especially not in two of ‘em who’ve made Jake cry like this. But she just can’t bear to say that and risk it pulling even a little piece of that broken, tender heart away from him for good.
Jake just lets her hold him for a long while, while the sun climbs the sky and the ants go trundling over the packed-earth paths between the vegetable patches. “Mama,” he says finally, voice no longer watery with tears he’s pretending not to shed but still soft and hurting and sad, “What if I’m gonna miss them like this forever?”
Mama closes her eyes and takes a deep, deep goddamned breath. She’s going to grind Hollis into paste. She’s gonna tear Keith into more tiny pieces than Carter’s got fucking liver pills. She’s gonna get her shotgun out of the shop and her shells out of the office and blast a goddamned hole through the world that made her boy this sad.
“Nothin’ hurts forever, baby.” She says instead. And then, because that’s a goddamned lie and she’s got the old, old heartaches to prove it, “Not the same way it does when it’s fresh, anyway.”
Jake accepts that with a nod and a snuffled, shuddery breath, slipping his dirt-caked hands around behind her back so he can squeeze her tight, tight. “I hate this. This fuckin’ sucks.” He mumbles into her shoulder.
“Sure does.” She holds him for another long while like that, until she can tell his breath’s evened out and he’s past the worst of it for now. She can’t imagine this’ll be the last of it, but it’s a lull in the storm.
“C’mon,” Mama says, nudging his neck gently with her hand. The fur underneath her fingers is starting to get damp and heavy. “Day’s warmin’ up. You need to get inside, honey, or put your bracelet back on before you overheat.”
“Mmmph. ‘Kay.” He nuzzles into her shoulder for another second before he pulls away, though, and grimaces at the clots of dried soil caked to the webs of his fingers. “Gotta shower, I guess.”
“Probably both could stand to.” Mama climbs to her feet, ignoring the way her knee creaks, and offers him a hand up. “How ‘bout after that you help me take that new bench out to the arboretum in Harrisonburg? We’ll get us some lunch while we’re out.”
Jake lights up. Not as much as he usually would, but enough that she feels a little bit smug about it. “Can we get tacos?”
Mama smiles, and the fondness goes through her like buckshot, sharp and swift and all-fuckin’-over. “I’ll buy you all the tacos you can eat.”
He wraps her up in another hug, this one tight and buoyant and quick before he’s out of the garden and halfway to the door. His steps aren’t as light as they ought to be, but the stoop’s gone out of his shoulders for now, and she’ll take that as a victory.
Mama smiles, watches him go, and then bends down and retrieves her gloves before she follows him into the Lodge.