Summerville, Washington

St. Jude Homeless Shelter

Christmas Eve

He needed Caroline like he needed light and air. More.

The tall, emaciated boy dressed in rags rose from his father’s lifeless body sprawled bonelessly on the icy, concrete floor of the shelter.

His father had been dying for a long time—most of his life, in fact. There had always been something in him that didn’t want to live. The boy couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father clean and sober. He had no mother. All his life, it had been just the two of them, father and son, drifting from shelter to shelter, staying until they were kicked out.

The boy stood for a moment, looking down at his only blood relation in this world, dead in a pool of vomit and shit. Nobody had noticed his father’s dead body yet. Nobody ever noticed them or even looked their way if they could help it. Even the other lost, hopeless souls in the shelter recognized someone worse off than they were and shunned them.

The boy looked around at the averted faces, eyes cast to the floor.

Nobody cared that the drunk wasn’t getting up again. Nobody cared what happened to his son.

There was nothing for the boy here. Nothing.

He had to get to Caroline.

He had to move fast before they discovered that his father was dead. If they found the body here, the police and social workers and administrators would come for him. He was eighteen, but he couldn’t prove it. And he knew enough about the way things worked to know that he’d become a ward of the state. He’d be locked up in some prisonlike orphanage.

No. No way. He’d rather die.

The boy moved toward the stairs that would take him up out of the shelter into the gelid, sleety afternoon.

An old woman looked up as he passed by, cloudy eyes flickering with recognition. Susie. Ancient, toothless Susie. She wasn’t lost in alcohol like his father. She was lost in the smoky depths of her own mind.

“Ben, chocolate chocolate?” she cackled and smacked her wrinkled, rubbery lips. He’d once shared a chocolate bar Caroline had brought him, and Susie had looked to him for sweets ever since.

Here he was known as Ben. In the last shelter—Portland, was it? — his father had called him Dick. Naming him after the manager of the shelter always bought them some time. Not enough. Eventually, the shelters got sick of his father’s drunken rages and found a way to kick them out.

Susie’s hands, with their long, black, ragged nails, grasped at him. Ben stopped and held her hand a moment. “No chocolate, Susie,” he said gently.

Like a child, her eyes filled with tears. Ben stooped to give her grimy wrinkled cheek a kiss, then rushed up the stairs and out into the open air.

No hesitation as he turned into Morrison Street. He knew exactly where he was going. To Greenbriars. To Caroline.

To the one person on the face of the earth who cared about him. To the only person who treated him as a human being and not some half-wild animal who smelled of dirty clothes and rotting food.

Ben hadn’t eaten in two days, and he had only a too-short cotton jacket on to keep the cold away. His big, bony wrists stuck out of the jacket’s sleeves, and he had to tuck his hands into his armpits to keep them warm.

No matter. He’d been cold and hungry before.

The only warm thing he wanted right now was Caroline’s smile.

Like the arrow of a compass to a lodestar, he leaned into the wind to walk the mile and a half to Greenbriars.

No one looked his way as he trudged by. He was invisible, a lone, tall figure dressed in rags. It didn’t bother him. He’d always been invisible. Being invisible had helped him survive.

The weather worsened. The wind blew icy needles of sleet directly into his eyes until he had to close them into slits.

Didn’t matter. He had an excellent sense of direction and could make his way to Greenbriars blindfolded.

Head down, arms wrapped around himself to conserve what little warmth he’d been able to absorb at the shelter, Ben slowly left behind the dark, sullen buildings of the part of the city that housed the shelter. Soon the roads opened up into tree-lined avenues. Ancient brick buildings gave way to graceful, modern buildings of glass and steel.

No cars passed—the weather was too severe for that. There was nobody on the streets. Under his feet, the icy buildup crackled.

He was almost there. The houses were big here, in this wealthy part of town. Large, well built, with sloping green lawns that were now covered in ice and snow.

He usually made his way through the back streets, invisible as always. Someone like him in this place of rich and powerful people would be immediately stopped by the police, so he always took the back streets on a normal day. But today the streets were deserted, and he walked openly on the broad sidewalks.

It usually took him half an hour to walk to Greenbriars but today the ice-slick sidewalks and hard wind dragged at him. An hour after leaving the shelter, he was still walking. He was strong, but hunger and cold started to wear him down. His feet, in their cracked shoes, were numb.

Music sounded, so lightly at first that he wondered whether he was hallucinating from cold and hunger. Notes floated in the air, as if borne by the snow.

He rounded a corner and there it was—Greenbriars. Caroline’s home. His heart pounded as it loomed out of the sleety mist. It always pounded when he came here, just as it pounded whenever she was near.

He usually came in through the back entrance, when her parents were at work and Caroline and her brother in school. The maid left at noon and from noon to one the house was his to explore. He could move in and out like a ghost. The back door lock was flimsy, and he’d been picking locks since he was five.

He’d wander from room to room, soaking up the rich, scented atmosphere of Caroline’s home.

The shelter rarely had hot water, but still he took care to wash as well as he could whenever he headed out to Greenbriars. The stench of the shelter had no place in Caroline’s home.

Greenbriars was so far beyond what he could ever hope to have that there was no jealousy, no envy in him as he touched the backs of the thousands of books in the library, walked into sweet-smelling closets full of new clothes, opened the huge refrigerator to see fresh fruits and vegetables. Caroline’s family was rich in a way he couldn’t comprehend, as if they belonged to a different species living on another planet.

To him, it was simply Caroline’s world. And living in it for an hour a day was like touching the sky.

Today nobody could see him approach in the storm. He walked right up the driveway, feeling the gravel through the thin soles of his shoes. The snow intensified, the wind whipping painful icy particles through the air. Ben knew how to move quietly, stealthily when he had to. But it wasn’t necessary now. There was no one to see him or hear him as he crunched his way to the window.

The music was louder now, the source a yellow glow. It wasn’t until he had reached the end of the driveway that Ben realized that the yellow glow was the big twelve-pane window of the living room, and the music was someone playing the piano.