Epilogue #3
“I’m bringing Brocky,” she declared, grabbing the teddy bear off the couch. It was the same one I had given Riya for her missing Valentine’s Day. When Ari had found it, she decided it was hers and wouldn’t hear of any arguments to the contrary.
“Whatever fries your bacon, kid. But we gotta go.”
“I like bacon,” she declared, tucking the now ratty-looking bear under her arm. “Can we get bacon after?” she asked as we walked to the door.
“Only if you will eat the eggs first,” Riya told her, brow raised.
“Bleh,” Ari said as she walked out the door.
“You’d never know I choked down kale, spinach, and cucumber smoothies for her,” Riya said as we walked into the hall and I entered the code.
I put my arm around her as we started down the stairs. “Well, look at it this way: she’s never been sick thanks to that leg up.”
“Let’s go!” Ari yelled from the bottom of the stairs, as if she hadn’t been the one holding us up in the first place.
“We sure we want to do this?” I asked as we rounded on her.
“Never more sure of anything in my life,” she said with certainty, smiling over at me.
We drove to the courthouse to the sound of Ari singing some absolutely atrocious pop song that she had recently heard and promptly made us all sick of in under two days. It was a new record.
Then we went in and signed the documents that made Nathan officially ours.
Nathan was born addicted to heroin and had some ADHD as a side effect.
But when the caseworker came to check out the house that we had recently added onto because I bought the building next door and blew it out, wanting to keep the safety of being right above my work, and she met the little ball of energy that was our daughter, she declared we seemed more than capable of handling him.
He was the same age as Ari, actually having a birthday just one day after hers.
Ari had championed the case of being the big sister and would not hear of us adopting someone older than her.
She didn’t care if it was older by five years or five minutes; she just wanted to be older.
And while Riya always wanted to adopt the older, more unwanted kids, we figured that with his learning disabilities, he was likely not the top of most people’s lists.
That and we thought Ari having an age mate might work in everyone’s favor.
Nathan was tall and a bruiser size-wise, with shoulders that all but guaranteed the high school coaches would be vying for him one day.
While his case file was closed to us but open to the mother in case she ever wanted to get in touch—something Riya had insisted on like her parents had done with her—we were told that he was from a young Puerto Rican father and a Lebanese mother.
He had tan skin, dark brown hair, and almost startling gray-blue eyes.
“Nate,” Ari declared as soon as we walked out with a boy we had only gotten to spend a couple of stolen hours with here and there over the course of the year, “we are going to get bacon. But Mom says we have to eat our eggs first,” she said, scrunching up her face as she reached down and took his hand.
“I like eggs,” he said.
“Good,” she said, leaning close to his ear, “then you can eat half of mine.”
“Heard that,” Riya called. “Careful or I am going to make you eat some whole wheat toast too.”
“Whole wheat toast has seeds in it,” she told Nate with the same disgust as if it had snot in it.
“Gross,” he agreed in all their five-year-old opinionatedness.
“If we adopt more,” I said, looking over at Riya, “we are going to be outnumbered.”
She smiled then, big and happy, her entire face lit up by it, and took my hand. “I think we can handle it.”
We could.
If I could survive her hour in surgery after having Ari, I was pretty sure I could survive anything. And, to be perfectly honest, if adopting more kids kept putting that look on her face, I would be open to opening our doors to a goddamn bus full of them.
While she was happy most days, that look she had just given me was one I had seen a handful of times in our lives together.
I saw it when she first heard Ari’s heartbeat and when she first saw her after delivery.
I saw it when I finally got around to giving her a ring and a promise, about a year after we brought Ari home.
Then I had seen it again when she said “I do” in a very small civil ceremony with only Barrett, Brock, Tig, and Marg present.
And I saw it when she realized we were giving a kid in the system a life, a future, a family.
Yeah, there was no saying no to something that filled her so completely.
Riya - 4,995 Days
“You’re not scaring him off,” I told Sawyer, shaking my head at his daddy bear protective stance.
“Did you see that dress? I’m fucking scaring his no-good ass off.”
Ari was fifteen, and she had on an incredibly chaste sundress that showed practically no skin, and she was going on a group date with all her friends and a boy she had a crush on since the beginning of time.
It was all above board and safe, and I knew Ari was in no way the kind of girl to get pushed around or talked into anything.
We had already had the sex and safe, sex talk about half a dozen times over the past year, knowing I had become sexually active at around sixteen and that it was unrealistic to expect any different from her.
Though I certainly hoped she would hold off a little longer than I did.
Sawyer’s fears were realized when, about a year before, Ari had sprouted up, widened in the hip and butt area, and got a rack that put mine to shame, taking her out of an incredibly awkward phase she had been stuck in for about three years.
She was almost obnoxiously gorgeous.
But she was also confident, headstrong, opinionated, and set in her own beliefs and desires.
No boy was going to be able to tell her it was time to take things to the next level unless she had already decided that for herself.
But Sawyer was Sawyer and was overprotective of her and our other adoptive daughter, Benny, who was, thankfully for him, only seven and the biggest tomboy on the planet.
“I’m with Dad,” Nathan agreed, moving to stand next to his father, legs spread, arms crossed, full-on military stance.
See, when we brought Nate into the fold, he didn’t just get us; he got Barrett and Tig and Brock as well, all good men, all protective, all alpha in their own ways, all of them teaching him and our last adoptive son, Quinn, all the ways of being not only a good man but a good friend, brother, and protector to any woman who might need it.
“Me too!” Quinn declared, all of nine, but imitating his father and brother perfectly already.
Quinn was a somewhat new addition.
Sawyer and I had decided, after Benny, that we thought our family was complete.
But when we had shown up at the group home a couple of towns over to deliver Christmas presents, we had seen Quinn, and something inside my chest simply pulled me across the floor and toward him, like there was a chain connecting us.
His was the most tragic of all their stories.
Nate was drug-addicted as a baby and, even as a teen, struggled to keep himself focused in school, though he excelled in sports and training with his father and uncles. He had also been with us the longest and had opened up to receive love and gave it just as readily.
Benny had been raised by her grandmother, her mom disappearing off the face of the Earth for the first four years of her life. Then the grandmother died suddenly, and she was put up for adoption. We had found her barely two months later and went through the process of adopting her.
But Quinn, yeah, Quinn had a rough start in life.
He grew up in a slum with a crack-addicted mother and her abusive brother.
When child services took him away for the first time, it was because they showed up to a roach-infested house to find him in clothes two sizes too small, sitting in his own filthy diaper with a bleeding, blistering, oozing rash from it, crying, malnourished, and sleeping in a dresser drawer.
But having him taken away had seemed like a wake-up call to his mother who cleaned up, kicked out the uncle, got a job, got her life in order.
So when he was three, he was given back.
And his mother, worried about child services keeping her on file indefinitely, skipped town with him and started over in Navesink Bank. Where her drug abuse and neglect somehow flew under the radar, Quinn getting good at taking care of himself and covering for her.
That was until he was seven and they went shopping at the food store with whatever little money she had for such things.
She had shot up in the car before they went in.
And she OD’d right on the floor in the pasta aisle, with Quinn on the floor, screaming at her, trying to wake her up.
It was actually caught on camera by an onlooker who turned it over to child services ,who had, in turn, shown it to us so we could understand his trauma.
He came to us about eight months after that. And he was in therapy twice a week still to try to help him deal.
He still couldn’t stand the sight of pasta. So we never cooked it. He had a hard time accepting me as a maternal figure, likely because I was nothing like his biological mother and also that he was afraid I might die on him too.
But I was in it for the long haul and I knew we would get there some day.
He did, however, take to his sisters, brother, and Sawyer like a fish to water. He was Nate’s shadow, and if Nate took a stand on something, so did he.
“Mom,” Ari said, rolling her eyes at me.