Chapter 15 #2
“You’ve had him all that time. I don’t even remember who looked after him before that,” Linda admitted, “but you’re all he knows.” She turned to Trent and held out a hand to him. He took her hand. Linda added, “Please, please look after them.” And, with that, she stumbled toward the front door.
Naomi whispered to Trent, “We can’t just let her go out there like that. She won’t make it on her own.”
“I know,” he whispered. “An ambulance is on the way. It will be waiting right outside in just a minute.”
Naomi looked at him with gratitude.
Linda muttered, “It won’t matter.”
Naomi knew not to ask questions, but she couldn’t not ask. “Why? Trent can help you.”
“I know, but I’m already dead.”
“In that case,” Trent noted, “let us get you to a hospital where we can make sure you can at least be taken care of properly.”
She smiled. “They just threw me overboard. It would have been a faster and probably a kinder death, but somehow I survived everything and escaped.” With that, she added, “I left them everything they needed so that they would know to leave you alone.” She whispered, “Drug runners, they control the oceans here.”
“We can still help you,” Trent repeated.
She ignored him and went on. “Even when you try to stop one group, another group comes up. They now have everything they needed from us, so they’ll have no fight with you now.
But me?” She chuckled. “That’s a different story.
It won’t matter to them if you live or if my son lives, but for me? … It’s all over.”
“What did you give them?” Trent asked.
She turned to him and smiled. “Access to a particular bank account.”
“The whole operation?” Trent surmised.
“Most of it, yes,” she said. “The code was in Ricky’s teddy bear. Something we did years ago, just in case.”
“His teddy bear?” Naomi repeated.
“Yes,” Linda confirmed, with a sigh. “The teddy bear on the ship with you. They didn’t even know, but they had something far more valuable than the package they were meant to get all along.
That shipment is in the ocean someplace now, but I, like my son, have an aptitude for math and for remembering numbers,” she shared.
“I just never had an aptitude for staying on the straight and narrow. And that”—she chuckled lightly—“cost me so much.”
She went to open her mouth, and then her eyes rolled up in the back of her head, and she collapsed into Trent’s arms. He immediately called out, “Open the front door.”
She raced to the front door, opened it.
Oakley ran to them at top speed. Trent told Naomi to stay with Ricky, and, carrying the dying woman, Trent and Oakley raced downstairs. Naomi heard the sirens of an ambulance, but she already knew it was too late.
Even if Linda wasn’t dead right now, she would be very quickly.
It was so evident that she was done for and had been doing everything she could, just trying to make things right before she died.
Immediately Naomi forgave Linda for her failings, then chastised herself for every bad thought she’d ever had about Ricky’s parents.
Linda did what she could to protect her child, and that’s all any mother could ever do. That’s what was important.
At the end of the day, that mattered most.
And, just like that, they had the answers they had all been looking for.
Blood-stained cleaning cloths were in her hands now from cleaning up the mess.
When Trent came back up a little later, she still stood here at the front door, lost in all that had just happened. She looked up at him, tears in her eyes, and she knew the answer she would get before she asked. “Dear God, please don’t tell me—”
“I know, but it is closure. She’s gone.”
“What about the father? Any news on him, … any confirmation? He’s dead already, isn’t he? That’s what Linda said, but do we believe that?”
“Oh, I think so,” Trent declared. “She had no reason to lie about that. And she herself was gut shot. So, the fact that she was even moving was a testament to everything she was trying to accomplish.”
“It’s so sad,” Naomi cried out.
“It is. Yet it also brings closure in many ways.”
“Are you sure she’s dead?”
“Yeah,” he said, his tone flat. “The ambulance went out of here working on her, but I’m pretty sure she was gone before we got to the bottom of the stairs. That was a fatal wound from the get-go, and she knew it.”
Naomi closed her eyes, and Trent held her close, then whispered, “Just think about this though. We now know his parents are gone, and she went so far as to set up guardianship, so this will give you all the clearance and the freedom for you to be with Ricky for real. You both are good to go.”
She had tears in her eyes, realizing that’s exactly what she had wanted all along. Somehow through all this she not only got the boy but she also got the man, yet was acutely aware of the heartbreak in all this.
“The legal work will go through pretty easily now,” he told her in a soothing tone. “And you will be his legal mother.”
“And when do I tell him about tonight?”
He was quiet for a long moment. “I trust that, when he’s ready to know, you’ll know what to say.
If it isn’t right away, which I suspect it won’t be, just know that you’ll be ready and that you’ll give him the very best impression of who his parents were and how they felt about him when he asks about them. ”
Trent added, “At the end of the day, his parents did right by him—or at least they tried. We really can’t expect anything else.
Linda died to protect him, and, in a way, his father died to protect him too.
More than that, they sacrificed their time with him in order to keep him safe.
All of that is enough to tell Ricky how much both of his parents loved their little boy. ”
All Naomi could do was cry. It was both happy tears and really sad ones.
“No ifs, ands, or buts,” Trent told her as he took her hand in his, “this is a whole new beginning, and it’s perfect for the both of you.”
“For the three of us,” she clarified. “Right? You’ll be with us, so honestly this couldn’t get much better.”
“I’m all-in.” And, with that, he wrapped her up and pulled her inside. “Now, let’s finish cleaning things up so Ricky can’t see what happened and then try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is a whole new day.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, looking up at him, hope in her eyes. “About us?” No matter what tomorrow would bring her, today had been a crazy one. Still, at this moment, she was looking toward a brighter future than she’d ever dared to hope for. “Are you sure?” she repeated.
“Damn sure.”