A Certain Kind of Hero (8 page)

She hated her senseless emotionalism when what she needed was coolness and poise. She cleared her throat and forbade her voice to crack.

“We were even… We gave him his name and everything.”

She didn't have to do this, she told herself. There was no need to plead her case to these people, especially since the look in Arlen's eyes was decidedly unmoved.
Don't even try,
she wanted to say, but she was afraid.

“It was all perfectly legal,” she insisted quietly instead. She turned to Gideon, whose familiar face did not threaten her composure. “After all, Jared was an attorney, wasn't he, Gideon? So it
all
has to be in order, because Jared never left any loose ends.”

She took the slight bob of Gideon's chin as an endorsement. She turned to the judge, and calmly she concluded, “I know I'm a single parent now, but Peter is legally my own son.”

Judge Half was unruffled. “The boy's also Arlen's grandson.”

Son and grandson were not the same, Raina told herself, which enabled her to recover her manners and offer the old man a belated handshake. Arlen Skinner briefly permitted the courtesy, then withdrew his hand.

“Forgive me. I'm happy to meet you, Mr. Skinner. And I'm more than willing to…” She smiled at her son and fell back on her mother's prerogative to speak for him. “I know Peter's very glad to meet his grandfather, too. He never knew Jared's father, and mine is…”

Peter lowered his eyes and restlessly braced his hands on his knees.

Gideon was watching Peter.

Judge Half was surveying the order he had issued.

“All right, what's really going on here?” Raina demanded quietly. “Why did you send a policeman after my son?”

“Arlen asked the court to claim custody of his grandson on his behalf.” The judge's dark eyes conceded nothing, deeply impregnated as they were with the power of Solomon. “Peter is Chippewa.”

“So was my husband. Gideon's brother.” She spun around, seeking his help. “Gideon?”

But he appeared to be studying the blank side of the document the judge held in his hand. “I'm guessing the tribal court is exercising its right to claim custody of a Pine Lake Chippewa child living in a non-Indian home.” He looked up. “Right, Judge?”

“That's right.” Judge Half extended his beefy hand toward Raina. “I understand how you feel—”

“Gideon, whose side are you on? Peter is your…” Her hands curled into fists as she remembered Peter's claim. He could be related or not related—whichever he chose. Maybe Gideon saw it the same way.

But she did not. She was Peter's mother. Period.

“We'll call our attorney and get this whole thing straightened out today, Peter. I'm not going to let them do this.”

“I guess the question of whose side you're on—” Judge Half glanced sidelong at Gideon “—might be on a lot of people's minds, Mr. Chairman.”

Gideon sighed. “The boy lost his—” He swallowed hard and cast a quick look ceilingward. “He lost his father just two years ago.” He drilled Judge Half with a challenging stare. “We'd be hard-pressed to take him away from the only living parent he's ever known, wouldn't we, Judge? Hell, he's twelve years old. This is no time to be meddling in his—” Abruptly he turned his attention across the room. “You ready to raise another teenager, Arlen?”

“Marvin Strikes Many pointed him out to me at the celebration.” The old man shifted in his chair, spreading his hands wide. “I didn't interfere with my daughter's decision to give her baby up for adoption, even though I didn't think it was right. She said the baby would go to a good Indian home. Jared Defender, she said, so I thought, okay. A good Indian home. I was sorry when I heard he'd passed away. I wasn't doin' too good myself then, so I didn't get to his funeral or nothin'. I never knew he was married to a white woman. Never thought to ask.” He spared Raina a quick glance, then spoke to the judge. “I keep to myself, mostly. Never pay much attention to other people's business unless it crosses over into mine somehow.”

Judge Half folded his arms over his chest. “Did Tomasina tell you much about the boy's real father?”

Arlen shook his head. “She wouldn't say who it was. All she ever said was, ‘This is what he wants, too. Give the kid half a chance,' she said. I thought maybe she got some money out of it or something, because she always wanted to move to the big city, and that's what she up and did.” He grunted with
disgust and shook his head again. “But now, I don't think it's right, my grandson being raised by a white woman.”

“What's wrong with a
white
woman?” Raina demanded, the trepidation gone from her voice. “I'm a good mother, and Peter is my son. You can't take my
son.
I don't care what this crazy law—”

“Raina.” Gideon touched her arm. “Believe me, the judge has the authority to take this matter—”

She shook him off. “I
won't
give up my son!”

“I know.” His hand dropped to his side. “Under the circumstances, I'm sure some kind of compromise—”

“Compromise!” Raina clipped, as sharply indignant as any mother cat surrounded by males threatening to devour her young.

“Sounds a lot like the word
settlement,
” Arlen muttered. “Which is a word some of us are getting pretty tired of hearing.”

“Let's not confuse
that
issue with this one,” Gideon said. He rested one hand low on his hip and nodded toward the court order still held menacingly in the judge's hand. “What are we lookin' at here, Judge? Temporary custody while the lawyers cinch up their briefs, right? I'm the boy's uncle, and I'm also a resident of Pine Lake and an enrolled member of the band. I'd say I'm a good prospect, wouldn't you?”

“You want me to appoint you his guardian?”

Raina stepped forward. “Peter doesn't need—”

As a subtle warning, Gideon laid his hand on Raina's shoulder. “Temporarily.”

“Hey, I gotta get back to school by September,” Peter put in. It was his first real comment, and it surprised Raina that getting back to school was his first concern. But she was relieved to hear him speak up so sensibly for going home.

“We'll have time to get in some fishing, maybe a little
camping before school starts,” Gideon said. He slid Raina a glance that said
trust me,
while he turned his negotiations from the judge to Peter, skillfully including Arlen in the verbal circle he was drawing. “Your grandfather can teach you to dance like us. That's what you came up here for, right? To learn about your culture?”

All the while he kept his hand on Raina's shoulder.

She'd never known Gideon to be such a smooth talker. For the first time she could see a commonality between brothers. She noted that Arlen hadn't refused the suggestion yet.

Gideon sidled quickly over to Peter, tapped him on the arm with the back of his hand and inveigled some more. “So here you've got yourself a grandfather into the bargain. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty damn confusing,” Peter grumbled as he stood slowly. He looked up at Gideon, implicitly accepting him as an ally. “Can these guys really…uh…take me away from Mom?”

Raina closed her eyes briefly, clamping down on the terrible burning in her throat. She would not lose it now.
She would not.

“Judge Half is a fair man, Peter. He's got to sort though all the claims and the circumstances.” He laid his hand on the boy's shoulder. “You're right, it's confusing, but we'll get it straightened out. It'll just take a little time.” Gideon turned to the man who had the final say. “What about it, Judge?”

“You're her brother-in-law,” Arlen injected. “I don't know if that's such a good idea.”

“I'm the tribal chairman, Arlen. It's not like I'm gonna skip town.”

Arlen looked at Raina, then turned to the judge. “Maybe she might try to take off with him or something.”

“Take off!”
Raina ignored the look of warning in Gideon's
eyes. “If we leave, we won't be
taking off.
We have every right to leave here whenever—”

“Nobody's gonna take off,” Gideon, the self-appointed voice of reason, insisted. “You don't mind staying with me for a while, do you, Peter? Your mom will be staying at the lodge.”

Peter looked at each face in the room, one at a time. Finally he shrugged, then gave his head a quick shake. Unsure, uncomfortable, even a little unsteady, he was willing to defer to the man with the plan. At least Uncle Gideon—
Uncle
sounded better all the time—was not a stranger.

Gideon kept a judicious distance from Raina, but his eyes sought hers, and he offered quiet reassurance. “It'll work out.”

She glared at him.

He glanced away. “You got something you want me to sign, Judge?”

The judge produced another document, which he filled out and finally slid across the desk for Gideon's signature.

“I wish my dad was here,” Peter said as he assumed a detached stance from which to observe the proceedings. “He knew everything there was to know about the law. You'd hand him a court order, he'd hand you an injunction—” he snapped his fingers “—like that.”

Gideon looked up, a trace of regret in his eyes, and he smiled. “Guess you'll have to settle for me. I'm no lawyer, but I know a little bit about a lot of things.” He nodded toward Arlen, who hadn't moved from his chair. “Kinda like your grandfather.”

“I know it's not right for her to take him away,” Arlen said stubbornly. He folded his arms and shifted in his chair. The look in his eyes said this was only round one. “You'll need your Indian ways,” he told Peter. “You'll be a man soon.”

“But I don't know if I want to
live
up here. Summer might be okay, but—” Peter looked at the judge. “Don't I have something to say about all this?”

“Sure you do.” Judge Half slipped the paper with Gideon's signature on it into his file. “Everybody gets a say in my court.” He nodded in Arlen's direction. “I want you to spend some time with your grandfather, too, now that you two have finally met. You'll see to that, Gideon? And meanwhile, I've got to study up on your background a little bit. I'm just a judge. I'm not a lawyer, either. Like the chairman, I don't know everything there is to know about anything.” He brandished the file. “Got some studyin' up to do.”

 

Raina's brain was as wobbly as the hindquarters of a rhino shot with a tranquilizer gun. She hadn't seen the blow coming, and she was still reeling from it. Gideon kept telling her to stay cool, but his voice seemed distant. Peter had little to say, except that he didn't mind riding in Gideon's pickup “to keep up appearances,” while his mother followed them back to the lodge in her car.

There they set about packing up Peter's clothes.

“You got a TV that I can hook this up to?” Peter showed Gideon the controls to his video game.

Gideon shoved his hands into his pockets as he scanned the cords. “I have a TV, but it's not new. Will it still work?”

“Probably.” Peter glanced at Raina.

Without even seeing it, she could feel that visual check-in from child to mother, that won't-it-Mom? look. Sitting on the bed, carefully folding each shirt, she looked up. There was an unspoken concern in her son's eyes, as though he were seeing her differently as he prepared to take his first significant leave of her, and it scared her.

But he smiled at her as he reported, “At home I have my own TV.”

“I don't watch TV much,” Gideon said. “It's yours for the duration.”

“Yeah.” Peter reached behind the TV and unplugged his equipment. “Whatever that means.”

“It means until this custody thing gets straightened out,” Gideon said. “It gets complicated, doesn't it, being an Indian?”

“Hey, I'm just minding my own business, eatin' a banana, and in comes this cop.” Twirling the cord like a lasso, Peter nodded toward the door. “Pretty soon I've got a grandfather named Arlen Skinner, who tells me his daughter was my mother, and her name was Tomasina, and she's dead, and then my uncle gets to be my guardian, just
temporarily
….” He turned to Raina, giving her a puzzled look. “And I'm wondering, how come I never knew any of this stuff?”

“I didn't know about your grandfather,” Raina said. She laid her hand atop the pile of folded shirts, splaying her fingers over the soft cotton. “The adoption—your adoption—was a private arrangement, which is perfectly legal in this state. Your dad handled the technical end of it, and when the time came, we both went to the hospital to get you.” A warm surge of nostalgia flooded her as she recalled cradling her baby in her arms for the first time. So much beautiful black hair, she'd said. Such tiny, delicate fingernails.

“I remember the caseworker's name was Susan something, but I was never told your birth mother's name. I've often thought about her and wondered—” She shook the speculations away. She now knew the answer to the final question.
Wondered what ever happened to her.

“We were given some medical information, but that's about all. I was just so glad to…” Raina looked at her son and smiled.
“I was just so glad you were ours, Peter. Maybe I was afraid to rock the boat, I don't know. But I've never deliberately kept anything from you. I've answered all your questions as best I could.”

She picked up the shirts and rose from the bed. Gideon and Peter both watched her every move, as though they were suddenly fascinated by her ability to pack a bag. As though they'd forgotten that mothers did such things. “That's why we came, remember?” she continued. “To answer some of your questions. If I'd known about your grandfather, I would have told you. And I have no idea whether your dad knew about him.” With a glance she invited Gideon to answer for his brother.