The call about Danny came on a Tuesday, and it came from the last direction Ava expected: not disaster, but bureaucracy, which in her experience was simply disaster wearing a watch.
Katherine Brennan had been Danny's caseworker for eight months — a brisk, grey-eyed woman in her forties who had, alone among the professionals in Ava's life, always spoken to her like a colleague in the project of Danny rather than as a problem adjacent to him. When Katherine's number lit the club phone, Ava took the call out in the lot, in the cold, walking the fence line the way she'd seen the night watch walk it, because some news you take standing up and moving.
"Ava. I need to tell you some things and I need you to hear all of them before you react. Danny is safe. Start there. Danny is safe, tonight, in the county children's shelter, and he is not going back to the Pike house. Can you hear me?"
"I hear you," Ava said. The wind was doing something to her eyes. "Tell me the rest."
"There were reports. A teacher — Danny's teacher, good woman — noticed bruises twice and did her job. The second time she photographed his arm, and the photograph is not ambiguous, and the home visit found Mr. Pike in a frame of mind to explain that the boy is difficult and falls. Danny, asked directly by someone he trusts, said — I am quoting the report, Ava, because you deserve it verbatim — 'He grabs. When he's mad he grabs and shakes. I try to be quiet but quiet is hard.'" Katherine's voice, for the first time in Ava's experience of it, was not entirely professional. "The Pikes' license is suspended pending investigation. Emergency removal was executed yesterday afternoon. Danny asked for you approximately every twenty minutes for the first three hours. Then he asked the shelter staff if he could keep his shoes by his bed. When they said yes, he went to sleep."
Ava had reached the gate and stopped, one hand on the cold chain-link, the whole lot and the whole clubhouse and the whole impossible new architecture of her life blurring behind her eyes.
"He keeps his shoes on," she said. "At night. In bed. Did they put that in the report? He keeps them on in case. He's eight, Katherine. He's eight and he sleeps ready to run."
"I know," Katherine said. "I wrote it in the report myself. Ava — this changes your situation, legally. A sibling placement is preferred by the court. An older sibling with stable housing and income can petition for custody, even at seventeen, with a suitable co-guardian. Six months ago you had neither housing nor income, and I told you so, and you took it like a Marine. I am calling to tell you the equation has changed. I have seen the clubhouse. I have met Mr. Bull—" a small, dry sound that might have been a laugh "—who offered me coffee and his entire criminal record, unprompted, in the first five minutes, on the theory that I was going to find it anyway and he'd rather I heard the good parts in his voice. I have verified your employment with the shop and your enrollment in GED study. If you want your brother, Ava, the door that was shut is not shut anymore. It's heavy. But it's a door."
"I want him," Ava said. "I've always wanted him. That's never been the question. The question is whether wanting him is enough to—" She stopped, and chose the truth. "Whether I'm enough. A room over a garage and a shop job and a sheriff who hates my name. Tell me straight, Katherine. Is it enough?"
"It is enough to file," Katherine said, "and filing is how every custody in history has started. There will be a hearing. There will be a home study. There will be — Ava, I will not lie to you — people who look at the address and the motorcycles and the men with records and take some persuading. But the court also reads police reports about Mr. Pike. And the court reads school reports about a boy who sleeps in his shoes." A pause. "The court should read one more thing. A letter from the sister. In your words. Judges keep those, Ava. Write it like you mean it. You always do."
Ava stood in the cold with the phone against her ear and looked at the small window of the parts office, where Danny's photograph caught the late light off the sill, and understood that the ledger of her life had just opened its largest page yet, and that this time, God willing, the entry was going to be in credit.
"I'll write it tonight," she said. "And Katherine — when can I see him?"
"Tomorrow," Katherine said. "Eleven o'clock, the children's shelter on Poly Drive. Ava. He's going to run at you. Brace yourself. You've had practice lifting heavy things."