Page 104 of Shrapnel
Mateo Hudson had been brought in a few times. Mostly small stuff—twisted ankle, stitches after a playground incident. Nothing to raise his eyebrows until the last visit. Mateo’s hand had been crushed beneath a vehicle. Allegedly his foster parents hadn’t seen him playing in the driveway and had run over his hand. It sounded sketchy to Owen, and even the doctor had made notes about calling CPS to get him placed in a new home. The incident cost Mateo his entire hand. CPS couldn’t pay for a prosthetic.
Owen dug for a few more minutes but that was the last visit. Mateo never came back for any of his follow up visits. Which is weird considering his hand had been amputated. Even with Owen’s limited medical knowledge he knew that was the kind of injury that needed to be tended to for a while.
He sat back on the bed. That must have been when Mateo left the system, preferring the streets to the abusive foster homes. Owen wasn’t sure he could blame him. The system was atrocious.
Closing patient records, he began exploring the rest of the system. On another whim, he searched for the social worker records. It was almost too easy. Grinning, he searched Mateo’s name again.
Records that coincided with his previous hospital visits popped up. The social worker had interviewed him each time, and according to their notes, had actually developed a bit of a relationship with Mateo. He opened up to them. Owen grabbed a pen that was nestled on the keyboard and wrote the social workers name down on his palm. Maybe they remembered something about him that wasn’t in their notes.
He heard voices outside his room and quickly excited the programs, slamming the computer back against the wall and leaning back on the bed. The picture of innocence.
If he expected a doctor or nurse, he was surprised to see Jamie appearing in his doorway. His lips quivered in a crooked smile. He looked exhausted. There wasn’t an unwrinkled section of his clothes. Two buttons had ripped off his shirt and the stained white fabric hung open to expose bruised collarbones. At some point he had torn his pants, though when was anyone’s guess. Owen figured apart from the couple hours he had been unconscious, Jamie had been awake for close to twenty-seven hours.
“Hey O Face,” he greeted tiredly. “How’s the arm?”
Owen held up his cast. “Do I need a concealed carry for this weapon?”
Jamie’s smile deepened and he walked into the room. “It looks like someone stuck a traffic cone on your arm.”
He took one of the flimsy chairs off the wall, scooting it closer to the foot of the bed so he could sit. Jamie didn’t exactly sit so much as collapsed into the chair, legs splaying out and head leaning back. Owen had started to look at Jamie, really look, and he did that now. There was a dullness in his eyes. A brittleness that he got whenever he was close to retreating. Hiding away in that place Owen couldn’t follow.
“Hey,” Owen sat up, scooting down the bed and swinging his legs over the side. He hooked the chair with his ankles, dragging it closer so Jamie was framed between his thighs.
“Talk to me, Firebug.”
Jamie smiled tiredly, dropping his forehead against Owen’s thigh. His nose pressed into the seam of Owen’s dirty jeans, hot breath ghosting against his skin through the denim.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled against his skin. “I thought if I forgot my past, it would just go away. But it came back, and you got hurt.”
Owen began stroking Jamie’s head, his fingers stroking through the wispy strands of hair against his temple.
“Can you tell me about it?”
Jamie stilled. He might have been asleep, but Owen could see his eyes darting back and forth under his lids, like he was looking around for danger. He breathed out, deflating against Owen. His eyes opened and he looked up at him.
“No one has ever asked me before.”
Tilting his head, Owen tapped Jamie on the nose. “I’m asking now.”
Jamie grabbed Owen’s calf, hugging it to his chest. His fingers were trembling, and Owen wasn’t sure if he should have asked. Jamie didn’t need to tell him. It didn’t matter. None of it did. He had already accepted Jamie and all his many faces.
“Once upon a time, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” Jamie began, his voice low and wavering. “A young maiden lived in a shitty village. Far from the hustle and bustle of a city, she dreamed of a better life in a place with electricity and running water. Broke, alone, with stars in her eyes she left her village, hitch hiking to the nearest city. There she met a handsome man. He said he loved her, and he would take her to a better place. She believed him.”
The detached way Jamie spoke was a little unsettling. Owen wasn’t sure where he was going and didn’t know how to brace for it.
“I’m not sure when she realized he was full of shit—maybe it was the secrecy or maybe she didn’t realize until he had locked her in a shipping container full of other women. But the maiden was shocked to realize that her handsome man was actually a tyrant king. He ruled a dark kingdom full of drugs and illicit sex. When he finally opened the container, she was in this new place, but it wasn’t any better. He used her, gave her to other men for cash, and when she complained he hit her.”
Human trafficking.Owen knew what it was, but it was one of those words tossed around on the news. Like the boogeyman, something far away from him.
“One day the maiden—who was far from a maiden now—realized she was pregnant with the tyrant’s child. He tried to make her lose it, but the child stubbornly lived. The maiden gave birth to a little boy who smiled just like his father.”
“The maiden tried to love her son, but how could she when he smiled just like the monster who had taken her childhood from her? No matter how many times she hit him, the child loved his mother. Those rare moments of affection she showed him were enough. Once he even tried to protect her from a man who was hurting her. His mother locked him outside in the snow because she didn’t want to lose the money.”
Jamie’s hands were shaking so hard that the bed was vibrating. Owen reached down and covered his eyes with his good hand, pressing against his trembling eyelashes.
“The boy wasn’t always alone. One of the other women had a son, too. He was older and wiser. He showed the boy the best places to hide, and sometimes stole candy and toys to make the boy smile. He put bandaids on his wounds and cut his hair when the bugs in it grew too itchy. They said they were brothers. Promised each other to be there always.”
“The tyrant king had other ideas. When the boy was four or five, someone wanted to buy him. Feeling no love for the boy with his smile, the king sold him. In a rare moment of maternal love, the boy’s mother stole him away. They ran for days—in the cold and rain they fled from the king and his men. But the king was too strong, and he found them. On a rainy day, cornered in an alley, the boy’s mother decided that death was preferable. She took a knife and stabbed her child.”