Victoria Pade - It Takes a Family

He rang the doorbell when they reached the house and held the screen for her when the door was answered by a large man who was dressed in the same police uniform Luke had had on the night before.

“Hey, Cam,” Luke greeted him.

“Luke,” the other man responded, stepping aside for Karis and Luke to come in but never taking his eyes off Karis. Eyes that were every bit as suspicious of her as Luke’s had been, and no more welcoming.

“This is Karis. Karis, this is Cam.”

“Hi,” Karis said, thinking that in all of the awkward situations she’d found herself in recently, this had to be the worst.

“And is this Amy?” Cam Pratt asked.

Karis hadn’t thought about the fact that this man and the rest of her half siblings already knew Amy from the five weeks after her birth, but that question and the familiarity in his voice brought it home for her.

“That’s Amy,” Luke confirmed when Karis was slow in answering.

Cam nodded, taking a concentrated look at the infant but not making any overtures toward her.

“We’re all in the living room,” he said, leading the way from the vast Victorian-style entry that boasted a pedestal table in the center and a wide staircase rising from just beyond it to curve to the second level.

Luke waited for Karis to follow Cam, bringing up the rear.

The living room was large and, because it was furnished in a country motif, it lacked the formality of the entry. It was warm and welcoming, unlike the faces of the other people in the room.

“Hi,” Karis said quietly to everyone.

“Sit down,” one of the two women invited, pointing to the vacant love seat at a right angle to the couch.

Karis did, sitting only on the edge of the cushion and placing Amy on her lap.

It didn’t seem that she should take Amy’s coat completely off as if they were going to stay for a leisurely visit, but it was too warm to keep the baby bundled up. So Karis smoothed the hood back, fluffed Amy’s reddish-brown cap of curls and unzipped the coat, leaving it open but on.

“Is this Amy?” the other woman on the couch asked, echoing her brother’s question.

“It is.” Karis answered without hesitation this time.

She had the sense that had this been fourteen months ago the woman would have tried to hold Amy or play with her. But as it was, everyone kept their distance.

Luke had remained standing beside the love seat rather than sit with Karis and Amy so he made the introductions from there.

“You met Cam at the door,” he began, addressing Karis. “That’s Mara, Neily and Scott on the sofa—”

“I’m Mara,” said the woman who had asked about Amy. “This is Neily,” she added with a glance at the woman who had invited Karis to sit.

Karis said another, “Hi.”

“Boone and Jon are by the fireplace,” Luke continued. “Taylor is in the chair. Boone, Taylor and Jon are the triplets—in case you didn’t notice that they look almost exactly alike.”

Karis nodded.

“And this is Karis,” Luke finished unnecessarily.

No one seemed to know what to say, and Karis wasn’t sure whether to merely blurt out what she’d come to tell them or try to find some way to ease into it.

It was Cam who broke the silence before she’d decided. “What can we do for you?”

Clearly they were all leery of her and her motives for being there, so Karis opted for getting to the point.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

As she said that, she wondered for the first time if they would consider the news bad. Maybe they wouldn’t.

“I needed to tell you all that Dad…”

She stalled. Somehow referring to him like that seemed proprietary and she was afraid his first family would take offense.

“That your dad…”

But he was her father, too, so that was weird.

“Well, your dad and mine…”

No, that wasn’t good, either…

“It’s okay,” Luke said in a calming voice. “Just tell them.”

Grateful to him once more—this time for the steadying influence—Karis swallowed and took his advice. “There was an explosion in Denver six weeks ago. Dad…and Lea…were killed.”

The response of the other Pratts varied, but none were too overt. Some eyebrows rose. Some mouths gaped slightly. Some faces paled. No one appeared unaffected or as if they were glad to hear it, but there weren’t any tears, either.

Again, after a few moments of silent shock, it was Cam who spoke. “What happened?”

Karis took a measured breath and said, “Lea had done something that caused a lot of problems for a lot of people—”

“Isn’t that hard to believe,” Boone, one of the triplets, said sarcastically under his breath.

His tone made Karis even more uncomfortable, but she didn’t show it. She recognized that he had a right to think badly of Lea and thought that maybe she should let them know she was aware of her sister’s misdeeds.

“Luke told me this morning what Lea did the day she left here, so I know none of you think much of her—”

Once more, Karis paused to consider what she was going to say. She didn’t want any of the people in the room to think worse of her sister than they already did. In fact, it suddenly seemed important for them to understand Lea, if only a little.

So rather than rushing into telling them more about the explosion that had taken lives, she said, “I’m sorry for what Lea did to you. I know that probably doesn’t mean much but if you really knew Lea, you’d know how truly messed up she was. She had drug problems from the time she was a teenager. She’d clean up her act for a while and be great—personable and sweet and fun and kind and…”

Karis’s eyes welled up at the memory of her sister. She didn’t want to break down, though, so she fought not to and went on.

“I think that was the Lea you all met. And knew while she was here. While she was pregnant. The clean and sober Lea. The Lea I always hoped would prevail. The trouble was, that just never seemed to happen. She couldn’t stay off the drugs and when she was doing them…” Karis shrugged helplessly. “Well, she wasn’t that same person.”

Karis could see in the expressions of her half siblings that there still wasn’t much sympathy for her sister, so she gave up trying to elicit any and forged ahead.

“Abe—the man Lea left Luke for—” Karis gave Luke an apologetic glance over her shoulder before focusing on everyone else again. “Abe had his own drug problems, but when they got back to Denver they both swore they were staying clean. For Amy’s sake. I believed them and, from everything I saw, they actually were sober until about a month before the explosion. I’d gotten Lea a job and she had been coming to work every day, not doing anything that alarmed me.” Although Karis knew now that she’d been naive. “But that month before, Abe lost his job,” she said. “And that must have been when things started to break down again.”

Karis didn’t want to get into much about how the general breakdown had affected her own situation, so she cut to the chase.

“Like I said, Lea had done something that affected a lot of people and Dad went looking for her. I say looking for her because when he went to where she and Abe had been living, he found out they’d been evicted a week earlier—which I didn’t know, either, but it made sense because Lea had asked if Amy could stay with me for a few days right around the same time. Luckily Amy was still with me when Dad found Lea and Abe.”

Karis hadn’t realized it, but she’d been hugging Amy and apparently her grip on the baby was too tight, because Amy began to squirm.

Karis loosened her hold and kissed the crown of Amy’s head as compensation.

Then she went on. “Dad found Lea and Abe living in a mobile home out in the middle of nowhere. Lea, Abe and another man. But they weren’t only living in the trailer, they were also making methamphetamine there, to use themselves and to sell on the street. When Dad showed up, the other man went outside rather than be in the middle of a family fight. He could hear and see what was going on inside, though, and according to him, Dad and Lea argued and then Abe got into it, too. It became physical—”