“Oh god,” Lily moans. “Dad’s got that sappy look on his face again.”
“That means he loves Papa,” Noah says, grinning at me.
“That it does,” I agree.
“Who loves Papa?” a smaller voice asks before he pushes his way between Lily and Noah, gazing up with interest at everyone in the room.
Caleb Thompson. Our little fighter.
Dom had found him first in a shithole of a hovel outside of Seafare. There’d been a call to do a welfare check on a kid who hadn’t been to school in over a week. Dom had already been in the neighborhood and had stopped by, even though it hadn’t exactly been in his job description anymore as a detective.
Caleb’s parents had both overdosed on heroin. The mother was dead, having choked to death on her own vomit. The father had had a heart attack and was barely hanging on. Caleb was in a closet, hugging a dirty stuffed bear. He told Dom that he’d run out of crackers, even though he’d tried to save as many as he could as he didn’t know when his mom and dad would wake up.
His fifth birthday had been three days earlier.
Otter and I were still registered as foster parents.
Dom called us later that day, asking if we could meet with him at the station.
We were led to an interrogation room where we found them both, Caleb in his arms, face hidden in the big man’s neck, stuffed bear clutched against his chest. He was a tiny thing, looking like he needed to be fed immediately. He had pale skin and dirty blonde hair. His eyes were the brightest green but looked dulled in the harsh light overhead.
“I need you,” Dom had told us, looking a little haunted. “I need you to help me.”
Caleb’s father had died the next day.
They looked for family. They were required to, of course. And, as often happened in cases like this, they found nothing.
Caleb came to stay with us at the Green Monstrosity.
And he never left.
It took a long time, but now, five years later, he was ours just as much as Lily and Noah were. They’d taken to him quickly, circling around him, holding him close. He’d been wary of the both of them at first, but that had passed sooner than we’d thought. Lily had given him piggyback rides. Noah had made him cookies. He loved them completely.
It’d taken him longer to warm up to Bear and me, but when he was eight, he’d become a Thompson and looked up at us and asked in that quiet voice of his if he could call us Daddy and Papa like Lily and Noah did.
“Yes,” Bear had told him, voice cracking. “We’d like that very much.”
Once we decided we wanted to keep him as our own (Dom saying that he knew from the start we’d never let Caleb go once we saw him), we realized we wouldn’t have enough room for three growing kids, especially if they didn’t share a bedroom.
So we sold the Green Monstrosity and moved to a house a few streets over that had more room for all of us.
It was… harder than we thought it would be. Leaving that house. The family that had bought it from us seemed to love it as much as we had (“Look at that color! It’s like getting punched in the face with rotten limes!”), but turning over the keys to someone else felt like the end of a life I never expected to have.
Bear had made fun of me for being overly sentimental.
I got my revenge by telling him that the Green Monstrosity was the place where I figured out I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.
He’d gaped at me.
Then promptly burst into tears, calling me an asshole who didn’t play fair.
The new house was a normal house, red brick on the outside and plain white walls on the inside. We’d made it our own, of course, settling in and filling its corners with the bits and pieces of our lives. Lily and Noah had immediately claimed their rooms the day we’d gotten the keys. Caleb had moved a little more slowly, walking around, trailing his hands along the walls. We’d followed him around, waiting for the verdict. Finally he’d looked up at both of us and smiled, saying, “It’s very nice. Thank you.”
We knew then that everything was going to be okay.
It was a long road, but now he was healthy and whole, and even though we’d never seriously planned on having any more after Lily and Noah, he made me feel more complete than I’d ever felt before.
He belonged. Like he was made for us.