SPN FIC - Five Days in the Blue Room (Part 1 of 2)
This is for liliaeth, who requested wee!Dean ending up In The System -- but instead of dealing with the Foster Parents From Hell, finds himself (and Sam) in the care of some genuinely nice people ... and then has a decision to make.
They were already in trouble. Had been since yesterday.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 9), Sam (age 5), John, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 9668 words
FIVE DAYS IN THE BLUE ROOM
By Carol Davis
"Here we go, boys," the lady said, and her hand on Dean's shoulder was gentle and warm. Every time Dean looked at her, she seemed like she was happy about the whole thing, which wasn't at all what he had expected; what had been on his mind since yesterday afternoon was the stories that that kid Jeffrey had told, the ones that said people were just in this for the money.
The ones that said people were mean. That people hit, and screamed. Didn't feed a foster kid. Treated a foster kid like dirt. (Like shit, was what Jeffrey said: "They treat you like shit.")
Jeffrey was a foster kid. Dean figured he knew what he was talking about.
So maybe this lady would change, later on.
Maybe later on, after it got dark.
For now, though, her voice was soft, and she'd been smiling ever since she'd opened her front door to find Ms. Paulson The Social Worker and Dean and Sammy standing on her porch. Dad said sometimes that things weren't always what they seemed like, but "not always" could mean that other times, they were exactly what they seemed like.
This lady seemed nice.
"What do you think?" the lady asked.
It was a room. A blue room, with two beds.
"It's okay," Dean said softly. "Ma'am."
"You can go in. This is your room - yours and Sam's."
That was all the permission Sammy needed. He let go of Dean's hand and burst into the room like a dog with no leash, screaming out "Mine!" as he jumped up onto one of the beds. You jerk, Dean thought frantically; Don't do that, you little JERK, this isn't your house! You're gonna make her mad, and then we'll be in trouble.
They already were in trouble. Had been since yesterday.
Since Mrs. Robbie had dropped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, right out there where everybody could see - and what they had seen was, she was dead, and Dean and Sammy were standing there with nobody to take care of them. She'd been their babysitter, the person Dad said Dean and Sam needed (because of that whole thing with the monster; Dad didn't say that was the reason, but it was), the person who was looking after them until Dad got back.
The first policeman who came thought Mrs. Robbie was their grandmother. When Dean told him no, she wasn't, she was just the babysitter, the cop looked at him for a long time, then asked, "Where are your parents, son?"
"My dad is at work," Dean said.
"And where is that?"
"He travels around. A lot. In the car."
"So he's a traveling salesman, is that it? Is there a phone number? Do you know the number where we can reach him?"
People had started to gather around. Not a lot ever happened in this neighborhood - some yelling, sometimes, and one time the guy across the street drove his car up over the curb and ran it right into the corner of his porch - so a lady being dead right there on the sidewalk was a big deal. For a minute, Dean felt bad for Mrs. Robbie, lying there on the sidewalk with her hair all messed up and her tongue sticking a little bit out of her mouth, like she was going to lick a stamp.
"Son?" the policeman said.
There were numbers. Not for Dad, himself, but for Pastor Jim, and Uncle Bobby. Numbers that Dean was supposed to call if he got into trouble. They were written down on a piece of paper that was sitting underneath the phone, inside their apartment.
"We'll be okay," Dean told the cop. "My dad'll be back soon. He'll be back any time now."
"Is there a number, son?"
Dean shook his head. "He's in the car. My dad."
"Then is there a number for his boss? For the place he works out of? Is there an office?"
"No," Dean told the cop. "But -"
They should have run, he realized. He and Sammy should have run, the second Mrs. Robbie fell down, so nobody would see them out there by themselves. So there wouldn't be any cops asking them questions. They should have run, and hid inside the apartment, and they should have called Pastor Jim to come get them.
They still could, he thought. All he had to do was tell the cop there was a number upstairs, underneath the phone.
But a little voice in his head told him Don't.
It told him Dad's gonna be mad. He's really gonna be mad, because he tried putting you in charge and that didn't work, and he tried having a babysitter and that didn't work. He's not gonna be able to do his job, because he can't take Sammy where it's dangerous, so he's gonna have to stay and take care of you himself.
He's gonna be mad.
"He'll be home soon," he told the cop again. "Before dark. It's okay. We can just go in the house and wait for him."
"There's no one else? A relative, a friend?"
"I'm very responsible," Dean said.
The cop smiled at that. "I'm sure you are."
"He'll be back soon. A little while, that's all."
"How long is 'a little while', son?"
Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
All he could do was shrug. He could lie - he could say an hour, or a few hours, but he could see on the cop's face that that wouldn't be good enough, that the cop wasn't going to leave him and Sam here by themselves.
"We'll lock the door," he tried. "Dad told us not to go anywhere."
"I understand that. And that's a good thing. But if there's no one to keep an eye on you - that's not safe, and we want to make sure you and your brother are safe. When your dad gets back, he can swing by and pick you up." The cop glanced over at Mrs. Robbie. He seemed sad that she was dead, even though nobody else did. "There's a lot of commotion going on around here," he told Dean. "And we don't want your little brother to get scared. Okay?"
It wasn't. It wasn't okay at all.
"Everything's going to be fine," the cop said. "We're just going to take you someplace safe, until your dad gets back."
He wasn't going to let Dean say no. He was going to be quiet about it, maybe because he didn't want people to say he'd been mean to a couple of kids, but he wasn't going to let Dean and Sam just go inside by themselves.
No matter what Dad had said.
"I guess," Dean said quietly.
"Let's go for a ride, then. How's that sound?"
As Dean had guessed, the "somewhere safe" was the police station, where a lady cop (Officer Sherwood, she said) let Sammy play with some toys she had in her desk. When she thought Dean couldn't hear her, she told the other cop that there was a room in the back with some cots. A better place for two little boys to stay overnight than Juvie. There'd be someone on duty all night who could check on them now and then, who'd make sure they were okay and getting some rest.
I'm not little, Dean thought but didn't say.
But he was. He was a kid. Not a criminal. Just a kid.
We should've run. Should've said we lived in that house down the street, and our mom was there waiting for us.
They could have done that, if that lady from across the street hadn't ratted them out.
Should've took care of this.
But he hadn't. He'd messed it all up, again.
And Dad hadn't shown up. Not before dark. Not after dark, or this morning.
Dean stood in the doorway of the blue room now, watching Sammy bounce around on the bed, figuring any second now the lady with the soft, warm hands would tell Sammy to stop doing that because he was going to break something. When she didn't, Dean looked up at her, and it felt like his whole body was frowning.
Maybe she was a robot, like that "Grandma" on the Twilight Zone episode: the one those three kids had built because their mom had died and they needed somebody to be kind to them.
"When my dad comes back, will they tell him to come here?" he asked her.
"I'm sure they will. Now - why don't you go on in with your brother?" she told him. "Take a look around."
It wasn't any big deal, he thought, just a blue bedroom with two beds, but he would have to go on in there so he could get Sammy to calm down. He was only a couple of steps past the door when Sammy exploded off the bed and ran to some shelves in between the door and what was maybe the closet. "Wow!" Sam yelled, ready to grab, ready to play, but Dean caught him before he could mess up all those books, and games, and what looked like a whole set of G.I. Joes with all the accessories. That lady cop, Officer Sherwood - who was nice, but really kind of dumb, at least when it came to little kids - had given Sam way too much sugar for breakfast, juice and Cap'n Crunch and chocolate milk and two cookies, and Sam had been wired for sound ever since. He'd run around and around and around until he "hit bottom," as Uncle Bobby would say, and then he'd either cry or get ugly. Maybe both.
"LEGGO!" Sam screeched.
"He's five," Dean said to the lady in the doorway. "They gave him too much sugar."
She smiled at that, like she knew exactly what he meant. "Sam," she said. "How would you like to go out back for a little while? We've got a swing out there, and a sandhill."
"What's a sandhill?" Sam asked her.
A hill of sand, you dope, Dean wanted to say, but he wasn't sure enough about it to do that.
He was right, though. It was a big hill of sand, piled up in a corner of the lady's yard, and sitting at the foot of it were three Tonka trucks - a dump truck, a front loader, and a bulldozer. "My husband got those out of the attic," the lady said. "Since it's a nice day, he figured you boys might like to do some construction before lunch."
"COOL!" Sam shrieked, and ran for the sandpile.
It was, kind of.
"Go ahead," the lady said to Dean. "I'll be inside, in the kitchen. I can see you from the window. If you need me, just call me."
That was a small problem, though.
"What do I call you?" Dean asked.
She put her hand on his cheek. It felt even warmer than it had when she touched his shoulder. "How about 'Aunt Emily'? Does that sound okay?"
Like those ladies, he thought: the ladies who used to see him and Mom in the grocery store, or out taking a walk. The ladies from their neighborhood back in Lawrence. None of them had been his real aunt, but they'd told him to call them that.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess."
~~~~~~~~
Aunt Emily's husband said to call him Uncle Paul. Their real name was Burns. Paul and Emily Burns. During the daytime, Mr. Burns - Uncle Paul - worked in an insurance office, and wore a suit, and he drove an '84 Chevy Monte Carlo.
He was a little man, much smaller than Dad.
"I like a good burger," he said to Dean after he had changed his clothes and had put on jeans and a dark green shirt. "How about you? You a burger man?"
"I'm a burger man," Sam told him.
Uncle Paul laughed and messed up Sam's hair with his hand. "Okay, then. Burgers it is."
He grilled the burgers, out in the yard on a big shiny grill. They were thick and juicy and the one he gave Dean dripped all over Dean's arm when he bit into it. "This is the life, huh?" he said while Dean was wiping his arm off with a napkin.
He really seemed to believe that.
Dean kind of didn't.
~~~~~~~~
It wasn't until a while after Dean and Sam had gotten into bed, after Aunt Emily had tucked them in and turned out all the lights except for a nightlight shaped like a sailboat that was plugged into the wall near the closet door, then went on downstairs, that Sammy said anything about anything.
For a while after "lights out" Sammy had laid in his bed and sang the songs that Uncle Paul had reminded them of, out at the picnic table while they ate their burgers and corn and drank their milk: the theme songs from Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch and The Beverly Hillbillies. Uncle Paul had used all of the right words. Sam used some of the right ones and some that he made up in his own head.
After he was done with all of his goofed-up singing, Sam said, "Is Pastor Jim comin' tomorrow?"
"I don't know," Dean told him.
"How come?"
"Because I don't."
He did know, though, pretty much. Pastor Jim wasn't likely to show up tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, because nobody had called him. Not Dean, and as far as Dean knew, not anybody else, either.
But Pastor Jim believed in miracles, and had told Dean a bunch of times that they were a real, true thing, so Dean supposed it was possible that Jim would show up at Uncle Paul and Aunt Emily's front door all on his own, without being called, because somehow he'd known that Mrs. Robbie was dead and that Dean and Sammy were In The System.
It was possible, Dean supposed, that God would tell Pastor Jim what was going on.
It was also possible that Dad would show up, or Uncle Bobby. Tonight, or in the morning.
It was also possible that Santa Claus would ring the front doorbell.
"Is Dad comin'?" Sam asked.
"I don't know."
"Then you're a dumb stupid head."
No, Dean thought. I'm s'posed to take care of you. That's what I'm doing.
They would have been alone in the apartment, if they'd run and hid in there, he told himself. They'd had lots of salt to spread out at the doors and windows, and Dad had made sure all the doors and windows had good, strong locks - but that didn't mean bad things couldn't get in.
A lock on the door hadn't meant that that monster couldn't get into the motel room, the night Dean had left Sam alone.
But they were with people here. Grownup people who were just like babysitters, and didn't look old enough to drop dead on the sidewalk.
Nothing bad would come. Not here.
Not here.
Dean had been alone with Uncle Paul for a few minutes, downstairs, while Aunt Emily was upstairs, helping Sam take his bath. Uncle Paul had told him about their new VCR, and showed him how they were making a collection of movies that they could watch right there in their house, even without HBO, and asked what Dean and Sam liked to eat for breakfast.
"It doesn't matter," Dean told him, then figured he should be more specific, so Sam wouldn't pitch a fit. "Sam likes Froot Loops. Or sometimes Cap'n Crunch. Mainly just cereal. But I don't care. I can eat anything."
"Good to know," Uncle Paul said.
Then he said, "I know it takes a while."
"What does?" Dean asked.
"Settling into a new place. My dad was in the service, so we moved around a lot. I know how it is."
He didn't, Dean thought. Not really.
"Something on your mind?" Uncle Paul asked.
Dean looked at him for a minute. He had a kind face, a friendly face, like Pastor Jim, but different.
"Does bad stuff happen here?"
Uncle Paul frowned at that. "What kind of bad stuff, son? You mean robberies, things like that? No, there's nothing like that. Nothing for you and Sam to worry about. You're perfectly safe here, with us."
Are we? Dean wondered.
There was a shotgun in their apartment, loaded and ready to use, up on a shelf in Dad's closet. Sam didn't know it was there, and neither did anyone else; when the cops took Sam and Dean into the apartment so they could gather up clothes and things to take with them, and so the cops could try to figure out how to contact Dad, they didn't look up on the closet shelf, underneath the old plaid blanket Dad had folded up to hide the gun.
Maybe they'd found it by now.
Maybe they'd decided Dad was a nut job, because he kept a loaded shotgun in the house with his kids.
Maybe they'd found the piece of paper with the phone numbers on it, and had decided not to call Pastor Jim, or Uncle Bobby, because Dean and Sam would be better off far away from a guy who left his kids in an apartment with a loaded gun.
It's so we'd be safe, Dean thought.
But they hadn't been. Not that night he'd gone to play video games - just for a LITTLE WHILE - and the monster came in to kill Sam. Not the night Dad came home all bloody and torn up and made noises like he was going to die, until he finally fell asleep, then tossed and turned with Dean watching him, and the first thing he said when he woke up was, "Son of a BITCH."
Not the night Mom died. Especially not that night.
Because he'd stopped wanting to talk about anything like that, or even think about it, Dean had sat down on the soft carpeted floor of the Burnses' living room, close to the neat rows of video tapes, and ran his finger along the spines, looking at all the titles of the movies. There was Star Wars, he saw, and Raiders, and The Empire Strikes Back, and some Clint Eastwood stuff, and The Sound of Music. A few more he didn't recognize.
"You're safe here, Dean," Uncle Paul said from behind him.
"Okay," Dean replied.
~~~~~~~~
"Who are those people?" Sam demanded in the morning, pointing to some framed pictures hanging on the wall in the Burnses' living room.
"Those are our sons," Uncle Paul told him. "Adam and Christopher."
"Are they dead?"
That got a funny look out of Uncle Paul - one that said he was thinking a million different thoughts - before he said, "No, Sam. They're all grown up now. They have their own homes. Adam lives a few miles from here, and Chris lives in Michigan."
"Oh," Sam said.
"Why would you think they were dead?"
"They're not here," Sam replied.
That was all Sam wanted to know about the whole thing. He went back to drawing in the coloring book Aunt Emily had given him, squashing down hard on the crayon in the way Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby and half of everybody in the world had told him not to, because he'd break the crayon, and if there was one thing that gave Sam fits, it was broken crayons. "It's not GOOD no more!" he'd say, and would want somebody to conjure up a whole new box.
The box Aunt Emily had given him had been brand new, with the plastic wrap still on it, until Sam ripped it open and dumped all the crayons out onto the table. The coloring book was new, too, but that other stuff - the books and games and the trucks and the G.I. Joes - Dean figured had belonged to Adam and Christopher.
"Our house was too quiet," Uncle Paul said to Dean. "It's been a while since the boys moved out. We see Adam pretty often, but he's got a girlfriend now. Keeps him busy, along with his job. It'll be a while till we see grandchildren, so we thought -"
He looked into the kitchen, where Aunt Emily was washing the breakfast dishes, and humming while she did it.
"We got tired of the quiet," he said.
"Sam makes a lot of noise."
"It's a good kind of noise."
You won't think so when he really pitches a fit, Dean thought, but it was true: once all the sugar had worn off, yesterday afternoon, Sam had quieted right down into what Pastor Jim's housekeeper, Mrs. L, sometimes called his "angel self." He'd insisted on helping Aunt Emily make the beds this morning, and last night he'd helped Uncle Paul haul the trash out to the curb. The worst thing he'd done so far was sing the Gilligan's Island song about six hundred and fifty times, and even then he'd done it quietly.
Maybe he felt safe.
"Safe" could do that. Make you real calm.
I'm doing what I'm s'posed to do, Dean thought. I AM.
~~~~~~~~
Ms. Paulson the Social Worker showed up at lunchtime. "Just checking in," she said.
"We're all fine," Aunt Emily told her. "Everybody's getting settled in and getting acquainted. We're having grilled cheese and applesauce for lunch. Everything's going fine."
For a while, Ms. Paulson watched Sam battle the G.I. Joes against each other in the sandpile, and talked quietly with Aunt Emily, first in the kitchen and then in the living room. Dean couldn't hear everything she said, but he heard most of it.
She didn't say anything about phone numbers. About anybody finding those numbers underneath the phone and calling Pastor Jim or Uncle Bobby.
"Is there any sign of their father?" Aunt Emily whispered.
Dean heard the word father, and that was enough.
Ms. Paulson shook her head.
~~~~~~~~
"I thought we'd head over to the mall today," Uncle Paul said the next morning, which was Saturday. He spoke in a soft, low voice Dean recognized, the one that meant I don't want your brother to get all wound up about this just yet. "We can get you boys some more clothes, maybe some warmer jackets."
"We've got clothes," Dean pointed out. It was true: the cops had let him pack up all of his and Sammy's clothes from the apartment. At first they'd said "bring some," but when they saw that everything that was there wasn't a whole lot, they said, "Bring it all." Jeans, shirts, socks, underwear, shoes. Jackets, too.
"Everybody can use something new," Uncle Paul said.
What he meant was, he thought their clothes were kind of smelly and old. He and Aunt Emily weren't rich people; their house wasn't a big huge one, and they didn't have a lot of fancy stuff, but nothing in it was smelly or beat up. Their clothes were all nice and neat and didn't have any holes or funny stains where stuff had spilled on them and it wouldn't come out in the wash.
"You could use a warm jacket," Uncle Paul said.
Not gonna be here long enough to need a heavy jacket, Dean thought, but that might not be true. He and Dad and Sammy had been to places that were warm in the wintertime, but they'd also been to places that were freezing cold. Pastor Jim's, for instance. It got cold enough there to freeze the eyeballs right out of your head.
"You don't have to buy us stuff," Dean muttered. "We're okay."
"Just a few things. So you have what you need."
Uncle Paul was a lot like that cop: they both talked quietly, but they meant business. Even when it sounded like they were making a suggestion, they had already made up their minds.
"Thank you," Dean told him.
Sam got in the car like he thought it was the space shuttle or something, so maybe Aunt Emily had said something to him about going shopping. He settled into his seat and fastened his seat belt all on his own, without being asked.
Uncle Paul made the thinking a million thoughts face again when they pulled up outside of Sears and Sam told him, "We don't go there. We go to G-O-O-D-W-I-L-L."
What he told Sam was, "Not this time."
If there was anything as bad as giving Sam too much sugar, it was turning him loose in a store. It never mattered much to Sam whether or not there was much money involved, or whether or not he could actually buy something and bring it home; Sam's point of view always seemed to be that a store (or better yet, a whole mall) was a giant playground, with everything he could possibly imagine laid out for him to look at, touch, pick up, play with, and most of the time, make a giant mess out of. Dad never let Sam get away with that, not for more than a couple of minutes, anyway - but these people, the Burnses, didn't know Sam. Their grown-up sons might have been well-behaved. They might have walked around a mall not touching anything.
But Sam?
Uncle Bobby sometimes called Sam "Hands."
He could wreck a whole mall faster than Godzilla and Mothra put together.
He was good, though, this time. He did have to touch all the nice, neat, piled-up shirts, but he didn't make any noise while Aunt Emily was sorting through them looking for the right size, and then holding them up against him to see how they looked. Sam let her pick out two shirts and a pair of jeans for him, and some socks and underwear, which was more brand-new clothes than he'd ever gotten at one time in his whole life, except maybe when he was first born.
Then Aunt Emily turned to Dean and asked, "What do you see that you like?"
"I'm okay," he told her.
Mrs. Robbie had died on Wednesday. This was Saturday. Three whole days, and Dad hadn't come to get them. Neither had Pastor Jim, or Uncle Bobby. It didn't seem like anybody had found those phone numbers.
It didn't seem like anybody was gonna come.
Because you didn't TELL them.
But Dad would be mad. He'd be real mad that he can't go and do his job, no matter who's taking care of Sam. If he has to stay all the time and take care of Sam, then he can't go do his job, and people could die.
"Oh, honey," Aunt Emily said.
Right there, in front of Uncle Paul and Sam and everybody in the store, she put her arms around him and held him while he cried, patting his back and rubbing it and rubbing his hair like Mom used to do. When he started to cry harder she told him it was okay, and walked with him over to a quiet place in behind some racks of jeans. She told him it was okay to cry, no matter how old you were, and if anybody said they never cried, they were either lying or they were pretty dumb.
He got tears and snot all over her shirt, but she told him that was perfectly okay because it would dry, and when she got home she'd just throw the shirt in the wash, no harm done.
She gave him Kleenex out of her purse and smiled a little when he blew his nose.
"I want my dad," he told her. "I want my dad to come back."
"I know you do," she said.
They got him a new pair of sneakers and three t-shirts, each one a different color.
Uncle Paul held up a jacket he'd pulled off a rack.
I'm not your kid, Dean thought. He felt mad inside, really mad, the throwing-and-breaking things kind of mad, though he wasn't sure why.
Then he was sure.
The something here that he liked?
It wasn't the clothes. It wasn't the lunch in the food court that Uncle Paul and Aunt Emily bought for him and Sammy.
It was these people.
~~~~~~~~
The first night he'd spent in the Burnses' house, he barely slept at all; he'd spent most of the night curled on his side, watching Sammy, making sure that nothing crept out of the closet or out from under the bed, that nothing opened the window (even though he'd made sure it was locked) and came in from outside, or slithered in from the hallway.
This was just a regular house, where regular people lived - but Dad rescued regular people from bad things all the time.
That was his job.
The job he couldn't do if he was taking care of Dean and Sam.
The second night, because there was no shouting here, and no cars crashing into porches, he slept a little longer.
The third night - Saturday night - lulled by the sound of the TV downstairs and the quiet voices of Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul, and reminding himself that Dad was out there somewhere, doing his job and taking care of people so they wouldn't die, he slept all the way through.
The Conclusion…
They were already in trouble. Had been since yesterday.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 9), Sam (age 5), John, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 9668 words
FIVE DAYS IN THE BLUE ROOM
By Carol Davis
"Here we go, boys," the lady said, and her hand on Dean's shoulder was gentle and warm. Every time Dean looked at her, she seemed like she was happy about the whole thing, which wasn't at all what he had expected; what had been on his mind since yesterday afternoon was the stories that that kid Jeffrey had told, the ones that said people were just in this for the money.
The ones that said people were mean. That people hit, and screamed. Didn't feed a foster kid. Treated a foster kid like dirt. (Like shit, was what Jeffrey said: "They treat you like shit.")
Jeffrey was a foster kid. Dean figured he knew what he was talking about.
So maybe this lady would change, later on.
Maybe later on, after it got dark.
For now, though, her voice was soft, and she'd been smiling ever since she'd opened her front door to find Ms. Paulson The Social Worker and Dean and Sammy standing on her porch. Dad said sometimes that things weren't always what they seemed like, but "not always" could mean that other times, they were exactly what they seemed like.
This lady seemed nice.
"What do you think?" the lady asked.
It was a room. A blue room, with two beds.
"It's okay," Dean said softly. "Ma'am."
"You can go in. This is your room - yours and Sam's."
That was all the permission Sammy needed. He let go of Dean's hand and burst into the room like a dog with no leash, screaming out "Mine!" as he jumped up onto one of the beds. You jerk, Dean thought frantically; Don't do that, you little JERK, this isn't your house! You're gonna make her mad, and then we'll be in trouble.
They already were in trouble. Had been since yesterday.
Since Mrs. Robbie had dropped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, right out there where everybody could see - and what they had seen was, she was dead, and Dean and Sammy were standing there with nobody to take care of them. She'd been their babysitter, the person Dad said Dean and Sam needed (because of that whole thing with the monster; Dad didn't say that was the reason, but it was), the person who was looking after them until Dad got back.
The first policeman who came thought Mrs. Robbie was their grandmother. When Dean told him no, she wasn't, she was just the babysitter, the cop looked at him for a long time, then asked, "Where are your parents, son?"
"My dad is at work," Dean said.
"And where is that?"
"He travels around. A lot. In the car."
"So he's a traveling salesman, is that it? Is there a phone number? Do you know the number where we can reach him?"
People had started to gather around. Not a lot ever happened in this neighborhood - some yelling, sometimes, and one time the guy across the street drove his car up over the curb and ran it right into the corner of his porch - so a lady being dead right there on the sidewalk was a big deal. For a minute, Dean felt bad for Mrs. Robbie, lying there on the sidewalk with her hair all messed up and her tongue sticking a little bit out of her mouth, like she was going to lick a stamp.
"Son?" the policeman said.
There were numbers. Not for Dad, himself, but for Pastor Jim, and Uncle Bobby. Numbers that Dean was supposed to call if he got into trouble. They were written down on a piece of paper that was sitting underneath the phone, inside their apartment.
"We'll be okay," Dean told the cop. "My dad'll be back soon. He'll be back any time now."
"Is there a number, son?"
Dean shook his head. "He's in the car. My dad."
"Then is there a number for his boss? For the place he works out of? Is there an office?"
"No," Dean told the cop. "But -"
They should have run, he realized. He and Sammy should have run, the second Mrs. Robbie fell down, so nobody would see them out there by themselves. So there wouldn't be any cops asking them questions. They should have run, and hid inside the apartment, and they should have called Pastor Jim to come get them.
They still could, he thought. All he had to do was tell the cop there was a number upstairs, underneath the phone.
But a little voice in his head told him Don't.
It told him Dad's gonna be mad. He's really gonna be mad, because he tried putting you in charge and that didn't work, and he tried having a babysitter and that didn't work. He's not gonna be able to do his job, because he can't take Sammy where it's dangerous, so he's gonna have to stay and take care of you himself.
He's gonna be mad.
"He'll be home soon," he told the cop again. "Before dark. It's okay. We can just go in the house and wait for him."
"There's no one else? A relative, a friend?"
"I'm very responsible," Dean said.
The cop smiled at that. "I'm sure you are."
"He'll be back soon. A little while, that's all."
"How long is 'a little while', son?"
Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
All he could do was shrug. He could lie - he could say an hour, or a few hours, but he could see on the cop's face that that wouldn't be good enough, that the cop wasn't going to leave him and Sam here by themselves.
"We'll lock the door," he tried. "Dad told us not to go anywhere."
"I understand that. And that's a good thing. But if there's no one to keep an eye on you - that's not safe, and we want to make sure you and your brother are safe. When your dad gets back, he can swing by and pick you up." The cop glanced over at Mrs. Robbie. He seemed sad that she was dead, even though nobody else did. "There's a lot of commotion going on around here," he told Dean. "And we don't want your little brother to get scared. Okay?"
It wasn't. It wasn't okay at all.
"Everything's going to be fine," the cop said. "We're just going to take you someplace safe, until your dad gets back."
He wasn't going to let Dean say no. He was going to be quiet about it, maybe because he didn't want people to say he'd been mean to a couple of kids, but he wasn't going to let Dean and Sam just go inside by themselves.
No matter what Dad had said.
"I guess," Dean said quietly.
"Let's go for a ride, then. How's that sound?"
As Dean had guessed, the "somewhere safe" was the police station, where a lady cop (Officer Sherwood, she said) let Sammy play with some toys she had in her desk. When she thought Dean couldn't hear her, she told the other cop that there was a room in the back with some cots. A better place for two little boys to stay overnight than Juvie. There'd be someone on duty all night who could check on them now and then, who'd make sure they were okay and getting some rest.
I'm not little, Dean thought but didn't say.
But he was. He was a kid. Not a criminal. Just a kid.
We should've run. Should've said we lived in that house down the street, and our mom was there waiting for us.
They could have done that, if that lady from across the street hadn't ratted them out.
Should've took care of this.
But he hadn't. He'd messed it all up, again.
And Dad hadn't shown up. Not before dark. Not after dark, or this morning.
Dean stood in the doorway of the blue room now, watching Sammy bounce around on the bed, figuring any second now the lady with the soft, warm hands would tell Sammy to stop doing that because he was going to break something. When she didn't, Dean looked up at her, and it felt like his whole body was frowning.
Maybe she was a robot, like that "Grandma" on the Twilight Zone episode: the one those three kids had built because their mom had died and they needed somebody to be kind to them.
"When my dad comes back, will they tell him to come here?" he asked her.
"I'm sure they will. Now - why don't you go on in with your brother?" she told him. "Take a look around."
It wasn't any big deal, he thought, just a blue bedroom with two beds, but he would have to go on in there so he could get Sammy to calm down. He was only a couple of steps past the door when Sammy exploded off the bed and ran to some shelves in between the door and what was maybe the closet. "Wow!" Sam yelled, ready to grab, ready to play, but Dean caught him before he could mess up all those books, and games, and what looked like a whole set of G.I. Joes with all the accessories. That lady cop, Officer Sherwood - who was nice, but really kind of dumb, at least when it came to little kids - had given Sam way too much sugar for breakfast, juice and Cap'n Crunch and chocolate milk and two cookies, and Sam had been wired for sound ever since. He'd run around and around and around until he "hit bottom," as Uncle Bobby would say, and then he'd either cry or get ugly. Maybe both.
"LEGGO!" Sam screeched.
"He's five," Dean said to the lady in the doorway. "They gave him too much sugar."
She smiled at that, like she knew exactly what he meant. "Sam," she said. "How would you like to go out back for a little while? We've got a swing out there, and a sandhill."
"What's a sandhill?" Sam asked her.
A hill of sand, you dope, Dean wanted to say, but he wasn't sure enough about it to do that.
He was right, though. It was a big hill of sand, piled up in a corner of the lady's yard, and sitting at the foot of it were three Tonka trucks - a dump truck, a front loader, and a bulldozer. "My husband got those out of the attic," the lady said. "Since it's a nice day, he figured you boys might like to do some construction before lunch."
"COOL!" Sam shrieked, and ran for the sandpile.
It was, kind of.
"Go ahead," the lady said to Dean. "I'll be inside, in the kitchen. I can see you from the window. If you need me, just call me."
That was a small problem, though.
"What do I call you?" Dean asked.
She put her hand on his cheek. It felt even warmer than it had when she touched his shoulder. "How about 'Aunt Emily'? Does that sound okay?"
Like those ladies, he thought: the ladies who used to see him and Mom in the grocery store, or out taking a walk. The ladies from their neighborhood back in Lawrence. None of them had been his real aunt, but they'd told him to call them that.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess."
~~~~~~~~
Aunt Emily's husband said to call him Uncle Paul. Their real name was Burns. Paul and Emily Burns. During the daytime, Mr. Burns - Uncle Paul - worked in an insurance office, and wore a suit, and he drove an '84 Chevy Monte Carlo.
He was a little man, much smaller than Dad.
"I like a good burger," he said to Dean after he had changed his clothes and had put on jeans and a dark green shirt. "How about you? You a burger man?"
"I'm a burger man," Sam told him.
Uncle Paul laughed and messed up Sam's hair with his hand. "Okay, then. Burgers it is."
He grilled the burgers, out in the yard on a big shiny grill. They were thick and juicy and the one he gave Dean dripped all over Dean's arm when he bit into it. "This is the life, huh?" he said while Dean was wiping his arm off with a napkin.
He really seemed to believe that.
Dean kind of didn't.
~~~~~~~~
It wasn't until a while after Dean and Sam had gotten into bed, after Aunt Emily had tucked them in and turned out all the lights except for a nightlight shaped like a sailboat that was plugged into the wall near the closet door, then went on downstairs, that Sammy said anything about anything.
For a while after "lights out" Sammy had laid in his bed and sang the songs that Uncle Paul had reminded them of, out at the picnic table while they ate their burgers and corn and drank their milk: the theme songs from Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch and The Beverly Hillbillies. Uncle Paul had used all of the right words. Sam used some of the right ones and some that he made up in his own head.
After he was done with all of his goofed-up singing, Sam said, "Is Pastor Jim comin' tomorrow?"
"I don't know," Dean told him.
"How come?"
"Because I don't."
He did know, though, pretty much. Pastor Jim wasn't likely to show up tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, because nobody had called him. Not Dean, and as far as Dean knew, not anybody else, either.
But Pastor Jim believed in miracles, and had told Dean a bunch of times that they were a real, true thing, so Dean supposed it was possible that Jim would show up at Uncle Paul and Aunt Emily's front door all on his own, without being called, because somehow he'd known that Mrs. Robbie was dead and that Dean and Sammy were In The System.
It was possible, Dean supposed, that God would tell Pastor Jim what was going on.
It was also possible that Dad would show up, or Uncle Bobby. Tonight, or in the morning.
It was also possible that Santa Claus would ring the front doorbell.
"Is Dad comin'?" Sam asked.
"I don't know."
"Then you're a dumb stupid head."
No, Dean thought. I'm s'posed to take care of you. That's what I'm doing.
They would have been alone in the apartment, if they'd run and hid in there, he told himself. They'd had lots of salt to spread out at the doors and windows, and Dad had made sure all the doors and windows had good, strong locks - but that didn't mean bad things couldn't get in.
A lock on the door hadn't meant that that monster couldn't get into the motel room, the night Dean had left Sam alone.
But they were with people here. Grownup people who were just like babysitters, and didn't look old enough to drop dead on the sidewalk.
Nothing bad would come. Not here.
Not here.
Dean had been alone with Uncle Paul for a few minutes, downstairs, while Aunt Emily was upstairs, helping Sam take his bath. Uncle Paul had told him about their new VCR, and showed him how they were making a collection of movies that they could watch right there in their house, even without HBO, and asked what Dean and Sam liked to eat for breakfast.
"It doesn't matter," Dean told him, then figured he should be more specific, so Sam wouldn't pitch a fit. "Sam likes Froot Loops. Or sometimes Cap'n Crunch. Mainly just cereal. But I don't care. I can eat anything."
"Good to know," Uncle Paul said.
Then he said, "I know it takes a while."
"What does?" Dean asked.
"Settling into a new place. My dad was in the service, so we moved around a lot. I know how it is."
He didn't, Dean thought. Not really.
"Something on your mind?" Uncle Paul asked.
Dean looked at him for a minute. He had a kind face, a friendly face, like Pastor Jim, but different.
"Does bad stuff happen here?"
Uncle Paul frowned at that. "What kind of bad stuff, son? You mean robberies, things like that? No, there's nothing like that. Nothing for you and Sam to worry about. You're perfectly safe here, with us."
Are we? Dean wondered.
There was a shotgun in their apartment, loaded and ready to use, up on a shelf in Dad's closet. Sam didn't know it was there, and neither did anyone else; when the cops took Sam and Dean into the apartment so they could gather up clothes and things to take with them, and so the cops could try to figure out how to contact Dad, they didn't look up on the closet shelf, underneath the old plaid blanket Dad had folded up to hide the gun.
Maybe they'd found it by now.
Maybe they'd decided Dad was a nut job, because he kept a loaded shotgun in the house with his kids.
Maybe they'd found the piece of paper with the phone numbers on it, and had decided not to call Pastor Jim, or Uncle Bobby, because Dean and Sam would be better off far away from a guy who left his kids in an apartment with a loaded gun.
It's so we'd be safe, Dean thought.
But they hadn't been. Not that night he'd gone to play video games - just for a LITTLE WHILE - and the monster came in to kill Sam. Not the night Dad came home all bloody and torn up and made noises like he was going to die, until he finally fell asleep, then tossed and turned with Dean watching him, and the first thing he said when he woke up was, "Son of a BITCH."
Not the night Mom died. Especially not that night.
Because he'd stopped wanting to talk about anything like that, or even think about it, Dean had sat down on the soft carpeted floor of the Burnses' living room, close to the neat rows of video tapes, and ran his finger along the spines, looking at all the titles of the movies. There was Star Wars, he saw, and Raiders, and The Empire Strikes Back, and some Clint Eastwood stuff, and The Sound of Music. A few more he didn't recognize.
"You're safe here, Dean," Uncle Paul said from behind him.
"Okay," Dean replied.
~~~~~~~~
"Who are those people?" Sam demanded in the morning, pointing to some framed pictures hanging on the wall in the Burnses' living room.
"Those are our sons," Uncle Paul told him. "Adam and Christopher."
"Are they dead?"
That got a funny look out of Uncle Paul - one that said he was thinking a million different thoughts - before he said, "No, Sam. They're all grown up now. They have their own homes. Adam lives a few miles from here, and Chris lives in Michigan."
"Oh," Sam said.
"Why would you think they were dead?"
"They're not here," Sam replied.
That was all Sam wanted to know about the whole thing. He went back to drawing in the coloring book Aunt Emily had given him, squashing down hard on the crayon in the way Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby and half of everybody in the world had told him not to, because he'd break the crayon, and if there was one thing that gave Sam fits, it was broken crayons. "It's not GOOD no more!" he'd say, and would want somebody to conjure up a whole new box.
The box Aunt Emily had given him had been brand new, with the plastic wrap still on it, until Sam ripped it open and dumped all the crayons out onto the table. The coloring book was new, too, but that other stuff - the books and games and the trucks and the G.I. Joes - Dean figured had belonged to Adam and Christopher.
"Our house was too quiet," Uncle Paul said to Dean. "It's been a while since the boys moved out. We see Adam pretty often, but he's got a girlfriend now. Keeps him busy, along with his job. It'll be a while till we see grandchildren, so we thought -"
He looked into the kitchen, where Aunt Emily was washing the breakfast dishes, and humming while she did it.
"We got tired of the quiet," he said.
"Sam makes a lot of noise."
"It's a good kind of noise."
You won't think so when he really pitches a fit, Dean thought, but it was true: once all the sugar had worn off, yesterday afternoon, Sam had quieted right down into what Pastor Jim's housekeeper, Mrs. L, sometimes called his "angel self." He'd insisted on helping Aunt Emily make the beds this morning, and last night he'd helped Uncle Paul haul the trash out to the curb. The worst thing he'd done so far was sing the Gilligan's Island song about six hundred and fifty times, and even then he'd done it quietly.
Maybe he felt safe.
"Safe" could do that. Make you real calm.
I'm doing what I'm s'posed to do, Dean thought. I AM.
~~~~~~~~
Ms. Paulson the Social Worker showed up at lunchtime. "Just checking in," she said.
"We're all fine," Aunt Emily told her. "Everybody's getting settled in and getting acquainted. We're having grilled cheese and applesauce for lunch. Everything's going fine."
For a while, Ms. Paulson watched Sam battle the G.I. Joes against each other in the sandpile, and talked quietly with Aunt Emily, first in the kitchen and then in the living room. Dean couldn't hear everything she said, but he heard most of it.
She didn't say anything about phone numbers. About anybody finding those numbers underneath the phone and calling Pastor Jim or Uncle Bobby.
"Is there any sign of their father?" Aunt Emily whispered.
Dean heard the word father, and that was enough.
Ms. Paulson shook her head.
~~~~~~~~
"I thought we'd head over to the mall today," Uncle Paul said the next morning, which was Saturday. He spoke in a soft, low voice Dean recognized, the one that meant I don't want your brother to get all wound up about this just yet. "We can get you boys some more clothes, maybe some warmer jackets."
"We've got clothes," Dean pointed out. It was true: the cops had let him pack up all of his and Sammy's clothes from the apartment. At first they'd said "bring some," but when they saw that everything that was there wasn't a whole lot, they said, "Bring it all." Jeans, shirts, socks, underwear, shoes. Jackets, too.
"Everybody can use something new," Uncle Paul said.
What he meant was, he thought their clothes were kind of smelly and old. He and Aunt Emily weren't rich people; their house wasn't a big huge one, and they didn't have a lot of fancy stuff, but nothing in it was smelly or beat up. Their clothes were all nice and neat and didn't have any holes or funny stains where stuff had spilled on them and it wouldn't come out in the wash.
"You could use a warm jacket," Uncle Paul said.
Not gonna be here long enough to need a heavy jacket, Dean thought, but that might not be true. He and Dad and Sammy had been to places that were warm in the wintertime, but they'd also been to places that were freezing cold. Pastor Jim's, for instance. It got cold enough there to freeze the eyeballs right out of your head.
"You don't have to buy us stuff," Dean muttered. "We're okay."
"Just a few things. So you have what you need."
Uncle Paul was a lot like that cop: they both talked quietly, but they meant business. Even when it sounded like they were making a suggestion, they had already made up their minds.
"Thank you," Dean told him.
Sam got in the car like he thought it was the space shuttle or something, so maybe Aunt Emily had said something to him about going shopping. He settled into his seat and fastened his seat belt all on his own, without being asked.
Uncle Paul made the thinking a million thoughts face again when they pulled up outside of Sears and Sam told him, "We don't go there. We go to G-O-O-D-W-I-L-L."
What he told Sam was, "Not this time."
If there was anything as bad as giving Sam too much sugar, it was turning him loose in a store. It never mattered much to Sam whether or not there was much money involved, or whether or not he could actually buy something and bring it home; Sam's point of view always seemed to be that a store (or better yet, a whole mall) was a giant playground, with everything he could possibly imagine laid out for him to look at, touch, pick up, play with, and most of the time, make a giant mess out of. Dad never let Sam get away with that, not for more than a couple of minutes, anyway - but these people, the Burnses, didn't know Sam. Their grown-up sons might have been well-behaved. They might have walked around a mall not touching anything.
But Sam?
Uncle Bobby sometimes called Sam "Hands."
He could wreck a whole mall faster than Godzilla and Mothra put together.
He was good, though, this time. He did have to touch all the nice, neat, piled-up shirts, but he didn't make any noise while Aunt Emily was sorting through them looking for the right size, and then holding them up against him to see how they looked. Sam let her pick out two shirts and a pair of jeans for him, and some socks and underwear, which was more brand-new clothes than he'd ever gotten at one time in his whole life, except maybe when he was first born.
Then Aunt Emily turned to Dean and asked, "What do you see that you like?"
"I'm okay," he told her.
Mrs. Robbie had died on Wednesday. This was Saturday. Three whole days, and Dad hadn't come to get them. Neither had Pastor Jim, or Uncle Bobby. It didn't seem like anybody had found those phone numbers.
It didn't seem like anybody was gonna come.
Because you didn't TELL them.
But Dad would be mad. He'd be real mad that he can't go and do his job, no matter who's taking care of Sam. If he has to stay all the time and take care of Sam, then he can't go do his job, and people could die.
"Oh, honey," Aunt Emily said.
Right there, in front of Uncle Paul and Sam and everybody in the store, she put her arms around him and held him while he cried, patting his back and rubbing it and rubbing his hair like Mom used to do. When he started to cry harder she told him it was okay, and walked with him over to a quiet place in behind some racks of jeans. She told him it was okay to cry, no matter how old you were, and if anybody said they never cried, they were either lying or they were pretty dumb.
He got tears and snot all over her shirt, but she told him that was perfectly okay because it would dry, and when she got home she'd just throw the shirt in the wash, no harm done.
She gave him Kleenex out of her purse and smiled a little when he blew his nose.
"I want my dad," he told her. "I want my dad to come back."
"I know you do," she said.
They got him a new pair of sneakers and three t-shirts, each one a different color.
Uncle Paul held up a jacket he'd pulled off a rack.
I'm not your kid, Dean thought. He felt mad inside, really mad, the throwing-and-breaking things kind of mad, though he wasn't sure why.
Then he was sure.
The something here that he liked?
It wasn't the clothes. It wasn't the lunch in the food court that Uncle Paul and Aunt Emily bought for him and Sammy.
It was these people.
~~~~~~~~
The first night he'd spent in the Burnses' house, he barely slept at all; he'd spent most of the night curled on his side, watching Sammy, making sure that nothing crept out of the closet or out from under the bed, that nothing opened the window (even though he'd made sure it was locked) and came in from outside, or slithered in from the hallway.
This was just a regular house, where regular people lived - but Dad rescued regular people from bad things all the time.
That was his job.
The job he couldn't do if he was taking care of Dean and Sam.
The second night, because there was no shouting here, and no cars crashing into porches, he slept a little longer.
The third night - Saturday night - lulled by the sound of the TV downstairs and the quiet voices of Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul, and reminding himself that Dad was out there somewhere, doing his job and taking care of people so they wouldn't die, he slept all the way through.
The Conclusion…