TAMARINDO PARK—TAMARINDO, A COASTAL VILLAGE IN
COSTA RICA
CURRENT DAY
“OKAY, WHO’S NEXT?”
The kids screamed and jumped and raised their hands.
I stood among eight of our kids, breathing hard with a smile so huge it hurt. And at the same time loving life, a love generated from the pure joy on their young, innocent faces.
Rays of sun penetrated the jungle canopy with its tall Spanish Feeder trees at the top, and mango and banana closer to the ground. The vast park sat in the center of the village of Tamarindo, adjacent to the village’s church.
My wife, Marie, stayed over by the picnic tables, close enough to watch us. The two oldest of our ten children sat next to Marie, doting on her. They rarely left her side since she announced she was three months pregnant.
I raised my hand to get the attention of the eight children bouncing all around and tried to quiet them down just a little. “Who wants the chance,” I said, “to beat their Papi in a fair footrace? The prize is some melcochas for the winner.” Melcochas are sugar candies popular in Costa Rica.
All of them jumped and screamed louder, waving their hands even more. Marie didn’t often allow the kids to eat sugar, but this qualified as a special occasion. Eight-year-old Toby Bixler, for some unknown reason, had turned quiet two days earlier, and the trip to the park doubled as an excuse to exercise the children and to try and pull Toby out of his shell. Marie diagnosed it as post-traumatic stress from his past that had returned, and he just needed a little time to get over it.
Exercise the children, hell. These kids, with their endless energy, didn’t need exercise, and now they were trying to run my tired old ass into the ground.
I pointed to Toby. “How ’bout you, Son, you want to take on your Papi? Take a chance at winning some melcochas?” The child didn’t move or even smile. I froze; his eyes reminded me too much of the way he looked when Marie, my dad, and I grabbed all these children from abusive and toxic homes in South Central Los Angeles. We’d made our getaway down to Tamarindo, Costa Rica, where they’d been safe and thriving for the last year now. The ex-cop in me wanted to stop everything, take Toby aside, and quietly question him away from all other outside stimuli, do it by the book, work it out of him slow, build—no, rebuild—his confidence and get him to tell me what had happened to change things. Doubt no longer remained in my mind that something had happened. I no longer believed it to be an emotional relapse, as Marie had offered as a reason. I’d been away from the street too long and should’ve seen it a lot sooner. I looked up to catch Marie’s eye, as if she, too, could’ve seen, from that far off, what I’d just seen. She was sitting on the picnic bench, weaving bright-colored potholders with the two girls.
My mind raced back to when and how Toby could’ve been exposed to any sort of danger. I couldn’t come up with even one moment where jeopardy could weasel in and nip at his heels. We’d been that careful.
I worked full-time at the cabana bar at the El Margarite Hotel, and Marie volunteered at the local clinic as a physician’s assistant. During our absence, Rosa, our live-in help, and my dad oversaw the safety of the children. I trusted them both implicitly. The kids could not be in better hands.
Alonzo, my grandson, stepped up close. “Pick me, Papi, pick me.” He was five years old, with facial features that resembled my only natural daughter, Olivia. Olivia died of an overdose, leaving the twins, Alonzo and Albert, to live with their morally corrupt father, Derek Sams. Just the thought of that name caused the anger to rise up in my chest, looking for an outlet. Albert died at the hands of my son-in-law. I hunted Sams down and killed him after the justice system tried him and spit him out the other end, a free man. That same justice system tried me for my crime. I lost my job as a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective on the Violent Crimes Team and did two years in the slam up in the Q. Marie had waited for me those two long years, caring for Alonzo.
I pointed to Alonzo and said, “Okay, you.”
“Fix, the fix is in,” Eddie Crane said. Eddie was one of our newest additions to the family.
“What do you mean fix?” I didn’t have to ask.
The other children went quiet to see what would happen next.
Eddie shrugged, now a little sheepish. “You know exactly what I mean.”
He didn’t want to say it. Try as I might, I found it difficult not to favor my own grandson. I smiled at Eddie. I could beat him in a fair footrace as long as it was a short one, and he knew it, too. I got closer and whispered, “I think I liked it better when you couldn’t talk.”
He laughed, knowing I was only joking with him. He couldn’t talk when we’d first rescued him. He’d been abused and then kidnapped by a sadistic and violent man named Jonas Mabry, who took him for no other reason than to get even with me for something that had happened twenty years earlier. Eddie had gradually come out of his shell, just as all the others had, and started talking and interacting like a normal child should as a full-fledged member of our pieced-together family.
“Okay, then, tough guy.” I pointed at him. “I pick you.”
He giggled at the description, tough guy.
“Don’t laugh, my friend. You lose, you have to rake the leaves in the front yard for two weeks.”
He lost his smile for a brief moment. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t have any skin in the game it won’t be as exciting, will it?”
“Okay, then let’s make it a fair race.”
“Whatta ya have in mind, tough guy?”
“Aah . . . aah . . . okay, you have to carry him.” He pointed at Alonzo.
Alonzo hopped up and down as if he had to pee, and clapped his hands. “Yes, yes, yes. Please carry me, Papi, please carry me, please.”
The other kids took up his chant. “Carry Alonzo. Carry Alonzo.”
“Okay, but you have to give me a head start, at least as far as that bird of paradise off to the side there. This kid must weigh half a ton.”
The kids all laughed. “Alonzo weighs a ton. Alonzo weighs a ton.”
I held out my hand to Eddie Crane to shake. He didn’t take it right away. “I’ll give you a head start if you run through the playground in the sand and up and over the slides. I run on the outside of the playground, which is twice as far. Fair enough?”
“You’re going to make a good lawyer one day.” I again extended my hand.
He still didn’t take it. “And if I win, it’s not just melcochas for me. All the kids get some.” Everyone cheered.
“Your mami’s not gonna like that, I know that much for sure.” I turned to Toby and said, “What do you think, little man, candy for everyone if Eddie Crane wins?”
Some of the kids close to him nudged him, saying, “Come on, speak, tell him yes.”
He remained mum and gave those same eyes that threatened to rip my guts out.
I shook it off. I pointed to Eddie. “Count to three.”
The kids cheered and chanted, “Go, Eddie, go. Go, Eddie, go.”
Eddie said, “One.”
When he said “two,” I jumped the gun, scooped up Alonzo, and ran. The kids screamed with delight and took off after us. Eddie pulled ahead right away, but he had to go twice as far.
Out of breath, I said to my grandson, “No more tortillas for you, little man.” He weighed more than I expected, and my breathing came hard right away.
We made it to the sandbox with the slides before Eddie hit the halfway mark for his leg of the race.
My feet dug into the sand and gravity grabbed hard at our combined weight. The platform had two ladders on opposite sides and two slides on the other sides of those. I slowed at the slide, not wanting to slip while I was holding Alonzo, took a couple of deep breaths to catch up, and moved up the slick surface. I held Alonzo with one hand, his legs high around my waist, his arms around my neck, and gripped the side rail with the other. I made it to the top and traversed across the platform to the opposite slide to go down. I looked back. The kids all stood close around the perimeter of the sandbox, cheering Eddie. Toby stood back where the race started. He hadn’t moved an inch. He didn’t watch our game. He stared in a different direction, at the parking lot and the street, waiting for an evil that wasn’t there to saunter up and drag him back to a horrible place.