Safe at Home Read Online Free Page A

as much as he remembered the magic of that first time, the smells of the place and the sounds of the place and even all the green made him remember something else:
    Being sent back to foster care.
    • • •
    After that, Nick was convinced that he could wait forever and never get adopted. It turned out he didn’t even have to wait a year. A few months later, they used his story on one of the “Wednesday’s Child” segments on Channel 4. Nick didn’t know anything about it until the reporter and the cameraman came to the Boyds’ apartment and interviewed him and Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, but it was some kind of series they ran on boys and girls still waiting to be adopted.
    Nick didn’t know what to think about that, because he’d never told any of the kids at his school in Riverdale that he was in foster care in the first place.
    But it was summer and school was out, and Poppa and Nana Boyd told him it was a good thing.
    They were right.
    The very next week, Paul and Brenda Crandall—old but not as old as the Boyds—were sitting in the apartment on Elm Street and having their first meeting with Nick. Then there was another meeting. And a trip to the city to visit the Museum of Natural History with all the dinosaurs, what hadto be the biggest and best and coolest dino exhibit in the whole world.
    Nick made it to the sleepover this time, made it all the way to Connecticut.
    When the adoption was finalized, after Nick had met with all the social workers and counselors and the nice people from the Administration for Children’s Services, Nick had said to Mr. and Mrs. Crandall, “What should I call you?”
    He thought Mrs. Crandall was going to cry as she said, “Mom. And Dad.”
    Nick said, “Are you sure?”
    She said, “As sure as we’ve been of anything in our lives.”
    “It took so long,” Nick had said to her that day.
    “For us, too,” she’d said. “But we had to find the exact right boy. And now we have.”
    Mr. Crandall had said, “I’ve taught English pretty much my whole life, Nick. And I can tell you something from experience: Story is everything. And now your story is finally going to have the happy ending it deserves.”
    “Even if this ending is really just a beginning,” Mrs. Crandall said.
    Nick knew by then that they had tried and tried to have a child of their own and never could. Late in life, at least late to be parents, they had decided all over again how much they still wanted to have one.
    “We’d given up,” she’d said. “But then one day we decided that you should never give up on your dreams. That’s when we saw you on TV.”
    “My dream was just to get adopted,” Nick had said. “But then I sort of gave up on ever finding adoptive parents.”
    “No,” Brenda Crandall said. And then she started to cry, and Nick thought he’d done something wrong, said something to make her this sad. He just didn’t know what.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “These are happy tears.”
    Then Mrs. Crandall told him he didn’t have to put any words in front of
parents
ever again.
    “We’re just your parents,” she said.

FOUR
    Nick had finally found parents.
    They just happened to be parents who knew hardly anything about baseball. Instead they were parents who wanted him to be as good in school as he was in baseball.
    They tried to understand baseball. They really did, Nick could see his mom, especially, really trying, and he appreciated that she knew a lot more now than when they’d first adopted him, when she basically didn’t know a fair ball from a foul ball.
    The first time she’d seen him play a game, she’d had only one question afterward:
    “If the position you play isn’t dangerous, how come you’re the only one out there who has to wear equipment?”
    Nick didn’t take it personally. He just figured that you were either a sports fan or you weren’t. And the Crandalls weren’t. They seemed to be in great shape for people their age,