Page 88 of Creeping Beautiful

We didn’t have any meetings at Old Home for obvious reasons. We didn’t generally mix business life with personal life. So Adam had a warehouse in Baton Rouge and another one in New Orleans where he met with the leftovers and sent them on missions.

But the objective of leftover life was modified from Company life. We were soldiers for hire now. And no one gave us orders. Some of the teams still killed people. There was always a market for that. We called those clean-up missions. But sometimes teams kidnapped kids—this was often in foreign countries after a disgruntled parent would run off and take the child with them. We’d go get them back. We called those recovery missions.

Or we would steal things. High-ticket items like paintings and jewels. We called those thieving missions.

Or sometimes they were just boring intelligence-gathering jobs. And then we’d take pictures and compile a dossier and hand it over to whoever paid for it. We just called that reconnaissance.

And then, of course, I did those three stints in boarding school. I had to make one girl look like she committed suicide—that was, ironically, during the time of that Robert Frost poem. And then the second time I had to kidnap a girl. Or at least lead her to the team who was gonna kidnap her. I’m pretty sure she was held for ransom and let go. And the last one got a little messy at the end because Adam lied about it.

There were a lot of jobs. That is my real point. And there was a lot of money too. And by this time, I had my own bank account in the Cayman Islands that came with a debit card. So I bought myself a car the winter before I turned seventeen.

Donovan was busy with his plastic surgery stuff at UCLA so he only dropped by about once a month, if that. Not after every job like he used to. But we talked on the phone a lot. And he recorded those conversations too. He was still taking notes as well. I could hear the scratching of his pen on the other end of the line.

But Donovan wasn’t there when I bought my car. McKay was. He took me into New Orleans to get it because I ordered it online. It was actually a truck, because we lived on a dirt road in the middle of a swampy forest and that was only practical. But I wanted it the way I wanted it, so I got a custom order.

That summer I turned seventeen Adam was obsessed with the gardens. Now, we had always had nice gardens around Old Home. I don’t think I explained this properly in any of my previous journal entries, but they were beautiful. Many evergreen hedges, and pea-pebbled pathways, and regular flower plantings, and even a few fountains. Some summers they looked better than others because gardeners were always hard to keep since we lived so far away from everything.

But that summer I turned seventeen Adam took care of the gardens all by himself. And I took notice of this because he had never done that before.

By this time, we were talking again. Adam and I were never the best of friends. He was more like a… not a father, but that kind of figure. He was someone I took orders from. And not the same way I took orders from McKay. If McKay said, “Indie, you may not go to the movies with Nate tonight,” I would say, “Please, please, please!” with wide eyes and praying hands, and McKay would often give in.

Adam wasn’t in charge of my movie dates. Adam was in charge of my life. And I did not bother begging him for anything because he just never relented. He made up his mind and his mind was made up. That was that. I either obeyed or I didn’t and paid the consequences.

I learned pretty early that disobeying Adam was not gonna get me far. He was much easier to be around when you just did what you were told.

So my relationship with Adam, from the time I was ten until just after my seventeenth year, was mostly just following orders and going to church with him.

He was a stickler for that Sunday trip to fucking church.

But things started to change the summer I turned seventeen and saw him on his knees with hands in the dirt in our gardens.

At first, I just watched him from one of the windows. He had lots of deliveries from a nursery in a town about thirty miles away. They would pull up in their truck and Adam would stand there and point as they unloaded them. He would tell them exactly where to put each pot. But he didn’t ask them to help plant them. He did that part himself.

We had a small backhoe in the garden shed—which was really more of a building than a shed—and every other kind of garden equipment you can imagine. That’s where Nate and I got those chainsaws to clear trees back when we were eleven. And every morning in the early summer that year I turned seventeen, Adam was up with the sun digging holes and planting things.

I watched him do this for five days. McKay was busy with a few of the teams Adam told him to run, so he was in and out during this time. And Nate was busy with school things. And his grandfather, who was very, very ill at this point.

And I was alone.

Just Adam and me.

So on day six of this planting stuff I went outside in jeans and mud boots and asked Adam if I could help. It was like six in the morning, but it was already hot. So Adam took off his baseball hat, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, pointed to a row of potted evergreen shrubs, and said, “You can do those, Indie. Just put them in the holes and cover them with a nice mound of dirt and three inches of mulch. Then, when we’re done, you can water them.”

I nodded and did that. It took me all day.

They were not much to look at when all this took place and I said so when I was done. But Adam just smiled and leaned on a shovel. Then he said, “Don’t worry, Indie. This coming winter they will have pretty purple flowers with a scent you will die for. And next fall they will have bright red berries and the thrushes will come from miles around to feed on them. They will stay through the winter and the next spring we will have small, cup-like nests on all the trees and they will be heavy with blue-green, brown-speckled eggs.”

He was smiling when he said all this. Like talking about the berries and the birds was a fond memory he was conjuring up from long-ago days. He sounded a lot like Nate back when we were kids and my heart made room for Adam that day.

I think… I might even have fallen a little in love with him.

Because that was a new side to Adam that I had not seen before. I had never once imagined Adam as a boy growing up here at Old Home the way I did. I had no idea he was a swamp kid, like me.

But how could he not be?

He has no brothers and sisters. There was probably no one here but him when he was small. No mother. None of us had mothers. And the more I thought about it, the more I could picture Adam being Nate when he was small. Just a boy, all alone in the woods next to the duck lake and the river. Fishing from a little boat. Making fires on the beach and catching fireflies in jars to light up forts in the night.

I started wondering if he had a girl like me when he was young.