Page 168 of Strays
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You’re on extended leave for two more weeks,” he added. “Enjoy your vacation; you’re back on rotation soon.”
But we couldn’t enjoy anything with journalists glued to our windows, cameras flashing any time the blinds shifted. Jo couldn’t walk outside without a dozen voices shouting her name.
So we packed up and fled to Idaho with her uncles to stay with her family. Somewhere quiet.
I was nervous as hell when we landed at Boise Airport. My brothers were on edge too. Shane kept tapping his foot, and Jay kept running a hand through his hair the entire drive to Idaho City, with the three of us and Jo squeezed into the biggest rental truck we could find. It would be the first time we’d meet Jo’s entire family — her grandparents, cousins, and her aunt.
We’d dreamed of having a big family for so long, and now that we were here, we were all afraid of how it would go. But the minute we stepped inside Jo’s grandparents’ house, everything changed.
After hugging her, her grandmother hugged each of us tight for a full minute. Her mates smiled and shook our hands one by one, firm and strong.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, son,” Albert, one of them, told me.
I know ‘son’ is just something people say, but the last time someone called me that, I was nine years old. So yeah, it got me. Jay and Shane were no different. I saw it in their eyes, the shine every time one of Jo’s grandfathers said it.
That weekend, Jo’s uncles came from Mountain Home to Idaho City with Solange, Jo’s aunt, their three sons and their daughter Susie. Susie was ecstatic to see Jo and us. She’d spent too much time watching the romanticized version of Jo’s kidnapping on TV and was in love with our story.
She admires Jo, maybe a little too much for her fathers’ comfort. She talked nonstop about college. Like every nyra but Jo, she’d been homeschooled, but she had a plan.
“I found out about something called the GED,” she told Jo excitedly. “It’s a test you can take if you’re homeschooled. If I pass, I’ll get a high school certificate, and then I can apply to college like everybody else!”
Jo barely managed to smile at her, her face sad and tense. Later, when we were alone, she told us why: all those kinds of educational tests require valid human identification to take them.
“I don’t think she’ll be allowed to do it with her gregalis ID,” Jo says, her voice heavy with sadness. “But I don’t have the heart to tell her.”
We slept in Jo’s uncles’ old room, wrapped around her every night in the small nest, holding her thigh while we slept.
We spent a full week there. It was one of the best weeks of my life.
Jo’s grandfathers took us fishing. We didn’t catch anything. Jo kept jumping into the water to swim, and they said she scared the fish, but we didn’t care. We ended up jumping in with her before sunset, soaked and laughing.
We ate together at the big table every night, everyone talking over each other.
Jo’s grandmother called us sweetie all the time. My mother used to call me that too. I thought about her a lot after learning what really happened. It still hurt, but less than before. I finally did right by her. I found the truth. I put the man who took her in prison.
I spent hours talking with Jay and Shane before making the decision to call my fathers. They didn’t push, just helped me figure out what might give me peace, whether that meant making the call or letting it go.
In the end, I decided to call.
It felt right, calling them while I was in Idaho, surrounded by family, feeling like I finally belonged. I called Fontes first, gave him the names and an hour later, he sent me the number. I walked out to Jo’s grandparents’ backyard to make the call, and my brothers followed me. They didn’t say a word, just stayed close.
One of my fathers picked up on the third ring.
I thought I wouldn’t recognize the voice, but I did. I knew it was Paul the second he said, “Hello.”
“Hi, Paul. It’s Kory.”
Silence. Then: “Kory? I—I can’t believe it. Is it really you?!”
He told me he’d seen me on the news. That only when they saw the name — Larsen — that he and my other fathers realized who I was. They’d looked for me for years under Williams, thinking they’d find me in a precinct somewhere. But much later they found out packs from the Strays Program take the pack leader’s surname, so they assumed I’d taken a new one. It never occurred to them I might’ve taken my mother’s name.
I told him everything I had found out about my mother. I don’t know if I told him because I believed he deserved the truth, or because I wanted him to know I’d done what they couldn’t. That when my nyra was taken, I didn’t sitback and wait. I tore the world down to get her back.
Maybe it was both.
He asked if I wanted to talk to my other fathers. Asked if he could see me. Asked for a lot of things. But I cut him off, made a vague promise to call again sometime and hung up.
That was all I could do at the moment. Maybe I’ll change my mind someday, maybe I won’t.
