“Jim’s an only child,” Allen told her. “No family at all apart from the father, although he’s given to inventing grandparents far away. His mother committed suicide five years ago, one day before his seventh birthday. Jim found her. She’d used a shotgun—her husband’s favorite one, according to the newspaper reports—while he was away on business. Pretty emphatic statement there, as someone commented: husband’s pet gun and in a place the kid was sure to discover her when he came home from school.
“The father traveled a lot, he’s an investment counselor, whatever that is. A very successful one, it would appear—big house, full-time housekeeper, a new Lexus, a nice little Cessna he’s licensed for. Jim was a difficult kid, acting out at school, smart-mouthing the teachers, accusations of bullying from the younger children. One of his teachers thought he might have a learning disability, but his father took him out of there before they could test him, and stuck him in a private school with a reputation for discipline. That worked for a while, even though it involved an hour-long bus trip each way, but then there was a rapid succession of catastrophes: One of his school friends drowned, the school had a fairly serious fire. This was about six months before his mother killed herself. With the fire on top of the drowning, the entire school community was in chaos, half the classes working out of portables, trauma counselors wandering the halls with their stuffed dogs, the whole nine yards. By the time the repairs were done and the teachers a little more settled, Jim was beyond the reach of any counselors. The principal had to suspend him after a graffiti incident in the boy’s bathrooms, and said he’d let him back in only if he was in the care of a psychiatrist. It was the principal’s opinion that Jamie had an attention deficit disorder, needed to be on Ritalin at the very least. The father flat-out refused, which as far as the Ritalin goes I’d have agreed, but the boy would have really benefited by a lot of hours with a counselor. But no—one of those macho things, you know? ‘No kid of mine needs a shrink.’ ”
Rachel nodded; she’d worked with children a long time, had come across all the parents, and if she tended to avoid using labels such as “conduct disorder” and “flat affect,” that did not mean she was unfamiliar with the diagnosis. Or the reality.
“The next school was a very expensive academy, not quite military, but big on structure. Decent curriculum,” he admitted, “and only three miles away, but it wouldn’t have been my choice for a kid who’d just lost his mother. Jim seems to have settled down somewhat, but I have a feeling that as soon as the tight restrictions are off, he’s going to test the boundaries pretty aggressively. I’m afraid you’re going to have your hands full for a while.”
Rachel merely smiled; hands full of problem kids she was also used to.
“When the father’s away, he leaves the boy with the housekeeper, Mrs. Mendez. That’s another odd relationship: You’d expect an older woman in a house with a more or less parentless child would bond with him, become a surrogate grandmother, but she seems remarkably uninterested in the boy. Does her job, cleans and cooks, then retreats to her room and leaves him watching television.”
“The father encouraged her aloofness, you think?”
“Almost a sure thing, I’d say. Both to keep the boy isolated and because it was less of a danger that the details of his relationship with the boy come to light.”
“How much abuse was there?”
“Physically, it seems to have been sporadic, although from something Jim said, there’s been more recently than there usually is during the school year.”
“It’s a controlled abuse, then? Not a drunken rage?”
“As far as I saw, the father only drinks heavily on occasion, so yes, it’s a deliberate and controlled cruelty.” He described the scene with the shotgun, an act of pure psychological torture. Rachel listened without comment. He went on. “It could be escalating because of the perceived threat of the boy’s increased height and maturity. And as far as I know, there’s been no overt sexual abuse, although you’ll watch for the signs.” Incest was always the most deeply buried secret of all, the last violation the victims would admit. Allen would not discount the possibility that Jamie’s father had included rape in his litany of domination, but the bugs he had planted on the house’s ground floor had not recorded any, and Allen had not picked up on the markers during the drive up here. Jamie had certainly been victimized, but perhaps not sexually.
“He wet the bed on our first night out, not since then. I have seen him with his thumb in his mouth, though he tends to chew the nail rather than suck on it. He doesn’t trust women any more than men, I’m afraid, so make sure Pete spends plenty of time with him. But no hunting. In fact, I’d lock away the guns completely for the summer while he’s around. It might just be the circumstances of his mother’s death, or the gun game his father plays, but I noticed on the drive up here, there’s something about hunting that sets all the boy’s nerves to twanging.”
“You think maybe dear old Daddy used to take his boy out in the woods to slaughter a pile of bunnies?” Rachel asked shrewdly. Her husband Pete and the boys all hunted for the table, as rural folk often do, and Allen knew that their big freezer depended on killing a deer during the season, but she had no illusions about the motivations of some hunters. “That old macho thing again?”
“Blooding his son,” Allen commented bitterly, and the phrase reached in and startled up a tangle of memory from the back of his mind: the shattering bang! and a spew of water across his face, his fingertips with a faint smear of blood on them—his first bloodshed—and the M16 kicking in his arms as it flung death at small men in black pajamas. He blinked, and was back in Montana again, with this war-hardened farmwife in a calico blouse and blue jeans.
“Deer season’s a long way off, so it won’t be a problem for a while. I’ll just have him and Pete Junior keep the guns locked up. And watch their tongues about it.”
“Jim’s a bright boy, and once you get through that hard shell of his, I think you’ll find his mother treated him well.” And Rachel would get through to the boy, of that Allen was certain, rubbing at Jamie’s protective shell with easy conversation, hard work, and the strong bonds of community, until one morning the boy would wake up and find the shell crumbled around his feet. If Allen was right, if in Jamie’s early childhood his mother had surrounded him with affection and respect, then freedom would come early: Trust was far easier to regain than to build from scratch.
And speaking of trust: “Don’t tell him we were watching his house, will you? I’d rather he didn’t know that Alice and I saw what his father did to him.”
“I won’t mention it,” she assured him. “So, how long will you stay?”
“Until he feels comfortable with me leaving. I imagine three or four days ought to do it.”
“It’s too bad I couldn’t have been there when you first picked him up. A boy like this, it’s hard to be passed from one adult to another. Not getting trust off to a good start.”
“You make it sound like geese hatching, imprinting on the nearest living thing,” Allen said.
Rachel laughed with delight. “My lord, Allen, a person would think you were a farm boy. How’d you pick up on that bit of lore?”
“Read it in a psych textbook ten thousand years ago. Look, Rachel, you really don’t want to be exposed any more than necessary. The very worst thing would be for Jim to bond with you, and then have you arrested. I’ll stay around until he gets used to being here, and then slip away.”
“Like shifting a sleeping baby from one lap to another,” she commented. “Come on, you conspirator, you; time I was getting dinner on the stove.”
In the end, in spite of his yearning to be away, it took until the end of the week before Allen could ease himself out from under Jamie’s weight and drive off, although by Thursday, he had begun to suspect that the hesitation he felt was not entirely for Jamie’s sake. Over the years he’d helped a lot of kids, but never had he met one who intrigued him like this boy. Although Jamie allo
wed himself to be taken into the family with more ease than Allen had anticipated, there remained about the boy a sense of reserve, a feeling that those dark eyes were watching his own interaction with his new family, standing back with a heavy dose of scorn at his own willingness to be drawn in. This deliberate distancing made Allen itch to do something to bring the boy out of his hermit’s cave, but in the end, he had to admit that his continued presence was on the verge of causing more confusion than assistance. Time to leave the family to get on with it; time to turn toward his own retirement.
On the morning of the sixth day, he announced at breakfast that he would be leaving after lunch. When the dishes were cleared, he and Jamie took a walk through the pasture in the general direction of the stream that divided the Johnsons’ land from their neighbor’s. Pete was out on the farm tractor, pulling out the stumps of some trees he had cut down the year before. Allen and Jamie paused to watch the contest.
“Wonder why he doesn’t just blow them up?” the boy asked.
“Maybe he finds this safer than dynamite.”
“Dynamite’s safe, if you’re careful.”
“Maybe it’s just more satisfying to yank them out. And I suppose it makes for a cleaner hole than blowing the tree to a million hunks.”
“I guess.” Jamie’s gaze indicated that he’d much rather have been watching pyrotechnics than a straining engine.
“You think you’re going to be okay here?” Allen asked him.
The thin shoulders shrugged.
“I mean it,” Allen persisted. “If this place isn’t going to be comfortable for you, it’s my job to find you a place more to your liking. You’re going to be spending several years here, before we can count on a judge declaring you an emancipated minor.” This was one of the things they’d talked about on the long drive north, and in the end, Allen had felt even more certain that he and Alice had been right, that Jamie was mature enough to have a voice in his own future.
The boy shrugged again. “Yeah, I guess it’ll be fine. It’s just weird, you know? Cows and people and chores and all. I mean, I didn’t exactly see myself growing up on a farm.”
“One thing those chores will do,” Allen said mildly, “is put muscle on a man. You see the shoulders on Pete and Pete Junior?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, sounding more interested. He was just old enough to be starting to take an interest in his body, Allen thought; farm work, fresh air, and Rachel’s cooking would build up the slight frame and put steel in the stooped backbone.
“Okay, if you’re sure this will do, then I need you to write a letter to your father, telling him that you’ve run away and found a new home, and that you’re happy. I’ll help you with the wording, and I’ll arrange to have it mailed far from here, so no one will be able to trace it. It’s better if the police think you’re a runaway rather than the victim of a kidnapping. They won’t look so hard, if they know you left under your own steam.”
“That makes sense,” said the veteran of a thousand police television dramas.
“And Jim, you’re going to have to watch yourself, every minute of every day. We’ve talked about this, I know, but you’re going to need to remember it in the same way you’ll remember to introduce yourself as ‘Jim.’ Every time you make a friend, you’ll want to tell them your secret so you won’t feel like an absolute fraud.” Allen could feel the boy give a little grimace of disbelief, not at the thought of betraying his secrets, but at the idea that he might make friends. “You’re going to make friends here, even though they’re just a bunch of farmers, and you’re going to feel like a liar every minute, for not telling your friends and your new cousins who you really are.”
Rachel, Pete, and their seventeen-year-old son Pete Junior knew Jamie’s story; it had been decided that the others were better off knowing just Jim’s public face, until they were older.
“And from time to time you’ll make enemies, and you’re going to be pissed off and you’ll want to show them up by telling them how much better you are than hicks like them. But you aren’t going to do that. Because if you do, word will travel, upwards to their parents and sideways through other kids and their friends, and sooner or later, someone at school or church will catch wind of it, and one day the local sheriff will knock on the door and ask Rachel for the phone number of that sister of hers in Texas whose illness meant she couldn’t take care of you for a while. And you really don’t want to see Rachel and Pete arrested for conspiracy to kidnap.” Then, in case the boy had failed to grasp it, Allen drove this last point home, hard. “Rachel and Pete are putting the future of their family in your hands—their children, the farm, everything. They are trusting you with their lives. If you talk, they could go to jail and lose it all.”
Jamie’s head jerked up, and he stared at Allen. “Why the hell would they do that? They don’t even know me!”
“If you asked Pete, he’d say it’s his Christian duty and leave it at that. Rachel would tell you that a person who doesn’t stand up to the wickedness of the world might as well be one of the wicked, which I suppose amounts to the same thing. And if you’re asking me, I’d tell you that the reason those two good people are offering you refuge and not working as missionaries in the Amazon or running a soup kitchen for the homeless in Harlem is because one of Rachel’s family found herself in a similar situation to yours, years ago, and someone helped her out. Lending you a hand, like they did one or two others before, is their way of paying back that help.”
Allen glanced down at the boy’s face, and nearly laughed aloud at the disbelief. “Jim, I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about now. But if you tell me you still don’t understand after you’ve lived here a year, then I’ll begin to worry. You want to turn back yet?”
“Can we go down to the creek?” This was not permitted to unaccompanied children, Allen knew. Jamie hadn’t yet noticed that the other boys his age were not, for this purpose, considered children. Or if he had, so far he had chosen to accept the restriction.
“Sure.”
They continued walking, Jamie concentrating on the ground so as to avoid the cow pats, Allen wondering—as a solitary man will, walking next to a child who is not his—what kind of father he would have made. When he caught himself starting down that pointless path, he wrenched his thoughts back to what the boy would do in the next few minutes. The boy was about to lose the person who had rescued him from an abusive father, a man who had spent five days in the car at his side, who had gentled his dreams, who had fed and clothed him and given him a new name and history, and who was now turning him over to that strange entity, a family. This was the point at which a sexually abused child would reach out—literally—to cling to an authority figure in the only way the child knew.
But Jamie made no attempt to take Allen’s hand, gave him no desperate and coquettish glance from under those dark lashes; for that, Allen was profoundly grateful, and immensely encouraged. Then the boy asked him a question.
“Do you think my father misses me?”
It hit Allen like a blow to the ribs, the question and the way it was asked, with neither hope nor expectation. Allen took a breath, blew it out between pursed lips, and for the first time since they’d left California, deliberately spoke the boy’s true name. “Jamie, I wish I could tell you that as soon as you left, your father realized how much he loved you and is making all kinds of promises to himself that if only you were to come back, he’d never mistreat you again. But my friend, I’m afraid your father has some pieces missing from his heart. No normal man would do what he’s done to you.”
“I deserved it,” the boy cut in. “He was only trying to make me stronger.”
“Jamie, no; you didn’t deserve any of it. You don’t make a person stronger by beating them. Believe me, I know.” Don’t criticize the father too much, he reminded himself, the boy will only defend him. He modified it to, “It may not even be entirely his fault—he may have been treated the same way by his father as he’s treated you—b
ut I have to tell you that as far as I could see, your father will be missing you in the same way he’d miss his car if someone stole it, or his favorite jacket. Personally, I think your father’s main reaction will be primarily one of rage. I think he’s probably feeling very, very angry that you’re gone.”
The boy shuddered; Allen couldn’t miss the reaction—not of grief that his father did not love him enough to miss him, but of visceral terror at the idea of a very angry father. Yes, he thought; Rachel and Pete had their work cut out for them this summer. Before he could stop himself, he reached out and smoothed the boy’s hair, then snatched back his hand as if he’d been burned. He’d learned early on to be cautious with physical contact, after the time he’d patted a six-year-old girl between the shoulder blades and had her dissolve into hysterics: Turned out the girl’s uncle had been in the habit of doing that after he’d raped her.