But the boy did not wince or duck away, and Allen breathed a sigh of relief, that the father hadn’t been accustomed to caressing his son’s hair.
“I guess you’re right,” Jamie said after a while. Then he added a peculiar thing: “My father’s really strong.”
“Jim, if you’re under the impression that strength and not needing anyone are the same thing, you really ought to think about that.”
“It’s just, my father is big on not showing weakness.”
Allen opened his mouth to pursue all the implications behind that idea, and then shut his jaws so tightly his back teeth protested. This was a cry for help if ever he’d heard one, but if he responded here and now, he’d never leave, and this dark, vivid child would never shift his allegiances to the good Rachel and Pete. Yes, he thought, it really is time for me to go, and merely said, “Again, I’m not sure that I’d agree that grief is a weakness where anger is not.”
The boy puzzled over the words as if they’d been in a foreign language, and then shook his head. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this.”
“What’s that?”
“Everything. Keep my mouth shut about who I am, live on a farm, pretend to be part of a family. Jeez, I’m not even used to having a door on my room.”
This last wry revelation was followed by an abrupt silence and a momentary jerk in the boy’s step, as if the words had surprised him by just slipping out. It was obvious that this was something he hadn’t intended to mention.
“You want to tell me about that?” Allen asked mildly. He didn’t need to see the boy’s face to know that he was blushing: The bend to his neck was indication enough.
“It’s nothing,” the boy said. “Just one of his punishments.”
“Your father.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to be reading one night and he saw the light around the door, so he took the door off. And, you know, the one to the bathroom, too. In case I decided to read in there.” He hesitated, but then the words came in a hurry as the boy tried to cover the revelation of his humiliation with distraction. “ ’Course, I never had much privacy to begin with, there wasn’t a lock or anything, and Mrs. Mendez always used to come in and move things around when I was at school, which I didn’t like but when I asked Father if maybe I could clean up the room myself so she didn’t mess up the computer he . . . well, he didn’t like that.”
Further humiliation, Allen gathered, and nodded. Oppressors never allowed their victims privacy, or the opportunity for making friends; when combined with random acts of violence and making food, warmth, and affection into rewards, the oppressor was set up as the center of his victim’s universe.
He asked merely, “How long ago was that?”
Jamie’s head rose a fraction at the reassuringly ordinary question. “That I complained about Mrs. Mendez?”
“No, that the door came down.”
“October.”
“I hope the book was worth it.”
The boy’s head came up all the way at that, and he grinned up at Allen; for a moment just a handsome kid without a care in the world. “Yeah. You ever read Lord of the Rings?”
“Long time ago. It was great.”
“Awesome. I was just at the end of the second book, where Sam is going to rescue Frodo from the giant spider Shelob? And I knew I was supposed to turn the light out but I just had to see what happened.”
“And he caught you.”
“Yeah.” The boy’s voice went dead again.
“Did he do anything other than taking down the door?”
“I don’t think I want to talk about it.”
“That’s fine. I just hope you got to finish the trilogy.”
“I did. It took forever, because I had to make sure to read only at school or when he was away. I wanted to bring those books with me here, but I couldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if one of your cousins has a set you could read.”
“I guess.”
The patent lack of enthusiasm in his voice made Allen wonder. “Is your set a special one?”
“Nah, just those big paperbacks that slide into a box. But my teacher at school gave them to me for my birthday, so I kinda wanted to keep them. And then Alice told me to bring just the things that would fit into my backpack and, well, they’d have taken up most of it.”
“They’ll be waiting for you,” Allen told him.
“I don’t think so,” the boy said in a bleak voice. Allen glanced down at his troubled young-old face, saw the faraway look, and wondered what memory of paternal brutality the boy was dredging up now. Or maybe he was picturing the father happily packing up all his son’s possessions and giving them away, to embrace his newly unburdened life. More likely, the boy was visualizing a bonfire of all the beloved childhood possessions he’d been forced to abandon, heaped in the backyard and drenched with gasoline by a vengeful father. Allen could have kicked himself: Surely he should know by now that platitudes did nothing for kids who had grown up knowing what an angry parent could do. And Mark O’Connell sounded to him like a man who would not take easily to being thwarted.
“You could be right,” he admitted to the boy. “But then again, possessions have a way of getting away from a person eventually anyway. Books fall apart, or a house burns down. What’s important is the words and the story that you’ve read and loved; those are a part of you now.”
“And I like that Ms. Rao gave them to me.”
“She sounds like a good teacher.”
“I guess. Yeah, she was. She tried hard, and it wasn’t her fault that . . . She told my father something that made him so mad—jeez,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh, “I thought it was about all over. Anyway, I was pissed at her for a while, but it really wasn’t her fault. She was just doing her job. And she was nice to give me the books.” He sighed, and straightened his shoulders. “Yeah, I guess I’ll see if someone has a set I can borrow. And I’ll get used to having a door again and I’ll learn to get the eggs out from under the hens without getting grossed out and I’ll remember to call them Aunt Rachel and Uncle Pete. Wouldn’t it be great if they could just take your brain and erase your memories, and plant a new set? Like in the movies?”
“Some memories,” Allen admitted. “Some of them we could do without. But I promise you, take it one step at a time, and every day it’ll become a little easier.”
“I guess.”
“It will. Look, Jim—I’ve been there. Maybe not where you are, but right next door. When I was twenty, I came home from Vietnam just a basket case, so completely screwed up I felt like an alien. It wouldn’t have surprised me to look in the mirror and see one of those gray X-Files creatures with no hair and giant eyes looking back at me.” He was startled, and gratified, to hear the boy snort with appreciation. “I didn’t have any help, mostly because I was too stupid and too messed up to ask for it, so it took me forever to get my head straight. But when you talk about feeling like a stranger in a strange land, I do know how that feels, Jim, I really do.”
The boy’s head was down, so what he muttered next was inaudible.
“Sorry?” Allen asked.
Jamie threw back his head to shoot Allen a look that was both challenge and something darker: resentment, perhaps, or an accusation of betrayal. “I said, so why aren’t you sticking around?”
“I wish I could.” The boy took it as yet another dismissal by an uncaring adult, and turned his back. Allen reached out, then drew back his hand before it landed on the boy’s shoulder and instead said firmly, “Jim, look at me.” The boy came to a halt, staring at the ground. Allen wanted to drop to his knees so he was on a level with Jamie, but he knew the boy would take the gesture as patronizing. Instead, he bent his shoulders and waited for the boy’s eyes to meet his before saying, “I swear to you, Jameson Patrick O’Connell, that in all my years, I’ve never, ever wanted to stick around a kid as badly as I do at this moment. It’s going to hurt like hell to get in the car today and drive off.
”
Allen saw his brutal honesty hit home, and thought, Good. What the boy needed more than anything else in the world—more than a bedroom door under his control, more than adults who raised neither hands nor voices, more even than the freedom to be a boy—was to know that he mattered to someone, that the presence of Jamie O’Connell on the earth changed the very landscape. Under his father’s reign, in his father’s presence, Jamie had been nothing but an insignificant blot. Rachel and Pete would spend months—years—building up in their new foster son a sense that the world was a place that cared, but Allen himself had no time at all. If he wanted to impress this, his last rescued child, with a sense of worth, he needed Jamie to know from the beginning that in this, his new life, he mattered.
“Jim, I would like nothing better than to stay with you, even take you with me, but if I stayed here or you came there, we wouldn’t last a month before all kinds of alarm flags went up. As the son of Rachel’s sick sister from Houston, you’re safe here. If a grown man suddenly appears with a boy who looks nothing like him, people ask questions. Neither of us can afford that. And I think you can see why.”
He saw in Jamie’s eyes that the boy did indeed see, the wistful regret and the acceptance.
“Can we at least—” the boy started to say, and then he broke off, startled, to crane his neck upward, searching the sky.
A small plane circled lazily back and forth on the horizon, the distant drone of its engines rising and falling through the still morning air. It was too far away to see its details, but Allen assumed it was a crop duster, surveying the country before it dropped down to spray a field. Jamie, however, seemed about to bolt for cover, or faint dead away. Allen was seized by a weird double vision of himself, both back in Vietnam, and yanking Lisa to safety from the beat of a chopper’s blades.
“What’s the matter?” Allen grabbed the shoulder of the white-faced, trembling creature cowering against his legs. “Whoa, Jamie, what is it? That’s just a crop duster. They use them around here to spray the fields. What’s wrong with it?”
Jamie couldn’t tear his eyes from the distant object, buzzing in the full blue sky. “It looks . . . it’s the same color as Father’s plane.”
“How do you know? I can barely tell it’s a plane.”
The boy’s eyes slitted in concentration, every muscle taut; then as abruptly as it had come, the tension dropped out of him. “No, it’s different. The wings, they’re, like, stubby.” He stepped away from Allen and shot him a look of embarrassment. “Sorry. I guess talking about him, and then hearing the plane made me think . . . It was one of the last things we did, him and me, the night before Alice picked me up. We went out to the airport to get something he’d forgotten, and he let me go on board and sit behind the wheel while he was talking to some friends. It’s a really nice little Cessna. He lets me . . . he used to let me take the controls sometimes, when we were up high. I really wanted to go up that afternoon—I mean, I thought we were going to, since there we were at the airport and all, but Father said he was really busy and that we couldn’t. Pissed me off. But anyway, that up there’s not his plane.”
“What were you about to say to me?” Allen asked, offering a distraction. “ ‘Can we at least,’ you were saying.”
“Oh, nothing. I was just wondering if maybe I could write you a letter sometimes. You know, paper, pen.”
Allen hesitated, torn between the potential for exposure and the boy’s obvious need to cling to him, trying to leave his own desires out of the equation. Finally he said, “I’d like that a lot. I think that if Rachel agrees, maybe once or twice a year we could risk your sending me a card.” A boy could never have too many male mentors, Allen told himself, and refused to hear his mind adding, And a man can never have too many adopted sons.
Back at the farmhouse, Rachel was putting lunch on the table. Jamie responded little to the family’s conversation, but Allen thought it was more his habitual shyness than because his rescuer was abandoning him. When the table was cleared, Allen got out the cheap paper and pen he’d brought for the purpose, both bought in Miami, and had Jamie write his runaway letter to his father. Not that the man would be appeased by it—indeed, Allen thought it would make him angrier than the outright theft of the child would—but it was a means of distracting the police, who were sure to be closely involved.
Allen went upstairs to fetch his things, followed by Rachel. While he packed, he told her what Jamie had said on their walk, the boy’s startling reaction to the crop duster, his conviction of his father’s omnipotence, and his doubts about the summer ahead. Rachel nodded at each piece of information. Allen went on.
“Two more things, and then I’ll stop telling you your business. First is, Jim wants to correspond with me. I should have asked you first, I know, but it seemed important to him, so I told him that a card once or twice a year wouldn’t be too much of a risk. You’ll have to read them to make sure he’s not accidentally giving anything away, and then send them through Alice.”
“I shouldn’t think that’s a problem,” Rachel said. “He’s young enough, you’ll probably soon fade into the role of some mythic being. A knight errant.”
“In a dented Ford pickup.”
“Of course, when he gets older, he may want to see you, so he can see how much was real and how much he imagined.”
“When he gets older, we won’t have to worry so much about his father.”
“What was the other thing?”
“The other . . . ? Oh yeah. I remembered something else that happened on our drive here. Jim spotted a man walking one of those Jack Russell terriers, you know, little white shorthair with brown spots, and he talked about it solidly for the next ten miles. I know you already have a dog, but if you and Pete are ever thinking about getting another, you might look around for one like that.”
“Allen, you’re the most softhearted scoundrel I’ve ever met,” Rachel told him.
“He’s a good kid,” he retorted, then undermined it by adding, “basically. Although some of the things he says make me nervous. The glorification of violence has already started, and the equation of power with right. And it concerns me, how quickly he’s able to shift off one emotion and seize on another that might be more useful at the moment. Another year of that man’s regimen, the boy would’ve been lost for good.”
“Instead of which, he’s been found for good.”
He looked at her placid face and felt a twinge of concern. “Rachel, this is a boy with more problems than three solid meals a day are going to solve.”
“Allen, give me a little credit. We’ll give him three solid meals, and along with that, the solid concern of a loving family. He needs to learn trust. After that, self-respect.”
“Just be careful. He’s . . .” Allen found that he’d been on the edge of telling her, He’s like a loaded weapon, and was not sure where that image came from. “He’s shut down emotionally, but there’s a lot of resentment stored in there. He’s had a shitload of trauma and he’s in a precarious state. Don’t let yourself forget that a kid on the edge can strike out.”
“Allen, remember who you’re talking to? I’ve worked with multiple personalities, written papers on dissociation. I may look like Betty Crocker, but I know what I’m doing.”
“I know. I’m just not sure that what he needs isn’t a bit more intensive than you’re set up for, here.”
Rachel sat down in the window seat. “Allen, have you ever read Stephen King?”
He was startled into a laugh by the question. “My lord, Rachel, don’t tell me that you have?”
“I read everything my kids bring into the house. How else do I know what’s going on with them? Well, a couple of years ago Pete Junior had one of King’s books, a story about a disease that wipes out most of the population and polarizes the remainder into good and evil. There’s this one scene that has stayed with me. I forget the details—something about, the hero has joined up with a woman and an emotionally damaged boy, and they have t
o siphon some gasoline from an underground tank. The man has the tubing, but he needs one of the others to hold up the heavy lid for him. And he chooses the boy, who to that point has shown not only a general instability but a specific dislike for the hero. The man inserts his fingers under the heavy metal lid, the boy holds it open, and then all three of them become intensely aware that if the boy lets go, the man loses his fingers. The man doesn’t snatch his hands back, doesn’t ask the woman to come and help, he just looks into the boy’s eyes and gets on with the job. It’s a wonderful scene, which could only have been written by a parent who knows what it is like to put yourself every day at the whim of a child. Yes, there are kids out there who are beyond the reach of trust; I’ve met some of them, they’re terribly sad and quite terrifying and I wouldn’t allow them within shouting distance of my family. Jim isn’t one of them, Allen. You got him to us in time.”
Allen gave an involuntary glance at the woman’s ten vulnerable fingers, folded together in the lap of her cotton apron. “Just so you keep your eyes open, especially at first,” he said.
“Stop worrying and go live your life, you wonderful man. Give your lady friend my respects.”
Allen jerked around from the bag he was zipping shut. “I never said anything about . . .”
“You didn’t need to. We girls can tell.”
“I didn’t know Mormons encouraged psychics,” he said, then picked up his bag and hugged her, hard.
At the farmhouse door, Jamie shook Allen’s hand in a good-bye, his face calm, his dark eyes unreadable.
Those eyes followed Allen across portions of five states as he meandered his indirect way across the northern part of the country to Seattle, and home.
Chapter 21
On the first Saturday of June, Allen left the camper truck in the airport parking garage, crossed over to the terminal, and caught a shuttle into Seattle. He walked up to the docks a scant five minutes before the boat left for the islands, and found that Ed not only had received Allen’s message but was waiting for him in Friday Harbor. Jimmy and Jimi—Buffett and Hendrix—accompanied the Orca Queen over the water. Rae must have heard the racket when they were a mile away, because she was on the beach with her hands shading her eyes from the afternoon sun when they rounded the point into the cove; when she saw who was on deck, she flung out her hand to wave, then ran down the path to meet him.