So that was why he looked at the curtains in his bedroom up high in the house as if they were magical or something, not because he liked them that much.
There were, he had to admit, things he did like about being here. Rachel’s cooking was great—not as fancy as the food Mrs. Mendez made when his father was around, but satisfying, kind of . . . motherly. And really, he got along okay with his new “cousins,” even the littlest kid Sally, who was kind of a pain, but secretly, only to himself, he’d admit that he sort of liked the experience of being looked up to. He was somewhat nervous around Pete Junior, the seventeen-year-old, who had, as Allen had said, a grown man’s shoulders but also the potential for devastating scorn, if he decided to turn it on Jamie. Not that he had, he seemed pretty nice in fact, but Jamie didn’t know enough people that age to be sure. And the other two kids were okay, thirteen-year-old Eli, who’d been away at a band summer camp for the last week, and bossy eleven-year-old Vera, who tried to be as grown up as her old-lady name was, helping Rachel in the kitchen a lot.
Then there was Terry. He still didn’t know what to make of that, still woke up barely able to believe that the heavy lump on top of his feet wasn’t his imagination. When Pete had driven off, two days after Allen left, Jamie’d had no idea, none at all. Sometimes, in fact, he replayed the whole morning in his mind, making a kind of movie out of it: Pete driving away in the dusty pickup with his elbow resting on the door, Rachel sitting the kids down at the kitchen table with enormous bowls of cherries in front of them and handing each a weird gadget that turned out to be what you used to remove the pits. Only she called them “pips.” They could eat as many of the huge, black, tart-sweet cherries as they wanted, but she wanted each bowl empty before its owner was free for the rest of the morning. Eli and Vera whipped through theirs at warp speed, and even Sally seemed to pit two to his one. It was humiliating, but Rachel just hummed away and pretended he was nice to go slow and keep her company. Anyway, he finally got through his bowl and took his purple fingers outside, where he didn’t have anything to do but stare at the stupid chickens and wish that he was allowed to watch TV during the day. Not that there’d be anything on the three channels they got but farm shows and soap operas. How could you live without cable? And the computer—he was allowed half an hour a day, like everyone else, on the same line the house telephone worked on.
If you’d told him six months ago that he’d be living on a farm with no online games, he’d have said you were nuts.
So he went upstairs and got the well-thumbed paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring that he’d borrowed from Pete Junior. He started to lie on his bed to read, where it was quiet and there was a chance nobody would notice him, but it was already hot upstairs (no air conditioning, either!) and Rachel had promised that they were free for the morning. He knew what adult promises were worth, and the relative security of his bedroom made even the sweating seem attractive, but then he heard Eli’s voice from the barn, and he felt a small surge of defiance. He went down the stairs and marched openly through the living room to the porch, where he settled down in the wide, two-person porch swing, just waiting for the adult recall to work. The first few pages were distracting, but when no one came to claim him, or to berate him for wasting his time, the treacherous words began to settle on the page. In a while the screen door screaked open and he braced himself (I knew she wouldn’t go through with it!), but without a word, Rachel just set a tall glass of lemonade down on the wobbly wicker table next to the swing and went back inside, leaving him in perfect peace.
After lunch he helped her make labels for the cooling jars of cherries, lined up on the sideboard and looking like a magazine illustration. One of them gave a loud ping, and he looked over to see if the glass had broken, but Rachel explained that the noise was the metal tops locking down over the fruit, when the hot contents had cooled into a vacuum. Pretty neat, he had to admit.
With the jars labeled he was free to go back and read for a couple of hours, and he had just reached the part where the Dancing Pony was being invaded by the black riders when he heard Pete’s truck drive in and around the back of the house. His body’s automatic response to the arrival of a vehicle was dry mouth and racing heart, but having been here for a week now he was able to tell himself that it was only Pete, and try to settle down again into the swing. Still, Pete’s return might not bring threat, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it heralded the next round of chores, no matter what Rachel had promised. And sure enough, in a couple of minutes the screen door screaked again. He dog-eared the page (it was only a paperback) before looking to see what Pete wanted, and was startled to find the whole family in the doorway, staring at him. He jerked upright, wondering what the hell he’d done now.
Then Pete stepped forward, big, silent Pete with his arms even thicker than Howard’s, both enormous hands held out in front of him. Jamie instinctively scrambled backward to get out of the man’s reach, but before he could get free from the porch swing, Pete’s hands were an inch from his stomach, and Jamie could see that he held some object, which he settled gently onto Jamie’s lap.
It was white and brown and warm, waking up in confusion, shiny black beads of eyes settled into a wide forehead beneath ears almost too soft to prick to attention, wet nose snuffling Jamie’s shirt for clues.
“It’s a terrier, a Jack Russell terrier,” Pete told him gruffly. “Had to drive halfway to Butte to find one. If it makes a puddle in the house, your aunt won’t be happy.”
Jamie stared at the man for a moment, utterly speechless, before tucking his chin down to peer at the puppy. It was trying to stand on the uneven surface of his lap and get its unbelievably delicate paws onto Jamie’s chest. It stumbled; without thinking, Jamie reached out to steady the animal as its tongue found his chin and its cold nose traced the line of his jaw to his hairline. He squirmed at the sensation of the creature snuffling into his ear, its wriggling warm body pressed itself against him as if trying to get inside his shirt, or his skin. Jamie’s eyes sought out Pete. “You mean, it’s for me?”
“Allen said you’d talked about that kind of dog one time, seemed to me we could use another dog around here anyway. If you don’t like it, I can take it back, look around for another kind, a Lab or something.”
Jamie’s arms hunched forward, as if Pete had moved to take it away, and he shook his head fiercely. “No, I like it fine. I don’t . . . I haven’t had a dog in a long time. It’s so small. What if I hurt it?”
“They’re tough little guys,” Pete reassured him.
The puppy abandoned the assault on Jamie’s ear and half tumbled onto the swing seat. Gingerly, Jamie closed his hands around the creature’s round belly and lifted it down onto the porch before it fell there, and the family watched their newest member explore his home, stump of a tail in the air, every hair bristling with fascination. Rachel laughed aloud, and Jamie glanced up at her, his wary disbelief giving way to wonder.
“What’s his name?” Sally asked her father.
“He doesn’t have one yet. That’s up to Jim.”
It’s a boy, Jamie thought. At least they hadn’t made him ask.
“Call it Jack,” Vera suggested prosaically.
“Its name is Terry,” Jamie told them. And that was that.
So yeah, there were some good things about living here, in spite of always seeming to have cow shit on his sneakers. He managed to keep Rachel and Pete happy most of the time, and so far he hadn’t kicked anything but chickens (which seemed not to mind) and his hands hadn’t done one of those weird compulsion things where they just reached out to hurt something—the puppy, or even worse, the little kid—and the chores were manageable and he was getting used to the quiet and all in all he thought he could get used to pretty much everything, if only he could only have a little more time on the computer. He just couldn’t get used to going to bed when it was still light outside, for God’s sake, and lying there playing with Terry’s ears while the rest of the house snored and the comput
er just sat there, with nobody on it, nobody even needing the phone line because in all the time he’d been here, five weeks now, they’d never had one single call after nine o’clock at night. The games and the chat rooms were going on in the absence of RageDaemon and Masterman, as if he’d never existed. It had been months since Father had made him smash the computer, weeks since he’d even had the limited but unsupervised freedom of the library terminals. Here, the computer was in a corner of the living room, and anybody was likely to walk by and comment on the goriness of the game you were playing or look to see what your conversation was about.
So he tried, he really did, but that keyboard downstairs in the sleeping house just called to him, and the more he tried to ignore it, the more his fingers craved it. Rachel just couldn’t understand that he didn’t need all that much sleep, not like he needed the computer. If she really understood, he knew she wouldn’t mind. What would it hurt? And anyway, he wouldn’t have to tell them—he knew where all the creaking steps were. And if he carried Terry down, the dog would just curl up and go to sleep on his lap, and provide a ready excuse for being there if anyone came downstairs—puppies always needed to go out and pee. He could eject the game and be offline and on the porch in seconds if he heard someone on the stairs. Nobody in this family would think to check and see if the computer was warm.
And indeed, in that family, nobody thought to check, not until it was too late.
Chapter 23
The letter came late in the afternoon on the third Monday of August. They had spent most of the afternoon hanging some cabinets Rae had built—Allen was becoming a halfway competent woodworker’s assistant—and Rae decided it was time to think about dinner. She moved around the kitchen, chopping onions and bacon and dumping them into a heavy pan, accepting a beer from her assistant. Allen leaned against the door frame, looking out, savoring the day.
The house Rae had spent the past two years rebuilding was the “folly” that her great-uncle had originally built here eighty years ago. Uncle Desmond might have had some odd ideas about architecture, Allen reflected, but the man knew how to choose a site. The house rested on stone foundations between a pair of impressive stone towers, halfway up the side of a hill overlooking the island’s small wooded cove; from the upstairs window, a person could look straight south along the Straits of Juan de Fuca to the Olympic Peninsula. On a summer’s afternoon like this one, sailboats were a common decoration.
Allen set his beer bottle down on the porch and walked back inside to wrap his arms around his woman. She answered his embrace with a rhythmic sway as she stirred the wooden spoon through the browning onions.
“Steer it up,” Allen sang in a vaguely Jamaican accent, his chin hooked over her shoulder. “Leettle darlin’.”
“I take it Ed’s on a Bob Marley kick?” The two men had been out on Ed’s boat the day before, picking up supplies in Friday Harbor.
“Rasta rules, mon. God, that smells great,” Allen murmured into the side of her neck.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, the food smells okay, too.”
He felt her chuckle under his arms, felt her shoulder blades press back into his chest. He nibbled his way down beneath the collar of her shirt, tasting salt and the faint flavor of sawdust that always permeated her clothing, waiting for the little shiver that she would give when her attention was well and truly caught. It came when his lips were a half inch from her spine; she let the spoon fall against the side of the pan and turned around to meet his mouth.
After a minute or two, Allen reached past her to shut off the stove. No point in wasting propane, after all.
But in another minute, Rae pulled away from him. “Did you hear something?”
“A bomb going off?” he said, unwilling to be distracted, but she stepped free and walked over to the open front door.
“Damn!” she exclaimed, and hurriedly stuffed her shirt back into her jeans as she moved to turn the gas back on under the onions.
Before Allen could get to the doorway himself, the top of a well-known head appeared, coming up the steps. Ed De la Torre paused on the narrow porch, shuffling his feet against the mat and squinting into the darkened interior.
“Anybody home?”
“Hello, Ed. Watch the bottle.” Allen walked over to pick up the abandoned beer. It was still cool. “Want a beer?”
“No thanks, I’ve got a date on Orcas, just wanted to drop off this stuff from the post office, thought it might be important.”
He came into the house to lay the mail on the table, Rae’s oversized express mail envelope on top. He took one look at the side of Rae’s face, shot Allen a glance that took in his rumpled shirt and his ill-concealed irritation, and a grin spread over his leathery features.
“I won’t interrupt you kids any further,” he told them. “See you in a couple days.”
He tromped down the steps, whistling, and halfway down the hill started singing one of Jimmy Buffett’s ruder songs. Rae, blushing like a schoolgirl, turned to the mail. She opened the envelope that had looked so important, found in it just a copy of an already signed contract, and dropped it on the table to sort through the other things. One of those she held out to Allen.
Surprised, he took it from her hand. One glance at the printed address and his heart stuttered: Alice’s writing. He ripped the envelope open and glanced at the tidy script that covered both sides of three sheets of paper, which was not Alice’s but that of a stranger. He flipped over the last page to read the signature: Rachel.
A letter from Rachel Johnson, forwarded by Alice, omitting Rachel’s last name with her usual care for anonymity. He had, he realized the moment he saw that precise hand, been expecting something from her.
Without pausing to read the words, Allen took the few strides onto the porch and shouted out Ed’s name. The man was nearly to the little dock, but he turned around in inquiry.
“Can you stop in on your way home?” Allen called.
“You need a ride?” Ed shouted back.
“I might.”
“I could take you now,” the boatman offered.
“Morning’s fine.” Ed’s dates were rarely confined to dinner and a movie.
Ed waved his understanding and continued on his way.
“Allen?” came Rae’s question from inside. “Are you going somewhere?”
Dear God, he thought, I hope not, but he said only, “Let me read this first, and I’ll tell you.” He sat on the top step of the porch and, with mounting apprehension, began to read about the state of Jamie O’Connell.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
I know that you had not expected to hear from me again, and trust that, knowing your concern for our young friend J, my letter does not trouble you. I write because I am having problems that I find myself uncomfortable about facing alone, and wish to consult the only other person who knows the child well.
I will not lie to you—we had some initial difficulties in getting J settled here. As you yourself indicated, terrible experiences teach terrible behavior, and although I persist in believing that love conquers all, I will admit that there is in our young friend a great deal to conquer. However, as the summer holidays came on and the others were home more hours, J began to emerge from the distant state and make tentative forays into the unfamiliar business of becoming a family member. There is, as you suspected, a great turbulence in there, and much testing of boundaries must take place before J feels safe to let the anger surface. But as you know, behavior such as that is a thing we are well used to, and it does at least indicate that J begins to trust that there are rules to test, and not just the random dictates of an abuser. J has succumbed to the charms of my youngest, whom you will remember as the official gatherer of eggs in the henhouse.
I should perhaps note here that I have so far seen no signs pointing at a history of sexual abuse, although I believe that J is somewhat dyslexic (a vigorously concealed problem that I shall take notice of before school begins) and also, as you told me,
slightly deaf in the right ear. J tells me that the father was right-handed, so if the deafness comes from blows, they were delivered from behind. As I think about this, I find that much as I detest a man who will strike a child to its face, it is even more unsettling to envision the man in the habit of giving a hard slap when his child is unawares.
These, however, are concerns for the longer term. I first noticed a change in J a couple of weeks ago, when the child began to appear at the breakfast table looking tired, and was occasionally short-tempered. I would have assumed the latter at any rate a positive sign—that J had become comfortable enough in this new setting to feel able to express emotions and be mildly self-assertive (and truly, thus far the ill temper has been very mild, nowhere near that of the average two-year-old)—except that it was joined with a certain secretiveness and a habit of meeting my questions with that wide-eyed innocence which children imagine conceals all wrongdoing.
Again, hiding things from authority is not in itself either unexpected or even undesirable at this point. However, before I could sort out what was happening, two events occurred which together seem to have precipitated a crisis in J’s mind. The first was when my elder son decided to go out and shoot some rabbits and, without thinking, brought them home uncleaned. J walked in on him at the very goriest part of the operation, when my boy was up to his arms in blood and the shotgun was propped against the table in the summerhouse. J was shocked into near immobility, so much so that I thought I would have to call the doctor, but a night’s rest, with me and my husband reading aloud from one book after another, seemed to calm the child, and after sleeping half the day away, J was quiet, and slightly wary around my son, but more nearly normal.