The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain

by Kevin David Jensen

The clinic that would perform the DNA test was located just a few minutes from home, in the downtown district. They opened early, so Kara roused the boy in time for Craig to take him there Thursday morning and still get him to school, with a quick stop for a doughnut breakfast along the way. Providing the DNA sample was remarkably simple: a single cotton swab of saliva each from inside their cheeks and they were done. Test results would be mailed to them in a few days, so there was nothing to do now but wait.

  Kara and the boy continued to scour the newspaper's obituaries that evening for signs of the boy's grandfather, but without success. They checked all the photos within three months of when the boy had been told that his grandfather had died, but finding nothing, they turned to searching for his grandmother. This effort was short-lived, though, as the boy knew only that she had died sometime after he turned five and did not know where she had lived, whether within or outside of Seattle. Without her name, that made it essentially impossible to know where to look for her, and they had to give up.

  Mr. Pecking from the Mariners called that evening, surprising Craig—apparently, with the appearance of the boy, he had forgotten about the letter they had sent. The man affirmed his invitation to both Craig and Derek to attend the ballgame—in excellent seats, no less, and all expenses paid—and to step onto the field to throw out the first pitch. Craig thanked Mr. Pecking profusely through the course of the call, and after he had hung up the phone and shared the news with her and the boy, he took the boy outside to practice his pitching until nightfall.

  On Friday they enjoyed a quiet evening at home, the boy spending most of his time in the yard with Paws, Kara working in the garden. One would have thought that after a full day at Grover's she might prefer to stay inside, away from sun and soil, but in fact it was the opposite; these were her plants, and all day she had looked forward to tending them. Craig spent a little extra time that evening finishing a job so Derek could be with his family. When he came home, the three of them curled up in the den to watch a movie, Kara and Craig snuggling on the couch while the boy lay on the floor beside Paws. Both dog and boy were asleep well before the closing credits.

  The sun shone with a pleasant, near-summer radiance Saturday morning as Kara awoke. Craig began to stir just as she did.

  "Do you have any plans today?" she asked him when he rolled over and opened his eyes.

  He stretched and rubbed some sleep out of them. "Not really. Just odds and ends."

  "Let's take your cousin's son out for a day on the town."

  "Why?" He sat up and faced her, his legs still tucked under the bed sheets.

  "Why not?" she replied, but he just looked at her; somehow he always knew when there was something more behind her words, sometimes even before she herself knew. Why did she want to take the boy out? "They kept him locked up inside all these years. He's lived in Seattle his whole life, but he's never really seen it…"

  "He's not ours, Kara. We can't just—"

  "Yes, we can!" she maintained. "We can take him wherever we want. No one's looking for him, Craig, or they would have contacted the police and come for him by now. They sent him away. And of course he's not ours, but he is family…"

  "And?"

  "And he might only be with us a few more days, and…well, this is something special we can do for him before we…"

  "Before we lose him?"

  "Before we find out where he lives and send him home."

  Craig got that calculating look again. She loved how he thought through difficult problems so fluidly, but sometimes it got downright irritating. "You don't want to, do you?" she groaned.

  To her surprise, he didn't respond for a moment. He was quiet for so long that she finally reached up and ruffled his bed-flattened hair a bit. He sucked in a deep breath. "I do want to," he admitted. "It would mean a lot to him."

  "Okay, then?"

  "All right."

  She pumped her fist and kissed him.

  An hour later, the three of them piled into Kara's car and pulled into the street, Craig at the wheel. "So," he called out, "where do you want to go, Zach?"

  "Anywhere I want?" he asked, still incredulous at their invitation.

  "Anywhere in the metro Seattle area," Kara answered, "Maybe someplace you've heard about and always wanted to go."

  The boy gazed out the window at the neighborhood around them. "The Space Needle?" he suggested cautiously. "Can regular people go up there?"

  "The Space Needle it is!" Craig proclaimed, and he took them out to I-5 and followed it north.

  A fifteen-minute drive, a parking garage, and a short walk later, the six hundred-foot structure towered over them. Its saucer floated directly above them, capping a central shaft flanked by four white legs that bowed inward, stretching all the way up to the saucer.

  Bending his head back to stare straight up at it, the boy seemed suddenly apprehensive. "Having second thoughts?" Kara probed.

  He hesitated before he shook his head.

  Craig grinned. "Don't worry, Zach. It's entirely stable. Kara and I have been up there a few times. Even in the big earthquake back in 2001, all it did was sway a little."

  The boy's eyes grew wider than they already were.

  "Thanks, Craig," Kara said with a playful backhand slap to his side. "That was helpful."

  "There's no danger at all," Craig continued. "It's only fallen down once, back in '89."

  The boy's face tensed.

  Kara threw Craig a scolding look. "It was a joke," she explained to the boy, "an April Fool's Day joke played by a TV show. They made a fake news broadcast saying it had collapsed. They made up pictures of it and everything. But it wasn't real."

  The boy stared at her nervously for a long moment before gazing back up at the top of the tower.

  Kara checked with the boy once more—he assured her, weakly, that he still wanted to go to the top—so they purchased tickets and waited for their elevator. When it came, he stepped inside ahead of them, and up they went. As the elevator climbed swiftly, the boy stiffened and grabbed Kara's arm. She grinned down at him and Craig put a hand on his shoulder. "Relax, pal," he whispered in the boy's ear. "People go up and down like this everyday." The boy nodded, and his grip on Kara's arm loosened just a little.

  The elevator lifted them to a stunning view of the city. The boy gaped out the windows at the city skyline and the blue water of Puget Sound beside it. "Mom, this is awesome!" he said. He didn't release Kara's arm, though.

  The elevator brought them to the observation deck, where tinted windows offered a stunning, 360-degree view of Seattle. The boy darted to the nearest window and stared out with amazement, his head sweeping right and left. Kara and Craig hung back and watched.

  "Look at him, Craig," Kara said quietly. Several other children marveled at the view, too, and pointed at various landmarks with delight. But this boy—he simply stood and stared, engulfed in wonder at the vista before him.

  Kara and Craig stayed out of the way of the other visitors and watched until the boy moved again at last, edging his way in a slow circle around the perimeter of the saucer. They didn't approach him until, ten minutes later, he turned and looked for them.

  "What's that, Dad?" he asked as they came near. He stood at the windows facing south, pointing beyond the downtown towers. "The thing with a black, roundish top."

  "That's Safeco Field, where the Mariners play."

  "I thought so," the boy nodded. "I saw it on TV."

  He continued along the circle of windows until he arrived back where he had started. There were people on a walkway outside the windows—he seemed to notice them for the first time. "Can we go out there?" he inquired.

  "Sure," Craig answered, and he led the boy outside. The walkway was built a few feet lower than the observation deck that curved around the entire rim of the saucer, offering an open-air view of Seattle blocked only by lines of metal safety cords stretching horizontally every six inches or s
o from waist-height to directly overhead. The boy stood back away from the edge at first, but gradually gained confidence and crept toward the outer handrail as he stepped along the platform, again circling the saucer.

  When he had made the full circle at last—somewhat more quickly than his circle in the saucer's interior—Craig stepped to his side. "Do you know what any of these places are?" he asked, sweeping his hand across the panorama.

  "That's Puget Sound," the boy replied, pointing to the water; "Elliott Bay…downtown… Where's our house?"

  Craig put a hand on the boy's back and bent over to look from the boy's eye level, pointing beyond downtown with his other hand. "See that airplane landing out there?"

  The boy searched a moment and located it. "Yeah."

  "That's Boeing Field. Most of the bigger planes use Seatac Airport, further south. But if you can find Boeing Field, you can find our house. We're on the hill above it to the east a little—that way." He shifted his finger to the left. The boy's eyes tracked to the left.

  "How do you know which way is east?" he asked. "When the sun gets high up in the sky, I mean."

  Craig, in full coaching mode, answered right away. "In Seattle, you just have to find a landmark you know. On a clear day like today you can see Mount Rainier"—he pointed toward the massive volcano, it's roughly-rounded, glimmering-white peak soaring above the city even from seventy miles away—"and you know that's southeast. So east has to be that way." He pointed to the left of the mountain. "Lake Washington is out that way. Puget Sound is west, and then the Olympic Mountains are beyond that. And from here, we're north of downtown, so if you're in our neighborhood looking past the towers toward the Space Needle, you know you're looking north."

  The boy paid close attention. For the next half hour, he circled the outer platform again, this time pulling Craig along with him, asking about everything and absorbing Craig's responses. Kara tagged along behind them, wrapped up in the two boys' conversation—not the information, but the camaraderie that had developed between them. Had she and Craig really not known this boy a mere nine days ago?

  And despite his blue eyes, he did look a lot like Craig. If Elliott had ever known he had a son and had shut him away in some house somewhere—well, he had better not ever show his face around Kara. She had never been prone to violence before, but this was different.

  *****