by David Estes
He’s not feeling very patient, so he grabs her hand and shakes it. “Janice!”
She pulls away from him sharply, her mouth opening wide and sucking in a gasp of air. “God. Oh God. I’m sorry, child. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
It’s only at her question that the boy realizes he’s flung his hands over his face, as if to protect himself. Protect myself from who? he asks himself. Janice? Janice would never hurt him. “No,” he says. “About the swimming…”
“Don’t worry another second about that. I’ll talk to your father,” she says.
“No!” the boy exclaims. “Please don’t. I don’t think that will help.”
“We’ll see,” she says, which he knows means she’s going to talk to his father anyway.
“Can you teach me to swim?” he asks. The way the sun is shining through the window makes him think he’ll enjoy it much more during the day.
Janice massages her crinkled forehead like she has a headache. “You know I can’t.” What she doesn’t say is what she and his father have told him a thousand times: It’s not safe out there. Does that mean it’s only safe at night? Surely his father wouldn’t have taken him out if it wasn’t safe.
He plops on the couch and stares at the black holo-screen, chewing on his lip. He knows he has to learn to swim. If his father says it’s important, it must be. And Zoran wouldn’t give up, so why should he?
“Want to play a game?” he calls to Janice.
But he’s too late. She’s gone again, her body curled on the couch while her mind wanders somewhere he can’t follow. He spends the morning playing Tunnels and Tubes, a holo-screen game where you take turns trying to guide your character through a city without going outside. He plays for three hours, two hours longer than normal. Janice mumbles a few words in her sleep, but her eyes don’t open.
When he finishes, Janice still hasn’t moved, and the boy takes it to mean they won’t be having any lessons today. As dark shadows creep like black tongues in the same places they always do, he plays one of his favorite games, which he calls Volcano Explorer. He dodges the shadows by sticking to the white carpet, pretending the dark blotches are lava, ready to burn him like the volcano tried to do to Zoran in one of his favorite episodes.
And Janice just lays there, her eyes now open and staring at the blank holo-screen.
The dark frown never leaves her face, even when his father returns.
~~~
Janice stays for dinner, which she never does.
An uneasy silence persists throughout the meal, broken only by clanks of forks on plates. Despite the meal consisting of a hearty square of macaroni and cheese, the boy has difficulty gulping it down, each bite sitting in his throat for three, four, five swallows.
Halfway through, the boy has the urge to scream at the top of his lungs, to pound his fists on the table, to shout, “Teach me how to swim!” But he remains silent, as he’d rather not lose his holo-screen rights when the next episode of Zoran the Adventurer comes out the following day.
After dinner, Janice ushers him to bed, tucking him in with a sloppy kiss on his forehead. “Do not fear the shadows, child,” she says.
Although her words feel warm and genuine, he suspects that if someone has to say you shouldn’t fear something, that’s exactly when you have something to fear.
When she leaves, he doesn’t even try to sleep; his mind is too restless. It’s as if flies are buzzing around in his skull, trying to escape. Why did his father drag him out into the cold night to learn to swim? And why did he break down and cry afterwards? Even more troubling, why does Janice look so angry? The shadows in the room creep into his mind.
For a hard life.
That’s what his father said he had to prepare for. But what’s so hard about watching his favorite programs on the holo-screen and being taught to read and write and add and subtract by Janice?
Despite the buzzing flies, the boy begins to drift off to slee—
Raised voices snap his eyes open. He’s fully awake in an instant, on high alert.
He listens for a moment, his muscles tight and his burning eyes unable to blink. After a few minutes of listening, however, his body relaxes and he closes his eyes once more.
There’s nothing to worry about.
Because the voices were just Janice and his father.
Just as reality meets the dream world, he wonders why Janice is staying later than she’s ever stayed before, and why she’s arguing with his father.
Chapter Five
Young Domino Destovan is so tired of being ignored.
Your sister this and your sister that is all his mother seems to say anymore. What about me? he wants to scream. Don’t I count? His sister isn’t even a real person, is she? At school they’ve started learning about the system in place to protect them. It protects everyone. There’s only a little food and things called “resources,” which everyone needs. And so there can’t be too many people. People have to be allowed to have kids before they actually have them. And his parents were most definitely not allowed to have his sister.
His mother always turns off the holo-screen when the news comes on, but he’s not stupid. He hears bits and pieces before she can turn it off. And the kids at school are constantly talking about it. The Slip. She’s eating their food. She’s using their resources. She’s endangering them all.
His sister, the Slip, could ruin everything.
So everyone’s looking for her.
But what is he supposed to do? He doesn’t even see her that often, not since his father took her away, hiding out in a dirty, old abandoned building barely fit for people to live in. He’ll never stop hating his father for leaving him with his mother, who barely even knows he exists.
As he listens to two of the popular kids chatter on about the hunt for the Slip, he has a thought.
I could be a hero.
I could turn her in.
Then maybe, just maybe, his father would come home and they could be a family again, go back to what it was like before his sister was born.
Although he almost wants to smile at the thought, he shakes his head and lets the wildly impossible idea fade away.
Chapter Six
When the nameless boy awakes in the morning, he’s surprised to find sunlight streaming through his window. He expected his father to wake him in the middle of the night, to drag him into the cold once more. For some reason he wanted him to. It scares him—the cold and the water—but letting his father down scares him more.
His father comes in already dressed in black, and the boy says, “Where’s Janice?”
“Gone home,” his father says.
There’s such finality in his tone that the boy sits up quickly in bed. “Is she coming back?” he asks.
“She could never stay away from you,” his father says, attempting a grin but grimacing instead.
The boy doesn’t know why he’s so relieved. It’s almost as if he expected Janice to abandon him, although she never has before. Like clockwork, she’s been there every single day of his childhood.
“Now you’d better get dressed and ready for breakfast before she gets here,” his father says, turning to go.
“Father?” the boy says.
His father turns, his eyebrows lifting in surprise. “Yes, Son?”
“I want to learn to swim,” he says. His father starts to shake his head, but the boy rushes on. “I don’t care if it’s cold or it’s hard or if the stones cut my feet. I want to learn. I can do it.”
His father’s strong face looks as soft as a pillow, as if it’s full of goose feathers. He’s seen it like that only once before, when the boy read to him for the first time. “Can you keep it a secret?” his father asks.
A secret? From who? Ohhhh… “From Janice,” the boy says, realizing his mistake. Yesterday. Janice’s frown. Last night. The argument he heard. They were his fault. Because he told Janice what father had made him do. What he now wants to do.
His father purses
his lips. Nods.
“A secret,” the boy says, tasting the word on his tongue. A secret between him and his father. “Yes.”
“I’ll think about it,” his father says, leaving him to get ready.
~~~
Three days and two nights pass and his father doesn’t come to him in the night.
Each morning the boy wants to ask whether he’s done thinking about it, but he manages to hold his tongue. He hasn’t said “no” yet, so that means there’s still a chance.
But when another two nights pass uninterrupted, he’s afraid he might explode if he doesn’t say anything.
“Will you teach me to swim?” he asks the moment his father enters his bedroom. The boy’s been up for an hour, just waiting for him to come in.
His father sits on the bed, resting one hand on the bump in the covers made by the boy’s knee. It’s a position his father has used before, and he knows what it means before his father says a single word.
“I’m sorry. I made a mistake,” his father says. “I never should’ve…” Moisture fills his father’s eyes but he blinks it away before it can overflow. “I thought I was helping you. You won’t have to go out to learn to swim again.”
Disappointment floods through him and the boy’s afraid he might cry. But he knows better than to argue with his father. “When’s Janice coming?” he asks. It’s a silly and pointless question that he already knows the answer to, but he doesn’t know what else to say.
His father manages a tight smile that’s kilometers away from his eyes, and pats his knee-bump. “I love you, Son,” he says.
The boy closes his eyes and feels his father’s warm lips kiss him on the forehead, in almost the exact same spot as Janice did the night she stayed late to talk his father out of letting him learn to swim.
~~~
The boy mopes around all day, going through the motions. He reads what Janice tells him to read, adds the numbers she tells him to add, studies the books she tells him to study. But his heart’s not in it. It’s like there’s an impenetrable wall between his heart and brain, allowing him to be in two places at once. His brain’s at school, learning from Janice, while his heart’s in the water, swimming gracefully beside Zoran, crossing the River to rescue the princess from the dragon.
Finally—finally—when Janice gives him a break from his schoolwork to turn on the holo-screen, his heart removes a brick and lets his brain peek through the wall. And it’s only then that the idea comes to him. Sometimes it takes both your heart and brain to make a decision, the boy realizes.
And for the first time that day, the boy smiles.
~~~
It takes him another three days to get an opportunity.
Janice is napping on his father’s bed, leaving him to watch a marathon of Zoran on the holo-screen. His favorite hero is standing right in front of him, projected from the screen. Zoran’s sword is as tall as the boy, his muscles as big as the boy’s head, as he fights off a legion of marauders while protecting a village.
But Zoran can wait, and he’s seen this episode anyway.
He sneaks down the hall, careful to avoid the three creaky floorboards. His bedroom’s open on the right, but that’s not where he’s going. Instead, he enters the room on the left, the one just after his playroom.
His father’s bedroom.
Janice lies on her side on the bed, her hands clasped tightly together, her knees bent slightly, almost as if she’s praying. Deep breathing fills the room.
A chest of drawers sits against one of the walls. First he tries the bottom drawers, but all he finds are black shoes. He looks inside each shoe, just in case. Despite the care he takes to open and close each drawer quietly, they make a small degree of noise, which turns his heart into a rattle in his chest. With each sound he has the urge to run from the room, settling for a life of Zoran and schoolwork.
Somehow, someway, he manages to cling to his frayed courage, moving onto the next drawer, methodically searching his father’s bedroom.
Black pants and black shirts and black socks. And red underwear, of course. He checks every last drawer and still doesn’t find what he’s looking for.
Janice shifts in her sleep and he freezes, holding his breath and a sock from the last drawer. She rolls over, yawns, mumbles, “Devils and saints,” and settles in again, her breathing returning to the same consistent rhythm as before.
That’s when he sees it, winking from beneath the corner of the pillow. A gleam of gold, catching a single ray of sunlight peeking through a crack in the blinds: The metal teeth that can open the door in the fence.
One cautious step at a time, the boy creeps toward the head of the bed, his eyes locked on the gold teeth.
Janice breathes.
He takes another step, so close now.
She shifts again, onto her back, her weight depressing the edge of the pillow, nearly obscuring his target from sight.
There’s no going back.
She stretches, her eyes still closed.
He crouches, takes another step, the pillow within arm’s reach.
Janice keeps rolling, pushing the corner of the pillow down, down, down—
The boy’s arm lashes out, his fingers closing on the metal, his feet already carrying him toward the door before Janice takes another deep breath.
And then he’s out, back on the couch, his heart racing, his breaths coming in bursts through his lips. His whole body feels full of wings and tingles.
Zoran strikes down the last marauder. The village leader gives him a shiny gold medal of valor.
The boy continues to grip his treasure so tightly he can feel the sharp metal teeth biting into his palm.
But not even the pinpricks of pain can shake the smile from his face.
~~~
He doesn’t even try to sleep that night.
Instead he listens to his father watching the holo-screen, wondering when he’ll turn it off and go to bed. It’s a news program, the most boring kind. A deep voice is going on and on about Crows and Hawks and something called “a Slip.” People are looking for the Slip, but they can’t find it. The boy wonders why they don’t just leave it alone—whatever it is. Maybe if they’d stop talking about it, his father would go to bed.
After what feels like hours, the voice is cut off, and he hears his father’s heavy black shoes thud across the polished wooden floor. One creak, two creaks, three creaks. His father doesn’t even try to avoid the creaky floorboards.
The boy jams his eyes shut tightly and breathes deeply, the same way Janice did during her nap.
The footsteps come closer. A kiss buzzes his forehead, his father’s face rough with a day’s worth of stubble growth.
“Goodnight, my son. Fear nothing and rest from your troubles. You are safe with me.”
The footsteps retreat and he hears his father’s bedroom door click shut.
His body quivers with something that he thinks is part fear, part excitement, but he manages to keep his wits and continue to pretend to sleep, just in case his father returns. He begins counting in his head; just to be safe, he counts to a hundred four times.
Then he arises from his bed, pulling the covers up to his pillow and shoving a large stuffed robot beneath them. He steps back and studies his handiwork, pleased with himself. A glance from the doorway will reveal nothing more than a sleeping boy, the covers pulled over his head for warmth.
Finally, he lifts the lid on a small wooden box he uses to house six brightly colored stones that Janice gave him. He leaves the stones in place, plucking only the gold teeth from the box, where he hid them before Janice woke up and his father got home from work.
He steals silently through the house and out the backdoor.
The night air is slightly warmer than the last time he experienced it, but his nose, fingers and toes still go cold almost immediately. The sky is cloudless and full of light from the stars and a three-quarter moon. The grass feels good on his feet, which are still bandaged. The fence looks dark
and foreboding and impenetrable. And it would be, if not for what he carries in his hand.
Mimicking what he saw his father do, he finds the lock and pushes the metal teeth into it. No good. The metal is too wide. He hits himself in the head, admonishing himself for his stupidity. Wrong side. The teeth have to go in first.
He flips it around and tries again. The teeth seem to want to fit, but they don’t. He pushes harder, but it doesn’t help. He spins the metal and tries once more.
The teeth slide in easily. What next? Twist, he remembers, picturing his father’s hand.
He twists and the lock disengages, falling to the ground. The thick chains drop away and the door eases open.
His heart skips a beat. Before now, all he had was a brilliant idea. But seeing the rough, twisting, weed-choked path makes him question his entire plan. He could go back to sleep and return the key to its hiding spot in the morning, and no one would know his courage had faltered.
But he would.
He takes a deep breath and steps out from the safety of the fence for the second time in his life, the first time alone. He stops as a wave of dizziness hits him, the trees and plants and even the black sky seeming to close in around him. Jamming his eyes shut, he grits his teeth and gets control of his shaking knees.
I can do this, he thinks. But no, it wasn’t a thought at all. He said it out loud, a promise to himself and the night.
When he opens his eyes his feet carry him forward immediately. His bandages make the harsh, rocky ground more bearable, but he still has to concentrate not to cry out when a particularly sharp stone jabs the bottom of his foot.
Afraid that any pause may cause his courage to waver, he plunges down the hill the moment he emerges from the tree line. He’s at the water a moment later. The moon’s in a different position than the last time he was here, no longer drawing a white pathway across the River. Instead, it casts a silver sheen over the whole of the waters. Will that help him keep his bearings or confuse him even more?