“No, dear,” said Lucy. “How terrible!”
“He was a fighter, though,” said my mother. “He always fought. He wanted to live so much. Oh, Adam,” she said, running the can of beans through the opener. “Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been? Your running coach called. He said you’ve been missing practice.”
“I haven’t been anywhere,” I said. “Give it a rest.”
“It’s everything happening all at once, isn’t it?” Lucy asked. “Poor kid. You should send him to see Dr. Phelps, Linda. Stuff like what happened to the Marks boy is hard on kids.”
“That’s an idea,” said my mother.
“Would you stop talking about me in front of me?” I said. “God, you two are ridiculous. You don’t have a goddamn clue about anything.”
My father came in the kitchen then, looking around like a policeman. “What’s all the racket?” he said. His voice boomed, filling up all the space, so I put my hands over my ears and they all looked at me like it was me who had the problem.
“Why don’t you just go kill someone!” I said. His mouth fell open like it does right before he starts in on us, so I made a break for it, opened the door behind me, and ran outside again.
I didn’t know where I was going at first, but by the time I reached the edge of the woods, I’d figured it out. The rain still fell steadily, and the wind crooned through the trees like a song I’d heard my grandma once sing. Some song from the old country about a black bird that plucked a baby from its mother’s arms and carried it away to the land of the dead. Leaves fell around me, red and gold stars falling through the mist. I pushed my way through the brambles until I could see a wall of twilight ahead where the woods broke and I could almost see the old railroad tracks.
His breath was on my neck before I could reach the spot though. I knew it was him before he even said a thing. I felt his breath on my neck, cold and damp, and then his arms were around my stomach like mine with Gracie and before I knew it he had climbed up on my back. “Keep going,” he whispered, holding tight, and I carried him like that all the way to the place where Gracie found him.
That section of the railroad had been marked out in yellow police tape, so I knew it was the right place. But something was wrong. Something didn’t match. The railroad ties hadn’t been pulled up like I’d thought. And the hole where Jamie had been buried—it was there all right, but next to the railroad tracks. He’d never been under those rails, I realized. He’d never looked up between the slats as trains ran over him.
Stories change. They change too easily and too often.
“What are you waiting for?” Jamie said, sliding off my back. I stood at the edge of the hole and he said, “Go ahead. Try it on.”
I turned around and there he was, naked, no Boy Scout uniform at all, with mud smudged on his pale white skin. His hair was all messed up, one lens of his glasses shattered. There was a gash in his head near his left temple, black and sticky with blood. He smiled. His teeth were filled with grit.
I stepped backward into the hole. It wasn’t very deep, not like Lola Peterson’s grave in the cemetery. Just a few feet down and I reached bottom. I stood at eye level with Jamie’s crotch. He slipped his hand down there and touched himself.
“Take off your clothes,” he told me.
I took them off.
“Lay down,” he told me.
I lay down.
He climbed in on top of me and he was so cold, so cold. I hugged him tighter, trying to warm his body up. He said there was room for two of us in there and that I should call him Moony.
I said, “I never liked that name.”
He said, “Me either.”
I said, “Then I won’t call you that.”
“Thank you,” he said, and tightened those cold, wet arms around my back. He said she never let him hug her. I told him I knew. I told him she was being selfish, that’s all.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve found you now. You don’t have to worry. I found you.”
“I found you,” he said, pulling away to look at me.
“Let’s not argue,” I said.
He rested his cheek against my chest and the rain washed over us. I imagined as I held him that he was coming back to life, that somehow I could sustain him. I didn’t look at him, but I could feel him clinging. Clinging to my body for life.
After a while I heard voices, faraway and tinny, like music on a radio turned down low. As the voices grew louder, I stood and saw flashlight beams coming toward us. My dad and Andy and Lucy. I imagined my mother wheeling in worried circles back in the kitchen. I imagined her holding her head between her hands, tearing her hair out, saying, “Get up! Get up and get him, goddamn it!” But she couldn’t. She couldn’t or wouldn’t get out of that chair.
“Adam!” my father shouted, his voice cutting through the rain.
I didn’t move. Not even when they came right up to me, their faces white and pale as Jamie’s dead body. Andy said, “I told you the little freak would be here.”
Lucy said, “My Lord, your poor mother,” and her hand flew to her mouth.
My father said, “Adam, come out of there. Come out of that place right now.” He held his hand out. “Well, come on, boy,” he said, flexing his fingers a little.
I grabbed hold of his hand and he hauled me onto the gravel around the hole and I lay there, naked, a newborn. They stood around me, staring. My father took off his coat and put it over my body, covering me up. When I didn’t move, he told me to come on, to just come on back to the house, so I finally got up and started walking down the tracks.
As we left, I looked up through the rain at the swirling dark. And although it was night and the sky was full of clouds, I saw something. A plane, or a part of the sky itself, falling through the air. I blinked and blinked, trying to make it go away. But after a few blinks, I knew it was useless. It was real, and it was coming down hard and fast. I saw it. God’s finger was pointing at us.
And right then I knew I had better start to run.
THE BOY WHO HEARD SHADOWS
WHEN MY FATHER PULLED ME OUT OF THE GRAVE, Jamie didn’t come with me. He stayed in the hole as we walked down the tracks. Pebbles rolled under my heels and toes; railroad ties scraped my bare feet. My father’s coat was warm, but rough against my shoulders. It was a camouflage jacket he usually wore while hunting. It smelled of sweat, of bark and leaf and mildew, of dark mornings trekking through the woods to climb into his tree stand. I wanted it off as soon as possible, but it was cold and the rain pelted my bare legs, so I kept it on.
Lucy had kneeled down to grab my clothes out of Jamie’s grave before we left and now she pushed them at me, saying, “Put your pants on. For Christ’s sake, at least put your pants on.” But I slapped her hands away.
I looked over my shoulder just once, to see if I could see him. He was still there, his head and shoulders rising out of the grave. He lifted one pale hand to wave as we walked away, then sank back down like a drowned person.
When I got in the van, I took the jacket off and laid it on my lap. My dad didn’t say anything, just started the engine, wiped his brow, put the van into drive and pulled onto Highway 88.
I sat beside my brother in the back, staring ahead at the point where the headlights weakened and the gray road in front of us disappeared in the dark. I was trying not to feel, to numb myself to the point where nothing mattered, when suddenly—pop!—I found myself outside, flying over treetops and telephone wires. Below me, a sliver of light moved down the road like the blip on my mother’s heart monitor. They were all inside that light, protected. And when I concentrated the roof of the van disappeared and I could see them in there: the father, the brother, the paralyzer and the body I used to live in.
The brother sat as far away from the body as possible, leaning against the sliding door. He breathed heavy on the window, fogging fingerprints into existence. The paralyzer rode next to the father, her head bobbing whenever the father drove the van over a pothole o
r took a turn too quick. She kept nagging the body, saying things like, “Just what were you thinking? Don’t you care about anyone but yourself?”
The body didn’t answer. It sat quiet and still while up above I imagined the paralyzer’s car careening into my mother’s: the smash, the crack of my mother’s back, her blood spattering the windshield. The body didn’t mention these things though. The body was better than that. I thought the paralyzer should consider herself lucky because right then the body could have opened its mouth and burned her alive with its words.
They were so far below, and me, I was in the clouds, drifting. Before the van reached its destination, though, I felt the tug. I had to come down, I had to drift back down through telephone lines and treetops, back into the van and back into the body. Then I no longer looked down, but watched as my father spun the wheel to turn into our driveway.
Light spilled from all the windows of our house, pooling on the front lawn and treetops. Normally my mother followed behind everyone, turning lights off, complaining about electric bills, but now she had switched on any possible source of light. She sat in the living room, holding the curtains of the picture window open with one hand, watching as we got out of the van.
We came into the kitchen through the garage entrance and a moment later, my mother wheeled in to meet us. She looked me up and down, shaking her head as if she didn’t recognize me. “My God,” she said. “What’s happened? Why are you naked like that?”
I moved past her, not answering, went back to my room, locked the door, threw the hunting jacket on the floor and climbed into bed, still covered with grit from the grave. But even with the door closed, I couldn’t shut them out all the way. Their voices moved like lines on a heart monitor, murmurs of worry and spikes of anger. My mother said, “Where did I go wrong?” which was the question she usually asked whenever Andy fucked up. I knew I’d arrived at a new level of trouble.
“He’s got a lot of growing up to do,” my father said. “You’ve babied them too much, Linda.”
“It’s not babying,” said my mother. “It’s called loving them, John. L-O-V-I-N-G. Loving.”
“John has a point, though, Linda,” said Lucy. “You can’t coddle them forever.”
I wanted to cut her face open. I wanted to watch blood drip down her cheek and ask how it felt.
“It’s about time you people woke up,” said Andy, his voice full of vindication. “That brat gets away with everything.”
“Hush,” said my mother.
“See?” Andy snorted. “Even now you take his side.”
“There are no sides in this family!” said my mother. My father grunted, but I couldn’t tell if it meant he agreed.
Andy huffed and puffed, whining, so I figured it must have been a grunt of agreement. A moment later he came thumping down the hall and as he passed my room said, “You are such a fucking idiot, Adam.” Then he slammed his door behind him.
“No more door slamming in this house!” my mother hollered.
“Bitch!” Andy shouted back. He started playing a heavy metal CD before she could yell again, and then I couldn’t hear anything except guitars screaming. When my mom was a walker, she would have been down that hallway in an instant, ready to beat the living crap out of him, but she couldn’t get to doors before they slammed now, so it would have been a wasted effort. There’s an economy to movement when you’re in a wheelchair. You have to pick and choose your battles.
By midnight Lucy was getting ready to go home to her husband, a man who ran an auto shop on the outskirts of town. His name was Doug but everyone called him Buck for some reason. As she opened the door to leave she said, “I’m sorry, but I have to get home to the child. Buck doesn’t give a damn when I’m there, but he does when I’m not.” When she shut the door, I let out a breath I’d been holding. I could breathe now that she’d gone back to the story she belonged to.
I tossed and turned after that, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t fall asleep. I stared at the ceiling, I stared into my pillow, I stared at the dark space in my head where I usually saw dreams. But nothing helped. The clock on my nightstand ticked through the hours.
My muscles twitched as if I’d run a long race; but it was my insides changing. Not my muscles. I could feel my blood rearranging, the DNA being rewritten, like Peter Parker turning into Spider-Man. I kept thinking I’d be someone or something completely different by morning, but I couldn’t imagine who or what. I whispered into my pillow, “You are no longer the person they think you are. You are no longer the person you think you are. You are someone else.”
When everyone had finally gone to sleep and snores came from their respective corners, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen. I hadn’t eaten, so I scoured the refrigerator until I found some chili my mom had left. I warmed it in the microwave, making sure to turn the timer off before it dinged. I ate two bowls, one right after the other, then got ice cream out of the freezer.
I was scooping the ice cream into a bowl when I heard him cough—once, twice—and turned to find him on the other side of the counter where my mother used to stand and do things like chop vegetables and cut the fat off chicken. On my side of the counter was the kitchen; on the other side was the dining room, the mahogany table and the hutch my grandma left us.
Jamie stood beside the table. He was still naked, but his skin didn’t glow like it had outdoors. In here he looked gray and dirty. A bruise covered his left cheek, fingerprints lingered on his neck. Somehow I hadn’t seen them earlier. And there too was that gash near his temple, black and sticky with blood. I shuddered, but I said, “You made it,” and smiled to make everything seem all right.
“Of course I made it,” he said. And when he came around the corner I saw his mud-streaked legs and knees, scraped and bloody as if he’d been dragged around on them. He opened his arms as he came toward me and I almost ran out the door again.
I didn’t though. I let him swing his arms around me. I rested my chin on his shoulder and told my body not to shiver. It’s nothing, I told myself. It’s nothing. And finally I was still again.
“I thought I lost you,” I said into his neck.
“You can’t lose me,” he said. “You couldn’t lose me if you wanted.”
I pulled back and he adjusted the smashed glasses that sat on the bridge of his nose. Suddenly he looked older. A lock of hair flopped over the gash and I thought he didn’t look like a Moony one bit. Maybe, I thought, it’s because he’s finally out of that Boy Scout uniform.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I looked down and said, “I’m just a little worried.”
“About what?”
“It’s nothing to do with you,” I said, “so don’t sweat it.” I waited before saying anything else. I wanted him to tell me something to make me feel better, but he just stared, face blank as a sheet of paper. I pretended to be interested in the view out the kitchen window. There was a pine tree out back and a grassy field with fence posts strung with barbed wire to keep our neighbor’s cows in their pasture. When I didn’t talk for a while he grabbed my chin and turned my face back, looking at me like I was something to be examined. “You up for playing video games?” I said.
His face lit up then, like he’d remembered something wonderful. But in the next moment his smile faded and he said, “I don’t know how. We don’t have a computer at my house. My mom and dad can’t afford one. So I only know the programs we learned at school.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I have no clue how to do those computer programs you helped me out with, but I can show you how to play Nevermorrow.”
So we went back to my room where I introduced him to the pleasures of staking vampires through their hearts for a good six hours. He was right though. He was a terrible player. He kept pressing the button to jump when he wanted to dodge, and he pressed the button to engage creatures that were too powerful for him to battle when what he should have done was turn his character around and run. Even with all o
f his mess ups, he somehow managed to complete the first level. And with my help, the next. And by the time we’d traveled down to the third layer of hell, morning light was slowly edging around the curtains of my window.
By then my eyes were dry and itchy, and I was making a lot of stupid mistakes myself: maneuvering my knight into death pits, going into rooms where demons ganged up on me. Making mistakes like that, you’re never going to have a chance to get out of hell and win. So I admitted defeat and said, “I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“Already?” said Jamie.
I said we’d been up all night, then turned off the computer and climbed into bed. He came over and slipped in beside me. I didn’t say anything when he turned on his side to make himself comfortable. I just lay there, feeling his back touch my back, feeling the chill of his skin spark against mine. I used to wonder what it would be like if he’d have ever stayed over like I heard other kids talk about doing, but this wasn’t how I’d imagined it happening.
I started talking about the game then, even though we weren’t playing. Talking about the game felt very important just then. I didn’t want to think about his body next to mine, bruised and broken. I explained the game about ten times, and he kept saying, “Okay, uh huh,” and every once in a while his leg would brush against mine and I’d start to shudder again.
“I’m so happy,” he said once, interrupting my lecture on how to fight goblin hordes. “It was lonely there for a while.”
I waited to see if he’d elaborate, but when he didn’t I came out and asked what I’d been wanting to know.
“Who did it?” I asked.
He turned over, then so did I. I was sure he was going to confess. He shook his head, though, looking very upset. “Don’t ask me that, Adam,” he said. “If you like me at all, don’t ask that again.”
“Why?” I asked.
He turned his back to me and sighed. “It hurts too much,” he said. “It hurts too much to remember.”
One For Sorrow Page 4