My Cousin's Keeper

by Simon French

  “I guess.”

  “Maybe it was all the bike riding. That and the night air.”

  I looked away guiltily.

  “It was a dumb thing to do,” he continued, “but you know that by now.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  “But you’ve kept up today,” Dad repeated, looking pleased. “You paced yourself well, nice even breathing — what’s happened?”

  “I just wanted to . . . get better at stuff,” I answered. “I don’t want to be on the soccer reserve list for another season.”

  Dad nodded. Across on Sheridan Street, the streetlights blinked off in the first glow of morning, and the familiar elderly dog walkers made their way along the sidewalk toward the convenience store. I could hear the rain hitting the roof more loudly.

  “It’s good to hear you sound so determined,” Dad replied at last. “You’ve got the makings of a good team player, Kieran. Keep trying and don’t lose heart.” He paused and took a deep, thoughtful breath. “Personally, I don’t know how many seasons I’ve got left in me.”

  I felt a little alarmed. “What do you mean?”

  Dad tapped his knees. “I’m one of the oldest guys on the team. Things hurt for a lot longer after a game than they used to. I don’t feel like ruining my health by playing a tough game for longer than I should, against players who are younger, fitter, and faster.” He laughed. “Don’t look so worried. I’ll still do the morning run, and maybe I’ll look at getting into coaching instead. You’ve set yourself a challenge, Kieran, but you don’t have to try to be me, you know. I’m just a guy who kicks a ball around with a bunch of friends. I’m no star. I just try to keep fit and enjoy myself. Do you understand?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Come running with me for the fun of it. If you make it onto the starting team next year, I’ll be happy. If you’re a reserve, I’ll be happy. If you keep trying, I’ll be happy. OK?”

  I nodded. “I guess.”

  “Well, then — ready for the run home?”

  “Almost,” I mumbled, looking down and trying to rehearse what had to be said.

  “What is it?”

  “Dad,” I said with an effort. “I need your help.”

  “My help? You got homework overdue?”

  “No . . .” My voice drifted away as I fumbled in my back pocket. “It’s not help for me, really. It’s for Bon.” I held the envelope out. “There’s a letter inside to Bon,” I explained. “From a friend. Except Bon doesn’t really know what to do, and I thought you might.”

  “You’ve become a bit of a team, you two,” Dad said. “Who’s the friend?”

  “Julia. She was a new girl at school — for a while.” I paused. “She doesn’t live here anymore. Her dad found her and took her home again.”

  Dad nodded. “I’ve heard the talk around town. About the mother being on the run with the daughter. That the girl was a missing person. And two years later, the father finds her again — here in town! She and Bon were friends?”

  “I think she was his best friend.”

  Dad gently unfolded the piece of paper. Then his lips moved silently as he read. “Well, isn’t this something,” he said at last. “Till we meet again. That’s a nice ending. So Bon has inherited her bike. He’ll have to keep practicing his bike-riding skills, now, won’t he?”

  “He has been already,” I said.

  “The night you two were out and about?”

  “No. There was another time.”

  “When?” Dad leaned across the picnic table, folding his arms and bringing his face close to mine.

  My voice wouldn’t work properly, and the words ran together in a jumbled panic. “It was Bon. He went away one night and I followed him.”

  “Where to? That hotel room he had the key to?”

  “No. Dad . . .”

  “Tell me, Kieran. I need to hear it. Now.”

  “Dad, I think he was running away. I went after him to make him come back.”

  I watched my dad close his eyes a moment, mouth a couple of words that looked like Oh, God, and then look back at me. “That boy,” he said. “What was he thinking?”

  “He thought we didn’t want him.”

  “Was he going off after his mother?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he really knew. And he didn’t want to ask you to help with the note. I think he’s a little scared of you, Dad.”

  “Scared of me — why?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Dad rolled his eyes and asked, “So, that night, how did you make him come home?”

  “By telling him we’d miss him. By saying that he was part of our family.” I took a deep breath. “By saying sorry.”

  Dad fell silent for a few minutes. He sighed and looked into the distance behind me, and I guessed that he was thinking about Bon, and maybe everything that had happened in our family over the last few months. About the way Bon had changed things.

  “He hasn’t had an easy life,” Dad said. “Your nan taking him on was the best thing. We’ll be good for him in all sorts of ways. And he’s going to be here with us for a long time to come. For as long as he’s at school, I think.”

  I was surprised at how gentle my dad’s voice had become. It wasn’t the voice I heard at soccer practice or at games, and it wasn’t even the voice I heard at our house or down in the Guys’ Room, at the bottom of our backyard.

  “Everyone deserves to be wanted,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t have been out by yourself, but you did well that night. You did really well bringing Bon home to us.” He held the note up. “As for this . . . I’ll track Bon’s bike down for him. And I’ll talk to him as well. Does he really think I’m a scary guy?” That last sentence almost had a laugh in it. “I’ll have to set him straight about that. Funny boy.”

  Dad stood up and pointed a thumb in the vague direction of home. We set off across the park toward Sheridan Street, our feet splashing on the wet ground. We said nothing more, but that felt quite OK to me. I knew we’d said enough important things to each other for one morning, and I easily kept up with Dad the entire way home.

  I wasn’t sure who it was that realized the people down on Hammond Road were a film crew. They’d driven their van a little way and then parked on the dusty shoulder of road that made its weedy way along the outside of the school fence. They were beyond the farthest side of the playground, the spot where the odd soccer ball got kicked from time to time. On the opposite side of Hammond Road was the local cemetery, so it wasn’t unusual for cars to be there. If we were outside playing, we usually took no notice.

  Until today, when one of the boys shouted, “Hey! They’ve got a camera. They’re going to film us.”

  The van had a large TV-station logo along its sides, and several people had climbed out and were taking in a view of the school and of everyone in the back playground. There was a woman with a microphone that she clipped onto a long pole, a man who unpacked and settled a camera onto his shoulder, and another man in a shirt and tie. He stopped to check his hair in the car’s rearview mirror before walking up to the playground fence. I thought I recognized him from a weekly television news show. Mike Somebody. So must have a lot of other kids, because soccer and chasing games were quickly forgotten as we all turned and ran toward the fence, where our unusual visitors stood waiting and smiling.

  “Hi, kids,” said Television Mike, beaming. “We’re here to ask about your friend. Julia Barrett.”

  My mouth dropped open in surprise, and I looked around at the gathering group of kids. More of them were still running toward us, as though the camera and microphone were magnets. And in the distance, at the very edge of the big back field near the classrooms, was Mrs. Barnes, the Thursday playground-duty teacher. She looked across and began walking quickly toward us.

  Everyone began talking and shouting at once.

  “Julia!” Her name began to be said over and over. Suddenly, everyone seemed to have
been Julia’s friend.

  Mason Cutler’s voice rose above everyone else’s. “Yeah, man,” he said in a tough, cool-guy voice. “She’s been taken. Abducted by aliens.”

  Television Mike tried again. “Any of her best friends here? Anybody know about her mom or her home life?”

  I noticed the camera wasn’t being pointed at our faces. It seemed to be hovering toward our legs and feet. It was only that and the sound of everybody’s voices that would make it onto television, but some of the kids didn’t seem to notice. They were busy trying to be famous, and everyone seemed to know something about Julia.

  “She was the most popular girl in the class. Everyone liked her.”

  “She had good ideas about things.”

  “She was kind to everyone.”

  I listened to their voices and looked at their faces — all the girls who used to fight among themselves and then had suddenly all learned to get along well with Julia around. They had been a little lost without her.

  “She never really told us where she came from.”

  “Julia never had friends over to visit.”

  “I wouldn’t invite friends to visit me in a trailer park.”

  “Her mom was kind of scary, too.”

  “Yeah, really unfriendly. We know why, now.”

  “Julia never talked about her dad.”

  Everyone was competing for the camera’s attention, and the comments began to change.

  “If she’d been a real friend, she would have said something,” someone said, and there was a chorus of agreement.

  I heard Lucas say, “Julia thought she was better than all of us. We could tell.”

  Then everyone began talking over one another. My mouth dropped open, surprised at hearing these things. I was stuck for something to say that would turn the conversation back to its starting point — about how everyone was missing Julia being here at school. Or were they?

  Suddenly, Bon was somewhere nearby. I heard his voice before I actually saw him.

  “It’s not true!” he shouted, pushing and elbowing his way through everyone. “Nobody is saying the right thing.”

  Kids looked at him, surprised and annoyed by the distraction.

  Mason kept up his cool-guy routine. “Just ignore him, man,” he said to the camera. “The rest of us do.”

  Bon glared at the television crew. “Everyone is wrong. Julia knew how to be friends with people. She was a nice person —”

  Abruptly, Mason snatched something from Bon’s hand. It was his book of maps and inventions, and Mason held it away from Bon’s panicked reach. “She was a niiiice person,” he mimicked back at Bon.

  Then Mrs. Barnes reached us.

  “Turn off that camera,” she called, in the same bossy voice she would have used to someone misbehaving on the playground. “Stop filming these children.”

  “We’re not on school grounds. And we’re not filming their faces,” Television Mike pointed out. “It’s strictly feet and voices only. We aren’t standing on school premises out here.”

  “I don’t care,” Mrs. Barnes scolded. “Turn your camera off now.” She glared at us kids. “And you children are to leave this part of the playground. All of you, up to the main quadrangle.”

  There was a lot of groaning, and whining voices saying, “Why, ma’am?” A couple of kids continued to make faces and give peace signs to the camera, until Mrs. Barnes threatened lunchtime detentions. “You should have spoken with our principal first,” I heard her growl at the television crew.

  I tried to spot Bon in the tumble of kids walking or jogging back across the field. And at the front of the group, I could see Mason. He flung a piece of paper into the air behind him, then another, as Bon jumped around him, caught between trying to retrieve his book and to pick up the pages that were now fluttering to the ground.

  I ran, faster than I ever had before, right up to Mason. In one quick move, I snatched the book from his grasp and gave him a push that sent him off-balance.

  It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger. Not the Mason who had visited my house and who I would have invited away on a family vacation, but somebody I hadn’t ever met and wouldn’t have liked knowing. I could tell he was shocked at my pushing him, but he fought back with an equal push. Bon’s book remained tightly in my grasp, and I struggled a little to keep my eyes set on Mason’s face. There was a small moment where his eyes blinked in disbelief, and a tiny silence, broken by him sneering, “You’re weak. Just like your girly cousin.”

  “And you’re a bully,” I managed to reply. “Leave Bon alone.”

  Mason walked away, a group of boys from our class falling into step with him.

  “Hurry up, children!” Mrs. Barnes called from behind us. When I turned to look, it seemed as though she were standing guard against invading forces. Some of the television crew had walked back to their van, but I could see the camera now being aimed at Television Mike, and I could hear the vague sound of his voice in the distance.

  Bon had gathered up his torn pages and reached out for his precious book.

  I didn’t hand it over. “I can help you fix it,” I reassured him.

  “How?” he demanded. I could hear leftover anger in his voice that minutes before had shouted, Nobody is saying the right thing.

  “There’ll be good tape in the library for fixing book pages,” I told him. “Ms. Tabor won’t mind us borrowing it.”

  His shoulders were heaving, and I saw that one hand was clenched into a fist. I put my own hand on his shoulder. “Bon, it’s OK now. I can help you.”

  He let me carry his book and, at a table in the library, watched as I carefully, steadily reattached the pages. They were pages full of the things I had become used to — diagrams, scribbled writing, something that could have been a treasure map. And the last one that I reattached was a busy, chaotic battle scene where horses collided and swords were raised. Our resolve was tested by the opponents of good.

  I read this messy scrawl of writing several times before looking sideways at Bon.

  “This is about us,” I said. “It’s not Kieran the Brave or Bon the Crusader. It’s us right now, and everything that’s happening. Everything here at school.”

  Bon wiped a hand across his face. “They were talking trash about Julia. They didn’t really know her. I knew her better than anyone.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “I know Julia told you that you should look after me. But you don’t have to, you know.” Bon pointed at the library window with the end of his pen. “You should be out there.” He took his book, turned past the damaged pages, and stared at a fresh, blank space. “You should be with your friends.”

  I looked in the direction his finger had waved, and, through the library window, I saw Mason, Lucas, Brendan, Ethan — most of the boys from my class — as they played and called to one another in the quadrangle outside. They were passing a ball between them, flicking it from hand to hand, laughing and joking around. I saw Mason turn and seem to glance in our direction, then make a comment that the others seemed to agree with: something to do with Bon and me.

  I sighed. There were probably a lot of words that would be left unsaid, things to do with Mason and Lucas and their best friends, which I knew didn’t include me.

  “No,” I told Bon. “It’s OK. I don’t know who my friends are, really.”

  “You pushed Mason,” Bon said. “I saw that.”

  “Yes. I had to. He deserved it,” I replied wearily.

  “And you rescued my book. Thank you.”

  I watched as Bon’s picture became a landscape, a hillside of tall and mysterious trees. On the horizon lay a craggy mountain range, and in between, the rooftops of houses, the spire of a church, traces of chimney smoke. It almost could have been a view of our town, the view I remembered from the window of the hotel room where Bon and his mom had stayed. Except the drawing had a trace of fantasy or fairy tale: the houses looked centuries older, and the landscape looked creepier than the fie
lds and hills that surrounded our town. I could almost forget I was here in the school library, that there were kids all around the place reading, talking, playing board games. That Ms. Tabor was over at her desk unloading a box of new books and talking with a couple of little kids.

  Thinking about the television crew disrupted my little daydream. “Bon,” I said, “why didn’t Julia tell someone? About her mom taking her and hiding her from her dad?”

  Bon’s pen stopped at the end of a curved line of black ink. He stared hard at his picture and then at me before resuming his drawing.

  “Why were you the first person she told?” I asked.

  “Julia was scared of her mom. I was scared of her mom when she got into our car that day.” Bon lifted his pen away from the page. “Julia said to me later that on the day her mom took her, everything seemed all planned out, because suddenly her mom had a different hairstyle and a different car. She had Julia’s hair cut differently, too. There was another name on the documents Julia saw once or twice; someone else’s address. Julia’s last name got changed.”

  “So she was never Julia Barrett?” My voice was close to a whisper.

  “No,” Bon replied quietly, resuming his drawing, his mouth curved in a small smile. “She was Julia Mitchell.”

  It took me a moment to absorb the sound of a different name. “Julia told you all of this?”

  “Yes. It started when we gave them a lift. It was the first thing Julia said to me. So who are you guys running away from? She whispered that to me in the backseat, once our moms had started talking, because she could see all our things packed into the car, as though we were moving. I didn’t know what to say to her, and then she didn’t say anything for a long time. But Julia was listening to my mom talking about not being able to look after me anymore. She kept looking at me, and I could see she was really sad about something. We began to whisper things about places we had stayed and what we liked and didn’t like. But it was only when we reached town and found the trailer park that Julia whispered the most important thing. I was taken from my dad two years ago. I shouldn’t be with my mom. We were alone in the car while our moms were in the park office, paying for the campers. At first I thought she was telling me a story. But when I knew she really was in trouble, I didn’t know how to help.”