After the excitement over the snake incident had passed, life in the Leland house settled back into a state of normalcy. They lived in Attleboro, Maryland, a suburb outside of Washington, DC, in a development that had been farms and orchards twenty years ago. Those original properties were torn down to make way for Vero’s neighborhood, a planned development filled with nearly identical homes. The homes were so similar, in fact, that if a resident walked into his neighbor’s house, he never needed to ask for directions to the powder room because it was in the same exact place as in his own home. More than once neighborhood kids had gotten confused and entered the wrong house after playing outside. The Lelands lived in a very normal neighborhood, and they lived very normal lives.
Nora drove a minivan and took her turn in the neighborhood carpool, driving kids to the weekly soccer games and Saturday afternoon movies. She’d been a nurse before becoming a stay-at-home mom, so she was the go-to mom whenever someone needed help bandaging a banged-up knee or bringing down a high fever. And she never refused anyone. Vero felt lucky to have her as his mother — most days.
Dennis worked as an analyst at the World Bank. He sat in an office all day and analyzed applications for international loans. The World Bank lent money to underdeveloped countries so they could build bridges or schools or clean up pollution. Vero’s dad studied the requests, researched them from every angle, and made recommendations. His reports carried a lot of weight.
Dennis drove a government car, a generic-looking black vehicle that got traded in every three years. The kids were never allowed to eat in his car because candy wrappers or leaky juice boxes on the floor of a government car would be unpatriotic.
The Lelands took camping trips and beach vacations and mall outings, hosted birthday parties, attended school plays, supported various sports teams, played late-night pajama Twister games, and just about every typical family thing one could imagine. The family was so normal, in fact, that some psychologists might suggest that Vero’s mom was overcompensating — trying to hide the fact the Vero was anything but normal.
Vero came into Nora’s life one fateful night when she was working in the ER. A horrendous storm system had wreaked havoc across the area, as vicious winds knocked telephone poles onto cars and houses, the torrential rains flooded low-lying areas, and power outages occurred across the region. It was her regular night shift, and the ER was overrun with victims of the storm. Shortly after she arrived at work, an elderly man was wheeled in on a gurney.
“A metal sign broke loose and sliced open his head!” the paramedic yelled. “Vitals are not good!”
The man was unconscious and had lost a lot of blood. Nora assisted the doctor as he tried to save the old man, but the heart monitor announced that he had flatlined. All of their efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. The doctor declared the man deceased and moved on to help another storm victim. Nora was with the deceased man when an aide walked into the room.
“I’m here to take him down to the morgue,” the aide said, and he draped a sheet over the body.
“Wait, please,” Nora said.
As she pulled the sheet away from the man’s face and tenderly closed his eyelids, the elderly man’s hand suddenly grabbed her wrist! The aide screamed and jumped away from the gurney, sending a tray full of medical supplies crashing to the floor.
The dead man did not release his grip. He opened his eyes and mouth, letting out an unearthly moan. And through the moan, Nora heard him say, “Name the baby Vero. Raise him as your own.”
Having heard the loud crash and the aide’s shrieks, the doctor rushed back into the room and saw the dead man clutching Nora’s wrist.
He checked the old man’s heartbeat to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake. They hadn’t. He was truly deceased. There was no sign of life coming from the old ticker. The doctor pried the man’s fingers from Nora’s wrist.
Oddly enough, Nora wasn’t nearly as upset as she should have been. She should have been screaming her head off just like the aide. But it had happened so fast, she didn’t have time to comprehend it all.
“It’s common for a body to jerk or have involuntary movements as rigor mortis sets in,” the doctor said.
“I’ve never seen that happen before!” the aide shouted. “And I heard the guy moan! Explain that!”
“Bodies can moan as gasses escape,” the doctor answered calmly.
“It was more than a moan, Doctor,” Nora said. Then she turned to the aide and asked, “Did you hear what he said?” She was putting together her thoughts, which didn’t make much sense.
“No, I did not! I most definitely did not. It was just a moan!” the aide yelled.
“He said something about a — ” Nora began, but the aide cut her off.
“They don’t pay me enough to put up with this! I quit! I’m out of here!” And the aide stormed out of the hospital for good.
Nora took one last look at the elderly man and pulled the sheet back over him. As she walked to the nurse’s station, she began to question whether or not the old man had said anything. Her mind had to be playing tricks on her.
So when she reached her desk and saw an infant lying on her chair, she wasn’t sure the baby was real. That is, until the chair began to cry. Then Nora knew she’d better not sit on it.
All of the other nurses had been helping patients, so no one saw the baby arrive. The security cameras hadn’t picked up a single image of Vero being dropped off. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next he was.
Pediatricians on call that night gave the baby a complete physical from head to toe. He was perfectly healthy and rather cute. The hospital’s social worker granted temporary custody to Nora until the child’s parents could be located, or until a judge determined a permanent home for him.
“We’ll just call him Baby Doe,” the social worker said as she filled out the paperwork.
“His name is Vero,” Nora told her.
“Vero?” the social worker asked. “Where’d you get that one?”
Nora grabbed the pen from the woman’s hand and met her eyes with an unwavering gaze. She said, “I found him, and his name is Vero.”
Seeing the conviction in her eyes, the social worker took back her pen and wrote Vero on the forms.
Nora loved Vero from the first moment she held him. The two bonded even before they left the hospital that night. As Nora stepped outside the hospital doors, she noticed it was oddly calm outside. The storm was now a memory. Clover was only a year old at the time, so Nora strapped Vero into Clover’s car seat before setting out for the all-night grocery store. Vero would need diapers and baby formula.
The store was completely empty except for a young man standing behind the cash register. He wore headphones and listened to music on his iPod to pass the time. After all, it was 5:30 in the morning, and the sun was not yet up. Nora read the labels on the various kinds of formula while baby Vero slept in the built-in baby seat on the shopping cart.
Out of the corner of her eye, Nora saw a figure, a man dressed in a long black trench coat that resembled a hooded robe. The hood was pulled far over his head, obscuring his face. When the man began to knock diapers off the shelves as he approached her, that little thing called intuition kicked in. Nora picked up Vero and sprinted down the aisle.
She turned back toward the entrance. Nora screamed at the cashier who was banging imaginary drums to some song on his iPod. He couldn’t hear her, and she couldn’t leave through the front of the store without running smack into her pursuer.
The huge double doors to the storage room caught her attention. She plowed through them. The storage room was filled with rows of shelves that were stocked to the ceiling with wooden pallets filled with all different sorts of foods and goods. Nora ducked behind a massive crate containing boxes of cereal, and silently prayed that Vero wouldn’t make a sound. She peered around the corner of the crate and saw that the man in black was now surveying the warehouse.
He’s abnormally tall, Nora thought
.
It seemed like a stroke of good luck when the man went down another aisle. She exhaled with relief until ketchup bottles, soup cans, and products of all kinds started flying off the highest shelves in every direction and crashed to the floor. Vero began crying. Nora held him tightly to her chest and stepped out into the open. The man saw them.
“Stay away from me!” Nora shouted.
The man let out a chilling laugh as he slowly approached her. With her back against the locked loading-dock gate, Nora had nowhere to turn. The hooded man had cornered her like a trapped animal.
Instinctively she knew he was after Vero, and this man wouldn’t hesitate to take her life in order to get what he wanted. “Please,” Nora begged. “Don’t hurt the baby!”
But her pleas fell on deaf ears as the dark figure loomed toward her. He reached out his hand to grab her, his face still hidden by his hood. Nora clutched Vero with all her might. She would die protecting him. She would die without seeing the face of her killer.
“God help me!” Nora shouted. “Please help us!”
Suddenly, the massive metal gate behind her blasted away with an immense BOOM! A blinding white light filled the room, and the figure instantly recoiled with a howl of intense agony. The light blinded Nora as well, so she didn’t see the hooded man vanish. She also didn’t see the baby in her arms staring directly into the brilliant light, smiling serenely. He wasn’t even blinking.
“Are you okay, lady?” the deliveryman asked Nora as he pushed the metal gate open.
Nora was standing by the loading dock, still clutching Vero to her chest, and feeling totally bewildered. The radiant light was gone. It had been replaced with the regular morning sun that now streamed throughout the warehouse, coaxing Nora back to her senses.
“Yes, I think so,” Nora said meekly.
The deliveryman’s bright violet eyes and friendly smile helped put her at ease.
“He looks just like you,” he said with a nod toward Vero. “But you should probably be getting him home to bed, no?”
“I don’t understand . . . there was a man in black chasing us . . . and then you . . . ”
“I didn’t see anyone,” he said. “I just got here for my morning shift and found you standing there when I opened the warehouse door. But when I was driving in to work, I heard we had a decent-sized earthquake this morning. Unusual for DC, but not unheard of. Crazy times, huh? First that storm last night, and now an earthquake.”
The deliveryman surveyed the damage as food and other goods were strewn all over the warehouse floor.
“I pity the poor sap who has to clean up this place,” he said, shaking his head. But then he looked directly at Nora, his violet eyes piercing her own. “Really, you should be getting that boy home now.”
“Y-y-yes,” Nora said. “Home.” She was stunned, confused. What had just happened?
“Can I help you to your car?” the deliveryman asked with a smile.
Nora blinked and came back to herself. “No, thank you. I’ll get my groceries, and then I’ll head home. Thank you again.”
“No problem, ma’am.”
Right before she went through the double doors and reentered the main grocery store, she looked back at the man and said, “I didn’t catch your name . . . ”
But he was outside unloading boxes from a produce truck.
No one besides Nora had seen the man in black. Nora didn’t dare tell a soul what she’d experienced that night — not even her husband. She knew if she did, any judge would label her crazy, and she’d never be allowed to adopt the baby. So it was her secret to keep.
Weeks later, a judge formally permitted Nora and Dennis to adopt the baby, and he became Vero Leland.
As for Vero, he grew up knowing he’d been adopted. Nora told him that his biological parents had dropped him off at a hospital because they couldn’t provide for him. And then Nora and Dennis became his parents, and Clover became his sister. There was never a need to question anything.
5
BACKSEAT DRIVER
Vero was smart in school. Good grades came easily to him. He barely had to study, and yet he got all As on his report cards. Mrs. Cleary, his language arts teacher, was most impressed with his reading and writing — especially his essays. She assigned him the more difficult books to read. At the Lelands’ parent-teacher conference, Mrs. Cleary presented Vero’s essay on Milton’s Paradise Lost.
“This poem is usually assigned in the twelfth grade, but I wanted to see if Vero could handle it,” Mrs. Cleary began. “Paradise Lost tells the story of the fall of the angel Lucifer and his descent into hell. Of how he turned against God, was cast out of heaven, and spread his ills into the garden of Eden, persuading Eve to take a bite from the forbidden fruit.”
“Yes, I remember reading that in college,” Vero’s dad said.
Vero sighed and rolled his eyes at the pride in his dad’s voice. Vero looked at the clock, willing it to go faster.
Mrs. Cleary continued, “It’s the original story of good versus evil. God was good. Lucifer was evil. There’s no debating that. However, readers of the poem often debate Eve’s sin. Some feel anger toward the very first woman because all of mankind was forced to live with the consequences of her choice. On the other hand, some feel sympathy for her. Eve was deceived, tricked by the serpent, and at a time when deception was unheard of. They feel she was simply a pawn in the great war between heaven and hell. I expected Vero to take one of these two viewpoints in his essay.”
Nora squirmed in her seat. Vero thought she looked uncomfortable. He wished Mrs. Cleary would hurry up and get to the point.
“But Vero saw Eve’s sin from a completely unexpected angle,” Mrs. Cleary said. She began reading Vero’s essay aloud, and Vero felt his cheeks burning. “It was the archangel Uriel’s job to protect the garden of Eden. Uriel was the one who failed to prevent Lucifer from gaining access to the garden in the first place. Man’s fall was actually the result of Uriel’s poor job performance. If an archangel, a heavenly being, could be deceived by the serpent, then poor Eve never stood a chance. A human, especially one only recently created, could never be a match for the master of deception. So the archangel should have been aware of Eve’s vulnerability and stayed extra vigilant.”
Mrs. Cleary handed the paper to Vero’s father. “Brilliant,” she said.
Dennis beamed with pride. His entire face lit up. But Nora didn’t have the same reaction. She actually looked a bit sick.
“Vero’s insight is far beyond that of his peers. It’s a joy to read his papers. How did you ever come up with your idea?” Mrs. Cleary asked Vero.
“I don’t know,” Vero shrugged. “It just made sense to me.”
“And he’s modest too,” Mrs. Cleary said, admiringly.
Nora suddenly stood up and declared, “He copied it off the Internet!”
Everyone else looked taken aback.
“No, I didn’t . . . ” Vero said. “I swear.”
“Mrs. Cleary, please give him the F he deserves,” Nora said.
“Nora, don’t you think you’re overreacting?” Dennis said.
“Enough!” Nora shouted with a ferocity that silenced them all. “There’s no way Vero could have such knowledge of these things! He may have fooled you, Mrs. Cleary, but not me. I’m done with this conversation!”
Nora pulled Vero out of his chair by his upper arm and dragged him out of the classroom. But not before Vero saw Mrs. Cleary turn to his dad with a bewildered expression on her face.
Dennis shrugged and said, “I’m sorry, but my wife has a hard time hearing that Vero is anything but normal.”
“You just gotta stop getting such good grades,” Tack said to Vero as they were changing clothes in the boys’ locker room the next day.
“You sound like my mom,” Vero said.
“Your mom doesn’t want you getting good grades?” Tack asked, wide-eyed.
“Yeah, yesterday at my parent-teacher conference, she accused me of steal
ing an essay off the Internet. And no matter how much I tell her I didn’t do it, she won’t believe me. She won’t even go there,” Vero said. “It’s like she wants me to dumb myself down. It’s weird.”
“Did you steal it?”
“No!” Vero shouted.
“Okay, chill . . . but I think she’s on to something. Getting good grades the way you do, everyone’s gonna think you’re a dork. It was okay being a super-genius when we were little, but now girls like jocks.”
“Whatever you say, Tack.” Vero snorted as he watched Tack shove an entire Hostess Ding Dong into his mouth.
“Whaa?” Tack asked, with a mouth full of chocolate. After he’d swallowed, he said, “I need the energy to run the hurdles.”
Vero shook his head as Tack adjusted his extra-large sweatpants. Up until last summer, Tack had always been the pudgy kid. And he and Vero had been best friends since preschool.
It all started one afternoon during naptime when Tack accidentally rolled on top of a sleeping Vero. The preschool teachers panicked when they did a head count and couldn’t find little Vero anywhere. They searched the classroom closets, bathrooms, and even inside the school’s piano, but Vero was nowhere to be found. They immediately feared the worst: Vero had wandered off the schoolyard.
When Tack woke up and complained that his mat was lumpy, the teachers found Vero squashed underneath him. Vero was perfectly fine; but from that day on, Tack had to sleep in a corner away from the other kids. And then he and Vero became inseparable.
They grew up sharing each other’s lunches — with Tack typically eating the lion’s share. They raced across the monkey bars, played with Tonka trucks in the sandbox, and spent hours on the seesaw. Tack would sit on his end with such force that Vero went flying into the air — which Vero loved, of course.
When Vero had a difficult time learning how to swim, Tack swam with him for hours to help Vero stay afloat. When Tack got sick and missed days of school, Vero brought his homework to him. (Although Tack didn’t always appreciate that gesture.) When Tack’s dog Pork Chop ran away from home, Vero posted flyers and searched the whole neighborhood until Tack’s beloved English bulldog was finally found.
The Ether Page 3