The Lost Celt

by Conran, A. E. ;

  Hurry Grandpa, please hurry. If Ryan’s dad gets arrested, it’ll be my fault. If Ryan’s dad gets arrested, he’ll be taken from Ryan again. If Ryan’s dad gets arrested…

  The tall officer finishes his conversation on the radio, and makes some sort of hand signal to his colleague as he walks back. This is it. They’re going to arrest him. I can’t think of anything else to say, anything else to do. And that’s when Grandpa and Gerry, one of his buds, drive around the corner.

  “Grandpa!” I yell. “See,” I say to the officer, “there’s Grandpa, just like I said.”

  They park on the cross street and Grandpa gets out of the passenger side as fast as he can, heaving himself out with one strong arm, struggling with his stick, and knocking his wizard hat from his head.

  “All right, Mikey Boy?” Grandpa waves. “Are you all right, son?”

  He walks across the grass to meet the tall officer, and they shake hands. “Marty!” the officer says, clapping Grandpa on the back.

  “Steve,” Grandpa says, “how are you? I haven’t seen you at the Legion since you were Honor Guard at the Memorial Day Parade. Where’ve you been?”

  “Busy, Marty. Coaching two basketball teams and my oldest is doing college tours, you know?”

  Grandpa keeps walking alongside the officer, limping over the bumpy grass. “Is everything all right here?” he asks, “with my grandson and his friends?”

  The officer hesitates, as if wondering what he should say. “Look, Marty, we’ve had some complaints,” he says, “about public drunkenness, and endangering cars on the street.”

  “But, everyone’s calm and cooperative now?” Grandpa says.

  The tall officer approaches Ryan’s dad. “Yes, but we got a report—”

  “But he has an appointment,” I break in. I probably shouldn’t, but I do. “Tonight…at our house…with Dr. Mariko Curtis.”

  Steve looks to Grandpa. Liam and Ryan just look confused.

  “That’s right,” Grandpa quickly fills the silence. “With Dr. Mariko Curtis, from the VA. My friend here has seen…how many tours?”

  Grandpa walks up to Liam like he’s meeting us in the schoolyard, holding his arm out in greeting.

  “Three,” Ryan cuts in. “Three tours.”

  “That’s right, son. Isn’t it?” Grandpa shakes Liam by the hand and gives him a friendly pat on the shoulder. Then he whispers, “Semper Fi. We’ll straighten this out.”

  “Well, I know something about that,” Steve says.

  The officers back off a little to talk. Grandpa joins them. “Maybe you could follow us, Steve, and discuss this with the VA doc?” he suggests.

  The policemen talk in low tones and exchange glances. “That’s reasonable,” Steve says, finally. “We’ll follow you, Marty.”

  We make our way slowly toward the car, me on one side of Ryan’s dad, Ryan on the other, while Grandpa chats with the officers. There’s no one like Grandpa.

  The minute we’re in the car and Gerry starts to drive, Grandpa calls Mariko. “Meet us outside the house,” he says as he ends the call. Then he relaxes back in his seat. “There’s no need to say anything right now; not until we’re home.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Mariko is waiting outside our house with Kyler when we arrive. The police hover outside, talking to her. They look concerned, but not angry. They listen and nod and phone in on their radios again.

  Grandpa escorts Liam up the front steps and into the kitchen where the rest of Grandpa’s buddies are waiting. They shake his hand and say, “Semper Fi.”

  “Welcome,” Mom says.

  Ryan’s dad looks confused and sad. Ryan stands next to him, his hand on his dad’s shoulder. Kyler and I don’t know where to stand, or what to do now.

  When Mariko hurries in she just says, “It’s all right. They understand.”

  Grandpa introduces her to Liam. “Mariko is a good friend and a great doctor. You can trust her, son.” Mariko smiles. Grandpa moves so she can sit down next to Ryan’s dad. She starts assessing him the way she did Grandpa at the ER. Her voice is quiet and calm.

  Mom brews coffee at the kitchen counter. She catches my eye and points to Kyler. We walk over to see what she wants. “Boys, will you empty the last bags of candy into the cauldron on the porch and leave it at the bottom of the steps? The trick or treaters can help themselves. We don’t need to be disturbed right now.”

  Outside, kids are still running up to houses and having fun. We dump the candy just like Mom told us to, putting a few pieces in our pockets.

  “Are you OK?” Kyler asks as we walk back up the steps to the front door.

  “I got everything wrong.” I feel sick just saying it.

  Kyler shrugs.

  Mom is by the door as we come back inside. She switches the porch lights off. “Now, take Ryan upstairs,” she whispers. “This might take some time.”

  “No!” Ryan overhears. “I don’t want to go. He’s my dad.”

  “It’s OK, Ryan,” Mom says. “I’ll call your mom.”

  “You can’t,” Ryan snaps. “She thinks he’s staying with friends.”

  Ryan’s dad cradles his head in his hands and leans forward so we can’t see his face. It’s as if he wants to curl up into a ball and never uncurl again.

  “She’ll understand. Really she will,” Mom says. “You boys have done the right thing.”

  “You don’t know anything—” Ryan shouts. His dad catches his hand. They look at each other. Ryan glares and wriggles out of his father’s grasp. He can’t run out the front door because we’re blocking the way, so he bolts upstairs instead. My mom chases after him. “Ryan!”

  As they disappear, I hear her say, “I’m the kid of a veteran. I have some idea…” Ryan’s footsteps thump up the stairs. My door closes. Mom asks to be let in and after a while the door opens and closes again. Kyler and I don’t know what to do. We can’t go to my room right now. We can’t really sit in the kitchen, either. So we sit at the bottom of the stairs and wait.

  We hear the men talking in low whispers and then Liam lets out a sob and speaks. “It was a wedding party. People were all dressed up on the streets, like tonight. It was my third tour in Iraq. I was in the Reserve by then, but I got redeployed. I didn’t know if I could hold out. I was always on edge, always jumpy. Someone set off fireworks. I smelled cordite and then a boy approached with a bag of candies for the wedding. He was just a kid. We’re supposed to keep kids away from our patrol, but I let him get up close. Too close. He pulled out a cell phone.

  “The guys in my patrol are shouting, ‘Cell phone! Cell phone!’ I yell at the kid, but he doesn’t put the phone down. At that point I’m supposed to shoot, but I couldn’t because he reminded me of my son and my heart ached. And then the kid hit the button and the Humvee went up in flames, and I shot the kid, and…” He pauses. “I was supposed to protect the guys inside, but they got blown up. I dragged them out, but it was too late.”

  Kyler gasps. I hold my breath. He had no choice. There was no right thing he could do. We hear Grandpa and his buds talking to Liam, sharing, and then Mom comes out of my bedroom and tells us to come up and keep Ryan company. Mariko is already making phone calls in the kitchen.

  Ryan’s standing with his back to us in one corner of my room. He rests his forehead against the wall. Kyler looks at me. “What are we supposed to do?” I mouth. Kyler shrugs. I take a step toward Ryan, but I get scared, so I kind of turn it into another move and sit on the floor instead. I rearrange some Roman cavalry soldiers that I left under my desk. Kyler stretches out on my bed, pretending to read a book. I feel so uncomfortable I could split right out of my skin. Ryan hates me, even though he isn’t saying a thing. Yesterday I didn’t care whether he hated me or not. Now, I do.

  Below, the grown-ups talk. Sometimes Ryan’s dad shouts, sometimes he cries. We can’t hear clearly, but every time there’s a shout, Ryan tenses and his hands ball into fists. Finally, he turns and slides down until he’s sitting with hi
s elbows on his knees, his head resting back against the wall. His mouth is a tight hard line.

  I did the right thing, I tell myself. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just got Ryan and his dad into a whole lot of trouble. My stomach churns at the thought of it.

  “He didn’t want to risk hurting you,” I whisper. “That’s why he hid from you.” I don’t dare look at Ryan. I twirl a Roman soldier around on the floor. There’s no answer. “Kyler’s mom will look after him. She always helps Grandpa.” I glance up, and the way Ryan returns my gaze makes me wish I’d never said a thing.

  The doorbell rings, and a woman calls out. It’s an indescribable noise caught between screaming and crying. “Mom!” Ryan leaps up and runs to the bedroom door. He grasps the handle and I don’t know whether he means to fling the door open or barricade himself in. “She’s gonna kill me.”

  “No, she’s not.” I might be wrong, but I stand up and keep going. “You wanted your dad to stay near you. We all understand that. She will too. My dad’s in Nigeria, and I sure don’t want him to be there. I mean it’s not the same as your dad being at war,” I say really quickly. “It’s not the same as your dad going to Iraq again and again and each time worse…” I take a sidelong look at Ryan expecting that he’ll be so mad that he’ll want to punch me, but he doesn’t move. Then I feel a burning inside my gut and the words topple out of my mouth, “But Dad’s been away for five months, and he’s going to be there another nine, and I miss him. Mom’s horrible when he’s away. She gets so stressed she goes ballistic even if I just leave a book on the floor or forget my homework.”

  When I’ve finished, I feel so dumb I just look down at my feet. Kyler turns a page. Then Ryan says, “My mom can’t get through a single day without yelling, and if she’s not yelling she’s crying or sleeping on the couch. She never goes out anymore. It sucks.” That sums it up.

  “Yeah, it sucks.”

  There’s more crying downstairs. Ryan draws in a breath. “And your dad’s like Cuchulain,” I say. “He did the right thing, and he did the wrong thing, both at the same time. He had no choice.”

  Ryan’s eyes glisten and he wipes his face with the back of his arm.

  “Forget that,” Kyler says over the noise.

  “What?” I say, taken totally by surprise.

  “Let’s do something fun. Let’s look for the plastic gun stash.”

  That’s the last thing on my mind right now. I can’t believe Kyler would say such a dumb thing, but Ryan says, “What gun stash?” and looks almost interested.

  I go with it. “Great idea,” I say.

  Ryan’s completely in the dark so I fill him in. When we get to the bit where Mom used black markers to erase the gun pictures on the boxes, Ryan laughs out loud. Even though he has to wipe his face again and his voice is still shaky, he says, “Dude, your mom’s crazier than mine!”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It sucks.”

  “Sucks,” he echoes.

  “Mega sucks,” I say.

  “Mega, mammoth sucks,” Kyler says.

  “Mega, mammoth, tyrannosaurus sucks,” Ryan says. He gets the game right away, and wins. Kyler and I high five.

  “The guns have to be in a secret compartment,” Kyler says, “like under the floorboards.” He heads right for the landing outside the bathroom and kneels down to inspect the floor.

  Ryan’s not buying it. “She’d have to cut a hole in the wood to hide a plastic bag underneath the floor. She’d never do that. Moms are sneaky, but they don’t destroy their houses.”

  I like Ryan’s logic. He watches people a lot. I know he’s been watching me and Kyler over the whole Celtic-warrior thing. I guess he learns more than he lets on.

  “No. She’s done something trickier than that,” Ryan continues. “She’s hidden them somewhere so obvious that you wouldn’t even think to look. Like in the closet of your own bedroom, Mikey. No kid ever knows what’s in their own closet.”

  “Genius!” Kyler looks up with a grin. “Pure genius.”

  Ryan opens my closet. A basketball bounces over his feet, and a box of toy tanks and armored vehicles spills onto the floor. “Was I right or was I right? Your mom could hide an elephant in here.” He pulls out the dirty clothes that I stuffed into the closet the last time Mom told me to clean my room, then starts in on a pile of storage boxes.

  Kyler’s still on his knees on the landing trying to get his pinkie finger down a gap in the floorboards. “I think I got something,” he says. “I need wire. Something thin.”

  “Pencil,” I say.

  “No, thinner.”

  “Ruler?”

  “Too thick.”

  “Plastic spear?” Ryan hands him one from a Roman soldier.

  “Yeah, that’ll work.” Kyler gives it a try, but the spear just twangs to a stop in the slot between the boards.

  “It’s still too thick,” he says.

  “Door popper,” I say.

  “What?” Ryan asks.

  “Door popper. Mom keeps a special piece of wire on the door ledge over the bathroom. I saw her use it once when Grandpa got stuck. She pulled it down, stuck it in the little hole in the handle, and popped the lock open.”

  “Worth a try, but hurry,” Kyler says.

  I drag a chair over to the bathroom. When I reach up, I can just get my fingers to curl around the top of the door ledge. There’s something there for sure. I flick my fingertips forward. Something black edges toward me. “Yuck, a spider!” I hate spiders, especially when they’re scuttling toward me. I wobble back off the chair and half collapse onto Kyler. One, then two, small dark objects plop to the floor. It takes me a second to recognize what they are. A tiny Brown Bess from my redcoats and, OMG, an awesome assault rifle from my Navy Seals.

  “Whoa! You are not going to believe this,” I say. Kyler and Ryan are already crowding ‘round. “I think I’ve found them!”

  I step back onto the chair and sweep my fingers right along the top of the doorframe. Mini-weapons topple over the edge like a waterfall.

  “Let me see!” Kyler picks up a tiny weapon, no bigger than his fingernail, and pretends to fire it. “This is insane, Mikey.” He laughs.

  Ryan grabs another chair from my room, pulls it into the farthest corner of the landing and stands on tiptoe. “Wow! They’re lined up in rows along all the doorframes, Mikey. You’ve got a whole arsenal here.”

  “Yes!” I cry. “I knew she wouldn’t throw them away.”

  Ryan drags the chair to Grandpa’s room and brushes his fingers across the top of the doorframe, triggering a new cascade of assault rifles and grenade launchers.

  “It’s raining weapons,” Kyler says. On the ledge of every doorframe Mom has lined up the tiny plastic weapons she stole from my soldiers. They scatter to the floor like a military supply drop.

  I flex my arms, and I’m about to roar like the Celt when I realize I’d be copying Ryan’s dad. That wouldn’t be right.

  “Sor—” I say, my arms half up in a biceps flex, but I’m interrupted by a woman’s voice.

  “Ryan, are you there?”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Ryan’s mom stands in the pool of light spilling out of the kitchen. Her face is white, her eyes are red from crying, but she’s smiling, too. Mom and Mariko stand on either side of her, holding her elbows as if she needs steadying on a stormy sea.

  From the kitchen I hear Ryan’s dad and then Grandpa laughing, “Heh, heh, heh.”

  Ryan runs down the stairs into a hug. His mom cries. Mariko rubs Ryan’s mom’s back in small circles. My mom puts her hand on Ryan’s shoulder. When Ryan finally pulls away, his mom says, “It’s going to be all right. Dr. Curtis says she’s found a place for Dad, and it’s only an hour away. He’s agreed to go, tonight. We’ll be able to visit every day…until he’s well. Until I’m better, too. We can all go see the doctors there until we work this out.”

  Mom looks up at us and flashes a quick smile. She’s not mad. I guess we did the right thing after all.

&nb
sp; “Come talk to your dad,” Ryan’s mom says.

  As they go back into the kitchen, I walk down a few steps and whisper, “Is he really going to be all right?”

  Mom closes the kitchen door before she answers. “Mariko seems to think so. She suspects he’s suffering not just from post-traumatic stress but other things too…a mixture of things…but they can be treated. He’s getting help. That’s a big first step.” She reaches for the door handle. “Can you two wait upstairs a few more minutes?”

  “Sure, Mom.” I use my brightest voice, not only because I feel lighter having heard what Mom said, but because this will give Kyler and me time to deal with the mini-guns.

  The moment she leaves, I aim for the landing and scoop the guns off the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Kyler asks.

  “Putting them back. If Mom knows I’ve found them, she’ll hide them somewhere else, and I’ll have to find them all over again. This way I can use them whenever I want, and she’ll never know. Besides, I don’t want to spoil her fun.”

  Kyler grins. “That is pure genius.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  This afternoon we’re presenting our Veterans Day reports, and even Miss O’Brien seems nervous. She’s expecting a whole bunch of parents, grandparents, and friends, and she’s already called the janitor three times to check that extra chairs will be delivered. But she’s nowhere near as nervous as I am. My old report didn’t make sense any more. My Celt wasn’t a Celt, so I ended up writing my report on Grandpa after all, just like Miss O’Brien had suggested. My stomach twists when I think about reading it aloud. Just like all my reports, it isn’t very good. The words never come out right.

  Kyler’s in charge of putting our artwork on the wall. We’ve taken the last three weeks of art class to draw charcoal portraits of our veterans. Kyler’s portrait of Grandpa is one of the best. Kyler drew him wearing the jungle hat that I found in the shoe box. When Grandpa showed us the hat, I had to pretend I’d never seen it before. In Kyler’s portrait, Grandpa seems to be looking right at you. Half of his face is in the shade, and you’re not sure whether he’s going to burst into tears or laughter. At least, that’s what I think.