by James Renner
“Sure.”
“Then you wanted to kiss her.”
“You think so?”
Paige nodded emphatically. “Like Tauriel wanted to kiss that dwarf, Kili. She pretends she doesn’t. But she does.”
“Oh, honey, that’s not exactly Hobbit canon…”
“Mommy said you used to kiss Sam in school.”
He gave Jean a sharp look. “We kissed a lot of people in school,” he said.
“There’s this one boy. Dusty Miller. He kissed me on the playground. Then he punched me in the stomach and ran away.”
“Stay away from Dusty.”
The girl shrugged. “He wasn’t a bad kisser,” she explained, tossing her bangs aside insouciantly. “But he smelled like whole milk. I don’t think he brushes his teeth.”
“Paige,” said Jean, hiding her smile with coffee mug. “Why don’t you play outside or something?”
“’Kay,” she said. She took the Pringles can with her.
“Watch that one,” he said.
Jean gave his suit a once-over. “Back to Haven today?” she asked.
“Yep. And tomorrow, probably. It’s like trying to solve a riddle talking to that boy.”
“We have to talk about the Captain soon,” she said, holding his eyes with her own. “Executor stuff. Living will…”
“Later.”
“Soon, Jack.”
He blinked. “Okay.”
3 On the way to Haven, a ten-minute drive that took him past John F. Kennedy High School, its sports fields silent for June, the radio began to buzz like an old dial-up modem. One second Jethro Tull was singing about a homeless man named Aqualung and the next the car’s speakers blared the sound of an ancient computer booting up and slipping into the white-noise crash of connectivity.
“This has been a test of the Emergency Alert System,” a robotic voice informed him. “Had this been an actual emergency…”
Jack clicked off the radio. He felt ill at ease suddenly. Nauseated. He hated those EAS broadcasts. Always had. They were harbingers. Every time he’d heard that noise as a kid, he’d looked to the horizon for funnel clouds. Or worse: the telltale white flash of a nuclear blast.
He checked himself in the rearview mirror. What a job he’d done with the razor this morning! It looked like he hadn’t shaved at all.
4 “You’re a teacher?” asked Cole. “What do you teach?” They were in the common room, again, looking out at the cattails.
“I teach history.”
Cole’s eyes widened. Then he laughed loudly.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” said Cole. “That’s perfect.”
Suddenly, Jack remembered where he’d left the watch. He’d placed it on the windowsill beside his bed as he was undressing. He could see it resting there in his mind.
“What?” asked Cole.
“Nothing.”
“C’mon. What?”
“It’s stupid,” said Jack. “I just remembered where I left my watch.”
The boy nodded but didn’t say anything more. His eyelids seemed to want to close.
“Can you tell me more about your conversations with Tony? Dr. Sanders, I mean? Do you know how he got out of Franklin Mills without his car?”
“No. I can’t do that. Sorry, man.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t boil your water.”
“I did. I started last night.”
Cole smiled a thin smile but didn’t look him in the eyes. “Jack, you don’t know enough about what’s going on to be able to lie to me. You don’t even know what day it is.”
“It’s Tuesday. June sixteenth.”
Cole shook his head.
“What day do you think it is?” asked Jack.
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Cole, I’m sure it’s Tuesday.”
“I know you’re sure it’s Tuesday. That’s the problem.” The boy was getting agitated. He blinked like a soldier tapping Morse code. “It’s the fluoride. They put it in the water to make you suggestible. Then they plant ideas in your mind through radio waves. Ideas like what day they want it be. Tell me, Jack, did you hear an emergency broadcast on the radio this morning?”
For a second he was too weirded out to answer. Then logic set in. Cole must have been listening to the radio in his room before their interview. He was hijacking that little fact for his delusion, using it to pull Jack in.
“That’s how they plant their ideas in your brain, like what day it is,” said Cole. The boy’s body pitched forward, as if sleep were trying to take him, but Cole brought his head up again.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” he said. “It’s okay, Jack. Maybe it’s better for you to live in your cave. I wish I could sometimes. I really do.”
The boy’s eyes closed.
“Cole?”
Jack reached across the table and nudged the boy’s shoulder with his hand. He opened his eyes a bit.
“Why are you so tired?” asked Jack.
Cole smiled but his eyes didn’t. “It’s probably the bottle of pills I swallowed.”
“What?”
“I swiped a bottle from Quick’s cabinet before they reset the calendar and planted the idea in your head that it was still Tuesday.” Cole’s eyes closed and the boy’s head fell against the table.
“Nurse!” Jack screamed. “Nurse! Hey! Hey, goddamn it! Somebody! Somebody!”
The nurses came. Within moments they had the boy on a gurney and were running down the corridor toward the clinic. Jack was ushered quickly out of the building.
5 Jack rang the doorbell three times before realizing it didn’t work. He knocked loudly on the porthole with his fist and then Sam was at the door. She was dressed in a Johnny Maziel jersey that reached below her knees.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This town is bullshit,” he said. “Is it always like this? Or is it me? Am I some kind of curse?”
“What happened?”
He shook his head. “I’m just tired, Sam. I’m tired of all the sadness. And I’m tired of hating you.”
She squinted her eyes and lifted a hand to block the sunlight playing through the giant oak in her front yard. “You don’t hate me,” she said.
“That’s not true,” said Jack, but he couldn’t help smiling.
“You’re not cursed, Jack. You just trust people too much. You were always kind of stupid that way. Now did you come here to feel sorry for yourself or did you come to kiss me?”
“I would like to kiss you.”
“Okay, then.”
He stepped inside and closed the door with the heel of his shoe. Sam twisted up to him on her tiptoes. Kissing her was like kissing a memory.
6 She slept beside him, her downy arm raked over his chest, but Jack did not sleep.
It was early afternoon. The sun through the half-open window gave her bedroom a honey light and a breeze rolled the curtains in a way that mimicked their breathing. The only noise was the hum of early cicadas in the trees surrounding the house and the occasional car crackling gravel on Giddings. Sam snored softy.
Jack couldn’t sleep. Tony was all over this room: in that framed photograph from their honeymoon (arms around her in front of some Boston lobster shack), in the slender sports jackets hanging neatly in the closet, in the stack of yellow-spined National Geographics gathering dust on the nightstand …
* * *
“Mister Jack?” It was Virginia, home from bus garage. It was the afternoon of the first day of his junior year of high school and Jack was in the living room playing Zelda, trying not to think about Sam. Sam was all he could think about anymore. She was his consuming secret. He found himself lost during the day, imagining their rushed moments together, the nights they would sneak away and meet up on the shore of Claytor Lake. He flinched at the sound of his mother’s voice. When Virginia called him “Mister Jack,” it meant he was in for one of her legendary tirades, one likely to end with a call to the Captain and a p
romise of three smacks with his belt when he returned.
Jack should have expected this. When school was in and Virginia was at the bus garage with twenty men who loved gossip more than a quilting club, the rumor mill was lightning quick.
He set the controller down. She still had her keys in her hand. “In the car,” she said through clenched teeth. Then, to Jean, watching from the couch: “We’ll be back soon. Get some supper going.”
He sat in the passenger seat of her Ford Escort and braced himself. She reached into her purse, resting in the space between the seats, and fished out a Winston Light. Her hands trembled as she lit the cigarette. She pulled deep and exhaled out the window and then was a little better. She started the car and they drove down Tallmadge, away from the center of town. He had a feeling there was no destination but privacy.
“I don’t know what you were thinking, Johnny.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head but did not look at him. “You’re not smart enough to be able to lie to me, yet,” she said. She took another long drag. “If Sam’s brother, or her father, if either of them had found out first, they might have killed you. I really think they might have. Do you know how that makes me feel?”
He couldn’t look at her. So he looked out the window and counted the trees.
“Her brother, Mark, is dangerous,” she said. “The school was notified when Sam’s family moved here from Warren. A cop come down from the city to brief the guidance counselor. Family shipped Mark off to the military instead of a psych ward. And that probably makes him even more dangerous.”
“I don’t understand.”
Virginia sighed. “We live out here so that you don’t have to know things like this,” she said. “You’ll hear it at school eventually. No getting around it. Surprised Jean doesn’t know yet. Hell. Maybe she does. I don’t know her as well as I used to.”
They passed over Berlin Lake, the muddy water stretching out from under the bridge on either side, stagnant water so hot the fish were dying. Beyond was North Benton and still she did not turn off. It was like she was distancing them from the news itself. Or trying to. The way Einstein had wanted to drive away from the clock tower so that it was never noon. As she spoke, Jack focused his attention on an aspen leaf that had gotten stuck under one of the windshield wipers.
“Mark was raping Sam, Johnny. They caught him at school with her behind the bleachers. And if it was happening there, out in the open, you can imagine what was going on in their home.”
“No,” he said.
“Mark was still a minor by a few months. Family got a lawyer, kept Mark out of jail. When it was over, they moved away and the father forced Mark into the navy. Their mother died in the middle of it all. Wrapped her car around a tree. They called it an accident.”
“Pull over.”
Virginia skidded the Escort onto the shoulder and came to a quick stop. Jack threw the door wide, leaned out, and puked into the grass. The bile stung his throat and cleared his head. He spit a few times until the nausea subsided, then pulled the door closed.
“How did it happen?” she asked. “You and Samantha.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just happened. The fair.”
“Johnny. You can’t see her again.”
“I heard you.”
“She’s bad news. If she’s not crazy already, she will be. You can’t escape those memories. She’s not safe, Johnny. She’s a little barracuda. Understand?”
He did. But he didn’t want to. He shook his head.
“She’s also in the eighth grade,” Virginia continued. “You’re a junior now, kiddo. This is all kinds of trouble.”
“Okay.”
“She’ll ruin your future.” Virginia flicked the spent cigarette out the window and then pulled the car back onto the road and turned back toward home.
But Jack knew he couldn’t stay away. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Sam. He could feel the pressure of her lips on his own, the way her upper lip was always chapped and cracked.
That night at Claytor Lake he found a note from her folded into the nook of a chestnut tree that gave them shade.
I know you know. Please stop. It’s okay. I don’t even care.
That night the heat wave broke. A wave of cool air blasted the house at 3:00 a.m., knocking slate shingles off the eaves. Morning brought rain, and it didn’t let up for three days. Ten homes along the Cuyahoga were swept into the river, gobbled up and spit out as timber into Lake Erie. The world, after, felt new.
Jack kept the note with him and thought about what to do. A week later, he taped it to his bus window with his own message written in black marker on the back. Her bus faced his in the parking lot when school let out. A simple message, but profound: I love you.
Such public displays are never overlooked in school. They become one of those stories told in the lunchroom for years. A junior proclaiming his love for a lowly eighth-grader? That’s good stuff.
As his bus pulled away that day he saw her smile. Smile and nod and mouth one word: “Okay.”
* * *
When Sam awoke, the sun was low on the horizon. She pulled herself up enough to rest her head on Jack’s chest. Her right hand drew words on his skin that he could not read.
“Stay,” she said.
“Okay, then.”
7 Cole’s mother, Imogen, was a fit aristocrat with bright gray hair that ended harshly at her shoulders, as if it had been snipped off in one go by a pair of giant shears. She was the creative VP for a midtown advertising firm. She had written the slogan for Rivertin, the drug her son had overdosed on: Return! Revive! Rivertin! Forever better.
By the time Imogen flew to Akron the doctors had pumped Cole’s stomach. The boy lived. Another five minutes was all it would have taken. She was angry. At everyone, it seemed, but Jack.
He came at her request to a meeting with Haven’s director, Dr. Jimi Frazier, two days after Cole’s attempted suicide. The director’s office was high-ceilinged and lit by soft lamps. There was a gurgling pebble fountain in the corner and an array of diplomas and pictures on the wall behind his mahogany desk. Imogen sat across from Frazier, next to Jack, in a cushioned chair, legs crossed at the ankles, eyebrows furrowed.
“Do you know what it’s like to entrust the well-being of your only child to someone, Dr. Frazier?” she asked.
Frazier was stoic, unreadable. “I have grown kids in the world, Imogen,” he said. “I know what it’s like to fear for them.”
“This place is supposed to be safe.”
“Yes.”
“It’s supposed to be a goddamn haven, Jimi.”
“Yes.”
“So how did this happen?”
“Your son is clever. One of the most intelligent young men we’ve ever treated. If he wishes to kill himself he will find a way. Here or elsewhere. What we have to do is treat that impulse. Cole has to want to live.” He looked from her to Jack. “We were making progress until Mr. Felter intervened.”
“Are you blaming me for this?” asked Jack.
“Before he disappeared, Dr. Sanders filled Cole’s mind with false hope,” Frazier said to Imogen. “He promised Cole that his friend Jack would have all the answers. When Jack didn’t provide them, that three-year-old delusion came crashing down.”
“That isn’t how it played out,” said Jack.
Imogen lifted a hand to quiet them. “Here’s what I see. I see that it took your staff over a year to get my son to communicate again after Dr. Sanders left. And I see that it took Jack all of thirty seconds. For whatever reason, my son is responding to him. I know he’s not a doctor. But he is a teacher. He knows something about kids. I want Jack to find out why my son tried to kill himself—”
“Wait,” Jack started, “I couldn’t—”
“And in the process, Jack might be able to get some answers about Dr. Sanders’s whereabouts. And that, I believe, would help the both of you. Aren’t you looking for him, too?”
&n
bsp; Frazier leaned back in his seat and rubbed his bald head.
“Cole really does want to see you again,” said Imogen. “You’re the only one he’s asked for.”
“I’m not a shrink,” said Jack.
“He doesn’t need a shrink. He needs someone he can trust. He’s trying to tell us something. We need someone to figure out what it is. I can’t do it. I can’t talk to him like that. I look at him, all I see is his father.”
8 Imogen walked Jack to his car. The day was bright, sunlight reflecting off the whitewash of the Haven home. She placed a hand on his arm.
“Jack,” she said, her voice wavering. “Have they told you about Cole’s compulsion to pull people into his delusions?”
“Yes,” he said.
She batted away a stray strand of hair and seemed to consider her next words. Finally she said, “Let him.”
“What?”
“Let him draw you in. I think the only way we find out what’s going on with my son and what happened to your friend is for someone to really see what’s cooking inside his brain. And you seem healthy enough for it.”
If you only knew, lady, he thought. If you only knew how I got these marks on my neck.
When he didn’t say anything, she continued. “I think his other doctors were too quick to dismiss everything Cole told them.”
“Like what?”
“Cole believes his father was a secret government agent who collected Nazi artifacts.”
Jack shrugged. “You think, what? There’s something to it? Was your husband working for the government?”
“If you’d asked me a year ago I would have said, unequivocally, no. He was a day trader. No way. He couldn’t hide something like that from me. I mean, it sounds crazy, right?”
“It does.”
“About a year ago I moved out of our home on Long Island and into an apartment in the city. During the move, I found some things my husband had hidden from me.”
Imogen reached into her pocket and came out with something in her hand. She passed it to Jack. The object felt cool wrapped inside his fist.