Adam realized that he had become his six-year-old self again. This wasn’t just a memory or a dream; he was actually there, reliving a moment that had been buried in the past. It was so vivid that he could even feel his young heart pounding with excitement as he gazed out the window at her. Beatrice.
He turned and looked back into the living room. Everything now appeared as it once was. His grandmother’s art table, the old books, the lumpy couch. A log crackling in the cast-iron stove. Instinctively, Adam understood that if this lucid memory were to continue, he would not have time to linger on details; he must simply go along for the ride.
Adam hopped down off his little bed beneath the window and grabbed his jean jacket from the couch. He needed to get outside, to see Beatrice. As he slipped on his jacket, unfamiliar adult voices could be heard arguing in angry whispers somewhere in the house. Creeping down the hallway, the nonsqueaky side, Adam found his hiding spot by the kitchen door. Then, with great concentration, he made himself invisible, just like his grandmother had taught him.
Peeking past the doorframe, he saw a man standing by the stove smoking a cigarette, tipping the ashes in the sink. “What was I supposed to do, baby? I was a basket case, remember.”
At the kitchen table a woman was seated with her back to Adam. Her hair was tightly pulled into a very serious-looking ponytail. Her stillness emanated power. “I can tell you right now, we are not going to leave that boy here a day longer. Not around this insanity.”
Adam recalled meeting these two earlier that day when they had arrived in their noisy car. Anne had told him that the man was his father and that this woman was going to be his new mother. Adam didn’t like them—they felt jittery—but Anne had seemed happy when the two showed up. After Adam’s real mother had died, Anne said, his dad had become a deadbeat, the bad kind of hippie, but this woman with the serious ponytail had helped straighten him out.
“Come on, Gloria. Can we please not start again with the ‘his grandmother’s crazy’ crap,” the man in the bell-bottom jeans complained.
The woman suddenly jutted out her hand, causing the man to hand over his cigarette to her. She has serious power, Adam thought.
“It’s not just her, Mark. There’s something not right about this place, this whole area. And it’s having a terrible effect on your son. Look, you have issues with responsibility; we both know that. But I can help you. I can be a real mother to Adam—”
“He’s fine. That’s just the way kids are.”
“No, Mark, your son has serious developmental issues. I’m telling you this not just as your wife, but as a professional. He is going to end up having big problems unless we get him out of here and get him some help. Anne can’t take care of him anymore, and she knows it.”
Adam didn’t like what he was hearing—not just the words, but the colors beneath them. He could sense something especially dangerous about this woman, just from the back of her head. Physically she was much smaller than the bell-bottom man, but in more serious ways, she was at least 10 times his size.
Feeling his invisibility starting to fade, Adam slipped back from the doorframe. Beatrice was waiting outside. He needed to get out of there. The back door, he thought. Creeping back down the hallway, there was another room he had to pass on his way out, but this one did not require invisibility. He stopped and peeked in.
His grandmother’s bedroom. The small church organ in the corner had all sorts of colored buttons and switches that Adam liked to flip on and off, and the foot pedals were hard to push down unless he used both feet. Dark, dreamlike paintings covered the wall, many of which Adam had helped Anne with. A low table looked like the one in the living room, but this one had lots of jars on it with strange-smelling plants and things inside.
When Adam’s asthma got bad, Anne could make him feel better by rubbing tingly oil on his chest and giving him a healing kiss. If his chest got really tight, like breathing through a straw, she encouraged him to inhale a nasty smoke that made him cough, but then the straw would widen and he could breathe again. Anne used to inhale that smoke as well, to help with the many bad pains in her body and her head too. Sometimes she would sit on the couch and stare at the flames in the cast-iron stove for hours without moving. That would scare Adam. He could see that she was not inside her body when that happened, that she had gone off to visit someplace else. Lately her trips had gotten longer, which was why the two jittery adults had come.
Stepping into the bedroom, Adam saw his grandmother sitting in her chair by the window. Adam walked over, reached out, and touched her hand. It was trembling slightly. She slowly turned her head to look at him. She looks so old, so tired.
Her lips struggled to smile. “Friends,” she whispered hoarsely. “You and I, we’ll always be . . . best of friends.”
Adam nodded.
“Try not to forget who you are.” She smiled but seemed sad. “You’re the shepherd boy.”
Adam nodded, understanding.
Adam’s grandmother glanced out the window, and then turned back to him with a mischievous look in her eyes. “I think I spied your little friend out there.” With a conspiratorial whisper she added, “Better go see her before it’s too late.”
Adam kissed his grandmother’s hand, a healing kiss, then slipped out of the room.
Having made his escape through the back door, Adam catapulted himself down the grassy slope toward the grove. With each step he felt himself getting stronger. If he wanted he could double his leaps, then triple them, until he only needed to touch down occasionally to sustain his gliding flight. For a moment, nothing else existed but his body and running. He could see himself from high above, looking down. Here is a picture of me running, he thought. Snap.
Down among the redwoods, Adam scanned for the girl. It was never clear where he might find her; she was an expert at concealment. He looked by the stream, inside the tree-cave, behind the blackberry bushes; she was nowhere to be seen. It had taken Adam a long time to escape the house, so maybe she had given up on him, but then he saw proof that she had not. Across the stream on a rock, glistening brightly in a patch of dappled sunlight, lay an orange peel.
Immediately Adam knew the game. It was one of his favorites. He leaped across the stream from rock to rock (touching down only four times!) until he reached the orange peel. From there he looked around until—There!
He spotted the next peel on a log a few hundred feet away. He lifted off and (this time in only three leaps!) was on the log. From there he could see the third peel had been placed beneath a big, dusty fern at the top of the ridge. Gliding up to it, Adam looked down into the ravine to the left, where all the hippie people lived. He scanned the area quickly: a woman was hanging laundry on a line suspended between two trees, a dog was rolling in the dirt next to a group of kittens, a man leaned over the engine of a big camper van, and another man with a thick, red beard tapped the keys on a typewriter. Click, click, clack, clack, click, click, zip.
As he suspected, the girl wasn’t down there. Adam looked the other way, toward the road. There! A fourth orange peel. He bounded over to pick it up, already knowing where they would lead him. Three orange peels later, Adam saw it.
The old schoolhouse. She would be waiting in the playground around back. That was where the game with orange peels had first begun.
Adam quietly made his way across the front school yard, careful not to step on any cracks or thick, yellow lines painted on the cement. Passing the tetherball pole, the rings, and the monkey bars, he reached the edge of the building. Cautiously he peeked around the corner. At the far end of the yard, he saw her, hiding her face in her hands, the remaining orange peels at her side. She was sitting on the single most important play structure at the school—the merry-go-round. This circular platform with six metal bars arching out from its center was like a miniature carousel that required nothing more than a tug to make it spin. It was a rocket ship, a time machine, or an ancient temple—but for this game it was the princess’s fortress
.
Adam heard Beatrice giggling as she peeked through her fingers; she knew he was there. In a single leap, Adam made it to his hiding place behind the leaky water fountain. He noticed his breath was getting a bit wheezy. Probably from all that flying. But it wasn’t too bad yet. He could still play the game.
Crouching low, Adam crab-walked along the side of the schoolhouse until he reached the bushes by the sandbox. He peeked over at Beatrice, who was looking around for him through her fingers. From here, as long as he stayed quiet, he could work his way closer to the merry-go-round without being seen. One of grandmother’s Indian friends had taught Adam a special technique for moving silently called “walking on the wind.” That, along with his power of invisibility, might allow him to surprise her, although she was remarkably sensitive to even the slightest changes around her.
Inch by inch he crept closer. He was right behind her now. Then Adam saw something he couldn’t believe. What he had thought were orange peels beside her had become pieces of gold. He slowly reached over and took one in his hand. It was heavy and bright—real gold.
“Ready or not, here I come,” the girl sang out. “One, two, three, four . . .”
Adam tried to scoop up the other gold pieces, but she was counting faster now.
“Five, six, seven-eight-nine-ten!” she rattled off and then spun around. “Caught!” Beatrice dove at Adam, who fell backward, the stolen gold pieces falling from his hands. It was too late to get away; she was too fast. In a fit of laughter, she tackled him. Adam was laughing too, despite the wheezing in his lungs.
Helping Adam to his feet, Beatrice led her captured thief back to the merry-go-round, which now had magically transformed into an enchanted prison. Accepting his fate, Adam climbed on. Beatrice took hold of a metal bar and spun her prisoner into the great vortex of timelessness. Round and round the world went by with a rhythmic, metal squeak. Yellow sunlight pulsed hypnotically off the metal bars around him. Adam’s eyelids fluttered. He was falling down, down, down, toward a place between worlds.
He could feel the girl’s face close to his now. Her eyes were jade sea glass, guiding him toward another world. Into his ear she whispered the question, “What lies beyond the stars?”
Just as he was beginning to see the answer, he heard a distant sound—grug-grug-grug-grug-grug. The deep, metallic rumble grew louder, falling into rhythm with the flickering sunlight pulsing on the backs of his eyelids. Adam could hear the girl next to him, faintly pleading with him to wake up. You can’t stay here. Wake up, Adam. Run. You’ve got to run. But it was already too late.
“Adam!” The voice cut through the air like a lash, the sound forcing Adam’s eyes open. He looked around, confused. The merry-go-round was no longer spinning. The sky had clouded over, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. Instead Adam saw a woman standing at the edge of the schoolhouse, her expression as tight and serious as her ponytail.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice was calm, but he sensed the anger in it. “We’ve been looking all over for you. It’s time to go.”
Adam glared back.
“Adam, I want you to come over here, right now.”
Adam didn’t move.
“Your father and I are going to be taking care of you now, and when I ask you to do something, I expect you to do it. Now. Come. Here.”
Adam said nothing.
His stepmother slowly approached the merry-go-round. “I know you can hear me, Adam, and I know you can understand what I’m saying. It is time for us to go.”
Defiantly Adam stayed absolutely still. There was a lone cricket chirping nearby. Two birds were having a conversation in the tree overhead, and the wind was quietly whistling in anticipation.
In a flash his stepmother’s arm shot out and grabbed Adam by the leg. She was pulling him toward her.
“No!” Adam screamed.
“Stop it!” his stepmother snapped as she struggled to get a better grip on his leg.
“No, no, no!” Adam fought back, kicking and screaming like a wild animal. Before he knew it, his stepmother ensnared his arms and yanked him to the edge of the merry-go-round.
“Stop it, Adam! Stop fighting me! This is not acceptable!” She had him by the shoulders now.
Adam continued to scream and twist and try to worm himself loose.
In a sudden fit of rage, his stepmother grabbed his face with both her hands, forcing him to look directly into her eyes. “You will behave yourself!” Then—CRACK—she struck Adam across the face with her open palm. It sounded like a pistol shot and was followed by a terrible silence. No birds. No crickets. Even the wind stopped to mark this moment with a void.
Gloria marched Adam by the arm to the front of the schoolhouse, where a diesel station wagon idled noisily. In the driver’s seat sat Adam’s father, Mark, smoking a cigarette. He reached over and pushed open the passenger door as they approached.
“Hey, little buddy. We’ve been looking for you.”
Adam’s stepmother crouched so that her face was level with Adam’s. She took both of his hands in hers and in a calm voice said, “Now what do you want to say to your father, who has been very, very worried about you?”
Adam’s face was stained with tears, his cheek red and puffy. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Good, Adam.” She gave his hands a squeeze. “And what about your new mother, Gloria?”
“I’m sorry.” There was no emotion in his voice.
Gloria opened the back door and gestured for Adam to climb in. He obeyed.
“We got you some treats, kiddo,” Adam’s father said over his shoulder.
“That’s right. When you’re a good boy, you get a reward.” Gloria handed Adam a small, brown grocery bag. Inside were two Hostess CupCakes, a Dr. Pepper, and a comic book.
Adam’s father stabbed out his cigarette in an overstuffed ashtray, and then gave the car some gas. Grug-grug-grug-grug-grug. Adam felt the rumble of the engine envelop him, vibrating up his spine from the seat beneath. Then his father turned on the radio, and the car filled with the sound of Cat Stevens singing “Wild World.”
Now that I’ve lost everything to you,
You say you want to start something new
And it’s breaking my heart you’re leaving,
Baby I’m grieving.
As the car carried Adam off, he turned in his seat and looked out the back window at the school yard. There at the corner of the building, he saw the girl step from her hiding place. Tree shadows pulsed sunlight across Adam’s face—on and off, on and off—as he strained to hold on to the image of Beatrice disappearing into the distance.
CHAPTER 13
BEYOND THE GRAVE
Adam looked around, confused. He was sitting inside the rental car in front of his grandmother’s boarded-up house. The windshield was steamed over from his breath, and the silence in the car felt terribly lonely. Without thinking, he reached into his pocket for his iPhone, to check his e-mails, or send a text message, or search for something online—anything to distract himself from the aching in his chest. Then he remembered what he’d done. He had thrown his phone into a ravine at the side of the road, along with the immediate sense of security it had so often provided. Starting up the car, Adam knew what he would do next, and the thought filled him with self-loathing. He would drive back to the Mendocino Hotel and call his wife. He would explain to her what he had done. He would apologize, first to Jane, then to Blake, and then to Dr. Mendelson. He would go back to the safe life they all expected him to live.
Car in gear, Adam pulled out of the driveway. Turning from Little River Airport Road onto Highway 1, he headed dutifully back in the direction of the Mendocino Hotel. Passing the Little River Gas Station, he was so caught up in rehearsing what he was going to say to Jane that he almost missed the woman walking along the opposite side of the highway. It wasn’t until he passed her that the information even registered.
Adam quickly slowed down and looked in the rearview mirror. Red hair. Oversize
parka. It’s her! It’s the woman! With a knapsack and a big loop of rope and . . . Is that a shovel? Why the hell would she—
HOOOONK! Adam’s eyes snapped across the rearview mirror to the road directly behind him. Rapidly descending on his beige economy rental car was the gleaming front grill of what must have been the largest monster truck outside of Texas. HOOOOOOOONKKK!
“Okay, okay!”
Adam had no choice but to hit the gas. The road was too narrow to make a U-turn, and there was no shoulder to pull over onto. He continued to accelerate, frantically scanning for a place to turn around.
“Shit!”
The bend became a curve, became a hairpin turn, twisting all the way down a hill to where Adam finally saw a turnout. He pulled over, and the monster truck drove past, its evil homunculus up in the cab letting out one last horn blast. HOOONKKK!
Adam swung the car around and accelerated back up through the twists and turns until he saw the gas station, but there was no sign of the parka. He continued driving until he reached the intersection of Little River Airport Road and then stopped. Straight ahead on Highway 1 he could see for almost a half of a mile. Nothing. To his left, up toward his grandmother’s house, also nothing. No parka. The woman had vanished.
“Damn it!”
Adam turned and looked to his right. The Little River Cemetery. There was a small gravel opening in front of its entrance gate, just big enough for a single car. Adam pulled onto it and got out. Stepping into the cemetery, he looked around. There was no one else in sight. But she has to be here, he thought, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Based on how fast she’d been walking, Adam was sure the woman couldn’t have made it any farther than this cemetery. Besides, she was carrying a shovel.
Adam considered a number of absurd thoughts before something caught his eye. At the back of the cemetery, toward the ocean, there appeared to be a break in the fence. Adam moved closer. It was an opening, and beyond it a narrow pathway disappeared into the thick woods.
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