by Unknown
She was leading them up the stairs as she spoke, past brittle, yellowed wallpaper curling off the walls. The house smelled of mice. The banister looked sticky, and Michael avoided touching it.
“I’ve been taking him his meals but I don’t see as he’s eaten,” Destiny was saying. “Of course, I haven’t a clue what a kid that age would like. I say, ‘Here! You care for some lentils?’ but he just stares at me so I set down the bowl and leave. Well, I do want to give him his space, right?”
She turned, having reached the top of the stairs, and raised her transparent eyebrows. Two complicated brass earrings hung nearly to her shoulders.
“What’s his name?” Pauline asked her.
“Pagan.”
“Pagan?” Michael and Pauline said together.
She shrugged. The earrings tinkled. “What can I tell you,” she said. “His mom always struck me as kind of wifty, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
She turned again and started down the dark hall, passing two closed doors before she stopped at the third. “Knock-knock!” she called. “Anyone home?”
No answer.
“Coming in, then!” She turned the knob.
The room was scarcely bigger than a closet, with a single, clouded window and water-stained ivory walls. On the bare floor lay a mattress heaped with tangled blankets and clothing. While Michael watched, one piece of clothing stirred. A small boy sat up and blinked at them. Then he scooted backwards to the far edge of the mattress.
“Hello, Pagan,” Pauline said softly.
He stared at her without answering. His eyes were a liquid brown and his hair was black and shaggy. It was foreign hair, Michael thought—a deeper, shinier black than any Anton’s hair. There were bluish shadows beneath his eyes, which gave him a world-weary look although he couldn’t have been much older than three.
“I’m your grandma!” Pauline was saying. “Your mommy’s mother. This is your grandpa! We’ve come all the way from Baltimore, Maryland, to see you!”
Silence.
“I’ll just get his things together,” Destiny said. “He doesn’t have all that many.”
So she really was expecting them to take him with them. Michael knew he should be used to the notion by now, but he felt a thump of shock even so. He watched Destiny drift about, collecting a T-shirt here and a sweater there and folding them over one arm. When she approached the mattress, Pagan scrambled to his feet, hugging a small blanket. His clothes were unexpectedly conventional (a striped red jersey, jeans, red sneakers) but very dirty, and his fingernails were rimmed with black. Because the mattress occupied the entire length of the far wall, he had no choice but to step into the center of the room, and the sight of such a small, frightened child standing so undefended wrenched Michael’s heart. Instinctively he drew backward, almost into the hall, to show that he meant no harm. Pauline, on the other hand, rushed forward. “Sweetheart,” she said, and she dropped to her knees in front of the child and folded her arms around him. “Oh, honey pie, sweetheart, oh, my poor, sweet little one!”
Michael was horrified. So was Destiny, evidently, for she straightened, holding a jacket, and gaped at the two of them.
For a moment, Pagan stood frozen within the circle of Pauline’s arms. Then he dropped his head to her shoulder. One grimy little hand reached around to pat her back.
Michael felt his eyes fill. He had to look away.
“I guess I’ll just donate a pillowcase for you to carry his stuff in,” Destiny said finally. She started cramming what she had gathered into a pillowcase more gray than white. “His mom has their only bag. I packed it up for her after she left, and my husband took it to Fleet Street.”
Destiny had a husband? Somehow, Michael hadn’t pictured that. He watched her shake out a sheet and stoop to retrieve a red sock. “Say,” he said, suddenly hopeful. “Do you happen to know if Lindy, if our daughter, might be married?”
“Not that I ever heard,” Destiny said cheerfully.
“I was just wondering about, ah, Pagan’s dad.”
“Oh, you know how those things can be.”
He didn’t know. He waited, in case she cared to explain. On the floor, Pauline was crooning, “It’s all, all, all right, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine now.”
Michael said, “Well, could you tell us a little more about what happened here?”
“Happened?” Destiny said.
“How Lindy, um, freaked out?”
Destiny flicked a glance toward Pagan. “I don’t guess now would be a good moment,” she said.
“Oh. Okay.”
“For sure, she’s in a great place, though! The retreat is great. She’s one lucky lady.”
Michael said, “The thing of it is, we had planned to take her home with us. Then when we got there we found we weren’t even allowed to talk to her. I worry she’s being kept against her will.”
“Nah, it’s cool. You don’t want to interrupt her in mid-birth.”
Michael had been about to say more, but he closed his mouth abruptly. He felt he’d landed in one of those science fiction movies where the hero all at once understands that everybody else’s mind has been taken over by aliens.
“So anyhow,” Destiny said, handing Michael the pillowcase, “here’s all his gear. I think it’s all. I’m not refunding the rest of her rent on account of the long-distance phone call, and also the window.”
“Window?” Michael asked.
“So this is goodbye, kid,” Destiny told Pagan. “It’s been nice knowing you. Have a cool life.”
Pauline rose and took Pagan by the hand. He was still holding on to the blanket—a scrap of a thing, washed-out blue flannel—and she asked Destiny, “Is the blanket yours?”
“No, it’s his,” Destiny said—unnecessarily, since Pagan had already torn free of Pauline to clutch it even more tightly.
“It’s okay, sugar,” Pauline told him. She guided him out of the room and toward the stairs, followed by Destiny and Michael. “We’re going to take you where Grandma and Grandpa are staying! Going to give you a bath, change you into clean clothes . . .”
All the way down the stairs the only voice was Pauline’s, murmuring and soothing. Even when she told Destiny goodbye at the door, she used that lullaby tone. “Thanks for getting in touch with us, hear? Thanks for everything.”
When Michael saw how she went first down the steps but then turned back to wait for Pagan once she’d reached the bottom, diplomatically protective, he felt a flood of love for her.
Walking a small child was like herding water, Michael used to think when his own children were small. Heaven only knew what they’d take it into their heads to do next—dart in front of a speeding car or throw a tantrum in mid-traffic or stop to pick a soaked cigar butt out of the gutter. So how to explain this child? He trudged between them in silence, incurious and resigned, hugging the bunched-up blanket with both arms. At the first intersection, he untangled one hand from the blanket and reached for Pauline’s hand in an automatic way, not looking at her and apparently not thinking about it—a gesture that Michael found reassuring. Someone had once cared for the boy, you would have to surmise. He hadn’t always been expected to manage on his own.
Other clues followed, now that Michael was watching for them—signposts that suggested the shape of Pagan’s past life. For instance, he seemed very much accustomed to eating out. At the Good Feelings Deli & Pizza, half a block before the tourist home, he draped his blanket efficiently over the back of a chair and then clambered up and settled himself and waited for his food. But it appeared that he had never encountered a hot dog before, because when it arrived—ordered for him by Michael—he first surveyed it dubiously and then, once he’d figured out how to grasp it, ate it like an ear of corn, nibbling small, shallow rows from left to right. Nor did he seem familiar with soft drinks. His first sip of Pepsi made him wrinkle his nose, although he adjusted soon enough and downed the rest in no time. Michael supposed that this meant he’d been reared
on hippie food, sugar-free and meatless and all that. He did seem to have some experience with potato chips, however. He ate all of his and then most of Pauline’s, licking his gray-creased fingers after each one. “Good?” Pauline asked him. He nodded.
Maybe he couldn’t speak. Maybe Destiny had only assumed that he used to speak before. Michael couldn’t remember now at what age children started talking. “How old are you?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
To his surprise, Pagan looked at him directly. He had eyebrows no thicker than threads, much lighter than his hair color, and now they drew up the skin at the center of his forehead like stitches gathering up cloth. Finally, he arrived at a conclusion. “Four,” he said. His voice was incongruously deep—not a small child’s voice at all.
Pauline gave a little cry and blotted her mouth with her napkin. “Four years old! What a clever boy!” she said. “He’s four,” she told Michael.
“So I gathered,” he said drily.
That Pagan had spoken his age instead of holding up four fingers might be another clue. He’d been blessed with the kind of mother who conversed with him intelligently. Or was Michael just grasping at straws now?
He so much wanted to believe the best about Lindy.
“So I guess you must go to school,” Pauline was saying. “Preschool, play group, nursery school . . . ,” offering every possible term for it. But Pagan seemed to consider the discussion finished. Either that, or the very notion of attending school was new to him, because he just reached for another potato chip.
“How are we doing here?” the waitress asked. “Anyone want dessert?”
“I guess not, thanks,” Michael told her.
She was the cheerful, plump, motherly style of waitress he was used to seeing in Baltimore. He wished he could let her know somehow that it wasn’t their fault their grandchild was so dirty.
And what to make of the fact that Pagan had no idea what to do with the fire engine? Pauline fished it from her purse and set it on the foot of one bed as soon as they reached their room. “Ooh!” she said. “What have we here?” But he treated it with suspicion, viewing it from a distance for several long minutes before daring to set one tentative finger atop the cellophane window. By the time Michael returned from inquiring about an extra cot (there wasn’t one; they would have to make do), the situation had progressed only slightly: Pagan had wrapped the boxed fire engine tidily in his blanket, its front end poking forth like a baby’s face from the flannel.
And he didn’t seem to know about television, either. He watched it sitting next to Pauline, propped against the pillow at the head of her bed, open-mouthed and disbelieving at the sight of an ordinary Benson & Hedges ad. Game shows followed soap operas and were followed in turn by the evening news, every flickering black-and-white scene earning his undivided attention. “Say,” Michael said at one point. “Isn’t there someplace you’d like to go? A park? A playground?” But Pagan’s silver-edged profile remained pointed toward the screen, and Michael himself was too done in to persist.
It could be the boy was shell-shocked. Perhaps he wasn’t watching television at all, because when a clown took a comic pratfall in a used-car commercial, Pagan kept the same stony expression.
At one point during the news (Vietnam and more Vietnam), Michael fell asleep sitting up, letting his head tip back against the metal headrail of his bed. He awoke dry-mouthed and befuddled, although he could tell he must have slept only minutes because the screen showed a bunch of soldiers tramping through a jungle with fancy arrangements of leaves on their helmets. The room was almost dark now, lit bluish by the TV. He looked at his watch and said, “What do you say I go get a pizza for supper?”
Pagan perked up and nodded emphatically. (Another clue.) Although he wouldn’t commit himself as to toppings. “Plain? Mushroom? Pepperoni?” Michael asked. No answer.
“Toad-frog?” Pauline suggested, and was rewarded with a pinched, reluctant smile that made her laugh and turn triumphantly to Michael. “Bring us a toad-frog pizza, please, Grandpa.”
“Sure thing,” Michael said too heartily, struggling up from his bed.
He had always imagined that his grandchildren would call him “Dziadziu”—the name he had used for his own grandfather. Well, but, okay. “Grandpa” was all right too.
While he was waiting at the Good Feelings for his pizza (plain, with extra cheese, which seemed safest), he used the pay phone in one corner of the café. He got the number from Information, dropped in his coins and dialed, and then had to wait for ten or twelve rings before a woman answered. “Fleet Street Retreat?” she said, sounding doubtful.
Michael said, “Yes, may I speak to . . . Becoming, please.”
The phone at the other end clattered and went silent. Behind the counter, the chef spread watery pink tomato sauce across a pizza shell.
“This is Becoming,” a voice said in Michael’s ear. “How may I offer help?”
“It’s Michael Anton. The father of, you know, Serenity.”
“Ah.”
“Look. We’ve reserved my daughter a seat tomorrow on the morning flight to Baltimore. Her mother and I will be traveling with her and also her little boy. Surely you agree that she and her little boy should be together.”
“I wasn’t aware that she had a child,” Becoming said.
Could she not even have mentioned the fact? How disturbed was she? Michael’s thoughts were deflected, for a moment, but he pulled himself together and said, “So now you understand—”
“This makes it very sad, yes, very difficult. So sad when a child is involved.”
“Now you understand why we should take her back with us.”
“Dear friend,” Becoming said in an alarmingly solicitous tone, “I don’t think you fully comprehend what it is we’re dealing with.”
“All right,” Michael said. “Tell me what we’re dealing with.”
“This is a young woman so zonked, so zapped and fried and hopped up and wigged out and blown away by drugs—”
“By drugs!”
“—she would never make it onto the airplane, friend. She wouldn’t make it down the front steps.”
“Do you mean drugs like . . . narcotics?”
“Every pill, every tab, every pop, every powder and capsule and button you can name. Every upper, every downer, every over-the-counter, under-the-counter . . .”
Michael sagged against the wall.
“And even if she were able to walk out of here, which she’s not, how would you two handle her? How would you protect her little boy from the sight of her?”
Michael couldn’t answer. It seemed his throat had closed over.
“Brother? Are you with me?”
He replaced the receiver.
The Good Feelings Deli was not equipped for takeout, and Michael had to carry the pizza wrapped in aluminum foil that let the heat burn through to the palms of his hands. But that was all right; he felt chilled to the bone. His teeth were chattering and his feet seemed too heavy, his limp more pronounced than usual.
“Zonked,” he heard in his mind, and “zapped” and “hopped up” and “wigged out”—terms that were brand-new to him. And Destiny’s word, “wifty,” also unfamiliar. Destiny’s face rose up before him, a faint green mark on one side of her jaw where her earring had rubbed as it swung. He hadn’t noticed the mark at the time, but now it seemed indented in his memory like a scar.
When he got back to the room, he didn’t tell Pauline what he had learned. Of course he would tell her eventually, but right now he couldn’t bear to speak the words. All he said was “I talked again with Becoming on the phone, and it does appear it will be some time before Lindy’s ready to travel.”
He braced himself for questions, protests, cross-examination, but Pauline just said, “Oh,” and sat silent for a moment. Maybe she’d somehow guessed. “So,” she said finally. “I guess we’d better just go ahead and fly back tomorrow without her, right?”
“It looks that way,” Micha
el said.
Pauline straightened her shoulders—squared her edges, so to speak—and rose to switch the light on.
The pizza was soggy and tasteless, but Michael suspected none of them would have enjoyed it in any case. Since he hadn’t thought to buy drinks, Pauline fetched three tiny paper cups of lukewarm water from the bathroom across the hall. “Cheers!” she said as she distributed them. But she seemed to have her mind elsewhere. Several times she trailed off in mid-sentence. “Oh, good boy, Pagan; let’s just wipe your . . . Isn’t this cozy and . . . Who’s for more? Anybody want . . . ?”
Pagan took dainty, unenthusiastic bites from just the tip of his pizza slice, leaving a broad swath of crust, never removing his eyes from the television screen. “How is it?” Michael asked him. Pagan didn’t answer. In the harsh glare of the overhead bulb his eyes were squinty, and he looked hunched and furtive.
Face it, this child was just a substitute. He was not their real child, the one they’d flown across the continent to find.
He didn’t own a toothbrush. He didn’t own a comb or a hairbrush, unless Destiny had forgotten to pack them. He wasn’t used to baths. (Could that be possible?) He had to be coaxed inch by inch into the claw-footed tub after first backing into a corner, bony-ribbed and shivering in his frayed gray underpants. But he did own a pair of pajamas, which he put on without assistance—footed pajamas patterned with spaceships, not entirely clean. (Every piece of clothing in that pillowcase had a close, sweet smell something like caramel, as did Pagan himself.)
He raised no objection when the light was switched off or when the window shade was pulled down to block the light from the street. He climbed obediently into Pauline’s bed and settled himself in a curled position with his blanket tucked in the crook of his neck, the fire engine still swaddled within in its crackling box. He fell asleep almost at once and breathed evenly but too quickly, it seemed to Michael—shallow, whispery, kitten breaths. He was not a thumb sucker or a fidgeter or a snorer. During the night, though, he wet the bed. Michael woke to the smell of warm urine and the bump and tumble of Pauline climbing over him to slip under the covers on his other side. He didn’t consider the bed-wetting to be a clue, however. He knew that even the best-trained child could regress in trying situations.