by Steven Gould
“Hello?”
“Hello, E.V, it’s—”
She interrupted. “It is you. I’ve been waiting almost an hour! My mother could’ve called me—I was just down the block at Rhonda’s! She didn’t realize it had to be an overseas call!”
“Well, no. Actually not. I’m in New York City.”
She was quiet for a second then said, “Really?”
“Really. I was wondering if I could drop off that sketch, tomorrow, perhaps, if your schedule is clear.”
She laughed. “Clear. Mother? Is my ‘schedule’ clear tomorrow?” She said it British, like I had, “shed-youl.” “Of course my schedule is clear.” This time she said it with the hard c. “Where? When? Should I take a train into the city?”
I liked that idea a lot but I said, “No. Don’t think your parents would give that a go, would they? Better I should come to you. All right if I come around about ten? Euclid Avenue, right? Looks like it’s walking distance from the station.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Maps, m’dear. Maps.”
“Oh. Well, that would be fine. What are you doing in New York?”
“Talking to you.”
I jumped to the Trenton station the next morning and joined the crowd getting off a Philadelphia train. I walked, stretching my legs more and more. The cut was still incredibly sore but I was regaining my stamina. I no longer got dizzy standing up, and I was able to manage the boxed sketch under my right arm. For the first time in two weeks, I felt clean, having had an excellent shower—no worries about getting the stitches wet.
There were buds just beginning on the trees and green grass sprouting among last year’s brown. Her home was a yellow-brick two-story with an enclosed porch. She’d called it a “colonial” on the phone. She was on the stairs when I turned onto the block, though she waited until I was in her yard before advancing to meet me. I could tell she was going to try to hug me, so I held out the box, quickly, and she had to halt her advance to take it.
“Come in, come in.”
Both her parents were waiting in the front parlor. Her mother was standing by the window and her dad was seated, with a book, but I had the feeling they’d both been waiting. I put on my best manners as I was introduced.
“Pleasure to meet you. Charmed.”
Mrs. Kelson was a redhead but running to silver. Mr. Kelson wore his dark hair cut seventies-long, over the ears, over the forehead. It hadn’t gone gray yet or there was dye involved. I didn’t like his smile—it didn’t touch his eyes.
It may have been a “who are you and what are you doing with my daughter” thing.
Her mum’s smile was genuine, though. Mrs. Kelson loved the sketch. E.V’s dad said “very nice,” but his brow was furrowed and he stole surreptitious looks from the sketch to his daughter and back.
“You made a copy?” E.V asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got a decent photocopy.” I didn’t say it was twice the size of the original and hung beside my bed. I didn’t think that would go over so big—not with her father.
“What are you doing in New York, Griffin?” asked Mr. Kelson.
“On my way home from Europe. I live in Southern Cal.”
“Oh, really? Not England?” He looked at his daughter.
“We didn’t really discuss it, Daddy. I saw him in London and he’s British. What was I supposed to think?”
“Yeah,” I added. “We were talking about drawing, mostly.”
“Where in Southern California?”
“Out in the desert, in west San Diego County. The nearest town is called Borrego Springs.” This was the truth, after all, but then I lied. “I spend half the time with my uncle in California, the other half in Lechlade, in Oxfordshire, with my grandparents. I was visiting a friend’s cousin when I met E.V in France.”
“Your schooling must be complicated,” Mrs. Keslon said.
“I’m on self-study. Homeschooling. It’s the only way this works. When I go to university, it’ll be different.”
E.V turned to face her parents. She said, “I’m taking Griffin to Laveta’s for coffee.”
“We’ve got coffee here—” That furrow between Mr. Kelson’s eyebrows was back again but Mrs. Kelson cut in, saying quickly, “Certainly. Are you going to get lunch out, or would you like to eat with us? Patrick’s coming in from Princeton on the train.”
E.V glanced at me then said, “My brother. We’ll catch him after lunch, okay?”
“Okay,” Mrs. Kelson said. “He’s going back on the four-seventeen so make sure you get back in time.”
“Right,” said E.V.
She grabbed her coat—the large black one she’d worn in Europe—and shrugged into it and we were out the door.
“Walking?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s close. Over on State Street, near the train station but on the far side.” She grabbed my left arm and I tensed and she let go. “What’s wrong? Is that not okay?”
Her face had dropped as if I’d struck her and I hurried to reassure her. “Sony—hurt my back. It’s the left side. I’d love for you to hold my other arm, though.”
He relief was palpable. “I thought you were moving a little stiffly.”
“Yeah.”
It took ten minutes to walk to Laveta’s, where we got coffee to go. Behind the coffee shop a cemetery stretched between State Street and the train station. “You warm enough?” she asked. It had started partially cloudy but now it was completely overcast and the wind was gusting around comers with a moist bite.
“Maybe if you let me share your coat.”
She grinned. “I like the way you think.”
She showed me a bench in the back corner of the graveyard. “Here. I come here to sketch.” She opened her coat wide on the bench and invited me to sit on it When I did, she wrapped it around us both.
“Huh,” she said.
I barely dared breath. “What?”
“We both fit in here just fine. I thought you were larger. You take up more space in my mind.”
“Sorry. Always been short for my—”
She kissed me.
I closed my eyes and leaned into it.
After a moment she drew back and I said, “You could’ve just said shut up.”
“Are you complaining? I mean—”
This time I stopped her mouth with a kiss.
Oh. My.
Hands were roaming, mine, hers, hers guiding mine. I ached and not in the bad way of the last two weeks. Her hand, roaming up under my shirt, found the cut and I nearly yelled in her ear.
“I’m sorry. They took out the stitches yesterday and it’s still, uh, tender.”
“Stitches? What happened?”
We’d ended up apart. She turned me around and lifted the edge of my jacket and shirt, previously tucked in, now out. “Jesus Christ! What happened?”
My mouth worked but nothing came out.
“Griffin? What’s wrong? Someone did this to you, didn’t they?”
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“Why? That’s from a knife, right?”
“Yeah, it is.” Then, in a rush, “He was aiming for my kidney.” I stood up and let the jacket and shirt drop back down. “Cold.”
She pulled her coat closed.
“Who did that?”
“I lied to your parents.”
She looked confused. “What? Can’t you answer a straight question? What do you mean, you lied to my parents?”
“I don’t live with my uncle or my grandparents. I don’t have grandparents. I don’t have an uncle. After my parents were—after they died—I lived with a friend in Mexico, then later, I got my own place. The place in the desert I talked about—that part was real.”
“What’s that have to do with the cut on your back?”
I kicked at a pile of last fall’s leaves, clumped and decomposing, sending them flying. It was a mistake. “Ow!” I limped around in a little circle, favoring my left side. “What I’m trying to say is that I d
on’t want to lie to you. But I don’t want to be thought crazy, too, and some of the stuff I want to say sounds terribly crazy.”
She pulled her legs up onto the bench under the coat, and hugged them. “What kind of crazy?”
“The people who killed my parents are still trying to kill me. They were trying to kill me when they killed them.”
She looked like she was about to cry. She doesn’t believe me. She does think I’m insane. I held out my hand like a crossing guard stopping oncoming traffic. “Wait. There’s proof.”
And I jumped away.
She’s going to run screaming, I thought, as I ripped the old microfilm newspaper printouts from my plywood gallery.
I jumped back.
She was standing, but she hadn’t run. She did have her fist against her mouth. She flinched back and sat down hard as the concrete bench caught the backs of her knees. She began gasping.
I took a step closer and her eyes widened and she leaned away. Well, now I knew how she’d felt when I’d flinched away from her in front of her house, when she’d grabbed my left arm and hurt my back by accident. I moved very slowly and set the papers down on the end of the bench but the minute I let go, the wind threatened to send them flying and I dropped my hand back down.
“Look, they’re gonna be all over if you don’t take them.” I slid them closer to her, careful to stay beyond the end of the bench.
She put her hand down, as far from my hand as possible and yet still on the pages. I straightened up and backed away.
“What was that?” There was suppressed hysteria in her voice. “How did you do that?”
I gestured to the papers. “It ties in. Go ahead, look.”
When she’d picked them up I said, “I’ve got other cuts—older scars,” I said quietly. “The top two stories are when they came for me when my parents were alive. I know it says drugs were involved but that was bullshit.” I pointed to my right hip, the wound I got that night. “They nearly killed me that night.”
She read through the pages, glancing up often to keep track of where I was. “So your name really is Griffin O’Conner.” When she got to the third page she said, “Who’s Sam Coulton and Consuelo, uh, Mon-jarraz?” She got the j right, a soft h.
“Sam and Consuelo found me in the desert after … that night. They fixed me up. Later, Consuelo took me to Oaxaca and I lived with her niece for almost two years, until they found me again and I had to leave. After that, I lived by myself.
“They held Sam and Consuelo hostage, trying to get me to surrender. When I sent the INS in … well, you see what happened.”
She read on. She stopped tracking me as she got into the body count. I crossed my right arm over my stomach, pulling my left into my side. I felt my shoulders droop, hunch forward. The accused is in the dock awaiting the verdict of the jury.
“So why do they want to kill you?”
I shook my head. “I wish I knew for sure.”
“It’s something to do with, uh, what you just did, right?”
“Yeah—I really think so.”
“And what did you just do?” She licked her lips. “I mean, I saw you disappear, but where did you go?”
“My place—uh, Southern Cal. In the desert.”
“You’re kidding me.”
I shook my head. “No. Want to see?” I took a step forward.
She held up her hands. “Whoa, boy!”
I stepped back again, the corners of my mouth tugging down. Please, please, please.
She pointed at the far side of the cemetery. “See the corner over by the birth control clinic?” It was about two hundred yards away. “Go there. Show me.”
I did.
How many Sensitives could there be? Hopefully there wasn’t one around here.
I stood there, two hundred yards away, and waved. After a moment, she raised her arm and made a large come-here gesture. I returned, my way. She didn’t jerk so much this time when I appeared.
“I suppose it could be drugs. Did you put something in my coffee?”
I shook my head.
“How do you do that?”
“I just do it. When I was five, the first time.”
“The Starbucks cup, in Mont-Saint-Michel—you said you’d got it in San Diego. You meant that morning, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
It started to rain, fat drops falling at an angle with the wind.
“Shit!” said E.V. “I’m so tired of winter! I want it to be warm.” She sounded upset and I didn’t think it was the weather.
“I can’t make it warm here,” I said. “But I can take you someplace that is.”
She didn’t say no. Her eyes were still wary but her forehead was no longer furrowed.
“How do you feel about Thai food?”
TWELVE
Rites of Passage
We were walking down Kensington High Street on our third date when E.V. said, “Let’s go in here.”
I thought she meant the shoe boutique but she pulled me sideways toward the shop on the corner. “What? The chemist?”
“Yes, the chemist.”
I followed her through the door—it was afternoon in New Jersey and nearly ten at night in London and they were about to close. “What do you need?”
She looked over her shoulder at me and said, “What do we need.” Then she blushed.
She bought the condoms, Durex brand, and some lubricant but got the cash from me since she only had American.
The clerk looked bored and my ears burned.
Back on the sidewalk she said, “We’ve two more hours.”
I’d offered to show her my place, the Hole, before, but she’d refused. So far she’d let me take her swimming in Mexico, to Paris for coffee, to Madrid for tapas, and Phuket for satay. But not to my place.
“Uh, I’ve never done it.”
She nodded. “I know. I could tell.” She stepped up to me and pressed against me. “Don’t you want to?”
I nodded mutely.
“Well, then.”
It was after, when we were lying in my bed, hip to belly, that she finally found out I was thirteen months younger than her seventeen and a half years.
“Oh, Christ! It’s like child abuse!”
I moved my hand sideways and she arched her back. “Well, more fun than self-abuse,” I said. “Think of it as charity to a poor orphan boy.”
“An orphan boy?”
“An orphan boy.”
She sang,
“Oh, men of dark and dismalfate,
Forgo your cruel employ,
Have pity on my lonely state,
I am an orphan boy!”
“Huh?” I was thoroughly confused.
“And you an Englishman! Pirates of Penzance. Gilbert and Sullivan. Got it?”
“Oh. Never saw it. ‘Modem Major-General,’ right? Okay, have pity on my lonely … ?”
“State. What time is it? Oh, shit!” She pushed my hands away. “Get me back or I’ll be grounded for all time.”
I jumped her to the corner of her block, depending on the gathering gloom to hide our sudden appearance. She kissed me and ran up the block, her book bag thumping at her shoulder.
I walked between two parked cars on the street and jumped away.
E.V.’s father had a rough commute, forty-five minutes, so he was rarely home before six. Her mother worked in a middle school in the Neshaminy school district in Pennsylvania—across the river and then some. She rarely made it home before five-thirty. So we had that time between three-fifteen and five-thirty, most weekdays.
“I’m not burning us out, though,” she said. “Three times a week, tops.”
I had to buy more condoms.
She drew me naked.
Well, naked with a sketchpad.
We drew each other.
And we swam naked in the moonlight at Phuket.
And we ate at little cafés overlooking the Seine while she did her class assignments. I helped her with her French—she helped me
with Algebra II.
“Madame Breskin says my accent is improving remarkably.”
“Le français est la langue de l’amour. Let’s go back to my place.”
She laughed. “No. I’ve barely got time to finish this essay.”
My sigh was eloquent.
“Tomorrow. Homework or not,” she promised.
But the next day she wasn’t there. We’d been meeting at the Shell station, across Greenwood Avenue from the high school and only a few blocks from her house.
I thought about calling but she told me her parents had caller ID, so if I was going to call, do it from where I was supposed to be. With a small mountain of quarters, I stood at a pay phone in San Diego’s Balboa Park, and dialed.
She answered. “Hey,” I said.
“Where are you calling from? Ah, where’s six-one-nine?”
“San Diego. How are you?” What I really meant was, Can you talk?
“I’m pissed. Dad went through my nightstand. He found the sketch I did of you in the nude. When we were sketching?”
“That was a really good sketch. Uh, what did he say? What did you say?”
“I said I’d drawn it from my imagination. Also that it was none of his business and if he ever went through my stuff again, I’d leave home.” She cleared her throat. “There was some shouting involved.”
“When did this happen?”
“Today. He showed up and pulled me out of school last period. Sorry. I’m grounded for a month. He suspects something—I have to come straight home after school and check in with him by phone at work. Can’t go anywhere. He’ll probably spot check with phone calls.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll stick it out. My mother’s upset, but a bit more at him, I think. I know they did it in high school. He’s a hypocrite. She’s the one who made sure I had condoms when I entered high school.”
“Oh, yeah? I knew I liked her.” I tried to keep my voice light but I felt like crying. I couldn’t imagine not seeing her for an entire month.
“Yeah. We fought like wildcats when I was in middle school but we’ve come to a pretty good place now. But I’m not speaking to Dad. I predict two weeks, tops, then he’ll cave. Maybe even sooner.”