Keeping Watch (23 page)

Rachel, Pete, and their seventeen-year-old son Pete Junior knew Jamie's story; it had been decided that the others were better off knowing just Jim's public face, until they were older.

“And from time to time you'll make enemies, and you're going to be pissed off and you'll want to show them up by telling them how much better you are than hicks like them. But you aren't going to do that. Because if you do, word will travel, upwards to their parents and sideways through other kids and their friends, and sooner or later, someone at school or church will catch wind of it, and one day the local sheriff will knock on the door and ask Rachel for the phone number of that sister of hers in Texas whose illness meant she couldn't take care of you for a while. And you really don't want to see Rachel and Pete arrested for conspiracy to kidnap.” Then, in case the boy had failed to grasp it, Allen drove this last point home, hard. “Rachel and Pete are putting the future of their family in your hands—their children, the farm, everything. They are trusting you with their lives. If you talk, they could go to jail and lose it all.”

Jamie's head jerked up, and he stared at Allen. “Why the hell would they do that? They don't even know me!”

“If you asked Pete, he'd say it's his Christian duty and leave it at that. Rachel would tell you that a person who doesn't stand up to the wickedness of the world might as well be one of the wicked, which I suppose amounts to the same thing. And if you're asking me, I'd tell you that the reason those two good people are offering you refuge and not working as missionaries in the Amazon or running a soup kitchen for the homeless in Harlem is because one of Rachel's family found herself in a similar situation to yours, years ago, and someone helped her out. Lending you a hand, like they did one or two others before, is their way of paying back that help.”

Allen glanced down at the boy's face, and nearly laughed aloud at the disbelief. “Jim, I don't expect you to know what I'm talking about now. But if you tell me you still don't understand after you've lived here a year, then I'll begin to worry. You want to turn back yet?”

“Can we go down to the creek?” This was not permitted to unaccompanied children, Allen knew. Jamie hadn't yet noticed that the other boys his age were not, for this purpose, considered children. Or if he had, so far he had chosen to accept the restriction.

“Sure.”

They continued walking, Jamie concentrating on the ground so as to avoid the cow pats, Allen wondering—as a solitary man will, walking next to a child who is not his—what kind of father he would have made. When he caught himself starting down that pointless path, he wrenched his thoughts back to what the boy would do in the next few minutes. The boy was about to lose the person who had rescued him from an abusive father, a man who had spent five days in the car at his side, who had gentled his dreams, who had fed and clothed him and given him a new name and history, and who was now turning him over to that strange entity, a family. This was the point at which a sexually abused child would reach out—literally—to cling to an authority figure in the only way the child knew.

But Jamie made no attempt to take Allen's hand, gave him no desperate and coquettish glance from under those dark lashes; for that, Allen was profoundly grateful, and immensely encouraged. Then the boy asked him a question.

“Do you think my father misses me?”

It hit Allen like a blow to the ribs, the question and the way it was asked, with neither hope nor expectation. Allen took a breath, blew it out between pursed lips, and for the first time since they'd left California, deliberately spoke the boy's true name. “Jamie, I wish I could tell you that as soon as you left, your father realized how much he loved you and is making all kinds of promises to himself that if only you were to come back, he'd never mistreat you again. But my friend, I'm afraid your father has some pieces missing from his heart. No normal man would do what he's done to you.”

“I deserved it,” the boy cut in. “He was only trying to make me stronger.”

“Jamie, no; you didn't deserve any of it. You don't make a person stronger by beating them. Believe me, I know.”
Don't criticize the father too much,
he reminded himself,
the boy will only defend him.
He modified it to, “It may not even be entirely his fault—he may have been treated the same way by his father as he's treated you—but I have to tell you that as far as I could see, your father will be missing you in the same way he'd miss his car if someone stole it, or his favorite jacket. Personally, I think your father's main reaction will be primarily one of rage. I think he's probably feeling very, very angry that you're gone.”

The boy shuddered; Allen couldn't miss the reaction—not of grief that his father did not love him enough to miss him, but of visceral terror at the idea of a very angry father. Yes, he thought; Rachel and Pete had their work cut out for them this summer. Before he could stop himself, he reached out and smoothed the boy's hair, then snatched back his hand as if he'd been burned. He'd learned early on to be cautious with physical contact, after the time he'd patted a six-year-old girl between the shoulder blades and had her dissolve into hysterics: Turned out the girl's uncle had been in the habit of doing that after he'd raped her.

But the boy did not wince or duck away, and Allen breathed a sigh of relief, that the father hadn't been accustomed to caressing his son's hair.

“I guess you're right,” Jamie said after a while. Then he added a peculiar thing: “My father's really strong.”

“Jim, if you're under the impression that strength and not needing anyone are the same thing, you really ought to think about that.”

“It's just, my father is big on not showing weakness.”

Allen opened his mouth to pursue all the implications behind that idea, and then shut his jaws so tightly his back teeth protested. This was a cry for help if ever he'd heard one, but if he responded here and now, he'd never leave, and this dark, vivid child would never shift his allegiances to the good Rachel and Pete.
Yes,
he thought,
it really is time for me to go,
and merely said, “Again, I'm not sure that I'd agree that grief is a weakness where anger is not.”

The boy puzzled over the words as if they'd been in a foreign language, and then shook his head. “I don't know how I'm going to do this.”

“What's that?”

“Everything. Keep my mouth shut about who I am, live on a farm, pretend to be part of a family. Jeez, I'm not even used to having a door on my room.”

This last wry revelation was followed by an abrupt silence and a momentary jerk in the boy's step, as if the words had surprised him by just slipping out. It was obvious that this was something he hadn't intended to mention.

“You want to tell me about that?” Allen asked mildly. He didn't need to see the boy's face to know that he was blushing: The bend to his neck was indication enough.

“It's nothing,” the boy said. “Just one of his punishments.”

“Your father.”

“Yeah. I wasn't supposed to be reading one night and he saw the light around the door, so he took the door off. And, you know, the one to the bathroom, too. In case I decided to read in there.” He hesitated, but then the words came in a hurry as the boy tried to cover the revelation of his humiliation with distraction. “ 'Course, I never had much privacy to begin with, there wasn't a lock or anything, and Mrs. Mendez always used to come in and move things around when I was at school, which I didn't like but when I asked Father if maybe I could clean up the room myself so she didn't mess up the computer he . . . well, he didn't like that.”

Further humiliation, Allen gathered, and nodded. Oppressors never allowed their victims privacy, or the opportunity for making friends; when combined with random acts of violence and making food, warmth, and affection into rewards, the oppressor was set up as the center of his victim's universe.

He asked merely, “How long ago was that?”

Jamie's head rose a fraction at the reassuringly ordinary question. “That I complained about Mrs. Mendez?”

“No, that the door came down.”

“October.”

“I hope the book was worth it.”

The boy's head came up all the way at that, and he grinned up at Allen; for a moment just a handsome kid without a care in the world. “Yeah. You ever read
Lord of the Rings
?”

“Long time ago. It was great.”

“Awesome. I was just at the end of the second book, where Sam is going to rescue Frodo from the giant spider Shelob? And I knew I was supposed to turn the light out but I just had to see what happened.”

“And he caught you.”

“Yeah.” The boy's voice went dead again.

“Did he do anything other than taking down the door?”

“I don't think I want to talk about it.”

“That's fine. I just hope you got to finish the trilogy.”

“I did. It took forever, because I had to make sure to read only at school or when he was away. I wanted to bring those books with me here, but I couldn't.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if one of your cousins has a set you could read.”

“I guess.”

The patent lack of enthusiasm in his voice made Allen wonder. “Is your set a special one?”

“Nah, just those big paperbacks that slide into a box. But my teacher at school gave them to me for my birthday, so I kinda wanted to keep them. And then Alice told me to bring just the things that would fit into my backpack and, well, they'd have taken up most of it.”

“They'll be waiting for you,” Allen told him.

“I don't think so,” the boy said in a bleak voice. Allen glanced down at his troubled young-old face, saw the faraway look, and wondered what memory of paternal brutality the boy was dredging up now. Or maybe he was picturing the father happily packing up all his son's possessions and giving them away, to embrace his newly unburdened life. More likely, the boy was visualizing a bonfire of all the beloved childhood possessions he'd been forced to abandon, heaped in the backyard and drenched with gasoline by a vengeful father. Allen could have kicked himself: Surely he should know by now that platitudes did nothing for kids who had grown up knowing what an angry parent could do. And Mark O'Connell sounded to him like a man who would not take easily to being thwarted.

“You could be right,” he admitted to the boy. “But then again, possessions have a way of getting away from a person eventually anyway. Books fall apart, or a house burns down. What's important is the words and the story that you've read and loved; those are a part of you now.”

“And I like that Ms. Rao gave them to me.”

“She sounds like a good teacher.”

“I guess. Yeah, she was. She tried hard, and it wasn't her fault that . . . She told my father something that made him so mad—jeez,” he said with an uncomfortable laugh, “I thought it was about all over. Anyway, I was pissed at her for a while, but it really wasn't her fault. She was just doing her job. And she was nice to give me the books.” He sighed, and straightened his shoulders. “Yeah, I guess I'll see if someone has a set I can borrow. And I'll get used to having a door again and I'll learn to get the eggs out from under the hens without getting grossed out and I'll remember to call them Aunt Rachel and Uncle Pete. Wouldn't it be great if they could just take your brain and erase your memories, and plant a new set? Like in the movies?”

“Some memories,” Allen admitted. “Some of them we could do without. But I promise you, take it one step at a time, and every day it'll become a little easier.”

“I guess.”

“It will. Look, Jim—I've been there. Maybe not where you are, but right next door. When I was twenty, I came home from Vietnam just a basket case, so completely screwed up I felt like an alien. It wouldn't have surprised me to look in the mirror and see one of those gray
X-Files
creatures with no hair and giant eyes looking back at me.” He was startled, and gratified, to hear the boy snort with appreciation. “I didn't have any help, mostly because I was too stupid and too messed up to ask for it, so it took me forever to get my head straight. But when you talk about feeling like a stranger in a strange land, I do know how that feels, Jim, I really do.”

The boy's head was down, so what he muttered next was inaudible.

“Sorry?” Allen asked.

Jamie threw back his head to shoot Allen a look that was both challenge and something darker: resentment, perhaps, or an accusation of betrayal. “I said, so why aren't you sticking around?”

“I wish I could.” The boy took it as yet another dismissal by an uncaring adult, and turned his back. Allen reached out, then drew back his hand before it landed on the boy's shoulder and instead said firmly, “Jim, look at me.” The boy came to a halt, staring at the ground. Allen wanted to drop to his knees so he was on a level with Jamie, but he knew the boy would take the gesture as patronizing. Instead, he bent his shoulders and waited for the boy's eyes to meet his before saying, “I swear to you, Jameson Patrick O'Connell, that in all my years, I've never, ever wanted to stick around a kid as badly as I do at this moment. It's going to hurt like hell to get in the car today and drive off.”

Allen saw his brutal honesty hit home, and thought,
Good.
What the boy needed more than anything else in the world—more than a bedroom door under his control, more than adults who raised neither hands nor voices, more even than the freedom to be a boy—was to know that he mattered to someone, that the presence of Jamie O'Connell on the earth changed the very landscape. Under his father's reign, in his father's presence, Jamie had been nothing but an insignificant blot. Rachel and Pete would spend months—years—building up in their new foster son a sense that the world was a place that cared, but Allen himself had no time at all. If he wanted to impress this, his last rescued child, with a sense of worth, he needed Jamie to know from the beginning that in this, his new life, he mattered.