More Than This (32 page)

“STORY OF RESCUE,” Tomasz practically shouts. “Regine was distracted. I figure out why. I say we come to save you. She says no, that is not what you want. I say, Who cares what Mr. Seth wants, Mr. Seth does not know proper danger he is in. I say we take shotgun and we go.” He looks at Regine again. “To this last, there was resistance.”

“For good reason,” Regine says, not turning around. “You could have died.”

“And yet here I am,” Tomasz says. “I am sorry that I know more about guns than you, but I do.”

“Not enough to keep it from blowing up in your hands.”

“But enough to stop the Driver from chasing us!” Tomasz holds up his wrapped hands in frustration. “Why is Tomasz never given credit? Why is he never thanked properly for his good ideas? I have saved you now
twice
from the thing that would kill us, but oh, no, I am still little joke Tommy with his bad English and his crazy hair and his too much enthusiasm.”

They stop, amazed a bit at his anger.

“Jeesh,” Regine says. “Someone needs a nap.”

Tomasz’s eyes blaze, and he hurls a long trail of furious Polish sentences at them.

“I said I was sorry,” Seth says. “Tomasz –”

“You do not understand!” Tomasz yells. “I am lonely, too! You think you are older and you are wiser and you feel things more deeply. You are not! I feel these things, too! If I lose you or you, then I am alone again, and I will not have this! I will not.”

He’s crying now, but they can see that he’s annoyed at himself for it, so they don’t try to comfort him.

“Tommy –” Regine starts.

“It is
Tomasz
!” he spits.

“You said it was okay for me to call you Tommy.”

“Only when I am liking you.” He wipes his eyes and mutters to himself. “You know nothing of Tomasz. Nothing.”

“We know you were struck by lightning,” Seth says.

Tomasz looks up to him, his eyes full of something Seth can’t quite read. Disbelief, for one, looking for teasing in what Seth says, but also fear. And pain. As if he was remembering being struck by lightning all over again.

“I’m not teasing you,” Seth says. “I understand loneliness. Boy, do I ever.”

“Do you?” Tomasz asks, almost as a challenge.

“Yeah,” Seth says. “Really, really.”

He reaches up to put a hand of truce on Tomasz’s back, and as Tomasz ducks into it, Seth’s fingers brush the spot on the base of Tomasz’s skull –

Which lights up suddenly under his touch –

And the world vanishes.

The room is cramped and dark. There are other people here, he can’t tell how many, but it’s crowded, bodies pressed into bodies, so close he can smell their sour breath and body odor. And their fear.

Their voices are hushed but speaking frantically. He can’t understand what they’re saying –

But yes, he
can
understand them. They’re not speaking English, but he can understand every word.

“Something’s gone wrong,” a woman’s voice says nearby. “They’re going to kill us.”

“They will be paid,” says another woman sternly, trying to calm the first woman but still plainly afraid herself. “The money will come. That’s all they want. The money will come –”

“Even if it comes, it won’t matter,” says the first woman, as other voices around her rise in the same worry. “They’re going to kill us! They’re going to –”

“Shut your mouth!” roars a new voice, one right behind his head, one owned by the woman whose arms are around him, holding him tight. “Shut your mouth or I will shut it for you.”

The first woman stops at the fury in this new voice. She begins a long, loud weeping, hardly better than the words before.

“Don’t you listen to her, my little puddle,” the voice behind him says into his ear. “Everything has gone according to plan, and there is nothing to be afraid of. This is a little delay. Only that. We will be starting our new life soon. And what a time that will be.”

He speaks. They are not his words, not his voice, but they are coming from his mouth.

“I’m not afraid, Mama,” he says.

“I know you’re not, puddle.” She kisses the back of his head, and he knows that she’s calming herself, too. He really isn’t afraid, though. She’s gotten them this far. She’ll get them farther still.

“Let Mama hear some of your English,” she whispers. “Let me hear your words, and we will make a new home out of them.”

And he remembers. Remembers being too poor to pay for English lessons but never questioning why his mama brought home videotape after videotape – not downloaded like at school or even on disc, but played on a massive, ancient machine held together by electrical tape – of black-and-white or flamboyantly colored films in English, a language that both leapt forward into wide-open spaces and then looped back to cramp itself up. They would make a game of it, him and his mama, trying to match the English dialogue to the subtitles.

He was smart, his teachers always said, some even saying “freakishly,” and he started picking it up against all odds, practicing it on the few English-speaking tourists who ventured that deep into the country. Even trying his hand at the moldy old English-language novels someone had donated to the local library.

He’s learned enough, he hopes. They are here. They are inside the borders. They have almost reached the end. He really, really hopes he’s learned enough.

“‘To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing,’” he says now to his mama, quoting a film, straining hard to remember, for her, “‘may be like losing your fortune. To lose both means that no one cares.’”

“Good, good, puddle,” his mama says, understanding less than half of it, he knows. “More.”

“‘You were only supposed to bleed open the doors off,’” he says, “‘and blow them away.’”

“Yes, my darling.”

“‘Of all the jukeboxes in every bit of the world –’”

There is a sudden sharp cry from the women around him – and he remembers now that it is all women and a few children like him – as a lock is loudly undone and the massive metal door begins to open, booming with its own weight. The women make sounds of relief when they see that it’s the friendlier of the two men who’ve brought them this far. The one with the kind smile and sad eyes who speaks to them of his own children.

“You see?” says his mother, standing them both up. “A few words and the world changes.”

But the women start to scream as they see that the kind man is holding a gun –

A hand shoves Seth hard in the chest, Regine, her full weight behind it. He tumbles to the mud-covered pavement. She stands next to Tomasz, who’s looking down at him now, too.

“What did you do?” Tomasz says, horrified. “What did you
do
to me?”

“Co się stało?”
Seth says.

In Polish.

“What?” Regine says.

“
What?
” Tomasz says, coming over to him. “What did you say?”

Seth sits up, shaking his head. He can still smell the fear in the cramped room, still feel the press of the women against him, the terrible, terrible panic that swept through the group when they saw the man’s gun –

“I said –” Seth tries again, in English this time, but he doesn’t get another word out before Tomasz strikes him across the face, hard, the cloth wrapped around his hands cushioning it hardly at all.

“You have no right!” Tomasz says, hitting him again and again. Seth, too stunned to defend himself, can already feel his nose bleeding. “That is private! You have no right to be there!”

“WHOA!” Regine shouts, grabbing Tomasz’s flailing arms. She wraps her big frame around him, straitjacketing him, but he still looks furiously at Seth.

“That was not yours to see!”

“Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?” Regine says, then she sees the back of Tomasz’s neck. “And why is Tommy’s light blinking?”

“I don’t know,” Seth says, pulling himself back up, wiping the blood from his face. “I don’t know what happened. I just touched him and –”

“I am right here!” Tomasz shouts. “Do not speak of me as if I am not present!”

“I’m sorry, Tomasz,” Seth says. “For both things. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean anything by it –”

“It was not yours to see!” Tomasz says again.

“What was it?” Regine asks Seth, still holding Tomasz close.

“I think . . .” Seth says. “I think it may be private.”

At that, Tomasz’s face crumples and he
really
begins to cry, buckling at the knees and dropping into Regine’s embrace. He speaks long sentences of Polish with his eyes squeezed shut.

“Okay, seriously, what the hell happened?” Regine says to Seth, holding Tomasz to her stomach. “I don’t need to know what you saw, but you touched the back of his neck and then you both just froze. Like you left your bodies.”

“I don’t know,” Seth says.

Regine sighs angrily. “Of course you don’t.”

“Regine –”

“I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I’m mad at this whole stupid place. You say you’re remembering and you just can’t imagine how much I want to know, but all that seems to mean is new pain. That’s all that happens in this life. One shitty, horrible surprise after another –”

“You weren’t a horrible surprise,” Seth says quietly.

“And the weather makes no sense and there’s some immortal
freak
in a black suit chasing us and . . . What did you say?”

“I said you weren’t a horrible surprise,” Seth says. “Neither of you.” Tomasz is still snuffling into Regine’s shirt, but he turns an eye back to Seth.

Seth wipes his nose. “Listen,” he says, but then stops. He runs a hand over his short hair, his fingers finding the rise at the back of his skull, knowing it’s blinking, not knowing why, despite the mess of it churning in his brain. Not knowing anything at all, in fact, except that he’s here, right this second, with Tomasz and Regine. And it feels like he owes them more than he can ever repay.

“I killed myself,” he says.

He waits to make sure they’re listening. They are. “I walked into the ocean. I broke my shoulder on a rock, and then that same rock crushed my skull, hitting it right where the light is.” He pauses. “But it wasn’t an accident. I did it to myself.”

Regine says nothing, but Tomasz sniffles and says, “We had a little bit guessed.”

“I know,” Seth says. “And that day you found me, that day you stopped me from running into that thing in the van, I . . .” He wavers, but then forces himself. “I was going to do it again. I know Masons Hill. I know where I could throw myself off. And that’s what I was going to do.”

He tastes blood on the back of his throat and spits it out. “And so when I say you weren’t a horrible surprise, I mean it. You were a good surprise,
so
good it’s why I doubt it’s even true. Even now. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry it made me lie to you. I’m sorry it sent me to the prison. And I’m sorry, Tomasz, for seeing what I saw. I didn’t mean to.”

Tomasz sniffles again. “I know this. But still.” He’s wearing the saddest face Seth has ever seen, his mouth curled down, his bottom lip out, his eyes too old for his young, young face.

“I did not get struck by lightning,” he says.

“We had nothing,” Tomasz continues, looking at his feet. “Remember those years when the world lost all its money? Even online, I guess.”

Seth and Regine both nod, but Tomasz isn’t looking at them anyway.

“We were poor before that,” he says. “And it was worse after. You used to be able to cross borders in Europe, but when all economies fell, you could not anymore. No one wanted anyone else. We were trapped, my mama and me. But she found a way. She found a man who says he can smuggle us in on a ship. Give us passports, documents to say we were there before borders close.” He clenches his little fists. “It costs us everything we have.
More
than everything, but my mama says it is better life. Makes me learn English, says all will be better.”

His eyes narrow. “But it is
not
better. Journey is very hard, very long, and the men who help us, well, they do not help us very much at all. One is nicer, but one is very bad. He treats us very badly. He . . .
do
things. To Mama.”