The Borrower (25 page)

He started
Number the Stars
before we were even out of the store. “The only problem is, I already know how it ends,” he said. “Because once when I looked at it back at the library, I found out.”

“I do that too,” I said. “It’s a bad habit.”

“But I never
mean
to.” He was walking, talking, and reading all at the same time. “It’s that I always have to look back and see how many pages there are, so I know when I’ll be exactly halfway through, but then when I see the last page it’s like my eyes suck up all the words.”

I said, “At least you know there’s a happy ending.”

I was glad for Ian’s sake that half the people we passed would have been stared at in Hannibal, Missouri. Mohawks, piercings, a man in a sarong, girlfriends in matching green hats holding hands.
UVM
was in session, and there were lots of dreadlocked nineteen-year-old boys making their slow ways up the street to the coffee shops under the snail shells of full backpacks, nodding along with their headphones.

After a while, he said, “People here have dirty hair.”

“It’s just a different hairstyle.”

“No, that guy actually had a
twig
sticking out of his hair.”

“I see your point.”

When we found an Irish pub, Ian decided that was better than Italian. We sat in a booth made of what seemed to be ancient church pews. I told Ian I wasn’t hungry. He said, “My mom only ever eats tomatoes.” I ordered a coffee, knowing it would come with bottomless refills and I could get some calories from the cream and sugar. When Ian’s food came, he bowed his head over his cheddar soup for a suspiciously long period of time. I went ahead and kept drinking my coffee, because you never knew how long he’d stay like that.

When he looked up, I said, “I gotta tell you, we’re almost out of money. I have some saved for getting back. After we see your grandmother. But we only have about a hundred dollars left besides that.”

“What about your credit cards?” He was blowing so hard on his soup that it was flying off the spoon in little droplets and landing all over the table.

“I’d rather not use those,” I said. “Because then someone could find where we are.”

“Don’t worry too much,” he said. “I have an idea for later.” He took the Vermont books out of their plastic bag and laid them out on the table. “But for now, we definitely have to find out where the Green Mountain Boys lived.”

I opened up the history book and he took the tourist guide. Skimming through the first few chapters, it appeared that Jake the drunken lumberjack had been correct. The state was a constant battleground, from the Iroquois chasing out the other tribes to the French claiming the land for New France, to the Dutch, to the English, to the French, to the English, to Massachusetts and New York and New Hampshire. Vermont was its own country for fourteen years, long enough to print its own money, long enough that its brave citizens had every reason to think they’d made it, to think that hundreds of years into the future, schoolchildren would look back on the Green Mountain Boys as founding fathers and visionaries. They were independent enough to be their own strong military presence in the Revolutionary War, to fight someone else’s battle for freedom.

And then they buckled, joined up, state number fourteen. Not early enough to get one of those bright-minted first white stars, not late enough to be a frontier. And then, Jake was right, people kept on coming. Farmers tried the land and mostly failed. Hippies in the sixties, communes in the seventies, and though the book stopped there, with its “hope for a bright new future for the state of Vermont,” I could see on Church Street what had happened next: the skiers, artists, backpackers, political idealists, runaways, all coming to contend with the Jakes of the world. And here we were too, trying to claim it in the name of—what? Sanctuary, maybe.

Ian finished his soup, but asked the waitress for more of the crusty white bread that had come with it. He put two slices on my coffee saucer and started spreading the other two with butter and shoving pieces in his mouth like he was preparing for hibernation.

When he came up for air, he said, “Miss Hull, I have to ask you something.”

“You can ask me anything,” I said, and my hangover was gone in a flash of adrenaline.

“Okay.” He asked it through a mouthful of bread. “Had you expected Jesus in a tart?”

“Okay, I can only
answer
if I can understand what you’re saying.”

He swallowed deliberately, several times, as if to clear out any crumb of food. “I said, have you accepted Jesus into your heart?”

“No.” The hangover was back. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up, but I also didn’t want to make him angry. “But listen, I already know all about it. It’s probably not worth your time to try.”

He shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s just I have this assignment for my class, and we’re supposed to witness to three different people.” It really didn’t seem to bother him. I was relieved to see that it wasn’t, as I’d briefly worried, the real reason for his bringing me all this way, some perverse and elaborate scheme approved by his parents.

“Well, did that count?”

“Probably. And also before we ate I prayed for your soul.”

“Fabulous.”

“Actually, I was supposed to pray
with
you, but I didn’t think you’d want to.”

“That would be correct.” After a second, I gestured at the graffitied church pew seats and the stained glass behind the bar. I said, “Maybe you get extra credit for bringing me to this lovely cathedral.” He rolled his eyes. “Okay, I have a question for
you
. Do you like your class that you go to? On Saturdays?”

“There’s this one workbook that has cartoons.”

“Right. But does the class make you feel better about yourself, or worse?”

He took his glasses off and wiped them on his napkin. “It’s probably not the kind of class you’re thinking of,” he said. “We don’t really learn stuff. I’d rather do, like, an art class.”

“I think I know which class it is. Isn’t it Pastor Bob?”

He looked surprised, then happy, then absolutely mortified. “It’s kind of supposed to be for boys who haven’t really grown yet. Like, maybe they’re not as tall as everybody else.”

“You’re pretty tall for your age.”

“Yeah, but I’m not, like, good at sports. So it’s supposed to help with that. And getting along with people.”

“Has it helped with those things?”

He took his empty inhaler from his pocket and puffed up whatever molecules of medicine were clinging to the bottom of the canister. He held his breath for ten seconds, putting down one finger for each second that passed until he was holding up two little fists. Then he let all the air out of his cheeks in a small, slow, noisy stream. “Actually, I really kind of hate it.”

Finally, after six days, the chink I’d been waiting for. I said, “You know, Pastor Bob is pretty notorious.”

“Doesn’t that mean criminal? He’s a criminal?”

“No.” Although who was to say. “It just means famous in a bad way. There are lots and lots of people—like journalists, and lawyers, and other ministers—who think that what he tells people is very, very wrong.”

He pointed his soup spoon at me and said, in a voice like a news anchor, “That is a rather interesting observation, ma’am.”

I charged on before he could launch into other voices or turn this into a talk about lawyers. I thought of phrasing this very vaguely, very tactfully, something about people loving each other. But I was tired of our tentative conversations, and I was hung over, and I apparently came from a long line of suicidal freedom fighters, and who was I to break with tradition? I said, “Basically, he tells people that if they’re gay, they’re going to go to hell. And he tells people that it’s a choice, to be gay or not. But almost all the scientists in the world disagree about the last part, and the first part is based on two little Bible verses that are in the middle of all kinds of other things that everyone ignores. Like right near there, it says you can’t ever eat pork or shellfish, and women should cover their heads, and you can’t plant two crops in the same field. But Pastor Bob ignores all that, and he spends his whole life telling people they can’t be gay.”

Ian was shaking his head. He looked mildly irritated, but other than that, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “We don’t really talk about that stuff, like—
gay
stuff.” He was whispering. “We mostly talk about families, and how to be a dad someday, and like what to do at a dance, but my school doesn’t even have dances for two more grades. It’s just that it gets really annoying and boring, and then my mom always makes me tell her everything we did, and she yells at me if I can’t remember. And then on the way home she always cries.”

I just said, “Oh.” Of course, if Pastor Bob was hoping to get to these kids before the “secular media” did, he wasn’t going to bring up the gay issue himself, not in so many words. And so if I pushed it,
I
would be the one making Ian uncomfortable. I’d lose him. Also, I didn’t want to be the one to break it to him: Hey, your parents think you’re gay. They’re probably right. The next eight to ten years are going to be hell.

So I said, “The problem is that he tells people they can just change the way they are, the way they were born. And it’s
not true
.” I realized as those last words came out that I was saying them on the presumption that Ian would end up back there, that he’d be in the Glad Heart rehabilitation program until he either turned out to be straight, or ran away, or shot himself, or overdosed, or married some miserable, lonely woman. It killed me to think it, but at least I’d said something. And at least we had a little more time, even if it was only the five minutes before I was arrested. If I hadn’t been so dehydrated, I might have been crying. I said it again: “It’s not true.”

Ian’s face was dark red, and he kept glancing around the room. I’d been talking too loudly, and I had probably embarrassed him so badly that he hadn’t absorbed a word I’d said. He had scrunched his napkin up into his empty soup bowl, and now he was poking it with his fork. I thought of apologizing, but instead I paid the bill. As we stood up, he said, “Is shrimp a shellfish?”

“Yes.”

“I saw him eating a shrimp at the Christmas party. Pastor Bob.”

“Well, there you go.”

Back on the cold street, Ian suddenly seemed positively bouncy, and he was breathing more slowly and deeply. He handed me his green sunglasses and said, “Okay. Stay very far back, like you don’t know me. And only come get me if I’m in trouble.” He was jamming his pockets full of the mints and toothpicks he’d filched on his way out.

I leaned against the side of the restaurant. The coffee had woken me up but dried me out even more, so I felt wired and empty. He walked up to a college student, actually the same kid we’d seen before, with the twig in his dreadlocks. They talked for a few seconds, Ian’s voice sincere and urgent and compellingly distressed, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying—and then the student set his backpack on the ground and knelt down to unzip a little pocket on the side. He handed Ian something, punched him gently on the shoulder, and walked away. Ian pocketed what looked like paper money, and approached two teenage girls walking together with shopping bags. How he knew which people to hit up—how to avoid mothers, for instance, who would try to march him home—I had no idea, but I guessed it had less to do with street smarts than instinctive childhood manipulation tactics. He tried a young professor type, a girl on a skateboard, and two waiters on break. After about twenty minutes I even closed my eyes, confident I’d recognize his voice if anything went wrong.

When I opened them he was still there, talking to a stoned-looking woman with a guitar. But across the street, leaning on the window of a children’s clothing store, was that man. I couldn’t check for his car, of course, but the dark blazer with jeans, the slicked-back hair, the wraparound sunglasses, were all the same. He was turning his phone over and over in his hand like a worry bead. He didn’t make any move toward me, and he didn’t move toward Ian, although he was close enough to snatch him up before I could get there. So I stayed still and used the wall for balance and hoped the pale, oblique sunlight could bake some of the alcohol from my body. I wrapped my fingers around the car keys in my pocket, in case I needed a weapon. But Mr. Shades looked pretty calm over there. I sang the Mr. Clean song in my head, with new lyrics.

Now that I was sure I wasn’t paranoid, I tried to work out who this could possibly be. If he were police, he’d certainly have reclaimed Ian by now. But he could be a private detective, hired by Rocky or Glenn. Or Rocky
and
Glenn. He could be an agent for Pastor Bob, watching over Ian and reporting back, not wanting to create a scene and unflattering media attention. He could be an intern for Loloblog, only he wasn’t quite young or hip enough. That slick hair was receding, after all. He could be my uncle Ilya, watching from beyond the grave to ensure that I paid for the sins of my father.

The man checked his watch, then entered the store and pretended to examine the racks of jumpers and rompers in the window. I looked back to the road and saw Ian galloping toward me.

“Guess how much!” he said.

“Let’s hope enough for dinner.” My real guess was around twenty-five. Twig boy hadn’t looked terribly rich.

“One hundred sixty-something!” He scooped it out of his pocket and handed it all over, a big wad of bills that looked like mostly singles. “It helped that the guy with dirty hair gave me a hundred-dollar bill and some other stuff. I told them I had to go see my grandmother in Boston on the train, and if they asked why, I said my mother tried to kill herself. I think I can get more!”

It occurred to me finally, through the haze of my hangover, that the main street of Vermont’s largest city was probably the worst possible place to panhandle. There were bound to be police everywhere. I said, “Let’s quit while we’re ahead.” In fact, the two waiters he’d approached were now looking at us and talking. They thought we were a scam. We
were
a scam, I had to remind myself. We dodged around the corner and walked fast back to the car, where the meter had almost run out anyway. If our stalker wanted to follow us, he’d have to find us again on the road. His car was there, just a few yards from our own, but he was nowhere to be seen.