“Give us a minute, Griff,” I said.
I unlaced my boots and pulled my socks off.
“You know, I really did bring that bottle of whiskey along,” Ben said. “You think we should have some?”
“I don’t know.”
“We came a long way. Henry would be proud of what you did.”
“Would he?”
“It’s like he said. I don’t know why, but he did say it. You really don’t remember, do you?”
“Not too good,” I said.
“Well, you were like his son, Jack. His favorite. He trusted you more than anyone in the world.”
“I wish he never did.”
“He always said that you were the same as him. That you both came from the same sorry place. Don’t you remember that?”
And I said, “What could possibly be sorrier than this?”
Suddenly Griffin began jumping and screaming. “A fish! I saw a fucking fish! Get a fucking gun, Ben, there’s fucking fish in here!”
Ben and I laughed.
Ben took off his boots and socks, began emptying the pockets of his fatigues. “I guess we can wash our clothes out if we get in there with him. You know he’s not gonna let us rest till we do, anyway.” Then he gave me a confused look and said, “Do you shoot at fish?”
“You don’t shoot fish,” I said. “I can figure out a way to catch one, though. And maybe I’ll have just a little bit of that whiskey, too.”
Ben stood up and went over to the suitcase he’d tied into a saddlebag, opened it, and looked across the shore at Griffin, who had his eyes pinned down on the surface of the water like a cat that had cornered the prey he’d been stalking.
“Don’t shoot nothing, Griffin,” he said. “We’re coming in with you in just a minute. And get over there and empty your pockets out, too, so you can wash your pants!”
There were some bullets in my pockets. I took off my gun belt and lay my knife down beside it. Then I pulled out the foil pouches of food that I’d intended to give the nun and that crazy man two nights before. Ben saw them.
“You didn’t give them the food,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“It’s good you didn’t say nothing to the kid.”
The water was good, the only pure and refreshing thing I’d run across since that first day in this place when I found Henry Hewitt’s head staked to a wall. From where I stood, waist-deep in the middle of the stream, I could see Seth, waiting in the spot where Ben and I left the half-filled whiskey bottle, just watching us as we swam or chased each other. But when I looked at him again, he flattened out and disappeared beneath the trees.
And I felt so certain then that Seth was going away.
So we washed all our clothes, but the bloodstains on Ben’s pants left permanent black splotches; and when we were all tired in the water, I promised to show the boys how to fish.
Using a hook I’d made out of a safety pin that I tied to thread from Griffin’s first aid kit, and with nothing more than a piece of a white medical cotton ball as our bait, we caught two fish. I cut them up with my knife and we sat naked on the shore and ate the meat raw while our clothes hung on willow limbs, drying in the heat of the afternoon.
Neither of the boys had ever tasted fish before, and Griffin said he preferred it to candy.
“Could we live here?” he asked.
“I think we haven’t come far enough, Griff,” I said. “We could stay here maybe a couple days and see how things go.”
Ben threw a scrap over to Griffin’s dog. “How far do we need to go?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re heading the right way, though. The air feels like there’s an ocean if we keep going down country. We’ll find people there. I have a feeling.”
“Regular people,” Ben said.
“Okay,” Griffin said. “You been right so far, Jack. If we find people, maybe they’ll be all kinds of ’em. Maybe they’ll be some girls, too.” Then he leaned over to look at the place on my chest where I’d been bitten. “That looks better now. Does it hurt anymore?”
“Itches.”
“That’s good.”
The dog let out a bark. We all tensed, listening, watching, trying to get a sense of what was out there. He moaned a threatening growl and his ears shot up in twinned points.
Something was moving toward us from behind the trees.
Then I saw them.
There were two of the things out there.
They froze when the dog barked a second time, but I could clearly see the red blaze that showed through from one of their marks.
It was Conner.
Knocking.
The sound of the door latch turning.
“Dude, are you fucking sleeping in the tub?”
I opened my eyes, had to think about where I was.
Conner stood over me.
He reached into the stall and shut the water off.
“It’s freezing cold, Jack. Were you doing that shit again?”
I touched my face. No glasses.
It was like I’d just bounced there. That’s the only way to explain it: Marbury was getting more and more just like here. As easy as walking into another room. Changing a channel on the TV.
This is real.
You fucked up again, Jack.
I need to get back there.
“No, I…I…”
“Jack? Conner, is everything all right?” Nickie’s voice from the other side of the door.
“He’s okay,” Conner said. “I think he fell asleep in the tub.”
He looked pissed off.
I rubbed my face. It was coming again, the nausea, but I couldn’t make my legs move.
Conner bent down, grabbed a hand tightly around my arm. It didn’t feel helpful at all, not like Conner. It hurt me. He put his face right next to mine and whispered, “You were doing that shit again, weren’t you?”
He tried pulling me up.
“No, Con. I swear, I…I fell asleep.”
“Look at you. Your lips are fucking blue, Jack. Get up.”
As soon as I straightened up, I leaned over the side of the tub and vomited into the toilet.
“You did it, didn’t you?”
“No.”
Where did I put those goddamned glasses?
Conner just looked at me and shook his head.
He knew I was lying to him.
You’re a fucking liar, Jack.
“Get dressed, asshole,” he said. “The girls are ready to leave.”
Conner never sounded like that to me. It felt like I’d been punched in the face.
I deserved it, though.
Fuck you, Jack.
He threw a towel down over my head, and exhaled a disgusted sigh.
“You told me you’d get rid of those fucking things, Jack. Look what it’s doing to you. Look at your fucking self!”
Then Conner left. He shut the door, but I could hear him on the other side as he told Nickie, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He fell asleep in the tub. He swears he’s okay, and he’ll be out in a minute.”
I felt terrible, mostly for how I’d let Conner down, how he knew I was lying to him. He had to think that Jack didn’t give a shit about him, that all I cared about was screwing my head up with those glasses.
I wiped my face with the towel. I looked so pale standing there, my muscles locked and quivering from the cold.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
No.
“Jack?”
It was Nickie, her hand rapping on the door.
I exhaled.
Fuck you, Jack.
It cracked open, and she peeked an eye in at me.
Nervously, I held the towel up in front of my belly. It hung loosely, a narrow drape between my knees.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She ducked back behind the door like I’d scared her.
“It’s okay.” I twisted the towel’s ends into a skirt around my waist.
“If you aren’t feeling
well, we can stay in,” she said.
I felt like such an idiot. I looked down at my clothes, erupting from the top of my open pack. The door. My clothes. I didn’t know what to do. I pulled the door open so she could see me.
“I’m okay. Really.” I tried to smile. “Remember, I told you how tired I was. I just kind of dozed off, I think.”
Nickie gazed straight into my eyes, her face showing a confident smile. Her eyes lowered, tracking down the length of my body, and she made no attempt to conceal her stare.
I was so embarrassed. My hand nervously clawed the knot at my hip as though I were somehow certain my cover was about to fall away. The look on her face made me feel so weak and out of control, and I was suddenly aware of something beginning to strain against the flimsy towel that hung doubtfully around my waist. I tried putting my left hand over the conspicuous bulge.
If I could have killed myself on the spot, I wouldn’t have thought twice about doing it.
“Oh,” she said, and there was a slight surprise to her tone. “Are these yours?”
Then she bent forward, her head so near my waist that I could feel the cool air that moved from her swinging hair onto the hand I kept pressed against my dick. Nickie reached down and picked up the glasses that were peeking out from beneath my discarded shorts on the bathroom floor.
“Groovy, Jack.” She laughed. “Purple.”
I nearly collapsed from the rush and confusion.
“No, Nickie—”
And I helplessly stood there, in sickened paralysis, one hand trying to hold down my irreconcilable penis, and the other keeping my towel in place, watching as she unfolded the glasses and slipped them onto her beautiful face.
“Nickie.”
As she turned to look at me, I could see the lenses come to life, like they were blowing holes straight through Nickie’s head, and lighting up another world.
The woods.
I can see Conner standing there.
And Griffin.
He’s running from something. Fast, like he’s afraid. He’s naked and wet from swimming, his pants still hanging where we’d left our clothes on the quivering fingers of a willow tree.
Running.
Look away, Jack.
I reach up and put my hands on the frames.
“Come on, Nickie. Don’t mess around.”
As I pull them away, I see him.
Freddie Horvath.
He’s there, too.
Freddie Horvath did something to my brain.
Help.
I could hear Griffin’s voice, crying out.
He needs help.
Nickie smiled, a puzzled look creasing her eyebrows together. “Don’t tell me you can actually see through those things, Jack.”
“Um. Yeah.” I brushed the towel down smooth over my crotch.
Nothing going on down there now after Jack saw that shit.
Then I folded the glasses up without looking at them again, wrapped them in a pair of underwear, stuffed them as far down into my pack as I could.
Freddie Horvath is there.
He saw me.
Griffin needs help.
I swallowed, straightened, made sure the towel would stay put. “Did you see through them?”
Nickie shrugged. “I couldn’t see a thing. Pitch-black. Nothing.”
I sighed. “Oh.”
Relief.
Maybe.
“Now come on,” she said, and rubbed her hand on my chest. “Rachel and I are starving. But you really should put on some trousers, or at the very least, something substantial enough to cover up…uh, your bumpy parts, Jack.”
Then she smiled, winked at me, and whirled out of the bathroom.
Part Four
The Marbury Lens
Forty-Three
Let me tell you a few things about Jack.
My father’s name is Mike Heath. Despite that, I was born John Wynn Whitmore IV, named for Amy’s father, who goes by Wynn.
I’ve never seen Mike one time in my life. In fact, the only way I found out about him was by looking through one of Amy’s old high school yearbooks. They didn’t think to keep it from me.
Who’d have thought Little Jack would be so curious, anyway?
Mike Heath was in the same grade as Amy: eleventh in 1994, the year before Jack showed up on the floor between Amy’s feet. He was a kid of few words, I guess. He wrote only I love you, Ames under his photograph. And when I saw that picture, it was like Jack was staring straight into a mirror. There could be no question at all as to paternity in the sad case of Jack Whitmore.
Mike was on the basketball team, tall and skinny—all kneecaps and elbows, just like his boy—and even though more than half the guys at Glenbrook High had short, perfectly groomed hair in 1994, Mike wore his the same way the son he carelessly sired would wear his own when he was in grade eleven, too: long enough to hang to his chin in a light brown wave that had just the slightest blond tips at the end. Mike even had the same crooked smile that Jack showed in his Glenbrook High School junior-class yearbook photo.
Gee, my dad.
Kind of chokes you up, doesn’t it?
Fuck you, Jack.
And I found out that Mike moved to San Luis Obispo after he graduated. I looked him up regularly on the Internet. He still lived there. A couple times, I started to drive down there just so I could look at his face, maybe to get a glimpse at what Jack might look like in his thirties, but Conner always talked me out of it. I mean, why bother, anyway? It wasn’t like I was going to bring the old glove and ball down and go throw a few with Dad at the park.
Yeah, and fuck you, too, Mike.
Amy never graduated from Glenbrook. Wynn and Stella sent her away as soon as Baby Jack splattered himself all over their nice kitchen floor. It didn’t matter. They didn’t need to tell me the story, anyway. Who couldn’t guess that Mike dumped Amy’s ass as soon as his lucky load of semen found a home that wasn’t just another toilet—or some wadded tissue paper—in Amy’s Jack Factory? And once my grandparents sent her away, they kept sending her, so Jack never saw his mommy, either.
By the time I was sixteen, Amy was living in Indonesia with an Australian artist who was a year older than Wynn.
A www. Jack’s mom.
Fuck you, Amy.
So, yeah, I hated them both: Mike and Amy. But I didn’t hate Wynn and Stella. That was different. I didn’t have any feelings for them at all. They might as well have been furniture or wallpaper, as far as Jack was concerned.
And saying it doesn’t make me feel sorry for myself, either. It’s just the way it was, and Jack had sixteen years to get used to it. In fact, to be honest, the only person I loved, in this world at least, was Conner. Griffin and Ben on that other side. And I believed I was starting to get those kinds of feelings for Nickie, too—and not just because she and I both noticed that she gave me a boner.
But Jack was fucking it up with Conner, and I could see myself easily letting it go that way with Nickie, too.
I didn’t like that.
I didn’t have any clue what I could do about it, either.
We ate Indonesian food that night in Blackpool, and went around the table telling our little autobiographies. I was not ashamed for talking about Mike Heath and Amy, and how much I hated them, especially because of how bad I felt about letting Conner down, how terrified I was for what was going on in Marbury, too. Of course, I’d left out the part about Griffin and Ben, and how Nickie made me get an erection just by looking at her, but I did stare Conner straight in the eye when I told him that he was the only person in the world I loved.
I know that mattered to him, too, because he didn’t crack a Jack-is-gay joke about it, he only patted my hand on the table with his and looked kind of sorry when I’d said it. At least, I could tell without him saying it that he felt bad about calling me an asshole, even if I did deserve it.
“And then, something terrible happened to me about three weeks ago,” I said. I looked down at all the lit
tle circles of food in front of us. “A man drugged me and kidnapped me and tried to rape me. He stripped me and tied me up for two days, and I guess you could say he tortured me, too. With a stun gun. But I got away from him. And sometimes, I still feel like all the drugs he shot into me have messed up my brain.”
Freddie Horvath did something.
Conner bit his lip.
Nickie and Rachel alternately looked at each of us, trying to measure whether this was some kind of weird joke.
I took a drink of water. It felt like I was choking. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see if I could say it. I never told anyone about it except Conner. And he saved my life. Look. This is where he tied me down.”
I slid my chair back from the table and lifted my foot out of my shoe. I pulled my sock down so Nickie and Rachel could see the scar where Freddie had bound Jack to his bed. Nickie looked at me, and I could tell it hurt her to see that. Or maybe it was relief I saw on her face, like I had finally shown her something real about me, but I don’t know. She put her fingers on the scar and stroked my ankle so softly. I could tell she knew that what I’d said was true. Then she kissed me on the side of my face and whispered, “You are very brave, Jack.”
I cleared my throat. “There. Now it’s Rachel’s turn.”
Rachel shifted uncomfortably, looked at each one of us. “I live near Harrogate with four younger brothers, my mother, and father, who is a doctor at a clinic in Leeds. I suppose my life is rather common. I enjoy visiting Nickie as often as possible. I have traveled to the States, but never to California and, until very recently, never cared much for American boys.” Rachel laughed softly and covered Conner’s hand.
Conner smiled. He always had this same expression when he was nervous. I never understood that about him: how being onstage made Conner self-conscious, but he was such a show-off around me. “I was born and grew up in Glenbrook. Jack was the first friend I ever had, and he’s my best friend. I would do anything for him. And I love him.”
Then he gave me a quick, serious glance and said, “We know everything there is to know about each other. Nothing is secret between me and Jack. We run cross-country together, drive the same kind of truck, pretty much we’re like brothers, I think. My parents both work in real estate, and I love them, too.”