Where I Belong

  I don’t say anything. She knows I don’t eat meat. Why can’t she remember? I’m too tired to explain. I just want to go to bed. And sleep for a week.

  FOURTEEN

  AS SOON AS WE GET to her house, Mrs. Clancy fixes a hot bath for me and tells me to wash all the paint off before my cuts get infected.

  “I’d do it myself,” she says, “but you’re too old for me to be bathing you.”

  After she shuts the door, I sink down into the tub. The water slowly turns muddy green. I wash languidly. Too weak to scrub. Too weak to drown myself.

  “Your pajamas are on the chair in the hall,” she shouts through the door. “Don’t stay in there too long. You’ll get a chill.”

  I get out of the tub and look at myself. I’m scratched and bruised all over. My head is covered with cuts and little tufts of hair that Sean missed. I look like what I am—an orphan no one loves or cares about. A lost boy from a Dickens novel. I wonder if my mother would have left me in the hospital if she’d known what my life would be like without her.

  My mother. Why did I think of her? Has she ever thought of me? Probably she’s forgotten me completely. No, I never had a baby, I can hear her say. Maybe to a doctor. Maybe to a friend. Maybe to her husband if she has one. Or to me, if I ever found her. Don’t you think I’d remember something like that?

  I shove my mother back into the box where I keep her, way down in a dark corner of my mind, and put on my pajamas.

  Mrs. Clancy calls from the kitchen, “Your soup’s ready,” but I don’t answer. I go into my room, shut the door, and crawl into bed. It’s only five o’clock. The sun is shining. But all I want to do is sleep.

  Mrs. Clancy has other ideas. Without even knocking, she barges into my room with a tray and sets it down on the bureau beside my bed. “Soup,” she says. “Applesauce. Toast. Ginger ale.”

  I turn my head away and refuse to answer.

  She sits down on the bed. The mattress sags under her weight. “Do I have to feed this to you?”

  I don’t say a word.

  “Oh, Brendan,” she sighs. “I’m too damned old for this nonsense. I don’t have the energy to deal with you. I’m leaving the soup here. Eat it or not. It’s vegetable noodle. No meat.”

  She stands up and walks away. She shuts the door behind her. Not with an angry bang but with a sort of sad thud.

  Vegetable noodle . . . Did she remember after all? I sit up. My body aches with the effort. But I eat the soup and the toast and the applesauce. I drink the ginger ale. Then I lie down and listen to the birds singing in the maple tree. Sunlight stripes the wall. I hear the television. Mrs. Clancy is watching one of those women talk shows she loves. She told me once that her biggest disappointment in life was never seeing The Oprah Winfrey Show live. Especially the time she gave everybody cars. That’s enough to make a person cry.

  I pick up my battered copy of The Return of the King, but I’m too tired to read it. My eyes close and I sleep.

  I dream I’m in a forest, not my forest but a truly ancient forest. The trees are so tall that I can’t see their tops. Masses of leaves and branches hide the sky. In the dim light, I glimpse creatures moving through the forest, almost hidden by gigantic ferns. Trolls with misshapen bodies and huge heads, long arms dangling, some carrying cudgels, some carrying swords. They mustn’t see me. I crouch down, hold my breath, but one stops and sniffs. The others pause. They sniff too. They talk in grumbles and growls, ugly sounds that mean nothing good. Then they begin crashing through the underbrush, trampling the ferns, huge, hairy-chested trolls heading straight for me.

  I scramble to my feet, I try to run, I try to call for help, but my legs won’t work and I can’t speak. I stumble and thrash about, but I can’t escape. They surround me. They have long, sharp yellow teeth. Their eyes are small and red. They jeer and laugh like dogs barking. They poke and prod, they push me around, they knock me down, they kick me. Harf, harf, they laugh. Louder and louder until the forest rings with the sound. HARF! HARF!

  I try to call the Green Man but my voice is the cry of a mouse and it makes them laugh louder. HARF! HARF!

  But then I hear someone running through the ferns, swish swish. Hands grasp my shoulders. It’s him, I know it’s him—he’s come. This time he won’t let me down. But the hands on my shoulders are small and weak. It’s a dwarf, too old and feeble to help me. Or himself.

  “Brendan, wake up!” I open my eyes and see Mrs. Clancy’s face hanging over me. “You’re having a bad dream!”

  I’m in my room, in my bed, the sheets twisted around me, moonlight casting dark shadows on the wall. The forest is gone. The trolls are gone. The dwarf is gone. It’s just Mrs. Clancy and me. The neighbor’s dog is barking.

  Still halfway between sleeping and waking, I stare around me, afraid I’ll see the trolls huddled together in a dark corner, waiting for her to leave so they can drag me away. “The trolls,” I mumble, “the trolls, they . . .”

  “I thought someone was murdering you in your bed,” she says. “Such screaming. A real fright you gave me.”

  Even in my sleep I can make her mad.

  She lays her hand on my forehead. “You still feel feverish,” she says. “I’ll call the doctor tomorrow and have her look at you. I’m worried about those cuts getting infected. Why did you smear that green stuff all over you? Don’t you ever think?”

  I think all the time, all the time, every second, the thoughts in my head never leave me alone. But I don’t tell her this. What’s the point? She wouldn’t understand.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” she says. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. Go back to sleep.”

  She leaves the room without shutting the door. Before long, I hear her snoring. I wonder if she knows she does it. If I tell her, she’ll probably deny it and get mad.

  I turn on my light and read until I fall asleep.

  The next day, Mrs. Clancy takes me to see Dr. Phillips. She’s a pediatrician, and she’s been my doctor ever since I came to East Bedford. I’m naturally very healthy, so I see her once a year for my school checkup, which never takes too long. Sometimes she asks me questions, but I never tell her much. I like to keep our discussions to my weight and height, stuff of an impersonal nature.

  First she takes my temperature—102. After that, she cleans my cuts carefully and rubs an antiseptic salve into them. She stitches up a couple of the worst ones. Next she gives me a shot of penicillin and a tetanus booster. I hate shots, but I try not to wince when she jabs a needle into my right arm and then into my left arm.

  Last of all, she sits me down at her desk and asks me who beat me up and why I rubbed paint all over myself.

  I look down at my hands. Just as I feared, we’re not sticking to my height and weight.

  “Brendan.” She leans across her desk to get my attention. “This is serious. You’ve been badly beaten. Whoever hurt you should be arrested and charged.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know their names.”

  “Why did they attack you?”

  “I have no idea. They just did, that’s all. Maybe they didn’t like my hair.”

  She knows I know more than I’m saying. But she can’t make me tell.

  “Did they threaten to hurt you if you told?”

  I stare at her medical certificate, framed in black and hanging on the wall. She went to the University of Vermont. On the other wall are three pictures of the human body, one showing the skeleton, one showing the muscles, and one showing the organs. Everything is labeled with Latin words. It’s hard to believe all those things are packed inside me. All of us walking around with our stomachs nestled under our rib cages and our intestines coiled up like sausages.

  “Brendan, please cooperate with me.” Dr. Phillips raises her voice to get my attention. “Mrs. Clancy is really worried about you. You won’t talk to her. She thought you might talk to me.”

  I turn my attention to a chart showing the parts of your ear. So many parts, so many chances for somethi
ng to go wrong.

  “I’m really tired and I ache all over,” I tell her. “Can I go home now?”

  Dr. Phillips sighs and leads me back to the waiting room. Mrs. Clancy is reading a House Beautiful magazine, but she looks up hopefully. I sense Dr. Phillips shaking her head—No, he didn’t tell me a thing.

  Mrs. Clancy stops at CVS to get my prescription for Cipro filled. I shiver in the air conditioning. It’s because I have a fever, Mrs. Clancy tells me. Soon I’ll feel better.

  In the afternoon, I fall asleep and dream about my mother. She comes to me dressed in clothes the color of summer leaves, gold and deep green, shot through with splashes of yellow like sunlight. She wears a wreath of wildflowers in her hair—bachelor’s buttons, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, and others I don’t know the names of. She tells me she must return to the forest and she’s taking me with her. We’ll live in a tree there. Just before I wake up, she leans close to my ear and whispers, “I’m the daughter of the Green Man. I would have come for you sooner, but I’ve been under a spell.”

  It’s like a story I used to tell myself when I was little. I had lots of stories then. Sometimes my mother’s a Gypsy who travels with a carnival. She’s a sword swallower, she eats fire, she walks on tightropes and dances on stilts, she paints her face white and her lips red. She puts dots of red on her cheeks. She draws eyebrows like the wings of birds. She wears clothes sewn together from snips of this and that. In every town she comes to, she looks for a boy who might be her long-lost son. When she finally finds him, she takes him with her and teaches him to juggle and walk tightropes and dance on stilts. When he’s older, she’ll teach him to swallow swords and eat fire.

  There’s a sad story too. In this one, my mother is lost. She wanders down dark roads and through moonlit woods. She’s searching for the baby she left behind because she had no way to take care of him, but she doesn’t know how to find me or where to look. I’m a question at midnight, a few words whispered by the wind, a blurred reflection in rippling water, a voice in falling rain. My mother’s hair is long and dark and her face is pale and sorrowful. She weeps in the shadows. She has no place to go, no one to love. I cry if I think about this story too long.

  But no more stories. The truth is, my mother isn’t looking for me. She has five kids and she wishes she’d left them all at the hospital. Their noses run, their clothes are stained, she wishes she could run away from them and her husband. But she never does because she can’t think of a place to go.

  But this is a story too. Maybe it’s closer to the truth than the other stories, but it’s still a story. Something I made up when I was eight years old.

  With a sigh, I roll over and watch the leaf shadows shift and change on my wall.

  I spend a few days in bed. At first I’m too tired to do anything but stare out the window. Somewhere out of sight is my tree and my tree house. I picture the platform I built so carefully and the one below it that Shea and I built together. I wonder where the Green Man is and what he’s doing. Part of me wants to see him but another part is still angry and disappointed.

  Mrs. Clancy is obviously frustrated. She misses a day of work. She brings me meals in bed. She gives me medicine every six hours, which means she has to get up at night. There’s a lot of sighing and muttering. She keeps asking me who beat me up, who cut my hair.

  She goes on and on about the Green Man, whom she continues to refer to as the town drunk. Or one of them. He isn’t the only bum she’s seen drinking in the park. It’s not wise to hang out with a man like him, she says—he might, he could have, he didn’t, did he?

  No, I tell her, he didn’t.

  “Well, I’ve sent him packing,” she says. “He won’t show his face around my house again.”

  “He came here?” I ask her. “To see me?”

  She purses her lips and gives me the pouty look I hate. “He asked how you were. I told him I didn’t want him near you, I know who he is, I’ve seen him in the park with the others. I said I’d call the police if he bothered you. He left soon enough, I can tell you.”

  I turn my face to the wall. He might not be the Green Man, he might have lied and pretended to be something he wasn’t, but Mrs. Clancy shouldn’t have chased him away.

  “You want some ginger ale?” Mrs. Clancy asks.

  I shake my head. She doesn’t understand. She never will.

  On Monday, the doorbell rings. I hear Shea say, “Mr. Hailey asked me to bring Brendan his homework so he won’t get behind.”

  “Thanks. I’ll tell him you were here.”

  “Can I come in and see him? Please?”

  “Just a minute.” Mrs. Clancy walks down the hall and opens my door. I’m pulling on my jeans, so she looks the other way.

  “That girl’s here,” she says, “the one I saw at Mr. Hailey’s house. Can’t tell if she’s white or black or something in between. You want to see her?”

  “Of course I do. Her name’s Shea and she’s my best friend.” I push past Mrs. Clancy.

  Shea stands at the front door, her face pressed flat against the screen, waiting for me.

  “Don’t tire him out,” Mrs. Clancy tells Shea. “He’s been very sick.” And I’ve had to take care of him and miss work, which I can’t afford, and it hasn’t been a pleasure, I can tell you. Of course she doesn’t say this, but I know she’s thinking it.

  Shea and I sit in the lawn chairs on the porch. “Guess who I saw on the way home from summer school?” she asks. “The Green Man. He was waiting on the corner near the school. He wants to know how you are and when you’re coming back to the tree house. He says Mrs. Clancy won’t let him near you.”

  “It’s true,” I say. “Mrs. Clancy hates him. You’d think he was the one who beat me up.”

  “She can’t stop you from seeing him. What’s she going to do—follow you everywhere? I can just see her trampling through the woods, grumbling and muttering.”

  We both laugh. We imagine Mrs. Clancy in disguise—wearing sunglasses, a blond wig, a trench coat, trailing us like a bear heading for a blackberry bush. Crash, snap, rustle, crash, here she comes.

  “He told me his real name,” Shea goes on. “It’s Edward Calhoun, but he says we can call him Ed.”

  Ed, I think. Ed. How can I call him an ordinary name like Ed? It doesn’t suit him. “Do I have to call him Ed?”

  Shea shrugs. “I don’t care what you call him as long as you know he isn’t the real Green Man.”

  I fold my math paper into a square. “He isn’t the Green Man, but . . .” I don’t know how to finish my sentence, so I just let it stop.

  Shea looks thoughtful. “In a way, he is the green man,” she says. “But without the magic. He told me he’s lived in the woods ever since he came back from Vietnam. He has a sort of tent made of a camouflage tarp and log walls. When you get well, he says he’ll show it to us.”

  “I feel pretty good now.” I fold my math paper smaller and smaller, creasing the folds with my thumbnail, and then I toss it at her.

  Shea ducks, grabs it, and throws it at me. We bat it back and forth, back and forth. It bounces all over the porch with Shea and me in pursuit. We make so much noise, we don’t hear Mrs. Clancy until she says, “What are you doing? Do you want to have a relapse, Brendan?”

  Shea looks like she’s ready to run for home, but I grab her arm to stop her. “Can Shea and I go for a walk?” I ask. “I feel great. Honest.”

  “He looks great,” Shea tells Mrs. Clancy. “Except for his hair.”

  We both laugh and Shea adds, “If anyone asks, he can say he got scalped by the worst barber in town.”

  I rub my head. The scabs are still there and they itch, but at least they don’t hurt. Mrs. Clancy did her best to trim the tufts Sean left. My bruises are yellow and green instead of red and purple and black, but my ribs still hurt from being kicked.

  “All right, all right,” Mrs. Clancy says. “Go for a walk but don’t be gone long. You haven’t got your strength back, Brendan. A
few blocks, that’s all.”

  Truthfully, I’m glad she says that. My legs feel weak and wobbly from lying in bed so long. I don’t think I can make it to the woods.

  Shea looks at me as if she expects me to argue, but I shrug and say, “Okay.”

  We’re halfway down the front walk when Mrs. Clancy calls, “And another thing—if you see that man, don’t talk to him.”

  Shea looks at me. “Does she mean Ed?”

  “Of course.” The pervert, the drunk, the bum, I hear Mrs. Clancy say.

  “Why does she hate him so much? Does she think he’ll molest you or something?”

  “She has a small mind.” I measure with my fingers about an inch apart.

  “Like most adults,” she says glumly. “They always think the worst.”

  “Maybe we should run away to Never Never Land,” I say.

  “To do that, we have to trap Peter Pan’s shadow in a bureau drawer. And then, when he comes to get it, he’ll teach us to fly and then . . .” She stops and frowns. “And then and then and then.”

  “And then we grow up. But we stay just like we are now. Inside, I mean. We will never be real-lifers—the kind of people who think big expensive houses and fancy clothes and boring jobs are all that matters.”

  We crook our little fingers together as a promise and head down Main Street. Shea has enough money for sodas, so we stop at Joe’s Diner and grab seats at the counter. The waitress looks at me. “What happened to your hair?”

  “He had brain surgery,” Shea says in a low voice. “They had to shave his head and saw his skull open and take out a tumor the size of a grapefruit. If you think he looks bad now, you should’ve seen him last month.”

  The waitress flushes and looks away from me. “I’m so sorry,” she murmurs, and busies herself fixing sodas.

  Shea and I start laughing. We try to stifle it but we can’t. The waitress comes back with our drinks. “If that’s your idea of a joke, it’s not funny,” she tells Shea, and slams our glasses down on the counter. “That will be three dollars. I was going to give him his for nothing, but not now.”