Keeping Watch

  And when Allen wasn’t there? Well, those were usually the times when he’d imagine Father looking on. He’d almost convinced himself that Father really was there, behind the mirror that had to be a one-way window, until Allen found out what he was thinking and took him behind it to see. But when the men with the suits started in on him, asking him about dates and when his father had been home and when he hadn’t, and who they had seen when they were in Vegas one time, and the places they’d flown last summer, and a hundred other things he knew the answers to deep down, he couldn’t tell them because he’d look over the shoulder of Father’s lawyer and see Father’s ghost through the glass—or after they moved to the room with the stupid bright kiddie prints on the wall, he’d see someone in the hall or walking down the street and think it was Father, even though he knew that Father was in jail.

  Yes, when Allen was in the room, there was more air to breathe, and he could think better, and Father’s ghostly figure wasn’t as substantial.

  But sometimes he hated it when Allen was there. Sometimes he’d be sitting in his chair with a clean man in a suit going at him—really polite, they always were, and Father’s lawyers were always ready whenever they got too pushy, but he could tell they wanted to pry him open like a clam. And he’d start to feel Father there, looking on, approving of his son’s silence, like it was strength under fire. Then Jamie would feel a little smile begin to grow on his face, like he and Father had a secret. And it was true, Father always knew, he knew what Jamie was thinking and what he was going to do—he’d have known what Jamie was up to back in May if he’d been around and not off in one of those places the suit men kept asking about. And Jamie was absolutely gut-certain that Father knew now, even locked in jail, exactly what Jamie was doing and saying, and those times when Jamie just stared at the clean men and thought, Oh, go fuck yourself—that was when Father would stir in the back of his mind, and nod his approval, and Jamie would smile to himself, an echo of that scary smile of Father’s.

  But then Allen would come in and Father would fade in Jamie’s mind just a little, and he’d just hate Allen, hate him for a few minutes until the extra air kicked in, and he’d remember Allen was his friend, and get confused again.

  Yes, all in all, Jamie wished he could just cut out his brain and stop thinking.

  But maybe not today. Today, at last—weeks and weeks after Allen and his brother had set the trap in the woods that Father had walked into, where Howard had died—Jamie was finally going to see Father. He’d been aware for some time that lawyers were maneuvering and people were fighting over this, and he’d tried not even to think about it, knowing it might never happen, and not knowing how he’d feel about it if it did.

  Because Father was sure to be really mad. With good reason—Jamie had brought this all down on him, Jamie’s unwillingness to be raised as Father saw fit, Jamie’s sissy-weakness that Father had worked so long to cure. And Father was sure to be mad in other ways, too: One thing Jamie had learned since May was, normal people didn’t live like that. Normal fathers didn’t do things to their sons like his did; when they went hunting, they hunted the deer; when they needed to be gone for a day or two, they got a baby-sitter, they didn’t lock their kid in a dark room or leave him in a cabin in the woods.

  Of course, Father would say that “normal” is another word for “stupid.” Ordinary people played baseball with their kids and helped them with their homework because they wanted their kids to be as stupid as they were, as dull and boring and spineless and weak. Herd animals. Father was something else, and his son would be something else, too. Stronger, more independent, with sharp teeth.

  Funny thing was, it was Allen who’d been the soldier, tough and trained—and you could see it, if you looked, see that there was something hard as rocks inside him. Yet it was Allen who now went along with the herd, who allowed the FBI and everyone to do things their way even though he very obviously thought they were clueless; Allen who’d walked freely into confinement, who stuck around when he clearly hated it, who could so easily walk away to freedom but let himself be dragged down by Jamie, and Rae, and even Jerry. Stupid. Weak to hang around, to put himself through hours of interviews where no one wanted him—not the suit men, not the lawyers, not Jamie. Stupid not to have dealt with Father when he had the chance, like a soldier (wasn’t this a war?). If he’d just shot Father—not that Jamie wanted that to have happened, but if he had—then it all could have ended and Jamie would be free of all this confusion and crap and he could get on with life, even though he’d hate Allen forever for killing Father, and probably never want to look at him again. But instead Allen and his brother had busted Father (and Jamie still couldn’t understand how that had happened, still held a strong suspicion that Father had arranged his own arrest as part of some incomprehensible scheme) and there was Father behind bars, more like a spider behind his web, tugging at them all through the lawyers, waiting there in jail until it was time for his lawyers to get him out.

  And they would, Jamie could feel that. The pressure was on, the men in suits seeming to sweat as they pressed him for information, giving Jamie the impression that they’d just love to take him by the throat and shake it out of him, even when they looked cool and unconcerned on the outside. Allen was there at most of the interviews now, never telling Jamie what to say, just being there and looking on, keeping the suits and lawyers in line and giving him room to breathe.

  Like he was going to be inside the room today, when Jamie and his father would meet for the first time since May.

  Jamie remembered thinking, during that strange drive away from Montana when he’d imagined he was leading Father away from the Johnsons, that if Allen tried to get between him and Father, Allen wouldn’t stand a chance. And it was weird that, even though Allen seemed to be ordinary and weak, Jamie was no longer quite so certain that Father’s capture had been a fluke, or part of a clever plan. He’d even thought, lying awake the night before, that with the three of them in a room together, he himself might be the one who got torn apart.

  But again, he couldn’t decide how he would feel, if Allen turned out to be a match for Father. He did honestly hate Allen for putting Father behind bars. If he and Alice had just left Jamie the hell alone back in May, it would be all right, instead of this. Well, maybe not all right, because even before deadboy, Father’d had sharp teeth, like a tiger, a man-eating tiger. But wasn’t Jamie his son? Wasn’t Jamie strong and independent as well, with teeth and claws and brains?

  Love and hate went round and round and it was all so confusing. He was nearly thirteen now, but some days he just wished someone would pick him up and hold him and tell him in a calm voice what to do.

  Oh, Jamie really wished he could just stop thinking.

  Allen Carmichael sat on the hard deck chair, a beer on his knee and the lights playing across the water in front of him, but he paid no attention to either, because he was thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with Jamie and Mark O’Connell. He was dreading it, had hated the very thought of it ever since it was proposed—his every instinct shouted, Keep the boy away from his father. But he was the one who’d proposed it, he’d fought for it, he’d wheedled and maneuvered and made vows he probably wouldn’t be able to keep, because Jamie had asked him for it.

  Don’t let him see the man, don’t let the bastard get his screws back into the boy.

  Allen Carmichael had been an advocate for children half his life, allying himself to their needs and wishes as he worked out the burden laid on him by the blue-eyed cave demon. He had thought he was accustomed to laying his trust at the feet of the children he served, thought he knew what it was to take risks. But never like this.

  Keep Jamie away from him, lock the bastard away and lose the key.

  And therein lay the problem. A man downing his own plane might be fined for littering, or pollution, but O’Connell hadn’t even made an insurance claim. And there were no laws against taking skydiving classes, or buying a pristine twelve-year-old diary f
rom an antiquarian bookstore in Denver just before Christmas last year and faking a record of your child’s history, or misleading your son into thinking that you were incompetent when it came to computers, or sending your tame thug up to Montana to talk to a little girl, or half the other sins the feds had tagged the man with. There was no evidence that Jamie had ever been locked in that bare, windowless room adjoining his father’s, nor that he had been parked in a remote cabin during one of the times when a target in Reno or Cincinnati had been hit. Oh sure, CPS would hold on to the boy for a while, but Allen did not imagine that a foster placement would deter Mark O’Connell for two minutes, once he was out.

  Everyone knew that from the purchase of the diary to the smashing of the potentially incriminating hard drive on Jamie’s computer—Jamie’s, but which his father also used when he wanted to hide the evidence of his activities—the man’s meticulous planning was aimed at closing down his operation and providing Jamie as a suspect for murder. Everyone but Jamie knew this, but so far the accumulated charges were all financial, and sooner or later O’Connell’s lawyers were going to hit on a judge with no imagination and a hefty respect for defendants’ rights, who would grant the man bail. And then he’d vanish.

  Only Jamie stood in his way. Jamie, who claimed he couldn’t remember half the places he’d been, any of the times he’d been abandoned for a crucial day or two. Jamie, whose clever mind had pieced together the story he’d blurted out to Allen, Jerry, and Ed, but who had since that night proved uncertain on chapter and verse. Jamie, who loved his father and desperately longed for the man’s blessing with all the passion in his confused, abused soul. Jamie, whom Allen would accompany to a confrontation with the father who had been setting him up, using him as a carpenter uses a nail or a hit man a scope (although the feds were proving wildly unsuccessful at proving that role too).

  He’d talked it over endlessly, with Rachel and Jerry, Alice and Rae, and several highly competent psychologists, and not one of them could tell him any more than he knew. Seeing his father would be bad for the boy; not seeing him would in the long run be worse.

  The feds were desperate enough that when Allen pointed out that he alone had a chance of prying the facts out of Jamie, they believed him. And when he told them that he would only do so if they allowed Jamie a visit with his father, they believed that as well. In fact, Allen had no intention of carrying out his half of the bargain. He did not for a moment doubt that he could break Jamie’s silence, had no question at all that the boy would testify if Allen drove him to it. But he would not do that, because to force Jamie would be to lose him. He’d be saving Jamie from his father, by becoming the father himself.

  As he’d snatched Mouse from one atrocity, by flinging him into another.

  And so he’d told the boy, Do what you think is right, praying that it was enough, knowing that when the boy came face-to-face with the father he so craved, those six little words would probably blow up in Allen’s face. Trip wires worked both ways.

  But in the end, all Allen could do was trust.

  At some point during that long and sleepless night, the realization stole into Allen’s mind that he was, again, keeping watch over a sleeping platoon. All his life, he had been assembling a far-flung platoon composed of nervy women with thousand-yard stares and their shell-shocked children who knew firsthand the meaning of “friendly fire.” He worked with them because it was the closest he could get to being with a bunch of vets: Until Rae, there was no bullshit with them, no need to explain hidden messages, no reason to pretend that life was pretty. They understood war stories, and although they didn’t have any room in their minds for black humor at first, give them a few weeks of safety, they managed just fine. There was not one woman he’d ever slept with that he felt as close to as the women he’d helped to disappear, not a kid among his blood relations he’d choose over one of the beaten children he took in hand.

  It was the reason, he supposed, that he loved Rae, who was as damaged as they come. And the reason he’d never felt as close to Jerry as he wanted to, because Jerry was basically a nice guy who knew the world’s pain from the outside.

  Thing was, a person needed a community that spoke the same language. People who had been there, whom he could trust not to get it wrong. People who could come to trust him, through shared ordeals. People like Jamie O’Connell.

  All that night, Allen Carmichael kept vigil at the side of a boy twenty miles away, thinking of green things, sitting between The Wolf and a man with a streak in his dark hair, seeing before him a black hand gentling a blond head. And the next morning, driving through the rain, the whirl of Allen’s mind calmed and grew still, until it seemed that he was traveling through a great and ringing silence. It persisted all the way to the jail, through the gates and the check-ins, into the conference room with its long table and forest of chairs, a room cleared of anything that might be adapted as a weapon, a private space set aside for their use. Jamie was already there, looking small and cold. Allen rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder, said hello, asked if he was all right. Then he took a chair to the side, so as not to come between the boy and his father.

  And with a rattle at the door, the man himself was there, wearing the ordinary shirt and jeans Allen had suggested instead of the orange jail-issue suit, the guards removing his handcuffs, his glance discarding Allen as he’d discarded the sight of Jerry’s badge, seeking out the child with the huge, dark eyes filled with such terrible hope. The man rubbed his wrists and smiled, that warm, charming, self-assured expression he’d used so often, and his voice when he spoke resonated with affection, approval, and humor.

  “Hello, son.”

  And Jamie stepped into his father’s arms like the last piece of a puzzle, fitting home.

  Chapter 36

  The two O’Connells held each other long and hard, blond hair bent over dark, a man’s muscles around the boy’s slimness. When O’Connell gently pushed his son from him, it was to look down into his eyes and say, “You’ve grown,” with a crooked smile that acknowledged the past months even as it dismissed them.

  Jamie tentatively returned the smile. “Almost half an inch.”

  “No, it’s got to be more than that. Three-quarters, I’m sure.”

  Pleased, Jamie shook his head and said without thinking, “I just got measured. Maybe it’s your shoes.” Then he froze, catching too late his reference to the jail-issue footgear his father had on. But O’Connell only laughed, stretching out one leg to display the cheap canvas shoes he wore.

  “You like the clothes, son?”

  “They don’t really look like you,” Jamie agreed, and Allen flashed briefly on the half-empty closet, its custom suits cleared out and as yet undiscovered.

  “You should see the jumpsuit I usually wear—makes me look like that Vegas mechanic. The one you like—what’s his name?”

  “Nick,” Jamie provided. It was a flattery game—Allen would have bet his left hand that O’Connell remembered the man’s name.

  “Nick, that’s right. The guy who wanted you to come work for him in the summer, thought he could pay Mark O’Connell’s son minimum wages. Can you see that happening, Mr. Carmichael?”

  He didn’t look at Allen when he asked the question, nor did Allen look up from the contemplation of his own hands. “Nothing wrong with honest work. Teaches a man self-respect.”

  “He’s right,” O’Connell told his son. “You might even enjoy it for a couple of months, James, maybe during high school. Hey, that’s only two years from now, isn’t it? We ought to think about where you want to go. There are some great schools in the Bay Area. Or boarding schools, if you’d rather. But there’s plenty of time to talk about that.”

  Jamie nodded, and his father, picking up on some faint hesitation, deflected it with physical movement, resting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and walking with him to the chairs at the table.

  He was good, Allen saw, watching as the con man maneuvered his son into a chair angling away fro
m Allen. He touched Jamie’s shoulders just enough to remind the boy of his hunger to be held, and then stood away, taking one of the other chairs and moving it so he and the boy were facing each other. Allen could see why the man had made such a success of bilking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs out of their money: His words and body language were enormously self-assured and letter-perfect, letting his son know that this was the most temporary of situations, one that they both needed to regard with good-tempered resignation. Allen fought down the urge to yank Jamie out before it went any further.

  “Anyway, son, you look great. You’ve been taking care of yourself over the summer, I’m glad to see.”

  “I missed you.”

  “Oh, man, I’ve missed you, too. Oh, James, you can’t imagine how awful it was, getting that call from Mrs. Mendez. I was . . . devastated. When I found you were alive last month, I was so happy.”

  “But I wrote you a letter, saying I ran away but I was safe.”

  “You wrote—I never got a letter.” The look on O’Connell’s face hastily arranged itself from puzzlement to dismay, but in between the two, Allen had seen the brief instant when the man remembered the letter. He didn’t think Jamie had noticed his father’s snap decision to lie.

  “I wrote so you wouldn’t worry, and so the police wouldn’t look so hard. I didn’t really say in it why I ran away, but I wanted to. And I want to now.”

  “Son, that’s all in the past. It’s time to move on.”

  “But Father, I—”

  “Son, why don’t you call me Dad, or Daddy? ‘Father’ is finished with. You’re practically grown up.” He reached out a finger to brush a lock of hair from Jamie’s forehead; Allen felt a sudden urge to rip the finger off and stuff it down the man’s throat. “I’ll get this all straightened up and get out of here, and you and I will go off somewhere. Then we can talk and talk and figure out what went wrong and how to make it right. How about that?”