So he didn’t tell, but he thought all the time about Ian and he asked if he could help the nuns in the kitchen. They said he could. He washed potatoes, and then he could hear the telly and the radio without them knowing. He watched the lines on the TV so he could make out some words, because he still couldn’t read or write. After a while, he started to recognize lots of words. He found words in a book of fairy tales and more in a book of children’s prayers.
He started writing his letters to Frank, although he knew him only as “the Fireman.”
Colin was sure that when he completed one, the nuns would find a way to send it. He would talk to them, without talking, and they would. He didn’t give them any of the letters, though. He wanted to wait until he was sure of the best one, the one named Mary Dominic, who always gave him sweets that her younger sister sent to her, little sugar half-moons that tasted like oranges and strawberries. He told her he didn’t know nuns had real sisters, and Mary Dominic started to cry.
Colin took action.
“She’s sad,” Colin told Mother Elizabeth Gray. “She wants to go home to her real sisters.”
“She’s not really sad, Colin,” said Mother Elizabeth Gray. “She’s just going through the hard time people go through when they have a vacation.”
One day in the late afternoon, he overheard the program that Brian Donovan made about his family. He saw the picture. He heard the name of the firefighter, Frank Mercy, whom the TV guy called “my gallant brother-in-law.” He would have to change the name on all the letters!
Sister Agatha said, “Sister, please turn that off. There’s a young one here who has had enough of—”
But then Colin screamed, first with this mind and then with his mouth, “No!”
All the nuns came running, from all over the building. Even the ones out in the garden heard him scream, in their minds.
“What, child?” Mother Elizabeth Gray said.
“That little boy! That is my gallant brother,” Colin said.
All the nuns clustered around.
Which picture had his brother in it? Could Colin tell if the brother was alive? Colin wasn’t sure; Ian couldn’t talk to him, but he had a notion that he would know if Ian had died. After all, he told Frank, just a few seconds before he hit his head and passed out, “I saw you grab Ian, Dad.”
Frank could tell that Colin didn’t want him to react to the use of the word Dad, so he simply nodded.
The big man from the telly showed up three days later. He walked with a stick but he was kind. He said he had two girls who died in the flood. He took Colin out for lunch, for a huge lunch of shrimp and chips. He took pictures of Colin with a camera that made the pictures right there before your eyes, and gave Colin one and promised he would send the other one to Frank Mercy.
Six sleeps later (Colin counted every night by making a little mark on the wall with his toothbrush), Mother Elizabeth Gray came to tell him to make sure he had a good shower and wore the clothes given to him by the women from the committee, because he was going to the United States the next day.
“Jesus Christ!” Colin said.
“Don’t swear, lad,” the nun told him.
Colin told the mother nun that he was praying. “Why am I going?” he asked her.
“Someone there is sending for you. Someone who has your brother. You have an uncle there.”
“Were you excited?” Frank asked. “About leaving?”
“No, scared.”
“Of course, you didn’t know me.”
“I thought you could be a bad guy. You could work for them. You still could work for them.”
And why not? They’d been little children living with what sounded like rather bemused hippie parents. Their mother died. Their father died. Except for Cora, the people they were left with treated Ian like a tool. They made Ian do things that Colin knew were stealing. They went on planes to cities. Sometimes they slept on the airplanes. Ian asked people to give him pictures from the walls in big white buildings that only had pictures and jewelry from locked stores with buzzers to let you in. The man in the soft clothes and the red-haired girl always took them, not the Hula man or anyone else.
Always those two. They dressed differently every time, in hats and wigs. The man made his hair blond.
“There would have been cameras in the walls at those places,” Frank told Colin. “They take pictures of those paintings because they’re very valuable.”
Not very good cameras, he thought.
But Frank didn’t know where the museums were, or what had happened to any of the security systems before the pair brought in their risk-free, blood-free, hassle-free theft device.
“She took us to this place once where they had little dolls that were God,” Colin said. “Little dolls made out of rocks. They took us to the racetrack a lot. That’s why Ian likes horses so much.”
Wherever they went, they saw people who were friends of theirs and Ian made them give things to them.
“Did you ever tell the people you didn’t want to be with the man or the red-haired girl?”
Colin’s eyes saucered. “No!”
“Were you scared to?”
“She said Shut the fuck up or I will fucking kill you.”
How colorful.
“So you thought I might have fooled Mother Elizabeth? Did you tell her you were afraid?”
“I was afraid more to stay there. It would have made me mental.”
“I’m surprised he isn’t mental anyhow,” Claudia said to Frank, later. “He might never trust anyone.” She paused. “At least, like I said, it didn’t happen when he was older.”
“Can you be grateful for something awful that happened,” Frank asked her, “just because it didn’t happen later?”
TWENTY-FOUR
THEY HAD DECIDED to arrive at Dr. Campo’s on the earliest flight, the morning of Thanksgiving day, leaving on the Saturday night. Frank was happy about that. In and out. Not too much scrutiny from Claudia’s sisters. Albert Campo was the second generation of Campo physicians, his mother a doctor in the United States Air Force, and Claudia was, she said, her father’s favorite, the one who’d followed in his footsteps.
Then she brought up Julia Madrigal.
That was another story.
Frank had forgotten about the woman Claudia had met when she was a medical student. The woman who was like Ian, who was the reason that Claudia hadn’t run from him like he was on fire, back on Edie’s wedding day when she saw Ian stop the neighborhood horse thief in his tracks. He didn’t suspect a setup. But when Claudia suggested that they visit her, being, as it were, in the neighborhood, Frank felt queasy. It all seemed too southern and gothic. There was nothing he wanted to do less than climb up to some tumbledown cabin to encounter an eccentric who shot squirrels with an old and unreliable rifle. Frank was, irrationally, he admitted, deeply suspicious of anyone who lived south of Peoria, Illinois.
“I don’t know if I want them to meet her,” Frank said, when they were on the plane. It was nine in the morning and the boys had fallen instantly to sleep. Claudia had already called the woman, and made an appointment to drop by for a cup of tea on Friday. Frank hadn’t objected—which was not, to him, the same as agreeing.
“What? Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want to be rude. And you just sort of bulled ahead with it . . .”
“I did not bull ahead with it, Frank. I asked you if it was okay, and you shrugged your shoulders. That’s the same as an oration from you!”
“I did not say yes.”
“Well, what are you scared of? She’s not a goblin. She has more experience with this than Ian and Colin put together, too. They’ve lived it, but she’s lived it longer. What if she has some insight about how to help them manage?”
“She won’t.”
“What if she does?”
“She won’t.”
“If only you weren’t so truculent!” Claudia told him. People in the airplane glanced up from
their newspapers.
“I’m not . . . what?” Frank said. He knew perfectly well what truculent meant.
“Silent to the point of irritability. Unforthcoming. An asshole.”
“I’m not in the least silent, Claudia. I just don’t emote, like you do. I’m betting she’ll say, Well, everyone’s different. And she’d be right. Big deal.”
“But how has this affected her life? I think I remember that she kept to herself. Do we want the boys to”—she made quote marks in the air with her fingertips—“keep to themselves?”
Frank didn’t answer at first. He had begun counting out his life in incident-free increments, bundles of days. It had been weeks since the fire and Linnet-like-the-bird’s attempt on the boys. In Frank’s ordinary life, the one he’d planned to have, any one of a dozen incidents in the past five months would have been the signal event of a decade. In this reconstructed life, an ordinary day was rare and treasured. Why not just be happy? The teacher scrawled radiant praise all over Colin’s homework papers. There were no more mutterings of mayhem. Ian was the sunny center of his class. (Ian also got excellent grades, at whatever kindergartners got grades for, although Frank couldn’t be sure that Ian wasn’t putting the moves on the teacher’s brain through some kind of sweet-natured necromancy.) The mother of the satanic triplets now brought them to Tenacity Farms in the way a pilgrim would approach a shrine. Eden’s pregnancy was blossoming. Hope’s health was good.
Why ask any questions at all?
Still, he knew that this fragile bubble would burst, in a way that Frank hoped would not be threatening or grotesque. He knew full well that these people—nameless, but so described by Colin that Frank felt sure he could pick them out of a lineup—weren’t going to give up. Linnet and her not-real-father and the man with the lightning tattoo, the Hula man, the fireman, whoever else there was, they wanted Ian back as much as Frank wanted to keep him—for reasons exactly antithetical in the universe of reasons.
How would anyone manage a long life with those kinds of stresses? Why even think about them? Claudia, meanwhile, waited for him to answer her, her temper visibly escalating. Was he afraid? Was he afraid of seeing what Ian and Colin could become?
Frank changed the subject. He said, “Do you think Ian is too nice?”
“I think it’s the way he is.”
“Nobody could blame Colin for being so mad he wanted to kill somebody, the way he was when he came. But Ian’s nice to everyone. He’s almost supernaturally, what would you say, caring. He really cares. He hardly ever has a tantrum . . .”
“There’s no reason to have a tantrum if you think, I want manicotti and you get manicotti. I’m surprised we don’t have it every night,” Claudia said.
“There are kids who run their parents like that without any particular powers except their parents are too tired.”
“Somebody might say it was reaction formation,” Claudia said. “He’s so nice because in reality, he’s so mad he wants to kill somebody, too . . .”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
“I’m not the one saying that. Some people would say that.”
“It’s farfetched.”
“But maybe that exaggerated sympathy is what people—”
“And dogs. And horses—”
“Beings. Creatures. They could be responding to that overly nice—”
“I think that’s nuts.”
“I think you’re nuts,” Claudia said. “You’re the world’s youngest grouchy old man.” She finished her ginger ale and asked, “Do you think about Natalie all the time these days? And that you would have been a father by now?”
Frank’s breath hitched. The baby . . . his son . . . would have been five months old. He’d have recognized Frank’s voice. Kids smiled by five months, maybe they sat up or something. Grief seized his gut like a cramp. The truth was, he thought of Natalie all the time, but he did not think of the baby.
He was a father. He had a boy. Ian. Colin.
“Are you nervous about me meeting your dad? Because I’m not a doctor? Because I’m just an ex-cop with a dirt farm?”
“It’s better than last time.”
“Wow!” Frank said. “What last time? Is it that the air is thin up here or what? More headlines in the last hour than in the last month!”
“I meant, the last time I took a man to meet my dad. And Becca and Miranda, and all my nieces. We all got married the same year, and only one princess got a shoe that didn’t fit.”
“Which one?” Claudia smiled and lifted the dregs of her ginger ale in the parody of a toast. Frank said, “Wait! You were married?”
“For a stupid, really stupid, not even agonizing, just stupid eleven months.”
“You never even said . . .”
“It wasn’t worth even saying. I got my lab partner confused with my life partner. I had this idea that I had to get married and have a baby or I never would. And I was twenty-five when I was thinking this. Then, one night, we were at a party and I caught him making out with this first-year, and I have no idea why, I was humiliated, and I threw a punch, and—”
“He hit you?”
“The girl hit me. The first-year! And she knocked me flat on my ass. I got a bruise on my eye like a plum. So I ran home to my mama and daddy. I never even picked up my clothes. He never tried to call me, and I never tried to call him. He had money, so I sold my big old engagement ring, and I packed up Prospero and I moved to Madison, and do you know what? I have no idea whatever happened to Prentice Allen. I have no idea where he is now.”
“I promise I won’t let anyone punch you in the eye,” Frank said.
• • •
Dr. Campo lived in a four-story log home girded with as many decks as there were doors. Each deck was equipped with wooden rockers that invited the occupants to look out upon mountain views so absurdly spectacular that Frank kept expecting someone to turn off the projector. Handed a camera, a blind man could have pointed it in any direction and created a calendar. To the east, notched into the chin of a taller hill, was a waterfall that spilled down into the open skirt of a river hole. The older man had earlier wrapped a bundle of egg sandwiches with slices of onion, and taken Ian and Claudia’s niece to fish until he had to go in to work, a brief round of visits to his patients at the medical center at Claudia’s alma mater, Duke. Dr. Campo—who said to Frank, “I know I should say, call me Al, but nobody calls me Al. I’m Albert”—specialized in cardiopulmonary bypass surgery. “It’s just like plumbing, Frank. Exactly like plumbing. You have a clog, you replace the pipes, tell him use some fiber now, Drano, keep those pipes open.” Albert quickly took the boys down to fish for trout, along with the youngest sister’s little girl, Ray, short for Ramona. “I’m not a fan of turkey, really,” Albert said. “Are you, Ray?”
“I love turkey, Grandpa,” she said. “I would eat it every day.”
“It’s bland, Ray. It’s not the Italian part of you that likes turkey. That’s why we’re having pheasant, Ray! It’s a nobler bird. And Cornish hens! Like having a little chicken all to yourself. The Italian part of you knows that all that’s better than turkey.”
“But all the other parts of me don’t know that,” she said.
The other girls, the older sister’s daughters, Angela and Mary, dressed Ian up in an old gypsy dance costume that had belonged to Claudia’s mother. All the sisters teared up. Colin held back.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” Frank asked him.
“They’re like . . . half-wits,” Colin said, sounding so grown up and weary of women that Frank couldn’t help but grin. “Can I go in there where the big TV is and watch hockey?” Billy, who still had no idea of what had really happened the night of the fire, said that next year, whatever age he was, Colin would have to move up a class.
“I’m so sorry about your wife,” said Becca. Her husband had yet to arrive, delayed at work, like Miranda’s husband, Mark, who was a private caterer. Frank smiled briefly in acknowledgment. People always told him th
at they couldn’t imagine the tsunami, and, since they were correct—even if they had seen videos, they really couldn’t imagine it—he never elaborated. Not long after, they sat down to dinner, Colin by then awake and ravenous, Ian content to watch this celebration of gluttony, a holiday he had never seen.
“Rad says to go on ahead without him,” Becca told everyone. Rad was her husband. They sat down. But when he was served a Cornish hen with wild-rice dressing, Ian, who ate everything, refused to even try it. He said it was creepy.
“Picky eater?” Becca said. “I had one of them. Got to cure him. Tabbouleh for a week.”
“No, really not. He loves food,” Frank told her. “What’s up, buddy?” Ian flushed. Frank might not have noticed it if Becca hadn’t leaned over at that moment to light the candles, eight of them in two small and one big candelabra. Darkness pressed close against the windows, having fallen, as it sometimes does, rather than slipped down slowly. Frank could still see a halo of fading purple crown the crest of the tallest visible mountain.
“They’re babies,” Ian said. “I don’t want to eat a baby.”
Colin had come back. “They’re grown up, Ian. They’re just little. Little tiny chicken legs.”
“That makes me gag, Collie.”
Everyone laughed, and Ian, still wearing the gypsy shirt and a spangled kerchief, got up. As if he’d seen leaves turn over and clouds begin to pile, Frank sensed a storm. Not now, Ian, not in front of . . . He stopped himself, realizing he’d been about to think, family. But Ian simply walked away, muttering “excuse me,” and went to the nearest bedroom, a small room that seemed to be in part used as a library, and lay down on the daybed, his face pressed into Frank’s light jacket. Frank swallowed the three bites it took to consume his whole meal, and then got up, intending to check on Ian. With his mind, Colin said, He’s a baby. He’s spoiled. Frank ignored Colin.