Until I Find You

Jack was familiar with the expression, but its application to his penis was alarming. “I don’t want Mister Penis to cry,” he said.

“Eet ees happening any meenute, dahleen. Don’t be afraid—eet won’t hurt.”

But Jack was afraid. (Hadn’t Chenko warned him about ending up underneath her?) “I’m scared, Mrs. Machado!” he cried.

“Eet’s almost feeneeshed, Jack.”

He felt something leave him. If he had tried to describe the feeling to The Gray Ghost, she would have told him that he’d lost his soul. Something momentous had departed, but its departure went almost unnoticed—like childhood. Jack would imagine, for years, that this was the moment he turned his back on God—without meaning to. Maybe God had slipped away when Jack wasn’t looking.

“What was that?” he asked Mrs. Machado, who had stopped grinding against him.

“Tears of joy. Eet’s your first time, I theenk.”

Not his first time, in fact. (The first time, Jack’s tears of joy had hit Penny Hamilton in the forehead.) “It’s my second time,” the boy told Mrs. Machado. “But the first time I forgot to breathe. This time was better.”

“Ha!” Mrs. Machado cried. “You can’t keed me, dahleen.”

He didn’t try to persuade her. When a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman is sitting on you, and you weigh only seventy-five pounds, you don’t argue. Besides, Jack was fascinated to watch Mrs. Machado dress herself. She did such a leisurely job of it, especially when you consider how quickly she had undressed. Mrs. Machado continued to sit on him while she put on her bra and tank top; finally she had to get off him when she put on her panties and the powder-blue gym shorts.

There was a wet spot on the bed, which Mrs. Machado wiped away with the towel. She put the towel in the laundry hamper and filled the bathtub only half full, instructing Jack to wash himself—Mister Penis in particular. Jack was aware of a strong, unfamiliar smell, which went away in the bath. What was strange about the smell was that he couldn’t decide if he liked it.

The wet spot was still damp when Jack got back in bed, but Mrs. Machado had fetched a pair of clean boxers, which she told him to put on. He lay down—not on the wet spot, but near enough to it that he could touch it with his hand. The spot was cold, and Jack felt a chill—as if he were kneeling on the stone floor of the chapel with his back turned to God, or maybe one of those women attending to Jesus in the stained glass above the altar had slipped into bed with him.

He knew that the stained-glass woman was a saint, because she was invisible. Mrs. Machado couldn’t see her, but Jack could feel the coldness coming off her unseen body, which was as hard as the stone floor of the chapel and as forbidden to touch as the stained glass above the altar, where she had come from.

“Don’t go,” he whispered to Mrs. Machado.

“Eet’s time to sleep, my dahleen.”

“Please don’t go!” the boy begged her.

Jack was somehow sure that the stained-glass saint was waiting for Mrs. Machado to leave. He didn’t know what plans the saint had for him. He touched the cold, damp spot in the bed again, but he didn’t dare reach beyond it, not knowing what he might feel.

“Tomorrow we’ll wrestle like crazy,” Mrs. Machado was saying. “No more keecking, just wrestling!”

“I’m afraid,” Jack told her.

“Does eet hurt, dahleen?”

“Does what hurt?”

“Meester Penis.”

“No, but it feels different,” he said.

“Eet ees different! Meester Penis has a secret.”

“What secret?”

“What happened to Meester Penis is our secret, dahleen.”

“Oh.”

Had he agreed to share Mrs. Machado’s secret? He felt the saint slip away, or maybe it was Jack himself who slipped away. Had the saint turned back into stained glass? (Or was it Jack’s childhood he felt slip away?)

“Boa noite,” Mrs. Machado whispered in Portuguese.

“What?”

“Good night, leetle one.”

“Good night, Mrs. Machado.”

From the bedroom doorway, she was backlit by the light at the far end of the guest-wing hall. Seeing her squat, thick silhouette made Jack remember Chenko’s observation of Mrs. Machado’s stance as a wrestler—namely, that she stood like a bear on its hind legs, as if Mrs. Machado might have felt more at home on all fours.

From the hall, as if to remind him of their secret, Mrs. Machado whispered one more time: “Boa noite, Meester Penis.”

Jack didn’t sleep well; he had dreams, of course. Was he worried that the stained-glass saint would slip back into his bed while he slept—or more worried that she had turned her back on him, as he feared he had turned his back on God?

Jack was aware that his mother and Mrs. Oastler had come home, not because he woke up when his mom came into his bedroom and kissed him—at least his mom said she came into his room and kissed him, every night—but because the lights in the hall had changed. No longer was there a light on at the far end of the corridor, but the door to his mother’s room was ajar and the light from her bathroom glowed dimly in the hall. The light in Jack’s bathroom was also on, and it cast a thin, bright line of light under the door.

Jack was aware of his wet dream, too, because the cold, damp area of his bed had dried—but near it was a wetter spot, still warm, where the little guy had shed a few more tears of joy. Maybe he’d been dreaming about Mrs. Machado. He wondered if he would tell Emma about his wet dream, which Emma had anticipated for so long. (Jack Burns wondered if he would ever tell anyone about Mrs. Machado.)

He got out of bed and crossed the hall to his mother’s room, but his mom wasn’t there; her bed wasn’t even turned down. Jack went looking for his mother in the dark mansion. Mrs. Machado must have gone home, because the downstairs lights were off. The boy wandered from the guest wing into the hallway that led past Emma’s empty bedroom. There was a flickering light; it came from under Leslie Oastler’s bedroom door.

Maybe Mrs. Oastler and his mom were watching television, Jack was thinking. He knocked on the door, but they didn’t hear him. Or maybe he forgot to knock and just opened the door. The TV was off—it was a candle on the night table that was flickering.

He thought at first that Mrs. Oastler was dead. Her body was arched as if her spine were broken, and her head was hanging off the side of the bed so that her face was turned toward Jack—but her face was upside down. The boy could tell that she didn’t see him. She was naked and her eyes were wide and staring, as if the dim light from the hall had made Jack invisible—or else he was the one who was dead and Mrs. Oastler was looking right through him. Maybe he’d died during his wet dream, Jack imagined. (It would not have surprised him to learn that the experience with Mrs. Machado had killed him—not just the high-groin kick, but all the rest of it.)

Alice sat up suddenly and covered her breasts with both hands. She was naked, too, but Jack had not seen her in the bed until she moved. She sat bolt-upright with Leslie Oastler’s legs wrapped around her. Mrs. Oastler hadn’t moved, but Jack saw that her eyes had regained their focus; he was greatly relieved that she saw him.

“I didn’t die, but I had a dream,” Jack told them.

“Go back to your room, Jack—I’ll be right there,” his mom told him.

Alice was looking for her nightgown, which she found tangled in the sheets at the foot of the bed. Leslie Oastler just lay there naked, staring at Jack. In the candlelight, the rose-red, rose-pink petals of her Rose of Jericho looked like two shades of black—black and blacker.

Jack was in the hall, going back to his room, when he heard Mrs. Oastler say: “You shouldn’t still be sleeping in the same bed with him, Alice—he’s too old.”

“I only do it when he’s had a bad dream,” Alice told her.