Until I Find You

two. When did this start?”

“I haven’t been rubbing it,” he told her.

“Don’t bullshit me, baby cakes. You’ve been whacking off so much that the little guy looks positively abused!”

“What’s ‘whacking off’?”

“You clearly know what it is, Jack. You’ve been masturbating.”

“What?”

“You’ve been giving yourself a hand job, Jack!”

“I didn’t do it to myself,” he said.

“Jack, you were doing it to yourself in your dream!” That was when Jack started to cry. He wanted Emma to believe him, but he didn’t know how to tell her. “Don’t cry, honey pie. We’ll make it all better.”

“How?”

“We’ll put some moisturizer on it or something. Don’t worry, Jack. This is what boys do—they beat off. I was wrong to think you were too young to be doing it.”

“I’m not doing it!” Jack insisted. He had to shout because she’d gone across the hall into his mother’s bathroom. She came back with some moisturizer. “Will it sting?” he asked her.

“Not this kind—only the kind with stuff in it stings.”

“What stuff?”

“Chemicals,” Emma said. “Perfume, unnatural shit, other stuff.” She was rubbing the lotion on his penis; it didn’t hurt, but he couldn’t stop crying. “You gotta get hold of yourself, honey pie. Beating off is no big deal.”

“I’m not beating off. It’s Mrs. Machado,” he told her.

Emma let go of the little guy in a hurry. “Mrs. Machado is touching you, Jack?”

“She does lots of things,” Jack said. “She puts Mister Penis inside her.”

“Mister Penis?”

“Mrs. Machado says Meester,” he told Emma.

“She puts you inside her where, baby cakes? In her mouth?” Emma asked, before he could answer her.

“In her mouth, too,” he said.

“Jack, what Mrs. Machado is doing is a crime!”

“A what?”

“It’s wrong, honey pie. I don’t mean you—you haven’t done anything wrong. But she has.”

“Please don’t tell my mom,” the boy said.

Emma put her arms around Jack and hugged him. “Honey pie,” she whispered, “we have to stop Mrs. Machado from doing this. We have to stop her.”

“You can stop her,” Jack suggested. “I bet you could stop her.”

“Yes, I bet I could,” Emma said darkly.

“Don’t go!” he begged her. He held her as tightly as he could. He knew she could hold him much tighter, but Emma went on holding him as before. She rubbed his back, between his shoulders, and she kissed his eyelids, which were still wet from crying, and she kissed his ears.

“I’ve got you, baby cakes. You just go to sleep, Jack. I’m not going anywhere.”

He fell into one of those dreamless sleeps, so deep he almost didn’t wake up for the argument. “He had a nightmare, for Christ’s sake,” Jack heard Emma saying. “I was just holding him until he went to sleep. I fell asleep, too. What do you think I was doing? Fucking him with all my clothes on?”

“You shouldn’t be in bed with Jack, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler was saying. “You were under the covers, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“I think it’s all right. I think Jack is fine,” Alice was saying.

“Oh, you think he’s fine. Well, I’m so fucking relieved to hear that!” Emma shouted.

“Don’t you use that tone of voice with Alice, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler said.

“Jack, are you awake?” Emma asked.

“I guess so,” he said.

“You have any bad dreams, you just let me know,” Emma told him. “You know where to find me.”

“Thank you!” Jack called after her as she was leaving.

“Emma—” Mrs. Oastler started to say.

“Let her go, Leslie,” Alice said. “I can tell that nothing happened.”

“Are you sure you’re okay, Jack?” Leslie asked.

“Sure I’m sure. I’m okay,” he told her. Jack looked at his mom as if she were his audience of one, although he knew that she wasn’t. “Nothing at all has happened,” he told her. Miss Wurtz would have approved of the boy’s enunciation. To Jack’s surprise, the lie was as simple to say as any line he’d ever delivered; for the first time, lying to his mother was actually easy to do.

Jack could hear Mrs. Oastler going down the hall. He heard the door to Emma’s room slam shut long before Leslie got there. He knew that his mom and Mrs. Oastler had made Emma madder than they made him, which was pretty mad—all things considered.

Jack smiled when his mother kissed him good night. He knew which of his smiles his mom liked best, and he gave it to her. He was tired and upset, but somehow he knew he would have a good night’s sleep. Mrs. Machado would meet her match in Emma Oastler—of that Jack had no doubt.

The following morning, Emma woke Jack before her mom was up. (Jack’s mother was never up in the morning; Mrs. Oastler always drove him to the Bathurst Street gym.) The boy usually got up and fixed himself a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast, and he drank a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice—by which time Leslie had come downstairs and made herself some coffee.

Mrs. Oastler was friendly to Jack in the mornings, but she wasn’t talkative. She smoothed the boy’s hair or patted the back of his neck with her hand, and she made him a sandwich for his lunch, which also included an apple and some cookies—especially if Leslie wanted to keep the cookies away from Emma.

But on this mid-August morning, Jack woke up with the ceiling fan going full speed. He saw Emma stuffing a pair of her shorts and socks and a T-shirt into his gym bag, where he carried his wrestling gear. “We’re getting to the gym early today, baby cakes. I’m your new workout partner, from now on. But I want to go over some moves with Wolf-Head before we start.”

“With Chenko?” Jack asked her.

“Yeah, with Wolf-Head,” Emma said.

“But why do we have to be early?” he asked.

“Because I’m a big girl, honey pie. Big girls gotta warm up.”

“Oh.”

There was already a note on the kitchen table when they padded downstairs in their bare feet—they were trying to be as quiet as they could. Emma must have written the note the night before. (“I’m taking Jack to the gym,” or a message to that effect.)

Emma and Jack walked to Forest Hill Village and had breakfast in a coffee shop on Spadina. He had a scone with raisins in it, and his usual glass of milk and glass of orange juice. Emma just had coffee, and a big bite of Jack’s scone.

They cut over to St. Clair and he pointed out the dirty, dark-brown apartment building where Mrs. Machado lived. He was a little afraid of how purposefully Emma kept walking; it wasn’t like her to not say anything. She seemed so angry that Jack thought he should tell her a nice story about Mrs. Machado— something sympathetic. To his shame, he basically liked Mrs. Machado. (He would recognize only later that this was part of the problem.)

“Mrs. Machado has to keep changing the locks on her apartment door, because her ex-husband keeps breaking in,” Jack told Emma.

“Did you see the new locks?” Emma asked.