Until I Find You

lights! “Well, if that isn’t ‘all over the place,’ I don’t know what is,” Emma was saying, while Jack practiced breathing again. “Just look at this mess. I never want to hear you say I don’t love you.”

“I love you, Emma,” the boy blurted out.

“You don’t have to make a commitment or anything,” Emma said. “That you’re my best friend is enough of a miracle.”

“I’m going to miss you!” Jack cried.

“Shhh, don’t cry—they’ll hear you. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

“The what?”

“I’m going to miss you, too, honey pie,” she whispered. She was putting her T-shirt back on—more stuffed animals were getting out of her way, in whatever way they could—when Jack heard his mother in the hall. Emma’s bedroom door was partially open.

“Was that you, Jackie?” his mom was calling. (No doubt he’d been making unusual sounds.)

Both Emma and Jack knew he hadn’t put his boxers back on. He didn’t even know where they were; he hoped they were under the covers. His head was on Emma’s shoulder; one of her arms was thrown loosely around his neck. The “loosely” made it not yet a headlock, but there was no question that they were snuggled together, under the covers, when Alice came into the room.

“I had a dream,” Jack told his mom.

“I see,” she said.

“There’s more room for him to have a bad dream in my bed than in his,” Emma told Alice.

“Yes, I see that there is,” Alice replied.

“It was that dream about the moat,” Jack said. “You remember the littlest soldier.”

“Yes, of course,” Alice said.

“It was that one,” he told her.

“I didn’t know you still had that one,” his mother said.

“All the time,” he lied. “More than usual, lately.”

“I see,” his mom said. “Well, I’m sorry.”

There were stuffed animals scattered everywhere, as if there’d been a massacre. Jack kept hoping his boxers weren’t lying among them. Alice started to leave Emma’s bedroom, but she paused in the doorway to the hall and turned back to face them.

“Thank you for being such a good friend to Jack, Emma,” Alice said.

“We’re gonna be friends for life, Alice,” Emma told her.

“Well, I hope so,” Alice said. “Good night, you two,” she called softly, as she went down the hall.

“Good night, Mom!” Jack called after her.

“Good night!” Emma called. Under the covers, her hand found and held the little guy, who appeared to have fallen asleep.

“How quickly you forget,” Emma whispered to his penis.

Like old times, Jack thought, as he was falling asleep—without ascertaining very clearly what had been good about the aforementioned “old times” and what hadn’t. It was even a comfort to listen to Emma snoring.

Emma had shot a whole roll of photographs of Jack with Chenko in the Bathurst Street gym. Various angles of Chenko’s wolf-head tattoo; Jack sitting cross-legged on the wrestling mat beside the old Ukrainian; Chenko’s arm around Jack’s shoulders in what the boy thought of as a fatherly way.

Jack lay listening to Emma snoring, just visualizing those photographs. Soon he would be in Maine, but he was no longer frightened. As he drifted away, Jack believed there was nothing in Maine that could scare him.

Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes especially the ones who had molested him!) He would miss Mrs. Machado, too—more than he ever admitted to Emma Oastler.

Jack even missed the girls who never abused him—among them Sandra Stewart, who had played the bilingual stutterer, the vomiter, the mail-order bride who gets fucked on a dog sled and wanders off and freezes to death in the snow, in a histrionic blizzard! How sick was it that he remembered her?

He would miss each one, every major and minor character in his sea of girls. Those girls—those women, at the time—had made him strong. They prepared Jack Burns for the terra firma (and not so firma) of the life ahead, including his life with boys and men. After the sea of girls, what pushovers boys were! After Jack’s older-women experiences, how easy it would be to deal with men!

III. Lucky

16. Frost Heaves

In those hectic last days before Jack left for Maine, his mother devoted herself to sewing name tags on his new clothes. Mrs. Oastler had taken him shopping. There were no school uniforms at Redding, no special colors, but the boys wore jackets and ties, and either khakis or wool-flannel trousers—not jeans. With Leslie Oastler choosing his clothes, Jack would be one of the best-dressed boys at the school.

Alice should have talked to him; she should have told Jack everything. But in lieu of conversation, she sewed.

It made no sense to Jack: when he was four, they’d spent the better part of a year searching those North Sea ports for his runaway dad; yet in Jack’s five years at St. Hilda’s, Alice rarely spoke of William. At ten, Jack was increasingly curious about his father; that William had been demonized made the boy afraid of himself and who he might become. But his mom would not indulge Jack’s questions about his dad. Alice was rarely cruel to Jack, but she could be cold, and nothing drew the coldness out of her as predictably as Jack asking her about his father.

Alice must have closed the door on that conversation a hundred times. “When you’re old enough,” she would usually say—a door-closing line if the boy had ever heard one.

He’d once spoken to Mrs. McQuat about it. “Don’t complain about a woman who knows how to keep a secret,” The Gray Ghost replied.

Since Emma had a list of grievances against her mother, Jack felt comfortable complaining to Emma about his. “I just want to know what kind of guy he was, for Christ’s sake!”

“Watch your language, baby cakes.”

Emma and Jack had both read the School Philosophy Handbook that Redding sent to new students and their families. So-called proper language was a big deal in the student code. Mr. Ramsey, who’d agreed to take Jack to Maine, had eagerly read the School Philosophy Handbook, too; he’d found the student code “very challenging.”

The day before Jack and Mr. Ramsey left for Maine, Emma and Jack got matching haircuts at a barbershop in Forest Hill Village. Jack’s wasn’t so bad, although it was shorter than the floppy mops most boys had for haircuts in 1975. But short hair on Emma was arguably a mistake. It wasn’t a buzz cut, but it was very much a boy’s haircut, which left her neck exposed. While she’d continued to lose weight, Emma’s neck had gotten noticeably bigger—all those neck-bridges, three or four times a week, with a flat twenty-five-pound weight on her chest. She had a neck like a linebacker, and her short haircut served to exaggerate one’s unfortunate first impression of her, which was that Emma Oastler had no neck at all. From behind, she looked like a man.

Jack got the first haircut and then stood beside Emma’s chair while the barber was cutting her hair. “Your mom’s going to kill you for this,” Jack told her.

“How?” Emma asked.

She had a point—Emma could have snapped Mrs. Oastler like a Popsicle stick. Not even Chenko was tough