Until I Find You

him in her favorite velvet top. (For fun, she put lemons in the underwire bra—being a small-breasted woman herself.) Jack would learn, much later, that Mrs. Adkins and her husband had had a son and lost him. The boy’s death was an underlying reason for the permanent air of sadness that had first attracted Jack to Mrs. Adkins, although Jack didn’t know this at the time.

“I love you in my clothes,” was all she told him.

Having cast Jack in his seventh-grade year as Mildred Douglas in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Mrs. Adkins loved him so much as Mildred that she perversely cast him the following year as Mildred’s cantankerous aunt. In that, his final year at Redding, when Jack was lying in her arms, Mrs. Adkins liked to test his memory of cue lines in the dark. In the husky voice of the Second Engineer in The Hairy Ape, she said: “ ‘You’ll likely rub against oil and dirt. It can’t be helped.’ ”

Rubbing against her, Jack-as-Mildred replied: “ ‘It doesn’t matter. I have lots of white dresses.’ ” All hers; every dress he wore on Drama Night had once been worn by Mrs. Adkins. How at home he felt in her clothes.

Except when he was wrestling, Jack took few trips away from Redding. Since Toronto was so far, he would generally spend American Thanksgiving in Boston—actually in nearby Cambridge—with his roommate, Noah. Jack went back to Toronto for Christmas, and for the misnomered spring break, which was in March or April—when it was barely more springlike in Toronto than it was in Maine. (It was never spring in Maine.)

But as a wrestler, he got to see a lot of New England. Coach Clum once took the team as far as New York State, to a tournament where even Loomis lost. It was the only time Jack saw Loomis lose, although Loomis—in addition to losing his parents and older sister—had other losses ahead. He would be expelled from Blair Academy for getting a referee’s underage daughter pregnant. Loomis gave up an opportunity for a college wrestling scholarship because of it. He became a Navy SEAL instead. He was stabbed to death somewhere in the Philippines, while on a perilous undercover mission, perhaps, or drunk and rowdy in a bar—in either case, his killer was reputed to be a transvestite prostitute.

But Loomis was the model Jack aspired to on the Redding wrestling team. Jack was never as good a wrestler as Loomis was, although in Jack’s last two years at Redding, he managed to win more matches than he lost.

If someone had been taking his picture on Drama Night, Jack would have known it, but he wouldn’t have known if someone was watching or taking pictures when he was wrestling—he wouldn’t have heard the click of the camera shutter or the noise of the crowd. When Jack was wrestling, he even lost sight of his audience of one. In a wrestling match, either you take command of your opponent or you lose; you wrestle in an empty space, to an audience of none. And after Loomis left Redding, Jack was the team leader—for the first time, he had responsibilities.

He was the leader on the team bus, too. His teammates were either asleep and farting—or doing their homework with flashlights and farting. (They were instructed to create a minimum of distractions for the bus driver.)

Sometimes Jack would tell stories on the way back to Redding. He told the one about the littlest soldier saving him from the Kastelsgraven, and the one about putting the bandage on Ingrid Moe’s breast after his mom tattooed her there. He told the one about Saskia’s bracelets, including how horribly one of her customers had burned her—but not the one about his mom breaking her pearl necklace in her efforts to be an advice-giver to that young boy in Amsterdam. And nothing about Mrs. Machado, of course.

Jack bragged that his “stepsister,” Emma, could beat anyone on the Redding wrestling team, with the exception of Loomis, who at that time hadn’t yet been kicked out of Blair. (Everyone at Redding, except Noah and Mrs. Adkins, thought that Jack’s mother was a famous tattoo artist who lived with a guy named Mr. Oastler, who was Emma’s dad.)

Possibly Jack told these stories because he missed not only Emma but also his mother and Mrs. Oastler— even Mrs. Machado, or at least her roughness, which was nowhere to be found in the gentler persuasions of Mrs. Adkins. Maybe he missed Mrs. Machado’s crudeness, too.

Jack also told the story of his greatest onstage triumph to date, which was his role in A Mail- Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. This was a dangerous story to tell on the team bus. Coach Clum objected to the word menstruation; once when Jack used it, the coach put down a half-point against the boy.

In his eighth-grade year, when Jack was co-captain of the wrestling team, they had a lightweight named Lambrecht—a new sixth grader from Arizona. He had grown up in the desert and had never seen snow before, let alone a road sign saying FROST HEAVES.

He must have had some difficulty reading in the dark, and the road signs out the window of the moving bus went by very fast at night, because Lambrecht asked, of no one in particular: “What’s a frost heavy?” His question hung there in the semidark bus; the sleepers and nonstop farters never stirred. Jack was memorizing Matthew Arnold at that moment. He turned off his flashlight and waited to see if anyone would answer Lambrecht. “We don’t have frost heavies in Arizona,” Lambrecht continued.

“Frost heavies are hard to see at night,” Jack told Lambrecht. “They’re so low to the ground that the headlights don’t reflect in their eyes, and they’re the color of the road.”

“But what are they?” Lambrecht asked.

Those bus rides were pure improv! “Look, just don’t go out of your dorm at night, Lambrecht—not at this time of year. Frost heavies are nocturnal.”

“But what do frost heavies do?” Lambrecht asked. He was getting agitated, in the peculiar way that lightweights express their agitation—his voice was pretty shrill under normal circumstances. That must have been what prompted Mike Heller, the team’s heavyweight, to put an end to Jack’s game. Heller was a humorless soul. He was a grumpy guy with too much baby fat to be a legitimate heavyweight; he never won a match, at least not one Jack saw.

“For Christ’s sake, Lambrecht, can’t you read?” Heller asked. “The sign says frost heaves, not frost heavies. You know heaves, like heaves in the road? Fucking potholes, you moron!”

“That’s one and a half points against you, Mike—correction, make that two,” Coach Clum said. (He was never really asleep.) “A half-point for Christ, a half-point for fucking, and one full point for moron, which you truly are, Lambrecht—but moron is a derogatory word, if I ever heard one.”

“Damn!” Heller said.

“Make that two and a half,” Coach Clum said.

“So frost heaves are just bumps in the road?” Lambrecht asked.

“I’m surprised you don’t have frost in Arizona,” Jack said.

“In parts of Arizona, we do,” Lambrecht replied. “We just don’t have the road signs—or the heaves, I guess.”

“Jesus, Lambrecht!” Heller cried.

“That’s three, Heller,” Coach Clum said. “You’re not having a very good road trip.”

“When does Heller ever have a good road trip?” Jack asked. He had no points against him for the month. He knew he could afford one.

To Jack’s surprise, Coach Clum said: “That’s two against you, Burns. It is derogatory of you to call our attention to Heller’s losing record, but it’s also dismissive of Lambrecht’s intelligence to encourage him to imagine that frost heavies exist, that they have eyes and are low to the ground—”

“—and they’re the color of the fucking road!” Lambrecht interrupted him.

“That’s a half-point against you, Lambrecht,” Coach Clum said.

They were somewhere in Rhode Island, or maybe it was Massachusetts. They were a long way from Maine, Jack knew. How he loved those nights! He turned his flashlight back on and redirected his thoughts to the task of memorizing “Dover Beach”—not a short poem, and one with an overlong first stanza.