time after time Eric would call heads and heads would turn up; Eric would call tails and tails it would be.
The nanny woke up one night from a deep sleep in which she was having a dream about flipping the coin with Eric. In the dream her faceless father was standing above her and the big blond boy. She and Eric were the same size in the dream.
Ahn had lost sixty-three flips in a row when her father said,
“One more loss and you will die, my daughter.”
That’s when Ahn awoke with a start.
“Every time he wins someone else loses,” she said to herself.
She gasped and suddenly saw her charge as some kind of monster.
“He killed his mother,” Ahn said to no one. “He killed Miss Branwyn.”
7 3
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
She lay back in her bed thinking of little Thomas.
“Maybe he’s safer away from Eric,” she thought. “Maybe Eric will destroy everyone he touches.”
Th e days and months and years passed in the Nolan household. Everyone wanted to be Eric’s best friend. Every girl wanted to be his girlfriend. The teachers loved him, and the sun illuminated his path.
He skipped the sixth grade because he knew all the subjects by grade five. It wasn’t hard for him to enter junior high school early because he was much bigger than his classmates anyway. He had natural agility and strength. And he was more mature than many adults at this early age.
And Eric was fearless. Nothing bad ever happened to him.
He and another boy, Lester Corning, were once playing with fireworks when Lester’s parents were out. They were both leaning over the same Roman candle when instead of firing a flaming ball into the air, the rocket exploded. Lester took the full blast on the left side of his face, but Eric went unharmed.
His hair wasn’t even singed. This was lucky for Lester, who was in so much pain that all he could do was roll on the grass of his backyard and scream.
Eric ran to the house and dialed 911. He explained the problem to the man on the other end of the line, and the ambulance came there in time to save Lester’s eyesight.
Eric was not only unhurt but seen as a hero by everyone.
The ambulance attendants praised him for keeping Lester from touching his severely burned face. Lester’s parents thanked Eric for having the presence of mind to call for help.
(Lester admitted that playing with the fireworks was his idea and that Eric didn’t even want to.) 7 4
F o r t u n a t e S o n
That night Dr. Nolan took his son, then ten years old, aside and did the fatherly thing by explaining how risky it was to allow other children to persuade him to do something dangerous.
“You could have been burned just as easily as Lester,”
Minas told his son.
“But why wasn’t I burned, Dad?” the boy asked. “We were holding the Roman candle between us. It was just as close to me as it was to him.”
“That’s what you call
“When I was a boy in Kansas, a tornado hit a neighborhood in my town. The twister set down at the beginning of the two-hundred block of Orchard Street. It knocked down four houses in a row, veered around the fifth, and then came back with a vengeance, destroying every other house on that side of the block. I suppose that there’s some scientific explanation for what happened, but for the people in house number five it was just good fortune.”
Eric went up to his room pondering the word
He often wondered why so many good things happened to him. He never counted on his luck, but things always seemed to go right. He was lying in his bed in the dark, in Thomas’s old room, thinking about Lester and the accident, when there came a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
The door opened, and Ahn shuffled in.
Eric had known Ahn his entire life. She was no longer his nanny. Now she was Dr. Nolan’s housekeeper and the family cook. Eric would have never said that he loved Ahn. He did love his father, but it wasn’t a very strong feeling.
“You have to be careful,” Ahn said to Eric.
7 5
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“You mean about the fireworks?” the boy asked. “Dad already told me that I could have been burned too.”
“No. I mean, yes, you shouldn’t play with danger because you will hurt others.”
“Not me?”
“You are dangerous,” Ahn said.
Eric tried to decipher what the Vietnamese servant meant.
Many times when they talked, she would say things like “you are dangerous,” really meaning that he was in
