danger.
“You mean I’m in danger?”
“No. You are the reason that boy is burned,” she said. “You are never hurt, but he is not lucky. Be careful with your friends. Do not put them in trouble.”
Ahn’s black eyes stared into Eric’s great blue orbs.
The boy wondered about what she was saying. Sometimes he felt like that, that he was lucky.
The housekeeper turned away.
“Ahn.”
“Yes?”
“Have you heard anything about Tommy?”
“Nobody ever answers your letters, but they don’t come back,” she replied. “I am not finding Mr. Trueblood in the phone book, and his grandmother says that Tommy is with him.”
“But he must be somewhere.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they left Los Angeles.”
“They have to be somewhere.”
“He is safe,” she said, and then turned away again.
Eric was angry at what she said. He knew that she meant Tommy was safe from him. But he would never hurt his brother. He loved Tommy. Always had. Tommy and Branwyn were the only people he’d ever felt passion for.
7 6
F o r t u n a t e S o n
The door closed behind Ahn, and Eric was once again in darkness. He sat there worrying that maybe Ahn was right.
Maybe he drove Tommy away.
That night Eric didn’t go to sleep. Instead he stayed awake thinking about his real mother, dead for so long, and Mama Branwyn, who was the perfect woman in his eyes. He thought about Tommy, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in more than four years.
After Tommy had left, Eric’s father went back to working long hours. He was quiet at the dinner table, and they hadn’t taken a vacation, or even a weekend holiday, in all that time.
Eric still missed his brother every day. Now and then he made friends at school or summer camp, but he’d never met another soul who saw the world the way Tommy did. Tommy saw faces in rocks, and he laughed at big, broad things like fat trees and passing images in clouds. He knew Branwyn better than anyone and never got mad at Eric for needing her love too.
Eric didn’t feel close to Ahn. When he was smaller she was just always there — to dress him, feed him, make sure that he was in the right place at the right time. He played games with her after Tommy was gone, but he didn’t care about her.
Eric realized that he didn’t care about much. He had fun and was befriended by almost everyone, but he never minded having to go home or when someone he saw every day left for good.
No, he wasn’t close to Ahn, but he remembered one day sitting outside the pool area in a health spa in Palm Springs.
He and Tommy were five, and the smaller boy wanted to sit on the brick wall and wait to see if a roadrunner, the fleet-footed bird, might pass by.
Eric got bored and started asking Tommy questions.
He asked how it felt to break a bone. (Tommy had broken 7 7
Wa l t e r M o s l e y
his finger, an ankle, his right leg, and his collarbone in falls.) He wanted to know what Branwyn wore when she went to bed. He asked Tommy if he ever wished that he and Branwyn were white like everybody else that they knew.
Tommy answered every question in his soft and slow voice.
“When my ankle broke it hurt so bad that I had to think that I was in another room from my foot,” Tommy said.
His mother wore a white cotton slip to bed, and he didn’t care what color they were.
Finally Eric asked Tommy, “Why do you think Ahn’s crazy?”
For a long time Tommy stared out into the desert between the cholla cacti and Joshua trees. After a while Eric thought that his brother had forgotten the question.
Then Tommy started talking in a voice so soft that he was in the middle of his answer before Eric realized that he was being addressed.
“An’ she’s been in the places where everybody’s sad all the time,” Tommy was saying.
“Who?” Eric asked.
“Ahn. She comes from far away in a war, my mom says. She’s always lookin’ to see bad things comin’, and that’s why Dr.
Nolan hired her, so she could see trouble before it gets here.”
