down with an ice-cold Pepsi. If I live long enough for my metabolism to turn against me, I might one day regret never having learned to eat for any reason but the sheer fun of it. Currently, however, I am at that blissful age when no indulgence can alter my thirty-inch waistline.
In the upstairs guest bedroom that served as my study, I sat at my desk in candlelight and spent a couple of minutes looking at a pair of framed photographs of my mom and dad. Her face was full of kindness and intelligence. His face was full of kindness and wisdom.
I have rarely seen my own face in full light. The few times I’ve stood in a bright place and confronted a mirror, I’ve not seen anything in my face that I can understand. This disturbs me. How can my parents’ images shine with such virtues and mine be enigmatic?
Did their mirrors show them mysteries?
I think not.
Well, I take solace from the realization that Sasha loves me — perhaps as much as she loves cooking, perhaps even as much as she loves a good aerobic workout. I wouldn’t risk suggesting that she values me as much as she does books and music. Though I hope.
In my study, among hundreds of volumes of poetry and reference books — my own and my father’s collections combined — is a thick Latin dictionary. I looked up the word for
Bobby had said,
We had been friends for so long that I knew Bobby had never sat through a class in Latin. Therefore, I was touched. The apparent effort that he had taken to mock me was a sign of true friendship.
I closed the dictionary and slid it aside, next to a copy of the book I had written about my life as a child of darkness. It had been a national best-seller about four years ago, when I’d thought I knew the meaning of my life, prior to my discovery that my mother, out of fierce maternal love and a desire to free me from my disability, had inadvertently made me the poster child for doomsday.
I hadn’t opened this book in two years. It should have been on one of the shelves behind my desk. I assumed Sasha had been looking at it and neglected to put it back where she’d found it.
Also on the desk was a decorative tin box painted with the faces of dogs. In the center of the lid are these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
This tin box was a gift from my mother, given to me on the day that she brought Orson home. I keep special biscuits in it, which he particularly enjoys, and from time to time I give him a couple, not to reward him for a trick learned, because I don’t teach him tricks, and not to enforce any training, for he needs no training, but simply because the taste of them makes him happy.
When my mother brought Orson to live with us, I didn’t know how special he was. She kept this secret until long after her death, until after my father’s death. When she gave me the box, she said, “I know you’ll give him love, Chris. But also, when he needs it — and he
At the time, I assumed she meant nothing more than that animals, like us, are subject to the fear and suffering of this world. Now I know there were deeper and more complex layers of meaning in her words.
I reached toward the tin, intending to test its weight, because I wanted to be certain that it was filled with treats for Orson’s triumphant return. My hand began to shake so badly that I left the box untouched.
I folded my hands, one over the other, on the desk. Staring down at the hard white points of my knuckles, I realized that I had assumed the very pose in which I’d first seen Lilly Wing when Bobby and I returned from Wyvern.
Orson. Jimmy. Aaron. Anson. Like the barbed points on a razor-wire fence, their names spiraled through my mind. The lost boys.
I felt an obligation to all of them, a fierce sense of duty, which wasn’t entirely explicable — except that in spite of my good fortune in parents and in spite of the riches of friendship that I enjoyed, I was the ultimate lost boy, myself, and to some extent would be lost until the day I passed out of my darkness in this world into whatever light waits beyond.
Impatience abraded my nerves. In conventional searches for lost hikers, for small aircraft downed in mountainous terrain, and for boats at sea, search parties break from dusk to dawn. We were limited, instead, to the dark hours, not merely by my XP but by our need to gather our forces and to act in utmost secrecy. I wondered whether the members of conventional search parties checked their watches every two minutes, chewed their lips, and went slightly screwy with frustration while waiting for first light. My watch crystal was etched with eye tracks, my lip was shaggy with shredded skin, and I was half nuts by 12:45.
Shortly before one o’clock, as I was diligently ridding myself of the second half of my sanity, the doorbell rang.
With the Glock in hand, I went downstairs. Through one of the stained-glass sidelights, I saw Bobby on the front porch. He was turned half away from the door, staring back toward the street, as though looking for a police surveillance team in one of the parked cars or for a school of anchovies in a passing vehicle.
As he stepped inside and I closed the door behind him, I said, “Bitchin’ shirt.”
He was wearing a red and gray volcanic-beach scene with blue ferns, which looked totally cool over a long- sleeve black pullover.
“Made by Iolani,” I said. “Coconut-husk buttons, 1955.”
Instead of commenting on my erudition with even as little as a roll of the eyes, he headed for the kitchen, saying, “I saw Charlie Dai again.”
The kitchen was brightened only by the ashen face of the day pressed to the window blinds, by the digital clocks on the ovens, and by two fat candles on the table.
“Another kid is gone,” Bobby said.
I felt a tremor in my hands once more, and I put the Glock on the kitchen table. “Who, when?”
Snatching a Mountain Dew from the refrigerator, where the standard light had been replaced with a lower- wattage, pink-tinted bulb, Bobby said, “Wendy Dulcinea.”
“Oh,” I said, and wanted to say more but couldn’t speak.
Wendy’s mother, Mary, is six years older than I am; when I was thirteen, my parents paid her to give me piano lessons, and I had a devastating crush on her. At that time, I was functioning under the delusion that I would one day play rock-’n’-roll piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis, be a keyboard-banging maniac who could make those ivories smoke. Eventually my parents and Mary concluded — and persuaded me — that the likelihood of my becoming a competent pianist was immeasurably less than the likelihood of me levitating and flying like a bird.
“Wendy’s seven.” Bobby said. “Mary was taking her to school. Backed the car out of the driveway. Then realized she’d forgotten something in the house, went in to get it. When she came back two minutes later, the car was gone. With Wendy.”
“No one saw anything?”
Bobby chugged the Mountain Dew: enough sugar to induce in him a diabetic coma, enough caffeine to keep a long-haul trucker awake through a five-hundred-mile run. He was legally wiring himself for the ordeal ahead.
“No one saw or heard anything,” he confirmed. “Neighborhood of the blind and deaf. Sometimes I think there’s something going around more contagious than your mom’s bug. We’ve got an epidemic of the shut-up- hunker-down-see-hear-smell-speak-no-evil influenza. Anyway, the cops found Mary’s car abandoned in the service lane behind the Nine Palms Plaza.”
Nine Palms was a shopping center that lost all the tenants when Fort Wyvern closed and took with it the
