Blessed Child (20 page)

Nikolous punched in a string of numbers and swiveled toward towering bookcases. He was clearly in his element.

“Hello, Donna. I'm afraid we have a problem. What does your schedule look like tomorrow evening?”

He listened and then quickly highlighted the situation. In under three minutes it was done. The Greek dropped the phone ceremoniously in its cradle and looked at them.

“We will have our meeting tomorrow night.”

“Where?”

“If we can't reschedule the Old Theater, I will find a suitable location. In the worst case we will use our auditorium.”

“How will you find enough people to attend by then?” Leiah asked.

Nikolous grinned at her. “Don't worry, my dear. I'll deliver the people and the media. And you would do well to encourage our boy's participation, yes?”

Jason spoke before she could. “Let's hope the INS doesn't show up before tomorrow night.”

“Yes, let's hope,” Nikolous said.

The matter was settled, then. The Greek was reaching for his phone as they left; he had a meeting to plan. Perhaps the biggest meeting of his life.

Martha made them wait twenty minutes until the one-o'clock hour before she called them to cross the play yard and enter the West Wing, as she called Caleb's prison.

Caleb was there, sitting on one of the large gray couches when they entered, and Leiah's pulse surged. They kept him dressed in shorts that came to his knees and high socks, like a schoolboy all dressed up for his visits. His aqua eyes shone round, and he cracked a wide grin the moment he saw them.

Martha stood near the wall, her arms crossed, looking disinterested but hawkish nonetheless.

Caleb swung from the couch and ran for them. Leiah dipped to one knee and met him with open arms.

“Hello, Caleb.”

She hugged him tight, and truth be told, she did not want to let go. His long curls swept across her chin and she kissed his head. “Oh boy, do I love you.” Leiah rubbed his back and then pushed him back to look at him. “I'm so proud of you. Do you know that?”

He grinned and looked up at Jason, who ruffled his hair and then lifted him for a hug. They were like a small family. An impossible, disjointed one without the blessing of union, but a family anyway.

Jason carried Caleb over to the couches and plopped him down with a bounce. Caleb giggled, rolled onto his seat, and pushed himself back between them. He spoke very rarely, and then only in short sentences, often in Amharic. Although he possessed a decent enough command of the English language, he shied from it, as he did from nearly all things Western.

“So how are they treating you, son?” Jason asked, gripping the boy's knee gently.

Caleb smiled and his eyes skipped to Martha.

Jason turned to the caretaker. “Don't you have some laundry to do or something?”

She glared at him and then marched off with a humph. But she didn't leave the room. The kitchen, forty feet off, was as far as she would remove herself during their visits.

Satisfied, Jason faced Caleb again. He winked. “Don't worry; she can't hear if we talk quiet. So are you okay?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

He tilted his head down. “Really good?”

“Yes.” He looked at them, self-conscious perhaps. But then he reached forward and put his small hands on top of each of theirs. They took his hands and he grinned, but he didn't elaborate.

Leiah felt her heart melt as it always did in the boy's company. At first, back on the road in Ethiopia, she'd guessed that her unique bond with Caleb came compliments of their shared isolation. He as a prodigy locked in a monastery; she as an outcast wrapped in scars. But in the nine days since their coming to California, she'd seen something else in the boy. Caleb wasn't isolated at all. He was simply living in another world somewhere. A world very different from the one she saw. A world that held him in full contentment, like a child curled up in his mother's lap, smiling and asleep.

She'd told Jason that Caleb was too wounded to know the difference between an abusive situation and a healthy one. In reality she suspected that he was too healthy to feel the difference. And she knew that whatever the boy believed, she craved. Because in many ways they were very much alike; their difference lay in their maturity. She wondered what it would take for her to rise to the boy's level.

The thought of going further, of maybe even mothering the child, made her bones feel wobbly.

Leiah took his hand in both of hers and rubbed it. “Are they feeding you well?”

“Yes.”

“What do they feed you?”

He thought about that. “Milk. Bread. Porridge.” He flashed pearly white teeth.

“That sounds good. Milk, huh?” She looked down the hall and asked the same question she'd asked every visit. “And you're sure you're comfortable in your room?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Because if there's any problem you would tell us, right?”

“Yes.”

Why Nikolous had banned any person but Martha from visiting his room, she could hardly fathom. The thought gave her a headache. But the Greek had promised a restraining order if they violated the terms of their visits. Jason had sneaked down the hall on the second day, during a moment when Martha had waddled off to fetch a screaming child in the yard. He'd poked his head in and returned to announce that it was simple but clean enough.

Still, the restriction alone was enough to fill her with doubts.

“And what about the . . . what about Martha?” Jason asked.

Caleb looked at him without answering.

“Is she good to you?”

“Not always.”

His answer took Leiah off guard.
Not always?
It was the first time he'd said anything less than glowing.

“What do you mean? She's hurting you?” she demanded in a hushed tone.

“No. She is leaving the moving pictures on all the time.”

“What moving pictures?”

“The television?” Jason asked.

“The box with pictures that move.” Caleb lifted questioning brows.

“The television!” Jason said, smiling.

Caleb smiled with him. “Yes. The tele . . . vision.”

“They have a television in his room and he doesn't like it,” Jason explained to Leiah.

“I think I got that,” she said. And then to the boy, “We'll tell her to turn off the television, Caleb. I promise.”

He rattled off something in Ge'ez and then grinned wide.

They talked for another ten minutes in the same short spurts. Unless addressed directly, Caleb seemed content to sit by them, as if their presence alone brought great satisfaction.

“Caleb, there's something I need to tell you,” Jason finally said. “There are some people who want to send you back to Ethiopia.”

“Yes?”

“But your father didn't want you to be in Ethiopia. He wanted you to be here, with us.”

The boy nodded.

“Well, we may be able to keep you here, but we need your help. Tomorrow there'll be a meeting. You should go to the meeting and . . .” He was obviously stumbling over how to describe what it was Caleb did. The boy just stared at him, and Leiah suppressed the urge to lean over and kiss his forehead. She smiled without thinking. “ . . . do your . . . use your power. You should show the people that you can do many strange, wonderful things. Very good things.” He stopped there and let his analysis rest.

He seemed bothered even by the simple description of Caleb's power, she thought. Regardless of its source, you could hardly deny that feats like straightening crooked legs and opening blind eyes were miraculous.

“They want you to do lots of miracles,” Leiah said. “Can you do that?”

Caleb looked up at her with big eyes and then seemed to understand. “Maybe,” he said with a small smile.

Jason shifted on the couch. “That's good.” He paused. “Caleb, I know we haven't talked a lot about, you know, your miracles, as Leiah says. But it would be helpful to know how you do them. They say that it's psychic, a power of your mind, but how? How do you make a blind boy see?”

They had agreed not to probe Caleb about the matter.

“Jason—”

The boy cut her off with a long string of words in Ge'ez. He sounded confident and strong but not angry. It was a diatribe neither of them could possibly begin to understand. Caleb ended, took a short breath, and then spoke in English. “Why is the way of God so unknown to you?”

Jason's face flushed red and he turned away. “Well, I don't really know the
way
of God, but if he does have a way with man, it makes about as much sense as the dialect of Ge'ez you insist on speaking.”

“Jason!”

He turned to her, unable to hide his frustration. “Come on, Leiah. He can heal people, for heaven's sakes! I for one want to know how.”

“I'm sure we all do. But we agreed not to go there.”

“Well, now we are there. And frankly I wouldn't mind knowing for myself why a little girl minding her own business at a convention hall is granted a full life, while my son lies six feet under.”

It was a frustration that seemed completely out of context to her. Had he lost his senses? “Get ahold of yourself, Jason!”

He closed his eyes and turned away.

A soft, high-pitched note suddenly filled her ears.

Leiah looked down at Caleb. He had pulled his knees up under his chin and was rocking back and forth with his eyes closed. He'd clamped his hands firmly over his ears, and his small lips quivered with wordless song.

Leiah didn't understand what happened next; she only knew that one moment she and Jason (although mostly Jason) were venting frustration that had built for a week, and the next they were both crying inexplicably.

The notes from Caleb's lips seemed to sweep through her like a drug, incapacitating her will to restrain the sorrow already hiding in her veins. That's how it felt. And suddenly she was weeping.

It was an impossible moment; one that terrified her at first. She scrambled for understanding, and for a few seconds she tried desperately to recheck her emotion, but then with one loud sob she let herself go.

What anger she'd felt for Jason melted with the next few tears. She wept for the boy. No, she wept for herself. For her own wounded spirit that begged to find peace.

Leiah put a hand on Caleb's head and stroked his hair. Her tears blurred her vision, but she saw that Jason's shoulders were shaking under great silent sobs, and it made her put aside her last wedge of restraint. She pulled the boy to her chest and rocked with him, weeping. He stopped singing and let her hold him, and the sorrow flowed from her eyes like a tide.

Leiah didn't know how long they held each other, only that when she looked up, Jason was leaning back on the cushions with red eyes and Martha was gone.

They sat dumbly in an afterglow for ten minutes, smiling and speaking little. But Leiah couldn't remember what was said. When they stood to leave, she thought she saw Martha peering out at them from down the dark hall, but she couldn't be sure.

They left Caleb sitting alone on the couch as they'd found him. She still had no clue what had happened. By the looks of it, neither did Jason. He blushed when she made direct eye contact, and his smile made her swallow.

Maybe they'd been touched by God, if there even was a God—she didn't know. But she did know one thing: as long as she had breath to live and strength to fight, she would never, ever let them take away Caleb. Never.

It wasn't until three o'clock that they remembered to call Martha and insist she get rid of the television. She grunted and then snapped a “Fine” before hanging up on them.

15

Day 10

T
HEY CALLED IT THE
O
LD
T
HEATER
because when they'd expanded the monster in the late seventies, they'd kept the stage area intact for theatrical events instead of replacing it with seats as in some renovated theaters. But in reality the brick building was more an arena than a theater, complete with facilities to accommodate any large-venue meeting as well as a variety of sporting events.

If you packed the main floor with folding chairs, the building sat ten thousand: three thousand on the wood floor, four thousand on the first tier of orange seats ringing the auditorium, and another three thousand on the upper tier, the latter referred to as the red seats, evidently the cheap seats. The seats ran in sections, each marked by lighted signs mounted above passageways that opened to the outer walkway. Except for the stage at the north end, it was a typical arena layout.

The stage stood five feet above the floor, cocooned in massive purple curtains that swept to either side, reminiscent of the oldest theaters. A gray carpet covered the floor, but it creaked when you walked on it, evidence of its age. An old upright piano sat alone on the west side of the stage, but otherwise it was bare tonight. Unless you counted the single mike stand, of course. It stood in the middle, facing the dim expanse like a lost tin soldier. On either side, stage exits, draped with the same purple cloth as the curtains, led backstage.

Jason stood on the large platform and scanned the auditorium, thinking that his part in this impossible show was not unlike a secret service agent, checking out a venue before the dignitaries arrived, in this case Caleb. He wasn't sure exactly what he was checking the place for; maybe the odd character who might be an INS agent, although any INS agent he'd ever seen could as easily be any Joe Blow as an immigration agent. The authorities hadn't come for Caleb yet, and for that Jason assumed he had either plain old bureaucracy or John Gardner to thank. But he wouldn't put it past the agency to march in at any moment and demand custody of the boy.

The Greek knew how to crank up an event; that much was clear. It was no mistake that he had worked his way into one of the largest Greek Orthodox churches this side of the Atlantic. He was a businessman to the core, and Jason couldn't help thinking the man was clearly misplaced. He belonged on Wall Street perhaps. Or in Hollywood. Then again, some churches weren't so different from Wall Street or Hollywood.