Harvest of Changelings (11 page)

Russell, come further up.

Russell stepped into what looked like a short hallway. To his left was what looked like a living room. On the far side of the living room he could see what had to be the dining room, as there was an empty table in the middle, surrounded by chairs. Beyond the dining room he could see what looked like a kitchen; the white tiles shone in the light.

This is a big, big house.

Russell.

He followed the voice upstairs, to another hallway, lined with doors. The first door was a bedroom, the second a closet, the third a bathroom. But the voice was calling from the last door, at the hall's end. The door opened by itself, slowly opening and revealing an attic, long and narrow, with a slanting roof and cedar wood floors. The attic ran the front length of the house, and two windows punctuated its slanted roof Each window had wide sills, wide enough for someone to sit in and stretch out their legs.

This is my room. This place is meant for me.

Outside the window Russell didn't see the tall trees and lawn and the woods he had seen outside the house. There were the trees, silver-white, with golden leaves, from his other dreams. Russell unlatched the window and crawled out on the roof The sky was black. The white trees swayed back and forth in a wind that was pulling at Russell, wrapping invisible hands around his legs. Russell let the wind slowly pull him to the roofs edge, and, then, as if it were something he had done all his life, Russell dove out into the wind and flew.

“Get up, boy. Time's a-wasting.”

Russell looked up, dazed, from the floor at his daddy, who had just flipped over Russell's bed. “Get yer clothes on and then put this bed in the truck. Get moving,” his daddy said and then clicked on the light. “Go on, now.”

Russell covered his face against the bare light bulb in the ceiling and stood. Outside it was still dark. He could still see a few stars in the sky and the fading moon. Why'd they have to get up so early? Sometimes his daddy did stuff just for meanness' sake.

“Everything is already on the trucks,” Russell muttered. He could see his father's pickup, his father's best friend's pickup, and his stepmother's station wagon. There was just enough room in the back of the station wagon for Russell to squeeze in. Russell's bed was to be tied to the top of one of the pickups.

Russell sighed and pulled a T-shirt over his head and then felt around on the floor for his pants. He had slept in his underwear. He could hear his father and stepmother yelling at each other about hurrying up and getting something to eat at Hardee's.
I bet the only reason we are moving like this is so we can be gone before the landlord comes to collect the late rent. This new house must be awfully cheap.
As he was pulling his shoes on, Jeanie started yelling for Russell to hurry the hell up and had he stripped the bed yet? Rolled up the mattress? Got his own personal box, put it in the car? Was he asleep or what?

An hour later, after packing up the last few things and biscuits at Hardee's, they were at the new house. Russell couldn't see it until his father opened up the back of the station wagon and let him climb out, holding tight to his Old Crow box. The box was filled with Russell's things: the Nativity scene, his mother's picture, the red fox Miz McNeil had given him.

It was a white, two-story frame house, with two roof windows. It was the house in Russell's dream. Beneath the slanting roof he knew he would find his attic bedroom. The woods he had seen behind the house were where they were supposed to be, even though the trees
were ordinary oaks, sweetgums, pines, poplars, maples. No silver trees with golden leaves. The yard, to Russell's surprise, was bigger than he had dreamed. Lush, thick greenness spread out around the house: tall, thick grass, Queen Anne's lace, patches of red clay—red clay islands and continents in a wild sea. Russell imagined running and running over that green ocean and then falling to roll, over and over and over, until he would lie still, his head spinning, staring up at the sky. The house stood alone. Its nearest neighbors were about a half-mile down the road, Greenwood Estates. Russell had seen the sign when they had driven past it. He had caught just a glimpse of Greenwood: brick houses, mostly, trimmed yards, bicycles, shiny cars.

“Get a move on, Russell. Grab some boxes and take them inside. I don't want you running off until everything is in the house. Your daddy tells me there's a creek back in the woods. I don't want you going near it until I get the clothesline up and the washer hooked up. I do hope Larry remembered to call CP&L; I don't want to sit in the dark and sweat,” Jeanie said.

A creek? I wonder if it's deep enough to swim in and has fish. Nobody mentioned a creek.

 

Russell went to bed early that night, in the attic bedroom. He lay motionless on his bed in the darkness, listening. The night-sounds were different from the trailer. A floor fan pushed air over him and outside, through the two open attic windows, Russell could hear, faintly, wilder noises than he had ever heard.

Learning the night-sounds was something Russell had done in every place he had ever lived in: the trailer, and the string of houses in Oklahoma and Kansas. For the first three or four nights Russell focused on knowing all the night-sounds before falling asleep. He had to learn the new words of the wind and the trees and if the house said anything in reply. Though muted, he could hear, right under his bed, the dull sound of a chair being dragged across some floor downstairs, probably the living room. The phone trilled like some distant bird.

Russell picked up a flashlight from the floor and clicked it on to read again the names he had found scrawled in magic marker and blue and black ink and pencil on the attic roof beams. Robert, 7-17-75; Donnie was here, 8-13-89; Sam, April 4, 1987. Tomorrow Russell would write his own name, below Donnie's. Russell wrote the letters of his name in the air with his flashlight. Then he turned it off and wrote his name again, using his fingers.

He was able to see, very faintly, the letters in what looked like blue skywriting, above his head.

The day before the beginning of the new school year, Mrs. Clark took Jeff into Nottingham Heights Elementary. To meet Mrs. Bondurant, the guidance counselor there, she said. His social worker had requested it. What for, he had wondered. What could he possibly tell this woman that he hadn't told somebody else, that wasn't already written down in some folder somewhere.

“I'm going to talk with your teacher and then look around the library,” Mrs. Clark said when she came out of Mrs. Bondurant's office. She had gone in first and Jeff had poked around the computer lab. The counselor's office was at the back of the lab. “This is Mrs. Bondurant.”

Jeff eyed the woman warily as she got up from her desk to shake his hand. Mrs. Bondurant looked too young, with long, dark brown hair pulled back with a bright blue scarf. Dark brown eyes, a turtleneck, jeans.

“Thanks for coming in, Mrs. Clark. Jeff and I won't be long, maybe half-an-hour, forty-five minutes? Come in, Jeff, sit down for a minute, while I make some notes in this file, then we'll visit some.”

She smiled a lot, Jeff thought, as he sat down stiffly in a chair by her desk, watching her as she wrote. Ever since he had come to live with the Clarks, everybody seemed to be writing something down all the time in little folders or notebooks and they wouldn't let him see any of it. They—the social workers, the police, the doctors, now this guidance counselor—were writing about what had happened and what he had said and hadn't said and what his saying or not saying meant. It
means I don't want to talk about it all the time.

They all wanted him to talk, to express himself, tell them how he felt, what he was dreaming. This young Mrs. Bondurant with her long hair and smiles was going to want the same thing, he thought. Maybe.

Jeff looked around the room as Mrs. Bondurant wrote—boy, she was writing a lot. No, now she was reading something. Now she was frowning. Mrs. Clark must have told her everything.

 

Camille Bondurant was starting her fourth year as a school guidance counselor, a year that was to be split between Nottingham Heights Elementary and Marlborough Road Elementary. Mondays and
Tuesdays and every other Friday at Nottingham; Wednesdays and Thursdays and the other Friday at Marlborough. But even with two schools and a heavy caseload, Camille had never been not ready to talk with a new student. Until today. The principal at Marlborough, a singularly boring man, with sandy blond hair cropped close to his head, had gone on and on and on. She had just started skimming the Gates boy's file, her blue-green mug steeping a bag of Constant Comment, when his foster mother had knocked on the door. She knew a little about Jeff from a phone conversation with his DSS social worker—dinosaurs—but she needed to put him in context. Why he was seeing her, when, how, and what did he know about what had happened to him.

Gates, Jeffrey Arthur, age 10 ... aggravated and protracted sexual abuse . . .

Now the boy was sitting three feet away and it was obvious he thought she was just one more person he had to tell his story to. About the right size for a ten-year-old, black hair that fell over his hazel eyes, slight body. Bored and detached? Yes, that was it, not quite present.

... father Perpetrator . . . abuse began when Jeffrey was six years old, with mother's tacit consent . . . mother deserted family, has had no contact with Jeffrey for a year and seven months ...

Detachment made perfect sense—how else would Jeff had gotten through four years of—what had the father said?
Servicing his sexual needs.
God. And the mother—the father blamed her, of course, after throwing him out of her bedroom. All her fault. In the next bedroom for three years, knowing what her husband was doing to their son. She had left a year ago, without warning. Fixed the boy's breakfast, got him ready for school, then drove away. No contact with the boy since. Camille felt like throwing her pencil across the room, followed by her stapler, coffee cup, and whatever else was within reach. She never got used to it—each time, each new case, she hurt all over. Now she wanted to take this little boy in her lap and rock him, tell him to cry, it wasn't his fault. Camille closed the file. Jeff had been told, she was sure, over and over and over, that it wasn't his fault, that he had done nothing wrong. Now she had to make him believe it. Those eyes—in a certain light, Jeffs eyes almost seem to be glowing, like two green fires.

 

Mrs. Bondurant's office was like most of the rooms Jeff had been in with adults who wrote things down and read folders and nodded and tapped their pencils. This one was a little different: there was an
open chest in one corner and blocks, stuffed animals, plastic dinosaurs, and Transformers spilled out onto the floor, in an untidy heap. The floor was covered with a bright patchwork of carpet squares, reds, greens, yellows, blues, browns, whites.

“I hear you collect dinosaurs. See anything over there you like?” the woman asked, between sips of her tea. The tea bag label dangled out of her mug.

Jeff jumped, startled. The woman laughed. “Go on. Go on over and poke through the toys. They're for the kids who come here. Let me show you some of my favorites,” she said and to add to Jeffs surprise, got up and walked over to the toy chest and started poking around herself. “Here, have you seen this one before?” she asked and held up a large, blue one with three horns.

“That's a triceratops. Everybody knows what they are,” Jeff said. For a minute, he had thought she actually knew something about dinosaurs. But she was like all the others who had tried the same tricks to get him to talk.

The woman looked at him and laughed. “Yeah, you're right. I did know that. I bet you've had a whole bunch of people talk to you about dinosaurs, haven't you? And probably not a one knew a whole lot, did they? All right, I won't ask you about dinosaurs. You probably know more about them than I do, even if I did go to the library last night. Let's talk about something else.”

Jeff nodded. He had to be careful. This woman was different.

“Mrs. Clark said you had a bad dream last night. Do you want to talk about it?” she asked and sat down on an old couch that was between the toy chest and her desk.

Jeff shook his hand. Not that dream, when he was trapped and it was dark and he couldn't move and there was nowhere to go. He had woken himself screaming and there, standing half in the yellow light of his lamp and half in shadow, had been a strange woman, her dark hair trailing down her back. Behind her was a man, hurriedly tying a knot in his white bathrobe. Jeff could see the man's hairy chest, a dark V between the white. Who were they and where was he? The wide bed wasn't his, nor were the sheets, decorated with Snoopy and Woodstock. His sheets were plain white. The dresser wasn't his. And what was in the strange darkness that he couldn't see? He was breathing hard, panting, his fists gripping the sheets. He had pushed away from the strangers, back against the wall—

“Jeff? What's the matter? Bad dream?”

Jeff looked at her, still breathing hard, pulling the sheet up to his neck. “You aren't my mother. You aren't my father,” he had added
to the man who was yawning as he sat down in a chair by the door.

The dark-haired woman had sat down very carefully and slowly in another chair by the strange bed. Jeff pressed back even harder against the wall, although he knew it wouldn't do any good. No matter how hard he had tried to get away, to push himself through the wall, it had never been enough. And sometimes he hadn't tried to escape through the wall. Sometimes he has just moved over and let his father slip into his bed. Sometimes Jeff would reach over and touch his father first. Things would hurt less, and would be over sooner.

That meant I wanted him to do it, doesn't it,
he had once said to one of the adults with the pencils and the folders.
Doesn't it?

No, no, no. You were just surviving, coping
. . . That's what they all said.

“No, I'm not your mother and Fred isn't your father. Count to ten, think. Take a deep breath. I'm Ellen, and Fred, and this is our house. You live here now, remember?”

Jeff had nodded his head, slowly, his breathing slowing down. He had remembered everything.

Not that dream, he thought, and looked back at Mrs. Bondurant. He shook his head again. “Not that dream—that's the bad one.”

“Well, do you have any dreams you can tell me about?”

“Well,” Jeff said slowly, “I have been having other dreams, about another place.”

“Tell me,” Mrs. Bondurant said and leaned back on the couch, the triceratops still in her hand.

“Sometimes I dream about the same boys and the same girl. One boy has red hair and the other's hair is blond. The girl's hair is brown. And when I see them, I always see a blue fire around them. Sometimes I dream my dinosaurs, the ones at Mrs. Clark's house, are flying and leaving trails in the air, like a jet does, except blue. Last night I dreamed about the sea again.”

He had stood alone on a sand dune, with a huge cliff at his back. Two moons shone in a starry sky. Someone, something, had called his name, and he had ran toward the voice, which came from the water.

“It was a dolphin calling my name. I woke up before I could get out to him.”

“You've had this dream before—have you ever gotten to the dolphin?”

“Not yet.”

“What do you think he wants? To play in the water?”

“Well,” Jeff said, “I think he wants me. He wants me to come and be where he is, to his place.”

 

As Jeff told me his sea-dream, his eyes seemed to become even greener and brighter. Alone, safe, the sea, the womb, the dolphin an animal guide, a protector—not too sure about the twin moons and the cliff And the other dream—a reenactment of the abuse, no doubt, a return to the dark where he was hurt. But in his sea dream the dark is safe and wonderful and inviting and he isn't alone, the dolphin is there to help him, be his friend. Jeff also dreams of flying. The escape motif is dominant, couplet with the desire for safety . . . Funny, when he left, I would have sworn I smelled the ocean ...