I Never Thought I'd See You Again: A Novelists Inc. Anthology (16 page)

Gateway, the choice of lab rats everywhere. The drug that kept Jake in control of his best friend’s body.

I looked at him, finishing his breakfast. Could Nancy’s son come flooding back at any time if the drug failed? How would I know? He already seemed alien to me. “Is there anything to look out for? Warning signs?” I asked.

“No worries.” She waved her hand at my question. “The doctors are remotely monitoring at all times.”

No worries. As if any mother ever had a moment without worries after giving birth. Absurd. Almost as absurd as a woman without a child counseling another woman without a child about a child who, right now, belonged to no one but the heirs of Frankenstein.

She packed all her equipment away in her bag. “I thought we could stay home and work on a transition plan today.”

I shook my head. “I have to go to work.”

She looked surprised. “But —”

Jake put his plate in the sink. “We may as well get on with it.” He smiled. “No point in wasting time.”

She frowned, unhappy with her lab rats as we grabbed our lunch bags and backpacks. I let her out and locked the front door behind her.

I stopped in the line of parents’ vehicles, feeling like a fraud. Jake said what he’d always said when I dropped him at school. “Thanks for the ride.”

He waited a beat, but when I said nothing, he climbed carefully out of the car. The drop-off traffic snaked along slowly enough that I saw him greet a friend. The boy smiled, and then did a double take as he realized he was talking to Jake by Deb Stoverd fas. The atonement program had worked with the school and the students to prepare them. Judging by the stares and sidelong glances, they were as well prepared as I had been.

I glanced at the dashboard clock. Three minutes extra to drop him off. I had almost become used to skipping that one broken step in the morning routine. Almost.

Traffic cleared and the Explorer headed down the hill to the middle school as if on auto-pilot. I didn’t look in the rear view mirror. He was on his own. He’d signed on for this lab rat life, he’d have to deal with it.

Work had become my heaven and my hell. Everyone I passed, parents, children, teachers, waved at me with that same look they’d given me when I’d shown up for work the day after Jake’s funeral. Wary. Like I carried a plague.

I shrugged it off. Last time the looks had disappeared when I got down to work. Never-ending work is the perfect antidote to never-ending loss.

Fortunately, my job put me in daily contact with people who have so many worries of their own, they don’t have time to borrow mine. Special Education Director in a small district with very little money and plenty of children in need has never been particularly easy or satisfying. But even after I was widowed I always thought I was doing some small good in the world. Nancy and I had joked about it. The Special Ed Director and the Guidance Counselor against the world.

Since the day I found out about Jake, I had cut Nancy out of my life like some people do with one of their kidneys. Painful, but ultimately something I could live without.

I had been going in the back entrance, snaking through the band room and the cafeteria, so that I could avoid walking past Nancy’s cheery yellow guidance office.

To make her feel more accessible to students, some principal in the distant past had installed big hallway windows so that she was visible, inviting anyone, troubled or not, in for a friendly chat. I’d used to admire her for being so open. I never understood how she managed. My nice four-walled office with only one door and a window that overlooked the dumpsters allowed me the privacy to put my head down on my desk when I felt the most frustrated or hopeless.

Like the day they had come to me, the doctors, and told me they could make my son live again. Sort of. For a while. That Nancy and I were the perfect candidates. Surely we, a Special Education Director, and a guidance counselor would understand what it might mean for the future of young offenders if true atonement could be substituted for incarceration. In the right case. After all, our boys had been best friends. They were young. No one said the word stupid, but I could see it hovering on their tongues.

They were young and stupid, true. But only my son had died. Her son hadn’t broken a bone. Lucky, they called him.

Today, for the first time since Jake died, I went in the front entrance and walked right by the big guidance office windows. She wasn’t at her desk. For a moment I thought she had quit, her desk was so barren. But then I saw the simple quote she had printed and taped to her window. “1 Kings 3:16-28.” I smiled. So she did feel it. Good.

“Did you want something?” Nancy’s voice was soft behind me. I fantasized that she had been in the ladies’ room crying, but when I turned her eyes showed no hint of redness. with the d fas

“No.” I turned away from her outstretched hand. I started to walk away.

“Karen.” She stopped, started again. “How is Jake? Did he go to school today?”

I kept walking. “That’s none of your business this year.”

The high school principal called me to her office on Thursday. She wouldn’t say why on the phone. The ghost of the day the hospital had done the same thing danced up and down my spine. The walk seemed longer from my middle school office at the bottom of the hill to where the high school perched above us, throwing a shadow to remind students of where they were headed. If nothing went wrong.

Sarah was not the best principal I’d ever worked with, but she was far from the worst. The grim look in her eyes forebode bad news when she said, without preamble, “I’m afraid Jake skipped school.”

She said his name with a little blink. Good, she had trouble with it all, too, even if she didn’t want to admit it.

“Skipped school?” That was not like Jake. Unless he was prodded into it by his best friend. But that was impossible.

She nodded. It felt odd to be on the parent side of the equation, instead of the two of us on the same side, talking about a student and/or difficult parent. For a second, I understood why the parents of my special education children preferred that I talk to Sarah for them. She had a very special, very patient smile when she dealt with parents. I felt simultaneously as if I were an errant toddler and not very bright.

I shook off the feeling. I was not a toddler and I was brighter than the principal.

“I will handle it.” I stood up.

“Karen. Wait.” Her voice was just short of drill sergeant sharp.

The door opened and the court-appointed counselor stepped in. She was out of breath. She’d come in a hurry.

I sat down again. I’d forgotten. This wasn’t just about me and Jake any longer. The world had a stake.

I paid no attention as Sarah consulted with the counselor. Again, I felt like my special ed students and parents must, during our annual student planning meetings. They talked around me, without me, using terms I knew only from the point of view of a Special Education Director. Terms that felt alien from the point of view of a mother. Every so often they remembered to look at me and smile.

But then something the counselor said caught my attention. I interrupted. “Chip?”

The counselor nodded, and I knew she would note the interruption in her log to the doctors. “It was in the paperwork. We implanted a tracking chip in Ben before we overwrote his brain with Jake’s personality. Just in case something went wrong.”

“I remember.” I didn’t, for the simple reason I hadn’t read the paperwork. Nothing had mattered except the stark fact that, if I didn’t sign in six places and initial in fifteen, Nancy would have custody of Jake while he was trapped in her son’s body. “So why didn’t you go find him?”

“I’ve sent someone to fetch him. He isn’ with the d fast very far.” She sounded reassured by this, as if a lesser physical distance was an indication of a less serious problem. “Did you notice anything different about this morning, at breakfast?”

“You were there.” There watching, recording, counseling. “What do you think?”

“I’m not his mother,” she replied patiently. She never seemed to get mad. I wondered if she were on some super Xanax-style drug that only allowed the gentler emotions through. If they could imprint Jake’s thought patterns and personality onto Nancy’s son, surely they could turn counselors into zombies of positivity and patience.

Well trained by all my degrees and years of experience, I thought about this morning. Had there been something different? The counselor had stopped by at 7 a.m. sharp and observed our morning routine, checked in with Jake about his plans for the day, checked in with me about how I was doing. Made sure that I knew she’d take Jake to his weekly appointment with his psychiatrist.

Jake had had pancakes for breakfast. Big round pancakes with strawberry eyes, a smiling blueberry mouth, and a whipped cream beard. I didn’t want the counselor doubting my ability to get him off to school properly. He’d eaten one eye and half of the smiling mouth and then pleaded being full as the reason he grabbed his lunch bag and backpack and headed for school ten minutes early.

“He did seem in a hurry to leave this morning. I’ve never known him to be early, except . . .” That couldn’t be the reason, no reason to say the words out loud and have them become real.

“Except for when?” the counselor pressed.

I didn’t answer, but Sarah did. She smiled. A real smile. The indulgent smile of a principal who knows and likes a kid, despite some temporary embroilment in mischief. “Except for when Ben had a plan, right?” She turned to the counselor. “Ben always had a plan, and Jake usually went along.”

“I am familiar with the personalities of both of the boys,” the counselor mirrored Sarah’s indulgent smile, even though reading about them wasn’t remotely like living with Jake when he was under the spell of one of his best friend’s plans.

“That’s not possible is it?” I had a sudden need for reassurance from the counselor. “Jake couldn’t be in communication with . . .him . . .could he?”

“Of course not,” the counselor said quickly. Before I could relax, she added, “That’s the reason I take his blood pressure and neuronic pattern readings every day. The doctors are monitoring him closely.”

Monitoring him closely. How many times I had said the same thing to a parent, even though I knew that there was no monitoring close enough that I would catch every sign of trouble in time.

I realized that I was the only one who would be able to see the signs, if the monitors missed something. “Let me talk to him.”

She hesitated. “It would be better if he had a complete physical, just to make sure nothing is wrong.” She spoke the absurdity as if she didn’t recognize it.

Everything about this situation was wrong. “He’s an eighteen-year-old boy who died and was brought back to life to live out ” he said. “I donedvohis senior year in his best friend’s body. That’s enough to make anyone want to skip school.”

Sarah wasn’t smiling any longer, though the counselor still had a lingering upturn of one corner of her mouth. Reading medical files wasn’t enough to truly understand what it meant to know two boys, and know that only one would ever have the chance to go to college, get married, have a good life. If he were lucky.

I’d had a lot of practice being firm. I stood up. “Let me talk to him first. Maybe he just had a bad day.” And maybe he was talking to Ben, somehow. I needed to know for sure, and that wasn’t going to happen if the doctors got hold of him. For all I knew they’d cancel the experiment. That was unthinkable.

They found him at the amusement park, riding the roller coaster. They brought him home, to let me talk to him. One tiny hollow victory for me. I wondered if he were subcutaneously miked as well as chipped. Probably. That had no doubt been in all that paperwork I hadn’t read. But it didn’t matter. Hiding my feelings had become second nature.

He looked at me warily, but I’d had time to prepare. I’d made his favorite snack — a banana split with extra whipped cream and three cherries. I’d been crafty. I’d made two. I slid his over to him after he half perched on one of the stools butted up against the kitchen island.

“I thought you didn’t eat ice cream anymore,” he challenged me.

I lifted a spoonful of strawberry to my mouth and savored it before answering. “You’re back, Jake. You have a year. Do you want to lose it?”

He shrugged. “I knew they chipped me. I didn’t care. I wanted to ride the roller coaster. What are they going to do? Fail me?”

Straining to pay attention to the slightest clue that Jake was under the influence of his best friend, I reminded him, “But you ditched school. That has consequences.”

He shrugged again. He didn’t eat his ice cream, just pushed it around with his spoon.

Relentlessly, I pressed him, “Why did you ditch school?”

“I felt like it.”

“Even knowing you have a chip in you that tells them where you are at all times, so you know they’ll come get you?”

“I wasn’t trying to hide what I did.”

“You could get suspended.” Even the word sounded lame and bloodless. Suspended. Wasn’t he already suspended — in someone else’s body, for too little time?

“For ditching once?” He scoffed.

“You like wasting some of your precious year in detention then? Because that’s what you’re going to have to do.”

“Maybe I’ll ditch detention, too.”

That made me angry enough to push harder. Maybe I could shake the truth out of him. Was he somehow talking to Ben? “Sounds like you have a piece of your best friend’s brain, not just his body.”

That made him angry. I was glad, until he did something by Deb Stoverd fas so Jake it took my breath away. He locked his little fingers together, fighting his anger, just as I had taught him to do when he was a toddler. A kinesthetic reminder to get hold of yourself that I’d learned in a university seminar one semester.

Without warning, the boy with Nancy’s son’s features, voice, body, became Jake to me. My son. Not hers. I squinted, trying to bring back Ben. Trying to bring back the distance. I realized I had linked my own little fingers together.

I unlinked my fingers and took a deep breath. “You haven’t eaten your ice cream. You always loved banana splits.”