Labor Day (23 page)

Then we heard a siren coming. Another siren. The sound of car wheels making a fast turn. Our street.

I came back down the stairs. Slower now. Nobody was going anywhere. I knew that now. Overhead, the sound of a helicopter.

My whole life up to then—with the exception of what had taken place with Eleanor—things happened way too slowly, but now it was like we were in a movie, only someone turned it to fast-forward, so it was hard keeping track of the action. Except for my mother. She couldn’t move.

She stood now in the almost-empty living room, holding on to the bag of hamster food. Frank stood next to her, like a man about to face the firing squad. He was holding her hand.

It’s all right, Adele. Don’t be scared.

I don’t understand, she said. How did they find out?

My heart was exploding.

I just wrote Dad a letter so he’d know we went away, I said. I didn’t mention a single thing about Frank. I didn’t think he’d pick up the letter so early. Normally he never gets the mail till dinnertime.

Outside, the sound of brakes screeching to a stop. One of the cars had pulled up on our lawn, the place my mother had tried to start a wildflower garden, only they didn’t come up. A couple of the neighbors who didn’t work—Mrs. Jervis, Mr. Temple—had come out on their front steps to see what was going on.

There was a voice on a bullhorn now.
Frank Chambers. We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up and no one will get hurt.

He stood there with his back very straight, facing the door. Except for that muscle in his neck I’d noticed the day I met him, that had twitched very slightly then too, he could have been one of those people you see in parks sometimes, who dress up and
take a pose as if they’re a statue, and people put money in their suitcase. That still. Nothing moving but his eyes.

My mother had wrapped her arms around him. Her hands were on his neck, his chest, his hair. She was moving her fingers over the skin of his face as if he were clay and she was sculpting it. Her fingers on his lips, his eyelids. I can’t let them take you away, she said. Her voice a whisper.

Listen, Adele, he said. I want you to do everything I say here. We don’t have time to discuss this.

There was a piece of rope on the counter that they’d used for tying up the boxes they packed, the things we were supposed to take with us for our new life in Canada. There was a knife left in the drawer, to cut the rope.

Sit in that chair, he told her. His voice was different now. Barely recognizable. Put your hands behind your back. Your feet in front of you. You too, Henry.

He wound the first piece of rope around her right wrist. As he tied, I could see her hand shaking. She was crying now, but he didn’t look at her face. He was concentrating on one thing, the knot. When he had formed it, he made a quick, firm tug, tight enough you could see it pulling at the skin on her hand. Any other time, if he’d hurt her in any way, he would have rubbed his finger over the place, but he seemed not to notice, or if he did, to care.

He moved on then to her other hand. Then her feet. To tie those properly, he had to take her shoes off. There was the red polish on her toes. The place, on her ankle, I’d seen him kissing her one time.

We could hear a police radio outside, men on walkie-talkies, the helicopter directly overhead.
Three minutes,
the voice said on the bullhorn
. Come out with your hands up.

Sit, Henry, Frank said.

The way he said it, you would never know we’d played catch.
Never know this was a person who had sat on the step with me once, teaching me a card trick. He was winding the rope around my chest now. No time for individual knots, just one tight loop around my middle, yanked hard enough to force the air out of me. Still, it was just a single knot he made, a single knot he had time for. This would come out later, when some reporter had raised the question we knew was coming, as to whether my mother had been cooperating with Frank. Consider how inadequate the restraints had been on her son, someone had observed. And how, when the two of them went to the bank—victims? perpetrators?—Frank wasn’t even with them.

She took that money out of her own free will, they said. Didn’t this prove the woman was involved?

But he’d tied her up. There was that. And me too, in a fashion.

More vehicles were screeching down our road. That voice on the bullhorn again.
We don’t want to have to use the tear gas
. No time for anything now.
This is your last chance to exit the building peacefully, Chambers,
the voice called out. By then, Frank was already heading to the door. One foot in front of the other. He did not look back.

As instructed, he had his hands above his head. He was still limping from the injury, but he moved with steady deliberation out the door, down the steps, to the lawn where they were waiting for him with the handcuffs.

We couldn’t see what happened after that, though soon after, a couple of police officers burst in the door and untied us. A woman officer gave my mother a glass of water and told her there was an ambulance waiting. The woman told my mother she was probably in shock, even if she didn’t know it.

Don’t be scared, sonny, one of the men told me. Your mom’s OK. We’ve got the guy in custody now. He won’t be able to do anything to you and your mom anymore.

My mother was sitting in her chair, still, with her shoes off. She was rubbing her wrists, as if she missed the rope. Where did freedom get you when you thought about it?

Rain was still coming down, though less heavily than before. Just a gentle drizzle. Across the street, I saw Mrs. Jervis taking photographs, and Mr. Temple being interviewed by a reporter. The helicopter had landed in the flat space in the back of our yard, where Frank and I had played catch, the place he had talked about for our Rhode Island Reds, and where, as of this morning, the body of Joe the hamster lay buried.

I knew something was up, Mr. Jervis was saying. When I brought her peaches the other day, I thought she was trying to say something to me in code. But he must have had the eagle eye on her the whole time.

A maroon minivan pulled up. My father. When he saw me, he came running over. What the heck is going on here? he said to one of the policemen. I just thought my ex-wife was losing it. I wasn’t expecting to see all you guys here.

Someone called in a tip, the police officer told him.

They were putting Frank in the backseat of one of the police cars now. He had his hands behind his back, and his head was bent down, avoiding the cameras probably. Just before they had him all the way in the car, he looked up one more time, at my mother.

I don’t think anyone else saw it but I did. No sound—he was just mouthing the word.
Adele.

CHAPTER 21

T
HEY CHARGED HIM WITH KIDNAPPING
my mother and me. This time, they’d lock him up and throw away the key, they said.

When she heard this, my mother—a woman who hardly ever drove anyplace anymore—drove to the capital to see the prosecutor, with me alongside to be her witness. She had to make him understand, she told him, that no unlawful detainment was involved here. Of her own free will, she had invited Frank into our home. He was good to her son. He took care of her. They were going to get married, somewhere in the Maritime Provinces. They were in love.

This prosecutor was a hard-liner, recently elected to office to support the governor’s war on crime. The question will have to be considered, he told her, why your son never reported what was going on. They’d take my age into account, he said, but
it was possible—unlikely perhaps, but possible—that I’d be viewed as an accomplice to a felony. This wouldn’t be the first time that a thirteen-year-old served time in juvenile detention, though probably only for a year. Two at most.

My mother, on the other hand, could be looking at a significantly stiffer sentence. Harboring a fugitive, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She would lose custody of me, naturally. They were already speaking to my father about that. Evidently even before this episode, there had been incidents suggesting questionable judgment on the part of my mother.

For once, my mother said nothing, driving home. That night, we ate our soup in silence, out of two bowls retrieved from the backseat of our car. Over the next few days, anytime we needed a cup or a plate, a spoon, a towel, that’s what we did. Go out to the car for it.

School was in session now. I entered seventh grade enjoying a new and unexpected fame that translated into something like popularity. Is it true, a guy asked me, in gym—as the two of us exited the shower, naked and dripping—that he tortured you? Was your mother his sex slave?

With girls, my recent adventures seemed to translate into something resembling sex appeal. Rachel McCann—for years, the chief object of my fantasies—found me at my locker one day as I was gathering my books to make a hasty retreat home.

I just wanted you to know I think you’re incredibly brave, she said. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you.

It was one of the many regrettable aspects of that strange holiday weekend that just at the moment when I had finally won the notice of the girl I’d dreamed about since second grade, all I wanted was to be left alone. For the first time, I understood my mother’s decision, years ago, to simply stay home. Though for me, this was not an option.

Around this time, my mother discontinued her subscription to the newspaper, though I followed the case by reading the paper at the library. If she ever fully understood how it had happened that charges were never pressed against her, that there was never a trial, she didn’t talk about it and I didn’t bring it up. Had the D.A. chosen to pursue the matter, it would not have been difficult to extract testimony from Evelyn (as for Barry, nobody thought about what he might have to offer) in which it would have been apparent that over the six days in question, my mother had not appeared to be under duress, or doing anything—besides taking care of Evelyn’s son, perhaps—she didn’t want to do.

But I understood, more than you might think a thirteen-year-old would. Frank had struck a deal. Full confession. Waiving right to trial. In exchange for the assurance that they’d leave my mother and me out of it. Which they did.

They gave Frank ten years for the escape, and fifteen for the attempted kidnapping. It’s ironic, the prosecutor said, when you consider that this man would have been up for parole in eighteen months. But we’re talking about a violent criminal here. A man without control over his own crazed mind.

I can’t regret anything, Frank told my mother, in the only letter she received from him, after the sentencing. If I’d never jumped out that window, I never would have found you.

Given his escape attempt, Frank was designated a high-risk prisoner, requiring detention in a maximum-security facility of a kind that did not exist in our state, or anywhere close. They sent him briefly to upstate New York, where my mother tried to visit him one time. She drove all the way, but when she got there, they told her he was doing solitary. Sometime after that, they transferred him to someplace in Idaho.

For a while, after it happened, my mother’s hands shook so violently she couldn’t even open a can of Campbell’s soup. She voluntarily relinquished custody of me to my father. Right before he came to pick me up, to take me over to the house where I would live with him and Marjorie and the munchkins, I told her I would never forgive her, but I did. She could have pointed out things I had done, far worse, but she forgave me those.

S
O
I
MOVED INTO MY FATHER’S HOUSE
, the one he shared with Marjorie. As I’d anticipated, they bought a bunk bed so Richard and I could more easily share his small room. He took the bottom bunk.

Lying on the top, at night, I no longer touched myself as I had back home. As much as I had loved that new and mysterious sensation, I associated it now with everything that broke a person’s heart: whispering and kisses in the dark, the slow deep sighs, that animal cry I had only briefly misunderstood as being about pain. Frank’s wild, joyful moaning, as if nothing less than the earth itself had opened up and a flood of light obliterated everything.

It all began with bodies touching other bodies, hands on skin. And so I kept mine to my sides, and my breathing steady, and stared up at the ceiling above my hard, narrow pallet, at the face of Albert Einstein, sticking out his tongue. The smartest man who ever lived, maybe. He should know, the whole thing was one big joke.

The only banging audible now, on the other side of the wall, took place around five thirty every morning, the sound of my little sister, Chloe (because that’s who she was, I saw now—my sister), announcing to the world that another day had begun.
Come get me was her cry, though not in so many words. And so after a while, I did.

Marjorie tried her best. It wasn’t her fault I wasn’t her son. I stood for everything that wasn’t normal in the very normal life she and my father had set out to make for themselves and her two children. She didn’t like me very much, but I didn’t like her either. Fair enough.

With Richard, things went better than you might have expected. Whatever our differences—my preference to live in Narnia; his, to play for the Red Sox—there was this one thing we shared. We had, each of us, another parent living in a house away from this one—somebody whose blood ran in our veins. Whatever his real father’s story was, I didn’t know it, but thirteen wasn’t too young to understand that sorrow and regret took many forms.

No doubt Richard’s father, like my mother, had once held his infant son in his arms, looked into the eyes of his child’s mother, and believed they would move into the future together with love. The fact that they didn’t was a weight each of us carried, as every child does, probably, whose parents no longer live under the same roof. Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.