The Borrower (26 page)

I didn’t see the black-haired man for the rest of that day—not on the road, where we put thirty miles between ourselves and Burlington, not at the cheap hotel with wet carpets, where I checked the parking lot frequently from our window, and not in the cheap restaurant, where we filled up on free breadsticks and split a plate of spaghetti.

That night, I used the computer in the hotel lobby to check e-mail, although I swore I wouldn’t search Ian’s name again. I had remarkably little mail, but there, at the top of the list, was one from Rocky, sent yesterday. It said, in its entirety, “I thought you’d find these interesting. Take care.” After that were links to three articles. The first was the same Loloblog one I’d found myself. I noticed this time, though, that 273 people had commented on the article since it had been posted. I didn’t bother looking at what I knew would be angry and uninformed tirades from both ends of the political spectrum, dissolving, predictably, into personal attacks on the authors of the other posts. The second article was the one from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
that Loloblog had referenced:
Hannibal police are asking for help in locating a 10-year-old boy missing since Sunday afternoon
, et cetera. It gave Ian’s address, which I might have found helpful six days ago, and told me he would be wearing a red T-shirt, which I was relieved to note that he was not.

The third link was also the
Post-Dispatch
but it was a new article, posted Saturday morning: “Amid Cries of Child Abuse, Pastor Defends ‘Gay Rehab’ Ministry.” I had trouble focusing on the words of the article itself, not because it said anything particularly horrifying, but because I was at that stage of fatigue and stress where words refused to link together into coherent relationships. I read each sentence five times, giving up on most of them. But what I did manage to put together was that the Loloblog article had incited a St. Louis
LGBT
group both to picket the “three-story former office building” that housed the headquarters of Glad Heart Ministries, and to launch a phone campaign wherein volunteers would call the Department of Child and Family Services hotline every ten minutes, reporting Pastor Bob for suspected verbal and sexual abuse of minors. (The president of the
LGBT
group stated that “Of course we don’t mean sexual abuse in a physical way, at least not that we know of. But we do believe that inflicting severe sexual identity disorders on underage children can produce the same lasting damage as hands-on abuse, and we believe that when this case goes to court, it will set a new and essential precedent to protect children and teenagers.”) Of course the case would never go to court. Even the author of the article implied as much, when it would have made a much better story to suggest that this was something with half a chance of happening.

The reporter had managed to confirm Loloblog’s assertions that the missing Ian Drake and Pastor Bob’s “Ian D.” were one and the same. There was a brief statement from the Drakes about just wanting their son to be safe. “We continue to support the good work of Glad Heart Ministries,” they said.

Only after I read the last paragraph for the sixth time did I absorb that Pastor Bob had responded by “expanding his current East Coast tour” and apparently milking any media coverage he could get, however minor. The original point of the tour, it seemed, had been to fire up and organize the dwindling number of East Coasters who actively opposed same-sex marriage, in those states where civil unions were finally evolving toward it. He was awfully brave, I reflected, marching into Boston with his hate flag flying. Of course, he might really be going there for the gay bars. “Lawson spoke with us by phone,” the article ended, “from Brattleboro, Vermont, where he will be attending worship services Sunday morning and speaking that evening.” Tonight.

I swore at the computer, loudly enough to attract giggles from the teenage girls behind me in the lobby, checking into the hotel in their basketball uniforms. Burlington is pretty far from Brattleboro by Vermont standards, but not far enough, and for half a second, I wondered what Ian’s motivation in directing me to Vermont had really been. But no, why would he run away from someone just in order to run back to him?

I looked at Rocky’s message again, at that insultingly stiff “Take care.” He had never even signed his e-mails before, and that fact made this formal little sendoff almost eerie. As in, “Be careful.” As in, “Watch out.”

Back in the room, Ian had carefully unpacked all his things, and I wondered if he’d been doing this every night. The night before, the first night we’d shared a room, I’d been down in the bar when he got settled in. I watched now as he put his inhaler in the drawer of the bedside table, then pulled from his backpack a stack of cable guides and restaurant flyers he’d apparently been collecting along the way, and arranged them in an arc on the dresser along with the Lowrys, the Vermont books, and a Hannibal Public Library copy of
The Egypt Game.
“I’m sorry I didn’t check this out,” he said when I saw it, “but I wouldn’t have been allowed to anyway. I tried to read it when I was in the library, but it got too scary. The library is definitely haunted at night.”

“Who’s haunting it?”

“Probably the ghosts of dead librarians. Not like you, but like old ladies who never got married.”

Lying in bed that night, I thought what a wonderful children’s book that would make: a library haunted by friendly old librarians. They would fly around the stacks, leaving clues in dusty books, helping three stalwart young children find the treasure beneath the floor. And what better hiding place for anything mysterious than a library? Thousands of closed books, hundreds of shelves.

And perhaps it was what I would do myself, after they shot me, or after I died of grief. I’d float and sneak and haunt, dropping clues like snowflakes. When children came to hide, I’d put them under a spell so they could crawl inside the picture books. If the cops or reporters or pastors came searching, I’d jump out of my little puppet theater, ghostly fingers twitching, and scare them all away.

E
verybody is looking for Ian. Can you help find him?

Is he under the bed? Lift the flap!

No! That’s a cat!

Is he on the BobMobile?

No! That’s an evangelical windbag!

Is he drinking coffee with Shapko the Ukrainian on a couch in the high-rise apartment?

No! That’s the patricidal Russian patriarch!

Is he in the library men’s room, whispering to the
FBI
on his cell phone?

No! That’s Rocky the Friendly Librarian!

Is he circling the hotel in a rusted blue car with Pennsylvania plates?

No! That’s a strange man with slick hair and ominous sunglasses!

Is he zigzagging across northern Vermont with a would-be revolutionary, sporadically bursting into impressions of Julie Andrews?

Hooray! You found Ian!

M
y phone wasn’t working here in the mountains or I would have called Rocky the next morning, to tell him I’d gotten the e-mail, to ask if there was any more news of Ian. Instead, we drove farther north on Route 89. Ian was giving the directions.

“Your grandmother better not live in Canada,” I said. “That’s where we’re headed.” We were whispering in the aisles of a little country store where we’d stopped to get food for breakfast.

“Why can’t we see Canada?”

“We don’t have passports. Not going to happen.” Although mine was right there in the zip pocket of my purse. “And you can’t get in with your pool pass.”

“I just meant I want to
see
Canada. Like, with my eyes. Can’t we do that?”

“I think the border gets pretty crowded with traffic. I don’t know how close we can even get.” The last thing I wanted was to drive straight into a police checkpoint.

Instead of Pop Tarts, Ian chose to buy a cheaper, one-serving box of cornflakes so he could afford Handi Wipes to clean off his sneakers. He knelt down there in the middle of the store, in front of the little wall of post office boxes, and scrubbed the white leather until the shoes, apart from the laces, looked brand new. “That’s
much
prettier,” he said, standing up and folding the Handi Wipe. The bearded man behind the counter, the postmaster, granola- and gasoline- and
Penthouse
-seller who was probably also the mayor, raised an eyebrow at me. “Something
wrong
with that kid,” said the look on his face.

We kept heading north, listening to one of Anya Labaznikov’s mid-’90s mix tapes: Nirvana and Pearl Jam and The Cure. I spent five futile minutes trying to explain to Ian the concept of grunge. I could hear him wheezing beside me. We were down to about three hundred dollars, including escape money, and this part of the state wouldn’t be very fertile begging territory. Trucks were parked in front of farmhouses that should have been abandoned fifty years ago, places with walls so rotted and curved, they looked like Dalí paintings. I knew that unless we found a pile of cash lying around, we’d only last about one more day.

“I completely miss the library,” Ian said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Mr. Walters said he’d show me his Purple Heart, but I never got to see it.”

I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “Rocky Walters, at the library? His what?”

“His Purple Heart for getting injured in the war.”

“Ian,” I said, and took my foot off the accelerator so I could turn and see his face for a second, “what are you
talking
about? What war? Mr. Walters from the library?”

“Yeah, he was in like the first war in Iraq or something. I thought you were friends with him.”

I looked ahead at the empty road, at the dead leaf scuttling across on its points like a cartoon lobster. “So,” I said slowly, “by injury, do you mean his wheelchair?” This must have been what Ian had meant, weeks earlier, by “red cross.” But I couldn’t get any of it to make sense.

“Yeah. Before that he was completely normal. My mom knew him in school, and he used to mow my grandpa’s lawn when he was little, so he must have been normal.”

“What the
fuck
are you talking about?” I said. And there, I did it. I swore at a ten-year-old child. Classy. Fabulous. Ian stopped talking and opened his Henry
VIII
book, burying his face in it and breathing fast. He thought he was in trouble. Or maybe he thought the hand of God was about to reach down and smite me, and he wanted to look like we’d never met.

I had never asked Rocky about his condition, but that was only out of tact. I thought I was being laid-back and understanding about just taking it for granted, not considering it worth conversation. I tried to remember anything he’d ever told me about his childhood, about high school or Boy Scouts or his brother. He’d talked once about relay races at camp, when we were preparing for Family Fun Day, but I’d pictured twenty little boys in identical wheelchairs, baseball cards stuck in the wheels for the flapping noise. It was almost as if he’d deliberately avoided any stories of sports or learning to swim or bunk beds or broken legs or driving a car that wasn’t a van. Or the entire United States military. I wondered if he did it to punish me for never asking, or if it was too painful to talk about a time when he could move through town with his head above people’s waistlines, a time when he didn’t live with his mother.

As we drove along I asked Ian stupidly, every five minutes, if he was sure, and he’d tell me he was, that he’d seen Rocky’s picture in his mother’s high school yearbook, and he was on the baseball team. I felt sick. Maybe from hunger, but more likely from the realization that Rocky and I weren’t nearly as close as I had thought. My nightmares had thus far been tempered by the distinct possibility that although Rocky might play detective and solve the whole case of the stolen boy, he would still want to protect me. This whole time I’d thought Rocky was in
love
with me, and he was barely my friend. I couldn’t even see straight. He’d gone to high school with Janet Drake. What if he knew her well? What if he’d been her boyfriend? Why hadn’t he ever mentioned this?

There was another matter, beyond the shock of it all, beyond my new fears about Rocky’s loyalty: if I didn’t really know anything about Rocky, if I didn’t really know anything about my own father—if my perceptions, in short, were this inaccurate—what if everything I thought about Ian and his family was wrong? All I’d really seen with my own eyes was the time Janet Drake dragged him upstairs while he shrieked that he’d already repented. But who knew what he’d done wrong that day? He could have strangled the cat. And since Ian said the fork marks on his head were self-inflicted, what exactly did I think I was rescuing him from? He was a ten-year-old boy who didn’t think his parents were always fair to him. Big trauma.

But Pastor Bob was very real, and I saw for myself the way Ian had fallen apart that winter. I hadn’t been making that up. I didn’t think I’d been making it up.

One of the only thoughts I could keep in my head was how glad I was to be heading away from Brattleboro, away from where Pastor Bob would be waking up, congratulating himself on last night’s speech, heading off in the BobMobile to the next New England town that needed rescuing from tolerance. Wherever he was going, it couldn’t be this far north, unless he intended to preach to the cows. That was yet another thing: if I’d misjudged everything so far, what if I really
had
been wrong about Ian’s reasons for coming to Vermont? What if Bob, in his repressed and slightly psychotic state, had started manipulating young boys into coming to meet him on the road, however they could get there? What if he threatened them until they ran away and forced naïve young librarians to give them rides? But that made no sense. Of course, logic didn’t seem to be a prerequisite anymore for events in my world.