The Crystal Child (11 page)

“Speed?” Julia said.  “I don’t understand.  What do you mean by speed?”

“Speed,” he answered.  “It’s what we have to beat time.”  His eyes were on her, seeming to ask the meaning of his own words.

Later that day Aaron’s parents called for him.  At the door, he turned to say one last thing.  “When you write up your results, keep one thing in mind.”  He handed her a computer disk.  It was the game called Kong.  “Kong is the key,” he told her.  “This is what did it.”

“I really don’t understand,” she confessed.  “Tell me.”

“Getting up to speed.  That’s the trick.  Speed, speed, speed.”  Then he went silent.  He gave her a pleading look that seemed to say
please understand! 

***

That night Julia was awakened by a phone call.  It was 4 AM.  Steve Kimoro, the doctor on duty at the clinic, told her Clara had died.  A nurse had gone to check on her and found her dead. There was no cause he could give beyond heart failure, though there had been no warning of that earlier in the day.  “It was as if she simply gave up,” Kimoro said.  “By all the signs, it was a peaceful death.”

***

I was sorry to hear about Clara.  I had so little to offer her.  She was being strangled by time.  It was like a rope at her throat.  The devil, the killer.  Being with her, I felt as if I were in a car making my getaway, racing through a dark place, some place where she stopped and stayed.  I knew what it was to be in that place.  Like a bad neighborhood where you don’t want to break down or even stop for traffic signals.  Just drive through fast before you get caught.  That’s what Clara lacked — the speed.  Without the speed, you can’t make it through.  Julia has watched me play Kong hundreds of times, but she never understood.  How could she?  Odd how nature — or whoever — chose this one speed, this one lethal rhythm for life, the speed that lets time catch up and capture us.

***

Being first to heal an exotic disease makes news.  And where there is so much drama — a little boy saved from a cruel fate by a self-sacrificing lady doctor — the result is more than a news item; it becomes a claim to celebrity.

No more than a few days after a case report of Aaron’s successful treatment appeared in the
California Journal of Gerontology
, a reporter at the
San Francisco Chronicle
spotted a good story. Julia agreed to answer questions on the phone; the newspaper story alerted the wire services; the television networks were quick to follow.  After her first brief television interview, the media began to swarm.  She was, after all, despite her conservative grooming and reserved style of dress, a good-looking, highly articulate woman.  Good television bait, as one producer put it. A Beverly Hills agency called, aggressively offering — almost demanding — to buy “the complete rights to your story” as if she had no choice in the matter.

“I have no rights, it’s not my story,” she answered groping her way through her annoyance.  She was getting more attention than she cared to have — or rather too much of the wrong kind of attention.  She may have made a major breakthrough in medicine, but in the hands of the media, her achievement shrank to the size of a run-of-the-mill human-interest feature.

She found herself snapping at reporters on the phone. 
No
, she would not give them the boy’s name, nor agree to be filmed with him. 
No
, she would not discuss her private life.  Could they have “before and after” pictures of Aaron? When they found out Julia kept photographic records of her patients, the television news magazines began to hound her more intensely still.  Her photos might have the makings of news special.  That prospect was raised as if it were a badge of honor.  Large sums of money were mentioned.  “These are private medical files,” she insisted. “I have no permission to make them public.  The boy’s parents want his privacy respected.”

Privacy?
Her callers seemed unfamiliar with the word.  “But,” one network producer assured her in an almost hurt tone, “the public loves stories like this.”

Above all, they pressed for footage of Aaron and his doctor together, warm, cuddly images of the two. Aaron hugging his savior, leaving his home to go to school or play ball like any ordinary kid — with his doctor watching over him proudly.  Julia’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Things became more disturbing.  She received a call from somebody who described himself as a medical talent consultant.  “There’s a growing demand in the media for medical experts, especially women,” he told her.  “Have you considered seeking professional representation?”

“Do you mean an agent?” Julia asked with true amazement.

“That’s right.”

“Why would I need an agent?” Julia asked with a laugh she could not hold back.

“You could have quite a lucrative career ahead of you, Dr. Stein.  People love doctors like you.”

“Oh?  What kind of doctor am I?”

“Caring, sensitive … sort of saintly.”

“Saintly!”

“You know:
Touched By an Angel
meets
ER.”

She hung up with a quick “No, thank you.”  Damn them all, these people who could see nothing beyond the surface, nothing that went deeper than a Sunday supplement article.   She was being maneuvered, and not very tactfully, into roles she did not wish to play: the healing angel, the good fairy.  That was embarrassing enough.  There was even worse. When reporters came to take pictures, they suggested more make-up, maybe a bit of combing and hair-spray.  One helpful television cosmetician who was combing her for a newscast special, suggested she consider coloring her hair. “It wouldn’t take much to get rid of these gray areas,” she said.  Julia winced.  She
did
color her hair, her one concession to female vanity.  Apparently even when she tried, she did not get things like that right.

“Can we take the glasses off?” a photographer asked during a shoot for a magazine feature.

“Why?”

“You know what they say about girls who wear glasses.”

“What do they say?” she asked coldly, knowing the answer.

“Men seldom make passes …”

“Maybe that’s why I’m wearing the glasses.” She smiled, but let her displeasure show.

“It’s just that you have great eyes,” the photographer said as he posed her, adjusting her in her chair (she could tell) to get her skirt above the knee.  And did she have a more stylish blouse to wear?  Something a bit more after-hours.  “Hey, why shouldn’t viewers know what great shape you’re in?”

“Maybe you’d like something in a bikini beside the pool?”

“Oh? You have a pool?” the photographer said, taking her up on the suggestion immediately.

“Sorry. No pool, no bikini,” she answered sharply, slapping the idea down hard. But one way or another — was it the lighting, the make-up, the camera angle?  — more than a hint of cheesecake got through.  Alex was the first to notice.  “You know what, Mom?” he commented during one of her interviews, “you look great. You ought to be on television.”

“I am on television.  Don’t you see me right there?”

“No, I mean regularly.  You’re sexier than the weather girl.  She’s flat as a board.”

It was the first time he had ever called her sexy.  She liked the compliment, but wondered if she should.  She reached over to tousle his hair.  “And don’t forget I can write prescriptions.  In Latin.”

She was being urged to play the beautiful lady scientist, still a lady although a scientist.  A little sex appeal to counter-balance all those intimidating brains.  This was the first time since college she had thought of herself as an attractive woman, someone who should care about the way her clothes fit or how her hair was styled.  Without any conscious decision, all that had dropped out of her life when she turned to pre-med studies.  Now, in spite of her reservations, she found herself studying her face in the mirror. That brought on a flush of shame.  Nothing doing, she decided.  She was keeping this strictly professional, for Aaron’s sake as much as her own.  She had agreed to address a state gerontological convention, a solid, technical presentation.  She welcomed that kind of recognition.  She wanted her achievement to make a difference in treating diseases of aging.  But some of her colleagues began to pass nasty remarks about her whoring after publicity. Men mainly, the sort who begrudge a woman any credit.  But they were more right than wrong.  Medicine and show business are two different things.

She began screening phone calls and turning away interviews. Then she found out one of the tabloid television shows had gone after Alex, cornering him at school to fire off a barrage of questions.  “What kind of woman is your mother?  Did you ever meet the boy?  Did she tell you how she did it?  How does it feel to be the son of a world-famous doctor?” And incidentally did he know the boy’s name and where he lived?  Julia protested vigorously. She was determined to let both Aaron and Alex enjoy a normal childhood — especially Aaron after all he had been through.

***

But she might have guessed that Aaron, though he was healed, had little chance of becoming a normal child.  As he had grasped for himself before he left the clinic, he was now even further from normality than before.  Outwardly, he was no longer the freakish little old man he had once been.  But his transformation had not come out right.  It had gone too far — well beyond normal to a kind of grotesque perfection.  There are countless ugly, deformed, even hideous people in the world.  They rarely surprise, and in any case people know how to react to them tactfully.  But Aaron emerged from his ordeal at the other extreme — as extraordinarily beautiful as he had once been extraordinarily misshapen. People now stared at him with a different kind of disbelief.  He had taken on a classic air of youthfulness, a statue that might have come to life and stepped down from its pedestal to go walking through the world.

Where had
this
Aaron Lacey come from, this lovely child?  Seemingly out of nowhere. In old photographs that had been taken of him before the progeria set in, Aaron looked like a cute little baby boy, but nothing more. When his hair grew in during those first few years of life, it had been straight and brown — not the golden crown he wore now.  Then, he had a snub nose, a pretty little button. Now, there was an aquiline elegance to his profile that might have been sculptured.  His features had become so delicately puerile that he was often mistaken for being younger than eleven years old.  Aaron welcomed none of this. Nor did his parents, if he judged their reactions correctly.  They seemed almost intimidated by their son.  He had overheard his father remarking to a relative, “We sometimes wonder if Dr. Stein pulled a switch on us.  Maybe she’s got our Aaron hidden in the cellar.”

Aaron found adjusting to his new outward appearance demanding. But far harder to accept were the interior changes.  These he found beyond all understanding.  He was restless, often impossible to talk with.  His prickliness arose from a maturity that was hopelessly at odds with his cherubic good-looks.  As sweet as he looked, he was frequently snappish and impatient.  His parents, so used to having a totally docile and dependent child on their hands, found his temperament far more taxing than his physical transformation.  He refused to be treated like a little boy, refused to return to school, refused to take advice or to ask permission.  He found his parents ordinary in ways that grated on him.  Sparks flew between them. “We don’t know you,” his father said one day.  “You’re not the Aaron we thought you would be.”

“Maybe you should have let the disease run its course,” Aaron replied caustically.  “It would all be over now.”

***

They’ll never admit it, but they wish I was dead.  Dead and out of their lives.  What have I ever been for them but a load of trouble?  But they’re such
good
parents, such very good parents.  They use love on me like a meat axe.

I wish the coma had lasted longer.  I wish it had gone on and on.  I wish I was still unconscious, out of this world,
their
world, these idiots I have to deal with every day.  Sometimes I’d like to scream in their faces,
Help me!
  But they can’t.  I can’t make them understand.  If they knew how I’m hurting, especially at night when the dreams come.  But they’re
not
dreams, because I’m not asleep.  I’m looking through a window and what I see — this shining landscape, these trees and mountains of liquid silver — is really
there
.  It gnaws at me like mouths I can’t see.  It eats me away, like worms in the grave. Like I’m dead and still conscious, waiting to be reduced to nothing.

What’s happening to me?  Why doesn’t Julia make it all go away?  Is this what it means to be cured?

The two boys stood at the door, taking one another’s measure.  Only a few inches parted them across the threshold, but Alex felt a distance between them as great as the gulf between stars.

“Is Julia in?” the visitor asked as casually as if he were an old friend.

Alex held back his answer. “Julia?” he repeated, as if he had never heard the name before.

“Julia Stein,” the visitor explained.  “Is she in?”

Alex tried to think of a lie that would allow him to turn the visitor away.  Instead he came up with a stuttering reply. “Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure.  I’ll see. Well, yeah, she’s here.”

Boys may register beauty in one another, but they learn early in life never to say so, never to pretend they care. Beauty is an attribute of girls.  Boys mention it to girls when they’re making out.  That was the rule as Alex understood it.  A boy who notices beauty in another boy had better take care.  As for a boy whose face mirrors feminine delicacy, what could be more unsettling?  Yet Alex was all but struck speechless by the boy he saw before him.  Flesh that fairly glowed, a face that might have been a painted angel’s, alluring eyes that studied him calmly as if from some privileged height. The boy at the door was as beautiful as any girl Alex had ever seen.  Waiting for an answer, Aaron ran a hand through his long, shimmering hair, looping it behind his ear.  It was a girl’s thing to do; girls were always fooling with their hair, especially when they were flirting.  But the boy at the door did it without a hint of self-consciousness.  He smiled and Alex felt himself shrink.  Without realizing it, he drew back toward the safety of the house, his house.

“Maybe you remember me,” the boy said, interpreting Alex’s small step backward as an invitation to enter.  He was carrying a suitcase, which he set down just inside the door, then stepped in after it.  “I’m Aaron Lacey.  We met at the clinic.”

“We did?” Alex squinted at him as if he were a stranger.

“I’ve changed a bit since then,” Aaron said almost apologetically.  “I’ve come to see your mother.”

“What’s it about?” Alex asked gruffly, trying to assert his territorial authority.

Aaron smiled again as if Alex amused him.  “Tell her I’m running away from home,” he said in a stage whisper.

“Oh?  Yeah?” Alex said. “Well, why should she care?”  As he spoke, he realized how clunky he sounded.  Like a kid.  Aaron did not sound that way.  Though his voice was light, almost girlish, if you closed your eyes, you might think it was a grown up who stood there, confident, in charge, almost overbearing.

“I think she’ll care,” Aaron answered, still smiling but mildly impatient now.  There was a nuance to his voice every adolescent hates: a condescending intonation that means
this is between grown-ups, don’t ask me to explain.

“Mom!” Alex called.  On the word, his voice cracked.  He turned to hide the blush that flared at his cheek.  Julia passed him in the hall as he headed toward the stairs and up to his room.  “There’s some kid wants to see you.  He wouldn’t tell me why.”

Behind him, Alex heard Aaron say, “I’m sorry, Julia.  I should have called.  May we talk?”

“Of course,” Julia said.   She ushered him through the hall and into her study.

Maybe you remember me.
  How could Alex not remember Aaron?  His mother had been talking about little else than Aaron for the past year.  He was her patient, her special patient, the most unusual she had ever treated.  Aaron was the boy with the incurable disease that his mother had managed to cure. He was the boy who was going to make her a famous doctor.  Like it or not, Alex had followed every step in Aaron’s medical progress.  “He’s such a fighter.” How often had she said that?  “God, he’s a fighter. I can’t let him down.” Once, when she was talking about a setback in Aaron’s condition, he had watched her eyes brim with tears.  The only time he had seen that happen.  He had come to think of his mother as a doctor, cool, dispassionate, analytical — qualities he might never have admired in a woman if he had not seen them first in his mother.  Julia may have felt she was talking medicine when she discussed Aaron’s tribulations, but all the while she talked, Alex was learning his need for her, seeing it weaken and fade.  Of course Alex knew who Aaron was.  Aaron was his rival, a rival with whom he knew instinctively he did not stand a chance.

All the while Julia and her visitor talked downstairs, Alex sat sullenly in his room, smoldering.  Whenever he behaved like this in the past, Julia admonished him not to be “a broody teen-ager.”  He had never cared.  Now suddenly, everything he saw around him, precious things from his childhood, looked so … childish.  Old toys and souvenirs, videos, comics, soccer shoes, pictures of sports heros, clothing strewn over chairs.  Even the fish tank and his pet newts. 
Kid stuff
.  It embarrassed him fiercely.  He wanted to hide it all or throw it away.  The feeling was strange.  Was he ashamed of being his age?  No, he was afraid.  Because there was somebody downstairs having a private conversation with his mother, a kid four years younger than himself who called her “Julia.”

An hour later when Julia and Aaron emerged from her study, she hastened to Alex’s room.  Finding the door locked, she knocked.  When he let her in, she asked brusquely, “What are you doing up here locked away?”  But before he could answer, she went on. “Aaron is going to stay with us for a while,” she explained.  “I don’t know how long.  I need to look after him.”  She looked ill at ease, but trying to sound cool and professional.  “Will you straighten up the bathroom?”

That evening Aaron was moved into the upstairs bedroom down the hall from Alex’s room.

***

The phone call came the next evening. Todd Lacey’s voice was brittle and threatening.   “How long do you intend to have Aaron staying with you, Dr. Stein?”  She noted that “Dr. Stein” had replaced “Julia.”

“I think we should let Aaron decide,” Julia answered.  “When he feels comfortable with you again.”

“Aaron is a child.  Since when do we allow children to make choices like this?  And who are you to decide whether he’s comfortable with us?”

“He ran from you.  Wouldn’t you prefer to have him with me?  At least you know he’s in good care.”

“We’re his family.  I don’t have to tell you how much we’ve sacrificed for Aaron.  He’s been receiving the best of care from us.  My wife and I regard what you’re doing as unwarranted and probably illegal.  He’s our son.  We want him at home, Dr. Stein.  Believe me, we don’t want this to go to the courts, but you can’t expect us to give up our child.”

Julia took a breath before she answered.  “He says he can’t stand being with you, Todd.  I’m sorry to tell you that.  I’m sure this is something he’ll get over, but I don’t think we should rush things.  We should allow time for Aaron to adjust.  Meanwhile, he’s safe with me. You must know that.”

“I wish I could agree, Doctor.  But we think this prolonged dependence on you is … well, unhealthy.”

“Why do you say that?”

There was a pause.  Then, reluctantly: “He doesn’t think of you as a doctor any more.  He’s beyond that.  There’s some other kind of bond taking shape.  The way he talks about you … it’s not professional.”

She was losing the thread of the conversation.  “I really don’t understand …”

“He calls you ‘Julia.’ “

“That’s been going on for quite a while.  Most of my patients call me …”

“I know, I know.”  She could tell he was groping forward, wandering.  “It’s not just that.”

“Then what?  I’d really like to …”

“He’s become so much more grown up, so suddenly.”

“He’s entering his teens.  It’s only natural …”

“No!”  He choked back the word, not wanting to raise his voice.  “It’s
not
natural, not the way he is, the way you relate.”

She felt her pulse accelerate.  What was she afraid of?  “I’m sorry, I really don’t under … ”

He blurted out the words.  “There’s some game the two of you have been playing.  About a knight and a lady.”

“Yes?”

“Something romantic.”

“Romantic?”  She tripped over the word.

“Princess Alyssa — isn’t that you?”

“Todd, it’s simply a game that he …”

“I know, I know.  But it’s not right, not healthy.  The way he … ”

“What is it you’re worried … ”

He cut her off abruptly, clearly wanting to end what he had begun.  “You should know that we’re seeing the juvenile authorities.  We intend to take legal action.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“We asked you to heal him, not adopt him.  Aren’t you way out of your depth here?”

“My only interest is in Aaron’s well-being.”

“And what do you think our interest is?”

***

“Why is he running away from home?” Alex asked the next time he got his mother to himself.

“It’s complicated,” Julia said, clearly dodging his question as if he were asking about something too adult for him to understand.

“Don’t act like I’m a kid!  Damn it, I’m older than he is.”

Julia backed off nervously, but still sounded condescending. “Yes, I know.  But Aaron’s different.”

“I’ll say.  He’s some kind of freak.”

Her eyes flashed, more anger than he could remember she had ever shown him.  Her hands clenched.  He was sure she would have liked to slap him. 
Yes,
he said to himself,
go ahead, slap me.  Show me who matters more to you.
  She said, “I don’t want to hear you say that, not ever.  Do you understand?”

“Well, he is a freak.  He was old, and now he’s young.  He’s going backwards through life.  What do you call that?”

She tried to shame him, showing a sad face.  “I’m so disappointed in you. I was hoping you could be his friend.  He doesn’t have any friends.”

“Who’d want him for a friend?  He doesn’t even look like a boy. I’ll bet he isn’t.  I think he’s queer.”

“Stop that! Why are you being so hostile?”

He wanted her to know the answer to that without having to say it.  “Because … because why is he here anyway?  He’s got his own home.”

“He’s having trouble with his parents.  I’m trying to help him work it out.  You know what he’s been through.  Can you imagine how you’d feel?”

“Sure.  If I ever looked the way he looks — like a freak, I’d go kill myself.”

She felt herself blushing with exasperation.  “Alex!  Please!”

“So is he going to school, or what?”

“Not for a while. Not until… ”

“Why the fuck not?”  There! The first time he had used the word with Julia.  Meant to jolt her.

“Alex!”

She glared at him, but he gave no ground.  “What is he?  Some kind of genius?”

She wanted to say
yes,
he was some kind of genius.  A prodigy, a wonder.  But instead she reverted to pleading. “Please try to find some understanding for Aaron.  He’s suffered so very much.”  But that was exactly the wrong way to go.  The more she pleaded for Aaron, the more hostile Alex became.  He saw too clearly what she perversely refused to notice.  That his privileged status in the family was eroding.  Worse, that someone else, a pretty-faced boy with pretentious manners, was replacing him in his mother’s affections.

That night he overheard the first in a succession of inflamed arguments between Julia and Jake.  “I won’t share my house with him,” Alex heard his father say. “It’s too risky.  Do you realize what thin ice you’re on?  He’s a minor here without his parents’ consent.”

“I want him close by. He needs emotional support.”

“That’s what families are for.  We’re taking on too much. You can’t simply take somebody’s child away from them. If this goes to court, you’ll lose.”

“You may be right about the law,” Julia answered, her tone as harsh as his.  “But I’m his doctor.  I won’t make him go.  He’s under my care.”

***

In the days that followed, Alex felt himself slipping into a black hole.  His parents had created a zone of secrecy around themselves that made him feel like an intruder.  Important things were being discussed but never in his presence.   Several times, after he was supposed to be asleep, Alex heard Julia and Jake talking in muffled tones, as if about things a little boy was not to know.  
A little boy.
  But Aaron was the little boy.  Wasn’t he? 
Wasn’t he?

Aaron made things no better.  From time to time, he tried, as if it were an act of kindness, to start a conversation, but with little success.  “Do you still have those games?” Aaron asked one day, making a feeble gesture at small talk.

“What games?” Alex muttered, avoiding eye contact.

“You brought me some games when I was at the clinic.  They were meant to get my brain turning over, I guess.  Do you still have them?”

Still
?  Of course he still had them.  It was not that long ago that he had loaned his mother the games.  Aaron asked the question as if Alex might have outgrown them.  Is that what he meant?  “No, I don’t have those anymore,” Alex muttered.

“There was one I liked a lot.  It was called Kong. Do you like that one?”

Alex stared at him in furious disbelief. He couldn’t be serious.  Kong was the most childish game he had loaned his mother.  “That’s for little kids,” Alex protested.

“Well, I liked it,” Aaron answered.  “There’s more to Kong than you might guess.”

Alex felt his temper surging.  He was certain Aaron was mocking him.  “I don’t play games like that,” he burst out.  “I don’t play any games any more.  They’re for children.”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Aaron said.  “I heard there are adults who get addicted to these games.”

Later that day in his room Alex, irate and frustrated, gathered all his computer games together and stuffed them into a brown paper bag.  He jammed the bag into the garbage can outside.  Then he systematically deleted every game he had installed on his computer.  When he finished, there were tears of rage in his eyes.

***

Julia wondered when Alex was going to say it. 
Aaron means more to you than me
.  And what would she answer when he said it?   She knew she was a bad liar. If she were to tell Alex “that’s not true,” would it show up as a lie?  Because it might be.  For the first time in her life, she was struggling with her son, debating with herself what he was, what he might be.  Above all she was asking how much she owed him.  Once the answer would have been
everything;
now she could not be sure.  She tried to believe it was her medical calling that was creating the conflict. But she knew that was not so.  It was Aaron who was tugging at her allegiance, and not as her patient.  That was a wrenching change, because she had only lately begun to feel good about the way Alex was shaping up. He was becoming a bright, gutsy young man, agile and athletic, brilliant at the computer and recently showing a healthy curiosity about music and art.  He was moving into manhood as she always hoped he would with an unforced confidence in his masculinity.  He had no need of the macho exaggeration she saw in other boys; he never needed to be loud or gross or pugnacious.  Though still bashful with females, he was achieving a sort of ungainly gallantry with them — including his mother.  He was perceptive enough to know that his parents were balancing on the edge of divorce, that his mother might soon be on her own with him.  That created a great project in his young life.  He wanted her to know he could be the man of the family if it came to that.  He enjoyed having the chance to help or explain or protect.  Little things: changing bulbs, buying the tickets at the movies, looking after the car.