The Inner Circle (22 page)

I never once complained about it. My wife and daughter were gone, I felt I had no more purpose, and now, taking care of Maya, I realized I did have a reason to keep going. Maya had become my reason.
 

So I took care of her. I nursed her back to health. And as the days became weeks, the weeks became months, we started to get to know each other very well. Nothing sexual in nature at all, but we started to connect. She fell in love with me, I fell in love with her, but neither of us went forward with our desires. Maya didn’t go forward because of her HIV and fear that she would somehow pass it on to me. I never went forward because I felt by doing so would be a betrayal to Jen and Casey.
 

But now almost two years had passed. Maya and I had started growing even closer. Oftentimes we would sleep together, but not have sex. Just hold each other until we fell asleep, listening to each other’s breathing, feeling each other’s heartbeats. Sometimes we kissed.
 

That was as far as it ever went. I was still holding back, and Maya, sensing this, understood. And recently, I found myself falling more and more in love with her, and as that realization blossomed in my head, I started to become afraid again. I started thinking more and more about my lost family.
 

Then Carver died, and I became even more scared.
 

Staring out at the dark horizon, holding Maya’s hand, I said, “Back in Miami, when we went into that hotel and they ambushed us? My first thought was you.”
 

Maya didn’t say anything.
 

“You were the thing that made me want to keep going. What made me want to survive. Just seeing your face, thinking of you ... that’s what made me want to come back home.”
 

She squeezed my hand again, those three light squeezes.
 

Maya said, “What did it look like?”
 

I closed my eyes. Thought about being back in the Beachside Hotel. Watching Carver speak his last word.
 

“It looked like a butterfly.”
 

“You’re just saying that.”
 

“It did.”
 

“What color was it?”
 

I let go of her hand. Adjusted myself on the swing so I could look at her, so I could see her dark eyes staring back into mine. I opened my mouth, started to speak, but then stopped. I listened to the insects, to the owl, to the voices inside the farmhouse. The Kid had stopped singing, everyone else had stopped, and now they were just talking, probably about Carver again.
 

Finally I whispered, “It was black.”
 

Maya stared at me another moment, biting her lower lip. She nodded, took a breath, and stared out at the trees.
 

I leaned back in the swing and stared out at the trees too.
 

“Maya?”
 

“Yes?”
 

“I ... I love you.”
 

“I know. I love you too.”
 

We continued sitting there then in silence, just watching the night. I squinted my eyes and imagined that I could see our words out there, rainbow-colored, fluttering about the night, rising up toward the stars that may or may not have been tinkling like bells.

32

At eight-thirty the next morning, the Kid had his overnight bag packed, Carver’s hard drive stored away in a box, and was ready to go. Jesse was going to drive him out to the airport. I volunteered to come along.
 

Jesse said, “Then you want me to thay?”
 

We were standing in the front yard, the three of us, only a couple feet from the pickup.
 

“No,” I said. “You can drive. I just want to tag along.”
 

The Kid had taken a shower, had applied gel to his hair, and he stood there now under the bright morning sun, not a strand of hair out of place. He gave me a strange look but didn’t say anything.
 

We got in the truck, Jesse in the driver’s seat, the Kid in the middle, and me on the passenger side.
 

It took nearly an hour and a half to get to the airport, and none of us spoke the entire way. Jesse played his country music, and while neither the Kid nor I cared for it much, we didn’t object.
 

When we arrived at the airport, the Kid said, “Thanks, guys. I’ll give you a call later tonight.”
 

I had gotten out of the truck so he could get out, and I stood there holding the door open.
 

“I’m going with you.”
 

The Kid said, “No you’re not.”
 

“Yes, I am.”
 

I leaned back into the pickup, told Jesse to head back to the farmhouse without me. He looked dubious but I told him it was okay, I would give him a call later when I boarded my returning flight.
 

“Tell Drew he’s in charge of checking up on the Racist,” I said, and shut the door, took a step back and waited for him to pull away.
 

When he did, I turned back to the Kid.
 

He said, “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
 

“I just can’t be there right now. Especially when they’re having that memorial service.”
 

“But you can’t come with me.”
 

“I’m the only one that believes boojum means anything. I want to be there for this.”
 

“It might not be anything.”
 

“But it might.”
 

The Kid sighed, shook his head, stared out at the parking lot.
 

“Fred’s not flying this time,” he said. “You can’t just hop on board.”
 

“I know that. That’s why I went online last night and reserved a ticket.”
 

“Yeah? And with whose money?”
 

I smiled at him.
 

“That’s right,” he said. “Mine.”
 

He started walking away, toward the airport entrance, his overnight bag swinging from the strap off his shoulder, the box containing Carver’s hard drive cradled in his arm.
 

“Kid,” I said, and there was defeat in my voice. “Please.”
 

He was only a few feet away when he stopped. “And what are you going to do when you find out it means nothing?”
 

“It won’t.”
 

“But what if it does? You can’t keep kidding yourself, Ben. You have to move on.”
 

“Okay.” I swallowed. “If that’s the case, I’ll move on. But until then, I can’t.”
 

The Kid mulled this over for a beat. “You already booked the flight, huh?”
 

I nodded.
 

“Well, then I guess you spent your Christmas present a couple months early.” He nodded toward the entrance for me to come along.
 

When we went through the sliding glass doors, he paused and looked around the terminal. He unzipped his bag and pulled loose his iPad, hesitated, then handed it to me.
 

“What do I want with this?”
 

“I figured you could use some in-flight reading.”
 

I glanced down at the iPad. He reached out and tapped one of the apps and a screen popped up, mostly all text.
 

“What am I looking at?”
 

“Do you know anything about Carver’s life? About how he spent his childhood?”
 

“No.”
 

“Exactly. None of us did. So when I found out about what happened, I got curious and I started doing some research. It’s one hell of a crazy story, I’ll tell you that much. A lot of the information I managed to find was originally sealed and was a major pain in the ass to uncover. I’d meant to talk to Graham about it but chickened out.”
 

I glanced down at the iPad again. A voice came on over the intercom announcing that gate three was now boarding.
 

“What’s so crazy about it?”
 

“For starters,” the Kid said, “Carver’s mother was a whore. Literally.”
 

I expected him to smile at this, as he usually did when he made a joke. But he just stared back at me. He didn’t even crack a grin.

33

Carver’s mother was indeed a whore. Her name was unknown, her age undistinguishable, but it’s a good guess that she was under the age of twenty. She had worked the streets of New York City, just one hooker among a thousand, and as these things go, she got pregnant.
 

Before she could have an abortion, though, her pimp found out. She was called to see him. Expectations of a beating, of him remodeling her face, quickly faded from her mind. As it turned out, her pimp, while angry, had other ideas for her. She was told to relax, to take a couple months off, and if she was going to work, to just give head, nothing else.
 

The pimp saw himself as an entrepreneur. There was always money to be made, no matter the outcome. He knew someone who knew someone who paid a pretty penny for children. Newborns went for an especially high price.
 

Once Carver was born, he was paid for by a middleman (seven thousand bucks), who drove with at least a half dozen other children—all ranging from newborns to two years old—down I-95 toward Washington, D.C. There the middleman met up with another man to complete the transaction, where he would then receive a couple more thousand dollars on top of what he had originally paid for the children.
 

Only thing was, the man he was meeting was an undercover federal agent. The operation had been under surveillance for eight months. When the middleman came to D.C. to make the trade, he was busted, his “goods” taken away to a local halfway house. (Truthfully, the government didn’t care what happened to the children. Once they were put into a government-funded orphanage, any thought of the children left the agents’ heads. Their main goal now was to concentrate on the trafficking that was going on between New York City and D.C.)
 

Carver’s time in the orphanage was not a bad one. The staff took good care of him. One nurse, who had graduated from Tuskegee University, had become quite taken with the baby. A name had to be placed on the birth certificate, so the nurse named him Carver, after George Washington Carver.
 

He spent his first two years at the halfway house before being put in the care of a young couple living in Maryland.
 

He only stayed with them for six months. Out of nowhere the man was laid off from his job; his wife slipped getting out of the bathtub and broke the lower section of her spinal cord. As much as they loved Carver, wanted to keep him, they had no choice but to give him back to the orphanage.
 

Carver spent another three years there. Learning to read, learning to write. One monthly report mentioned how Carver was “very attentive” and “showed great promise.”
 

He was nine when he was put in the care of a family who lived just outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. The man was a music teacher at a local high school. He was slim and handsome with neatly trimmed hair and a thin mustache. His wife was a pediatric nurse at the local hospital, working mostly nights. She was a few years younger than her husband, with soft hands and breath that always smelled of spearmint.
 

Together the couple had taken twelve children into their care over a fifteen-year stretch. They already had two other boys living with them by the time Carver arrived.
 

A year later, the family took in two more children, fraternal twins. Their names were Stacey and Kelley. They were twelve years old.
 

Less than three months passed before the father began molesting them.
 

This was not something new, however, and it was not something Carver—then ten years old—was aware of right away. At the time he didn’t find it strange at all that the father, on the nights the mother was working, visited the girls’ bedroom. That he would shut the door and lock it. Once Carver asked Stacey and Kelley what the father did with them, and they both claimed they played board games.
 

Carver thought nothing more of it.
 

Then he saw the bruises.
 

It happened by accident. He walked into the bathroom one day and saw Stacey naked. She was just coming out of the bath, reaching for her towel—and the moment Carver opened the door and saw her she stopped and stayed that way, frozen, the water dripping to the tiled floor.
 

Carver, ten years old, never seeing a girl naked before, did not notice the fact that this twelve-year-old girl had a vagina. What he noticed was the discolorations on the inside of her thighs.
 

“What’s that?” he asked, meaning the bruises, and when she just continued standing there, not saying anything, he said, “Are you hurt?”
 

“Leave,” she told him. “Get out.”
 

Carver left. He waited until she came out wearing her clothes. He asked her again about the bruises but she shook her head.
 

“Please,” she said. “Just forget it.”
 

She ran away and slammed her bedroom door shut.
 

Later that night, the mother away at work, the father again went into the girls’ bedroom. Carver heard the door open and close from where he lay in his bed. He stared at the ceiling, tried listening for any sound. When he heard none, he threw off his covers and started to get out of bed.
 

“Don’t,” one of the boys whispered.
 

“Why?”