The Orphan (31 page)

‘You,’ Adam says. ‘But…’

‘What?’

‘What about me? What’s gonna happen to… Adam?’

Darren Lynwood holds Adam’s jaw with one of his gloved hands and turns his chin until they are staring into each other’s eyes, close enough to kiss.

‘Adam is dead. He was lost, he never had a chance. His family tried to destroy him, and they almost succeeded, but he survived a little longer. And then I killed him, you understand? Tonight, at this moment, I gave him my life in exchange for the end of his. He can be no more, not in real life, not in your memory, not anywhere on this earth. Adam is gone to heaven, buddy. He’s dead and gone and for ever, amen.’

Darren Lynwood stares into Adam’s eyes, making sure he understands.

Adam nods.

‘Okay, then.’ Darren Lynwood stands and walks a few steps. He takes off his blue Haro riding gloves and drops them on the ground. From his sock he removes a scary-looking street knife, one that looks an awful lot like the one Adam took from his dad’s truck, and he flings it in a circle to snap the blade out. He holds the blade up for a moment, then slashes it across his palm. Blood begins to flow. He makes a tight fist, forcing the blood to come quicker.

‘You next,’ he says, handing Adam the knife.

Adam stares at the butterfly engraved on the handle for a moment, confused, because something is amiss here. It doesn’t make sense, how would Darren Lynwood have the same knife Adam stole from his father’s pickup truck? But Darren Lynwood is waiting for him and he can’t back out now. Adam cuts deep into his own palm and watches the blood drip to the ground. He makes a fist, just like Darren Lynwood’s.

Darren Lynwood comes forward and opens his stark white palm beaded with blood. Adam opens his hand. The boys shake, squeezing hard, making the blood mingle and drip from between their fingers, into each other’s veins. It doesn’t hurt, Adam realizes. It’s warm and soothing and it doesn’t hurt at all.

‘Stand up,’ Darren Lynwood says.

Adam does.

Darren Lynwood hugs him fiercely for a moment, then backs away. He slips his feet from his Vans sneakers. He removes his Patterson Racing jersey and hands it to Adam. He unbuttons his Levi’s and kicks them off, then his underwear and socks, until he is standing in the woods bare naked.

Adam thinks one or both of them should be embarrassed, but he’s not, and he doesn’t think Darren Lynwood is either.

‘Those are your new clothes,’ the boy says. ‘I give you my life. My name. My destiny. The rest is up to you. Can you do it?’

‘Yes,’ Adam says.

The strange naked boy smiles. ‘Then I guess we’ll never see each other again. Good luck, Darren Lynwood.’

Adam wants to say more, but he can’t think of what.

The boy turns and walks into the woods, his bare legs and butt and back shifting and fading as he winds through the small trees, and only a few steps later he is gone, nowhere to be seen. Adam runs after him a ways, but finds no trace. No footprints, no sound. He walks in circles, his mind empty and no longer searching, just feeling the earth beneath his new feet.

He returns to the fallen log and strips off his own filthy clothes. In the cool June night, he feels something draining from his legs and arms, and something new inching through his veins. He closes his eyes for a moment, swaying on his bare feet, and he turns the name over in his mind, seeing ashes, seeing flames, their burned corpses one final time. There is no goodbye. He has no mother no father no sister. Those people weren’t even real. Soon he will meet his real family, when he is ready, and his future with them has already been written. It is only waiting to be lived.

He must say goodbye to the Cinelli. He sees it there on the race stand, perfectly preserved for all time, a kernel of memory he will never visit again, and he knows somehow this is perfect. The Cinelli is another life, one he will never know. He was never meant to have the bike. The Cinelli was not his fate. There will be other bikes, someday, but never the Cinelli. It was too good for him, for all of them, even for Darren Lynwood.

‘Darren Lynwood,’ Adam says, testing the name, letting it cross his lips, his tongue, floating it out into the hills. ‘Darren Lynwood.’

Sounds good. Feels good.

Slowly he pulls on the other boy’s clothes, underwear and socks first. The Levi’s and the Patterson Racing jersey next. And finally the red checkered Vans. They are all several sizes too large but he knows that, given time, say in a year or two, they will come to fit him perfectly.

It all will.

‘Here it is,’ Darren said, pointing a flashlight at the old rotted log in the woods. He remembered when it used to be thick as three men, but now it was rotted nearly hollow, narrower than a phone pole, the ends crumbling to dust.

Behind Beth, just over the slope, the stream gurgled weakly. This year’s run-off from the mountains wasn’t what it had been when Darren was a boy, thanks to the drought that had come to afflict Colorado almost every summer.

‘This is where it happened?’ Beth asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘This is where I woke up. After that, everything was different. Adam was dead.’

Beth hugged herself and shivered. ‘I don’t understand. Was he real? The boy who followed you into the woods?’

‘He was real,’ Darren said. ‘But not that night. I worshipped him, the real Darren, and after what happened, something inside me just broke. Split in half, I guess. The boy I wanted to be came to me in a time of need, became my imaginary friend, and I… adopted him all the way. To protect me. To save me.’

Beth’s face was still a mask of confusion, disbelief. ‘How can you be sure?’

Darren walked to her and shined the flashlight onto his left palm. Between the triangle of wrinkle lines was a vertical white scar, thin as thread. He shifted the flashlight to his left hand and shined it down into his right palm. This line was larger, crooked, but also faint.

‘The blood oath,’ he said, ‘Two cuts. Two hands. One boy.’

Beth started to laugh, and he knew she must be on the verge of hysteria. ‘You never talked about it!’ she cried. ‘Since I met you, all you ever said about your childhood was that it was perfect, magical, one long Ray Bradbury story. No wonder. Jesus, Darren! It was all a lie?’

‘It wasn’t a lie. I believed it. I believed it all the way.’

‘How could you do this to me? To yourself?’

‘I don’t know.’ He doused the flashlight. ‘I’m sorry, Beth. I’m truly sorry.’

‘But what does it even mean? You’re someone else? You were an orphan? What in God’s name happened to you between the ages of eleven and… I don’t even know. When was it? When did you find a new family?’

‘When I was fifteen, almost sixteen. The winter I gave up living on the streets, I guess it was. Chicago is a very cold place to be a runaway.’

‘What about Andrew and Eloise? I suppose you lied to them too.’

‘I didn’t lie. I couldn’t remember. I didn’t want to remember. Everything from my Boulder days was a fabrication, Darren’s childhood. That was the story I told myself over and over until it was all I knew. By the time I moved into the boys’ home in Janesville, I wasn’t lying. I was telling as much as I could remember —’

‘But your name,’ she said. ‘It’s always been Lynwood. How did that work?’

‘It was my identity. It was all I had. My parents, Andrew and Eloise, they understood that. They never pressured me. But they were older, you know. They weren’t close to their relatives. They’d never been able to have a child of their own. I came late to them, as a foster child, and I had become so independent by then, it wasn’t much more than a sponsorship. When I graduated high school with honors, they took my name as a graduation present to me. So we could be a real fam —’

He stopped, paralyzed in thought.

‘What?’ Beth said.

‘My mom, what she said the other day when we went to visit her. She said his name. Adam.’

Beth stared at him. ‘She knew him?’

‘She must have known
something
,’ Darren said. ‘Somehow they knew. They kept the secret all these years, for my benefit, but the disease, her Alzheimer’s…’

‘It just slipped out?’

‘Maybe so. I don’t know.’

‘What happened to the real boy, your bully friend Darren? What about his family?’

‘They moved away. I must have picked up on that rumor as the end of the school year neared. I doubt he ever told me so himself, because we never spoke that spring. But knowing he was leaving, that must have planted a seed in my subconscious. Convinced me, on some level, I could take what wouldn’t be missed.’

‘But you never looked him up? Don’t you want to know what’s become of his life? Aren’t you curious?’

Darren rubbed his eyes. ‘Beth, I haven’t had time to process all this. You’re already ten steps ahead of me. He could still be in Albuquerque for all I know. Or living some charmed life in another country. Does it matter?’

‘It might,’ she said, turning and walking a few steps from him. ‘I guess I should be relieved you figured this out, but I’m sorry if this doesn’t sound like a heart-warming story right now. To me it feels like you’ve just bent the world and everyone in your life to your will, to continue this, this… this fabrication. You betrayed us. You lied to me, and to Raya.’

Darren felt impossibly tired. He was starting to get angry, though he knew he had no right to be. ‘If I hadn’t run away, if I hadn’t done it, we wouldn’t have met, Beth. If I’d lived Adam’s life, I would probably be in jail by now, or dead. There would be no us. No Raya. Do you realize that?’

‘But you’re not
you
. You’re Adam Burkett!’

‘No. Just the first ten years, and I couldn’t help that. If it were up to me, I would never have been born into that family. But I was, and I did what I had to do. For ten years I was him, and then I made my escape. The rest is me. I am the same man you’ve always known.’ He moved closer to her, put his arms around her. She flinched but he held her and eventually she stopped resisting him. ‘I guess it will take some time to get used to. I’ll tell you what I can. Seems like I remember more every day. I’m still in shock myself, but I promise to tell you everything that I remember.’

‘It almost makes sense,’ she said. ‘In a weird way. Your drive to succeed. The company. Your hoarding of all these bikes, all this stuff from your imaginary childhood. The Radical Sickness Collection was your own little Pink Floyd Wall? Were you trying to convince yourself it was real? Is that how it works?’

‘It wasn’t a plan, Beth. Something in me just broke that day, and then I became what I became. I don’t understand it any better than you do. But I want us to sort it out together. I’ll see a therapist, a hypnotist, whatever you want. But I need you, more than ever. I love you. Will you stay with me? So we can do it together?’

She looked into his eyes. ‘No more secrets?’

‘No more secrets.’

For a few minutes they simply stood there on the hillside, gazing around, looking up the stars. Eventually she said, ‘So, what about your family? The first ones. What happened to the Burketts?’

Darren shook his head. ‘Gone. In the fire.’

She frowned. ‘This had to have been news. We can find out. We have to look it up. You realize that, don’t you? We have to talk to the police, confirm it all. We have to bring it all out in the open. If we don’t, I’ll go crazy thinking about it.’

Darren nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘How does that make you feel? That they’re gone. The way they died?’

Darren thought it over, but not for very long. ‘It doesn’t make me feel anything at all.’

‘But if it’s true, if you really started that fire —’

‘You’d have to ask Adam about that.’

Beth covered her eyes, released a shrill little moan. ‘This is too much. I don’t like being out here at night. Can we go home? Now?’

He took her by the hand and they walked out of the woods, down the hill which had seemed so huge thirty years ago. The path led them back to the main trailhead, to the open-space land that used to be truly open but which now was populated by hundreds of new houses built off of Lee Hill Road at the base of the Foothills.

Twenty minutes later they were in the wagon. Beth turned the heater on. She checked her phone. ‘Damn it. Raya called three times. She’s probably worried sick.’

‘She’s such a good kid,’ Darren said.

‘Her last text said she was on her way home, everything is fine.’

‘Good. We’ll be there soon.’

They did not speak for the rest of the drive. They had talked half the night.

Darren parked in the garage and powered the door down. Seeing the Firebird in the driveway made him think of the backpack, where ‘Adam’ had left it in the front seat. The magazine, the knife, the sneakers… vintage goods. No wonder it had all seemed so familiar. It was the stuff he owned. Collected. Mementos from Adam’s life, preserved.

Beth stopped and looked at the Acura, its ruined windshield.

‘This makes no sense,’ she said. ‘If Adam isn’t real, then who’d you hit?’

‘I’m hoping it wasn’t a “who” but a what.’

‘What if you hurt somebody?’ she said, and burst into tears.

He came around the front of the car and hugged her.

‘No really, what if someone’s dead?’

‘It could have been a raccoon,’ he said, feeling like a fraud. ‘A phone pole, a tree, it could have been anything, Beth, but it wasn’t a boy. I know that much.’

The angry woman in the Range Rover, flipping him off. Had he run into her? Had she thrown something at him, broken his windshield? He didn’t think so, but then, why couldn’t he recall anything else that had happened then? Something must have thrown the switch, allowing him to see Adam. To meet him. To take him home.
 

‘You don’t know anything,’ Beth said. ‘Not with any kind of certainty. You can’t say that, not right now.’

Darren sighed with frustration, but she was right. He could have killed some kid and he had no way of knowing. Although, if he
had
killed some random kid, wouldn’t Officer Sewell have fielded a report from another set of concerned parents? Wouldn’t someone have found a body?

‘Look, I’ll do whatever you want. Tomorrow morning we’ll go at this together, from all sides, with the police’s help, all right?’

‘What about Tommy? You said something about it being too late. We had to come here before it was too late.’

Darren frowned. What had seemed so urgent a few hours ago now seemed a paltry thing compared with what had been unlocked within himself. ‘That was before I knew what happened,’ he said. ‘When I visited him today, I thought Adam slipped away, that maybe he was planning something. Tonight, I felt him again, and I was scared. Literally a scared ten-year-old kid. Those monsters, his parents —’

‘Your parents,’ she said.

‘Fine,
my
parents. They’re long gone. Dead. Tommy said so himself. Three bodies were found in the fire’s remains, right? Tommy knew it. And I must have known it back then, even when I was Adam. That’s what my friend Darren Lynwood told me up in the hills, that night I became him. But he was imaginary, springing up from the trauma I’d just been through, right? And if
that
Darren was a product of Adam, he couldn’t have known anything that Adam didn’t. So if Darren said the bodies had been found, then Adam must have known. I must have found out at some point. It had to have been in the news. Tommy only confirmed it yesterday. And that means they’re really gone. There are no parents, no monsters. The monsters were a figment of Adam’s imagination. That’s what his parents had become to him. It’s over. Now, can we please go to bed and talk the rest of this through tomorrow morning?’

She opened her mouth to argue, but instead pushed past him. He followed her inside. They dropped their jackets and keys on the kitchen bar counter. The clock over the stove said 4:23 a.m.

Beth walked around the counter and looked down at something sitting near the end, a piece of mail or a slip of paper. Darren watched her, a bad feeling building inside. But no, it was going to be okay now. Raya was home, he and Beth were home, they had confronted the beast. His past. Things would get better now. They could deal with the loose ends in the coming days. Everything that mattered was right here, safe.

Beth’s brow folded over itself. She covered her mouth. She whirled and stared toward the rear of the house.

‘What is it?’

She handed him the slip of paper, one sheet taken from the notepad they used for grocery lists, reminders, appointments.

Beth didn’t wait for him to read it. She bolted for Raya’s wing of the house.

‘Beth!’ Darren called, but she was already running down the hallway. He looked at the paper. It was a note. Scribbled with the penmanship of an unwell mind.

Darren ran to Raya’s bedroom, where Beth was screaming at the top of her lungs.