Two If by Sea (34 page)

They got to the airport hours early, and took walks up and down the main terminal until everyone had gotten “the kinks” out of their legs—Hope's euphemistic term, although no one had done much except walk for the past three days. Ian was fascinated by the electronic vending machine and Frank had taken out his card to buy a mini iPod before he realized that it wasn't his idea. Denied a music player, Ian then scowled about die-cast airplanes and jellybeans (“He's going to have to have all his teeth removed by the time he's thirty,” said Claudia). Denied the jellybeans, Ian ate so many bags of potato chips that he threw up in the bathroom. Frank bought him a toothbrush, and Ian insisted on buying one for Colin as well. Claudia confessed that she felt like throwing up, too. Frank said he would also buy her a toothbrush.

Summoning up all his years of experience at imposing calm on the agitated, Frank had no more effect on any of them than an obnoxious used-car salesman.

I'm scared
, said a voice.

“Don't be scared. It's fine,” Frank told Ian.

Ian said, “What? I'm not scared.”

Frank rocked up and down on his toes. Even his clothing felt funny, as if sewn from broken-down cardboard boxes. Every few minutes, the doors from the European flights would burst open and people would push against the barriers. People were generally too demonstrative in public. He turned to glare at some particularly boisterous groups; but they noticed him no more than they noticed the anemic music on its endless loop.

When he saw the big plane with its triangulated kangaroo in red, he said nothing at all. Behind him, rather more sternly than was her usual, Hope was telling Ian to stop running between the rows of seats. He'd already knocked over one girl's huge hobo bag, scattering lipgloss, candy, and tampons, and while she assured Hope that no harm was done, her face said that she would happily have set Ian on fire.

And then the door opened and a woman perhaps ten years younger than Hope strode out of the customs area. She was unmistakably a nun, dressed in a coarse knit suit so unfashionable it had to be deliberate, holding a little boy by the hand. He was only a little boy, small for his age, unmistakably the boy from the van. Frank saw his face that morning, determined, terrified, his chin lifted against the water that rose to his armpits.
Take my brother
 . . .

What had Frank expected, a preteen?

He had.

But Colin was just a second grader, in khakis that were too long for him, a red shirt, and a navy-blue blazer. The coat he and Hope had purchased would be big enough for both boys.

Ian stopped careening. He turned, ran a few steps toward the woman and the boy, and stopped again. He was about to duck under the railing, when Frank stepped forward to quiet him. Frank watched Colin's face, an ineffable alloy of pity and relief. Colin came around the barrier and said quietly, “Hullo, Ian. It's okay. It's me.”

Ian wrapped his arms so hard around Colin's waist he nearly knocked the good sister over. Hope got to them first, amazing Frank, as she always did, with the agility that let her crouch down and take both Colin's hands, once Ian let him go. “I'm Hope, the grandmother,” she said. “Everything is okay.” Claudia covered her face with both hands and sat down hard, in a chair. Frank wanted to say,
Mom, what happened to Frank, I hope you know what you're getting into with this other little boy
 . . .

Hope stood and offered her hand to the nun, who took it a little reluctantly.

“Where is the uncle?” she said.

“I'm Frank Mercy and this is . . . my fiancée, Claudia. And you've met Ian.”

“Our Colin was rather upset on the airplane,” the nun said. “I'm glad we're here now.” A group of stolid people, equally drab, was approaching in a throng.

“Sister!” one called, and the old woman's face split in what appeared to be an unaccustomed smile.

“I'll leave you now,” she said. “Good luck, Colin. There's a lad.”

“Goodbye, Sister Ursula.”

“His luggage,” Claudia said. “Will it be downstairs?”

“He has no luggage. That backpack is all. He won't let that go. He slept with it.”

“Let's go back to the hotel,” Hope said. “You're going to like New York. It's the second biggest city in the world. I think.”

The two groups turned to leave each other, but Colin hesitated.

“You can,” Ian said. Colin reached up and took Hope's free hand.

Frank stopped, his feet solider than his knees, which threatened to give out. “You were scared in the airplane, weren't you?” he said to Colin. “And you were bored a few days ago . . . you told me, didn't you? And you called me with your mind, and told me you weren't dead. Didn't you?” Colin nodded. “What do you call that?”

Colin shrugged. “Nothing. Talking without my mouth.”

“You told me . . . Why didn't you talk to my mother and my . . . Claudia?”

As if he were twenty instead of eight, Colin jerked his chin at Claudia and Hope. “I didn't even know they existed, did I?”

“What is this about?” Hope asked.

“We can discuss it later.”

That night, with boxes of clothes and toys opened and strewn around the room where Ian lay nearly on top of Colin on a two-foot-wide section of the queen-sized bed, Frank quietly told Claudia and Hope what Colin could do.

“What is that called? Telepathy? It doesn't exist. The Duke experiments were equivocal . . .” said Claudia. “But yeah. Those Duke researchers, they never met Ian.”

“He's been talking to me for weeks,” Frank said. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

“You said he didn't have . . . this thing,” Hope pleaded. “You said he was just like any other little boy.”

“Mom, I didn't know! And Ian's just like every other little boy,” Frank said. “I don't know if this is that thing or another thing, but I guess it exists or we're all nuts.”

“It could be both,” Claudia said, and sighed.

After Hope went to bed, they opened the backpack, both leery of invading Colin's privacy, both rationalizing that he was eight years old and needed protecting. If Frank hadn't known from Mother Elizabeth that it was there, he would never have seen the slit that held the documents in their thick waterproof envelope. Frank didn't disturb them. The newspaper clipping with Frank's picture was soft as flannel now, ruptured along the folds from being opened and refolded so many times. The one Brian sent must have been another copy. There was his passport, some rocks and shells and pencil nubs of the kind boys seem to need, and a small stack of ruled papers, torn from notebooks, letters written in pencil and never finished.

Dear Mr. Mercy,

Hello from me. Blessings to you in Christ. Please come get me. I am in Australia. Weetabix puts sun in your day. I am not

Dear Frank,

This is Colin. Cora died. She went with Jesus. It can be kind to let me come

Dear Mr. Mercy,

This is Colin. Ian is my little brother. I would have courage. Do it for your loved ones. I would come where

Dear Mr. Frank Mercy,

Hello. This is Colin McTeague. How are you? I am alive. I do good things. The sisters feed me. One time I was in a van after the sunami. I pushed Ian out. Ian is my brother. He is three. I did not drawn. I hit my head. I have a scar. I broke a half of my neck. Do it for your loved ones. Jesus is a loving father. Can you be gentle. Send

“The language,” Claudia said. “It's so odd. I know what! He was copying what people were saying around him, and what he saw in books at the convent.”

Frank nodded, barely able to answer, a picture in his mind of Colin working hard, trying to get the words just right.

Abruptly, he got up and left Claudia.

Frank had cried more in the past year than in the previous ten, but only for a moment in the morgue as he watched the attendant towel the dirty floodwater from Natalie's sweet face. To his surprise, he felt that upside-down wedge crowd his throat now. He walked into the bathroom and shut the door, closed the lid on the toilet, and rested his chin on his hands. After a while, hiccuping, he unspooled toilet paper and blew his nose. Breathing began to hurt. He blew his nose again. Frank thought he might never stop crying.

What if he had not found Colin?

What if good-hearted Brian had never done his documentary and this young boy had not taken on the equivalent of an adult earning a master's degree—in finding Frank?

The great, hot bale of guilt over the taking of Ian that pressed customarily on Frank rolled away, and into its place rolled one even hotter, wetter, heavier: he had saved one child at another's expense. Pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes, he imagined a Colin ten years on—tall, muscled by work, certainly furious, perhaps feral, left to die for his own valor—standing at Frank's door, finally to find the little brother.

A small sound tapped, apart from the ordinary whooshes and snaps of hotel atmosphere. Colin was standing in the doorway.

“Do you need to use the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“What's wrong?”

“I'm not a baby.”

“I know that,” Frank said. “I'm not a baby either. I'm just kind of sad you had to wait so long for us.”

“I talked to Ian.”

“So you knew Ian was alive, somewhere.”

“No, I didn't.”

“You said you talked to him.”

“I said I talked to him. He can't talk back.”

“Oh,” said Frank. It was like a radio with only a receiver on the other end, and no transmitter. “Do you have to be close to the person?” Colin looked as though he might laugh.

“No,” he said. “I never tried to talk to anybody who was in the space station or something. I suppose I could, though.” Colin regarded his too-large socks. “I was only a little afraid.”

“You don't have to be a baby to be really afraid. When I was a policeman, I was scared lots of times.”

“You were a policeman?”

“Yes, for a long time. Just until a few years ago.”

Mother Elizabeth said say thank you.

Colin said, “Thank you.”

“You don't have to thank us, Colin. You belong here.” Frank got up and led Colin to the chair in the bedroom where Claudia lay asleep on the second large bed. “Can you hear what I say, too?”

This time he did laugh. “No!” His face sobered then, and he glanced around the room, which was done all in black and white. One wall was striped, one wall dotted, the bedsheets satiny black as crow's wings, the coverlets white, and everywhere—on little shelves, high on the top of the curtain rods that looked down over the toy-town sparkle of Park Avenue, the great dark sea of the park beyond—were those little mime dolls, pierrots, Frank thought they were called. They were creepy. Hope's room was done up as a French open-air market, a great deal more restful. Colin said then, “My mum could hear everybody, unless she turned it off on purpose. She took drugs because it drove her crazy.”

She died
.

“How did she die?”

“She took too many drugs one night and she just fell asleep. My dad said it didn't hurt.”

“I'm sure it didn't,” Frank said, thinking, This . . . and the tsunami, too? Life owed this kid an apology.

“Was Ian always able to . . . Did he always get people to be nice and do what he wanted?”

Colin said, “He could make them be the way he wanted them to be. He's mostly nice, so nice, sure. And give him stuff.”

“What about you?”

“I knew people could hear me talk to them when I wanted to, from little.” Colin said, “I don't think the drugs made her happy, like my dad said. I think she just wanted it to be quiet.”

“Do you remember her very much?”

“In my dreaming, I do. Not really.”

“I think you'll be happy here.”

“Well, I have to look after Ian, don't I?”

“No,” said Frank. “You don't. We do that. We're the grownups. You just have to have fun and go to school.”

Colin held out his right hand. At first, Frank thought he was going to try to help him up out of the low chair. But the boy was offering to shake hands. Scrubbing at his face once more with one more wad of tissue, Frank held out his own hand, and they shook gravely. Frank then led Colin back to the bed. He put the blanket around his shoulders and Ian's. “Go to sleep.” Frank went back to the chair and got out his book, flipping on the small pin reading light.

“Will you stay awake?”

“Does it bother you?”

“No. The whole window's like a light anyhow. Like a Christmas tree. Which we never had one.”

“We have one now. We have two, in fact.”

“That'd be good, I guess,” the boy said.

“Well, okay. I guess I'll stay awake and read for now.”

“Until it's morning? I don't care. I just want to know.”

“Yes, until then.”

C
OLIN ATTRACTED AN
immediate circle of third-grade buddies. And even fourth-grade buddies. Most of them were card-carrying members of the young psychopaths' union. Colin could score off anybody at soccer. There was no wall too high for him to jump off, no tree too high for him to climb, no car too fast for him to try to dodge, no teacher too august for him to impersonate. Hope still had plenty of friends who were teachers—and one man at Linda Jean Williams Elementary said that since Colin arrived, the third-grade team met each morning to light candles in supplication that the days until Thanksgiving would fly past like the falling maple leaves.

Colin did get good grades. Everyone at home was delighted to see him so eager to get up and jump on the bus each morning, for he had never been to school before and loved everything about it, including the gruesome food. Yet Colin was also a half-broke horse. His deferential period of exploration of life at Tenacity lasted about a week. Then he grew louder and louder, and rowdier and rowdier, and rougher and rougher. A few times, he tripped Ian as they ran up the drive, once leaving Ian sobbing with a chunk of stone lodged deep in his knee. Hope saw it happen, and knew it wasn't a mistake. She hated to reprimand him so soon, with all he had been through, but it was impossible to see him be unkind to Ian, who adored him with doglike devotion. Frank and Claudia made do with frowns until the first time Colin told Ian not to be “such a fucking drongo.”