Two If by Sea (38 page)

“I should help.”

“You do help.”

“I'm sorry I called Claudia a wowser.”

“You shouldn't have,” Frank said. “But she forgives you.”

Colin said, “I'm sorry that your grandpa died.”

“My mother heard you telling her that. In her head at church. I'm going to go plant a little tree on his grave. Do you want to come with me?”

Colin said, “Okay.”

For the next hour, working quietly, Colin was a different child. It was as though the hell-raiser rheostat on Colin's personality had been turned down to dim. Lately, he was polite even with his mind. Hope sometimes heard him speak to her:
I'm sorry, but I don't like mashed potatoes because they make me gag.
So did Ian.
Ian, you can be the deadliest pirate if you want
. In a sitcom, Hope would have been taking his temperature. Time would tell whether this was Colin's personality or the aftermath of fear.

When Claudia knelt at the mound of dirt under the biggest hickory tree on Penny Hill and wept like a little girl for Prospero, Colin as well as Ian knelt on either side of her, each holding one of her hands.

“Pro was a very nice horse,” Colin said. “Ian is good to the horses. More than me. But Pro was very, very nice to me.”

“He liked you,” Claudia said. “He could tell you cared about people, horse people, too, even though he was sick.”

Claudia told Frank later that Colin said then, “Come on, Claudia. I can see Frank all the way down there. He's knocking that porch down that burned up. The barn bits, too.”

“That's good,” Claudia said. “It's dangerous, with all those old nails.”

“He's got a magnet picks them up,” said Colin. “Did you ever see it?”

Colin was telling her, Claudia said, that life goes on.

Colin and Ian took a long time choosing the little evergreen that would grow near Jack Mercy's grave. Frank explained that it couldn't get too big, because they needed to respect the graves where other old people were buried, so they would have to look at all the trees around the one they chose and make sure they weren't too big. They chose a juniper that might get to be five feet tall, and Frank then drove them over the hill to the cemetery, with the tree in a bucket of fragrant dried manure.

“Are they all old people up here?” Colin asked.

Frank thought, Oh no.

“Not every one of them.”

Ian said, “Look, Dad! This one was only one years!”

Frank thought, Oh no.

He said, “Long ago, doctors didn't know how to make babies get better if they got sick . . .”

“This girl was only one, two, six, ten, sixteen!” Ian yelled. “Look, you can see her picture!”

“Let's plant Jack's tree,” Frank said. “Most people grow up.”

“Our dad died from being sick,” Colin said.

Nearly flinching, Frank asked, “Did you see him when he was dead?”

“No, but I saw him when he was sick. He was in the bed. I heard people talking about him being dead soon, he would die pretty soon.”

“What did they say?”

“What if those boys find out they were dead this whole time? What if it messes Ian up? Then the old guy said, oh well, boo-hoo. We will un-mess him up.”

“What about your granny?”

“She was a nanny.”

“I don't mean Cora.”

“I didn't have a granny. My dad said, Mary, you and the kids are my only family I have. That was when he wanted to stop taking drugs.”

“When was that?”

Colin thought hard. “It was a long time ago. Maybe I was seven. Maybe. It was before we lived in the tree.”

“What tree? This would be just right before the flood. Right?”

Colin shrugged. For what did years mean to a child? The time before Christmas was the same as the time before dinner, the time that Ian found the sea turtle's shell was the same as the time Ian got a cold coin for making the red horse win the race, and the time when they had a swimming pool was the same as the time as when they lived in a tree. They weren't real memories but collages cut from shadows and circlets of memories and photos and murmurs overheard.

On the subject of his father's death, however, Colin was firm and detailed.

“He had stripes in this throat. They didn't let him go to a doctor because he would tell about Mum and us. He got very sleepy and even more sleepy. Then one morning I woke up and he wasn't there. Then Cora took us to the place with the pool.”

“I know!” Ian shrieked, raising his hand. “I had a burn.”

“Did you have to go to a hospital?” Frank asked.

“It was just a sunburn!” Colin said. “He got a sunburn right before we left the island with the tree castle.”

“What was it?”

“A tree castle.”

Not
Etry Castle
.
A tree castle
. They really did live in a tree house.

“What was that like?”

“It was really, really big. It was built with all these pretty walls with different grass baskets for shelves. It had ten rooms but not a fridge. It had beds but not a real roof. You could run on the swingy sidewalks.”

“I know!” Ian cried out again. “You had to go in the boat to the town. We had cookies and ice cream in town. I never had ice cream!”

At night, they took the ladder down and left them up there with Cora. “It was four hundred feet,” said Ian.

Colin said, “Like high as the racehorse spinner on the barn.”

Colin meant the weather vane. So thirty or forty feet up, perhaps more. The red-haired girl, the same one Colin hit with his skate blade, came one morning to bring their food and unlocked the door to the stairs and let the stairs fall down from the tree house. She turned her back when they climbed down the stairs.

“Did Ian make her do it?”

Colin nodded. He didn't know why that day and not another day.

Cora drove them to the airport in a Jeep she found on the street. He didn't know why.

They met a lady who gave them the purple van and gave Cora money and bought them backpacks and shorts. He didn't know why.

They went shopping and had corn and ice cream. Then Cora was crying and pushed them in the purple van. The man who wore soft shirts was chasing them in a car. He didn't know why.

They drove too fast, and Cora wasn't a very good driver, and she drove off the road, right down into the flood.

Colin didn't remember very much of his first few days in the hospital, except that he always felt like he was just about to wake up or just about to go to sleep.

Then a woman came, with a tape recorder the size of Colin's smallest finger. Another woman took pictures. She talked to Colin and asked him where he lived and what his mommy and daddy's names were. Colin didn't answer. Then two men came from the TV station, calling him “Moses.”

Colin said nothing to them either. He knew that his parents would not come, but he was afraid that the girl with the red hair would. She didn't. Neither did the tall black man with lightning tats on his head, or Hula man, or the man with the sharp nose who wore soft shirts. No one came, despite newspaper pictures, and stories on the telly and police searches.

Colin never told anyone about his family, or the house in the tree, not even the nurses or the doctors.

After a while, he got better and went home with Helen, wearing what he described as a big scarf around one arm, which Frank interpreted to mean a sling. Helen had cut out the stories about him, and put them into a folder from the church that had a big blue-and-gold cross on it. She got him a new backpack and offered to clean the rubber-coated envelope. Colin liked the new backpack, a big North Face Borealis, orange and blue, but he would not give up the brown envelope even to be cleaned. She might steal it. Once, he woke from sleeping in the church house and heard the minister and Helen having a fight. Helen was begging to keep Colin, and the minister was saying that his flock were their children, although at the time Colin didn't know that the minister meant people and not sheep.

Colin heard her crying, “Robert, it's as if God Himself sent him to us.”

But the minister said, “I'm sorry to see you this way, Helen. Maybe you are suffering from division.”

The wife said, “It's not a case of division to want a child! All women want a child.”

“God didn't give us a child, so there must be a divine raisin. It's up to you to find the raisin in this.”

The minister's wife had a sister who was a nun, Sister Mary Francis de Sales. The minister said he would drive Colin to the convent if Helen didn't.

One day, Helen drove him to the convent, and hugged him goodbye, still crying, as she had for days, pretty much all the time—but her sister did not. Helen smelled of pears and face powder, and she was a little too old and sad to be a mother. Still, he would have rather stayed with Helen and the minister than with the nuns.

The nuns were even older, and they liked the seven girls but not any of the boys, except the littlest, who was only two. They ate the same food every day—porridge for breakfast, toast and potato soup for lunch, carrots and eggs for dinner, and on Sundays some nasty fish and more potato soup. There was a box of dominoes and a box of checkers, but so many pieces were lost there was no way to make up proper sides for a game. After a couple of months, some ladies brought other things, writing and drawing paper and pens for everyone, and puzzles with a thousand pieces, and a race car set. The older boys took the race car set and wouldn't let the boys Colin's age or younger ever touch it. But Colin got writing paper and pens and hid them in his backpack. For months, he slept and played in a long room high up in the nuns' house, with the seven other boys bigger and littler than him. The big ones farted all night. The little ones cried for their mummies and the big ones cried, too, but just when it was dark. The littlest boy cried until he was sick on the floor about once a week. The biggest one punched Colin's face and pinched and pulled on his willy, and told other boys to do the same but only one did. The boy said he'd say Colin tried to grab his butt in the shower if he told.

So he didn't tell, but he thought all the time about Ian and he asked if he could help the nuns in the kitchen. They said he could. He washed potatoes, and then he could hear the telly and the radio without them knowing. He watched the lines on the TV so he could make out some words, because he still couldn't read or write. After a while, he started to recognize lots of words. He found words in a book of fairy tales and more in a book of children's prayers.

He started writing his letters to Frank, although he knew him only as “the Fireman.”

Colin was sure that when he completed one, the nuns would find a way to send it. He would talk to them, without talking, and they would. He didn't give them any of the letters, though. He wanted to wait until he was sure of the best one, the one named Mary Dominic, who always gave him sweets that her younger sister sent to her, little sugar half-moons that tasted like oranges and strawberries. He told her he didn't know nuns had real sisters, and Mary Dominic started to cry.

Colin took action.

“She's sad,” Colin told Mother Elizabeth Gray. “She wants to go home to her real sisters.”

“She's not really sad, Colin,” said Mother Elizabeth Gray. “She's just going through the hard time people go through when they have a vacation.”

One day in the late afternoon, he overheard the program that Brian Donovan made about his family. He saw the picture. He heard the name of the firefighter, Frank Mercy, whom the TV guy called “my gallant brother-in-law.” He would have to change the name on all the letters!

Sister Agatha said, “Sister, please turn that off. There's a young one here who has had enough of—”

But then Colin screamed, first with this mind and then with his mouth, “No!”

All the nuns came running, from all over the building. Even the ones out in the garden heard him scream, in their minds.

“What, child?” Mother Elizabeth Gray said.

“That little boy! That is my gallant brother,” Colin said.

All the nuns clustered around.

Which picture had his brother in it? Could Colin tell if the brother was alive? Colin wasn't sure; Ian couldn't talk to him, but he had a notion that he would know if Ian had died. After all, he told Frank, just a few seconds before he hit his head and passed out, “I saw you grab Ian, Dad.”

Frank could tell that Colin didn't want him to react to the use of the word
Dad
, so he simply nodded.

The big man from the telly showed up three days later. He walked with a stick but he was kind. He said he had two girls who died in the flood. He took Colin out for lunch, for a huge lunch of shrimp and chips. He took pictures of Colin with a camera that made the pictures right there before your eyes, and gave Colin one and promised he would send the other one to Frank Mercy.

Six sleeps later (Colin counted every night by making a little mark on the wall with his toothbrush), Mother Elizabeth Gray came to tell him to make sure he had a good shower and wore the clothes given to him by the women from the committee, because he was going to the United States the next day.

“Jesus Christ!” Colin said.

“Don't swear, lad,” the nun told him.

Colin told the mother nun that he was praying. “Why am I going?” he asked her.

“Someone there is sending for you. Someone who has your brother. You have an uncle there.”

“Were you excited?” Frank asked. “About leaving?”

“No, scared.”

“Of course, you didn't know me.”

“I thought you could be a bad guy. You could work for them. You still could work for them.”

And why not? They'd been little children living with what sounded like rather bemused hippie parents. Their mother died. Their father died. Except for Cora, the people they were left with treated Ian like a tool. They made Ian do things that Colin knew were stealing. They went on planes to cities. Sometimes they slept on the airplanes. Ian asked people to give him pictures from the walls in big white buildings that only had pictures and jewelry from locked stores with buzzers to let you in. The man in the soft clothes and the red-haired girl always took them, not the Hula man or anyone else.