My Cousin's Keeper

by Simon French

  Dad had hung around for a little while before announcing, “I’m off to the shed. I need to get that mower fixed.” He headed for the steps, leaving Mom behind on the deck with her sister.

  “Are you sure Bon is OK by himself?” Mom asked again. “I was hoping to see him. The kids were looking forward to him visiting again.”

  I wasn’t. My mouth dropped open in surprise, but nobody seemed to notice. Or at least Mom pretended not to.

  “He was told to behave and wait,” my aunt replied.

  Mom went to say something more, but then changed her mind.

  My aunt talked and talked . . . and talked. There was something secretive about whatever she was saying, and she kept ashing her cigarette with quick taps against the edge of the ashtray on the table. Mom listened patiently and didn’t seem to get much of a chance to say or ask my aunt much in return. My attention hovered between the morning sports show I’d turned the TV on to watch and the conversation on the back deck. From what I had overheard, it seemed that Aunt Renee had been through lots of man dramas, job dramas, and rented-house dramas. I heard my aunt call Nan our mother. For the first time, I heard her mention Bon’s name.

  Are you listening to me? I replayed that voice from Dad’s birthday party and pictured the hand clenching Bon’s face. Both bits of memory were tied together, as tight as a knot. I couldn’t stop feeling uncomfortable about my aunt being here. I was used to Nan, Mom, Dad, and their friends, who asked us stuff about the things we liked, or who shared jokes with us and sometimes joined in our games. My aunt was a mixture of talkative light and unsettling shadow.

  Suddenly, her voice was raised. “How did you get here?”

  I heard Mom’s soothing voice saying something I couldn’t make out, before she called, “Kieran! Come here, please!”

  Bon was at our back steps, silent and staring.

  “I asked you a question,” Aunt Renee said to him.

  “I walked,” he replied. “I remembered the house and the way to get here.”

  “Bon, it’s lovely to see you again,” Mom told him with a smile, before turning to her sister. “Renee, really, it’s fine. He’s very welcome. He and Kieran can do something together. Kieran?”

  “I was going to help Dad,” I said, my heart sinking. Dad’s shed was suddenly a quiet, welcome destination, though I wasn’t sure what I was going to help Dad with exactly.

  Mom shook her head firmly. “Renee and I are talking. You keep Bon company. Show him some computer games,” she suggested in an oddly bright voice.

  “Mom,” I muttered a little desperately.

  Then she added, “Or go outside and kick a ball around. Go for a bike ride. There’re two bikes, after all, and a spare helmet he can wear.”

  I hesitated long enough for Mom to frown a silent reply, a do-it-or-else death stare.

  If Aunt Renee smelled of cigarettes, I knew from the first morning on the playground that Bon still had the scent of sweat and pee I’d noticed two years before. Which gave me at least one excuse not to get too close to him if it could be managed.

  Bon had not even said anything like hello. “I don’t have a bike,” he said to no one in particular. “I’ve never had a bike. Kids get those for Christmas.” He wore a blank, dreamy expression.

  “Kids who behave themselves get presents,” Aunt Renee said to him, and though it sounded like an accusation, Bon did not reply.

  “Kieran,” Mom said a little more urgently.

  “We’ve got a computer,” I said, telling him the obvious in a flat voice. “And there’re games and stuff.” Unwillingly, I led him inside in the direction of the computer. Why me? I groaned to myself, thinking that whenever a friend from school visited, there had been easy, funny talk and always something to go and do. At least a computer game could mean no conversation, and that maybe I could escape, which I did after a few minutes of showing Bon a few games and sites. I left him sitting silently at the computer and ducked out the front door and down the side driveway, so that Mom wouldn’t see that I had left Bon behind in the house.

  “Another refugee,” Dad remarked when I turned up in his shed at the back end of the yard. He called his shed the Guys’ Room. It was where he kept his weight-lifting and gym equipment, his workbench, and his beer fridge. There were sports posters on the walls and a calendar with a bikini girl holding a pair of shock absorbers. Sometimes Dad would have friends visiting. Ant and Split Pin were my favorites. Ant worked on his parents’ sheep farm ten miles out of town, where he was known as Anthony by his mom and dad. Dad called him a human database of funny stories. Split Pin was so tall he had to duck his head whenever he walked through a doorway, and he had once been a state champion soccer player. I had seen his real name, Sam Pinnock, in gold letters on the sports record board that hung on the wall inside the front doors at school. If Ant and Split Pin were visiting, it gave me a good excuse to hang around, knowing that Dad’s buddies would include me in their talk and jokes. I’d sit with them on folding chairs around the doorway of the Guys’ Room, laughing along and joining in with their conversations.

  Dad had the shed to himself this time, until I wandered in.

  “So your aunt’s still up there going on and on,” he remarked. He had part of the lawn mower dismantled, and there were carburetor and gasket parts laid out on the workbench. “She was driving me crazy. Please don’t tell your mother I said that about her sister.”

  “Bon’s here,” I said. “He walked.”

  “I know, I heard the fuss your aunt just made. Poor kid. So where is he now?”

  “Playing on the computer,” I replied.

  “Hmm. Not interested in the great outdoors, then?”

  “I guess not,” I answered.

  But soon after, we heard voices in the backyard. Bon had teamed up with Gina, and they were over at the bikes. Gina’s bike was small and bright pink, with beads on the spokes that rattled around when she pedaled. I could see Bon sizing up the other bikes, the nearly new BMX that had been my Christmas present and the older bike that it had replaced. He glanced down to where I stood in the shed doorway watching, then chose the older bike.

  Our house might have been old and a bit cramped, but our backyard was large enough to ride bikes around and have a bit of fun. There was a bump and a slight drop where I could get my bike airborne if I pedaled hard enough, and a patch of gravel in the far corner where I could do skids and slides. Gina managed the yard well for a six-year-old who had recently asked Dad to take the training wheels off her bike. She pushed the little pink bike into motion and then pedaled furiously across the grass toward the back fence, looking quickly back two or three times to see where Bon was.

  “Come on,” she shrieked at him. “I’m racing you!”

  Bon didn’t set off quite as fast. One foot slipped from the pedal, and his bike twitched from left to right. Each time he pushed off, the bike wobbled and he stared intently at the handlebars and the ground, not quite able to get himself balanced. I guessed that he didn’t know much about cogs and gears, either. If I’d been close enough, I’m sure his knuckles would have shown white from him holding the grips so tightly. It took him a while to catch up with Gina, and it looked as though he had barely ridden a bike in his life. It was painful to watch.

  “You OK over there?” Dad called to Bon.

  “Nope!” I laughed. “He’s going to crash.” There was no reaction from Bon, save for one panicked glance.

  “Doesn’t look as though he’s ever ridden a bike before,” Dad said. Then he looked sideways at me. “I remember you being a bit wobbly on a bike, too, at first. He’s giving it his best shot.”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard. Of course I was wobbly the first time on a bike, but I reassured myself that I had been a little kid who never even needed training wheels. Dad went back to his workbench then and left me to watch the two bike riders — Gina racing and Bon wobbling.

  Shortly after came his mom’s voice. “Where are you? Time to go!” She hadn’t said h
is name. Bon wheeled the bike back to its resting place under the carport.

  Dad waved a relieved good-bye in the direction of Bon and his mom, then disappeared back inside the Guys’ Room. I saw him roll his eyes and shake his head.

  “Are you coming to play tomorrow, Bon?” Gina asked, trotting along behind him as they walked out to their car. She at least found him interesting.

  Mom came to find me.

  “Why are you down here?” she demanded.

  Dad blinked and looked a little surprised. “Fixing the mower — why? What’s happened?”

  “Not you,” she groaned. “Kieran. He was supposed to be in the house looking after Bon. Weren’t you?” She eyed me sharply. “Go and play,” she instructed. Then she stepped into the Guys’ Room and pulled the door closed behind her.

  I stayed nearby, eavesdropping.

  “Well,” came Mom’s voice. “You won’t believe what Renee’s just asked.”

  “Try me,” I heard Dad reply.

  “It was about Bon. She wants to leave him here.”

  “What, for a little vacation?”

  “More than that.”

  Their voices dropped to a low hum, apart from the one swearword I heard Dad use.

  I found my bike and rode aimlessly around the backyard and around my sister. Gina chattered about Bon and how she thought it was nice to have him as a cousin. I tried to make sense of whatever it was my aunt had said, and I hoped that my mom’s anxious face and voice did not mean what I started to imagine.

  “What did Aunt Renee want? It sounded important,” I asked later.

  “It was,” Mom replied patiently. “But for now it’s just between us adults. It’s not anything you need to be worrying about.”

  “But you were talking about Bon,” I persisted. “It’s something about him.”

  I had pushed just that bit too hard, and I got the lecture from Mom that I didn’t want to hear — how Bon was my cousin, that I needed to be a lot nicer to him. And was I helping him settle in at his new school?

  I went into my room to peel off my sneakers and socks. And there on the bed sat my missing white horse and armored knight. Gone for two years, they had reappeared to ride across the hills of my blanket and pillow. Something about the knight seemed different. His outstretched arms still carried his flag and sword, but the flag was now wrapped in a small sheet of folded paper. When I picked it off and opened the folds, there was a message in tiny, messy writing, and it took a little while to figure out what it said.

  Bon had written, We were borrowed and have been on many adventures. Now at last we are home.

  Of course I pretended not to be interested.

  But whenever I saw her on the playground, I tried to walk near to where she was, or somehow make whatever game my friends and I were playing veer close to Julia and the friends she had made. I hoped there would be a reason or excuse for her to talk to me, and I tried to hear what she was talking about, so that after a while, the sound of her voice was in my head whenever I wanted it. What spoiled this every time was the fact that wherever she was, Bon was there, too. Julia’s new friends seemed to have become his friends, all of them girls. Bon kept away from us boys.

  I put a lot of thought into where Julia might live, and her jeans and riding boots told me — a farm. Julia had to be an out-of-town girl whose parents had bought one of the horse or alpaca properties that spread themselves across the green hills outside our town. Some of the kids at school were from farms; I had been to a couple of birthday parties at houses that I felt quietly envious of afterward: huge backyards, land big enough for trail bikes or horses, dams deep enough to swim in and wide enough for paddling canoes. This, I wanted to think, had to be the sort of house where Julia would live.

  While just about every other kid on the playground wore a blue-and-red school uniform, Julia always wore jeans and those brown riding boots. I imagined that as well as having a big house on a beautiful farm, Julia was the sort of girl who might have her own horse, and that I would one day see her mom dropping her off at school in a luxury SUV that towed a horse trailer. But Julia’s mom didn’t seem to fit this picture at all. I had seen her walking Julia to the school gate each morning, and she was there every afternoon as well, meeting Julia and walking her away. There was no car that seemed to be theirs, and I never saw them having a conversation with each other. Julia’s mom walked quickly and anxiously and kept checking that Julia was keeping up. Watching this, I couldn’t quite imagine them going home to a beautiful farm.

  At the southern edge of our town, near the stockyards and warehouses, was a small knot of streets and houses that I’d heard Dad nickname Dodge City. The houses were all boxy and scruffy, and some of the rough kids at school came from here. So did a couple of the wilder guys Dad played soccer with.

  Two Saturdays after school had started back, I trailed along with Mom and Gina for a morning of going to garage sales. One was at a house in Dodge City. I felt uncomfortable being there. There was unlikely to be anything I wanted, and in a town as small as ours I would probably bump into at least one kid I knew from school. Mom was always on the lookout for old teapots and plates, Gina usually found a doll, a toy, or some clothing, and I always hoped for — but never found — old soccer collector cards, or better still, something with player autographs. This sale, as far as I was concerned, would have nothing I was interested in.

  The people had spread a few old pieces of furniture, toys, a lawn mower, and a jumble of car parts across their front lawn. Against a tree rested a tangle of old bicycles. Everything looked shabby and sad. Then a little kid came out of the house in her pajamas and exclaimed, “Mom, here’s someone from my school. It’s Gina and her big brother.” I realized then it was the Pearsons’ house, and sure enough, when the big brother appeared at the door, it was Troy from my class. He said an awkward hello, then waited hopefully in case I wanted to buy one of his old toys. I wasn’t going to, but spent a few moments looking anyway. Then I saw someone else’s feet come and stand near to mine.

  “Hi —” I began, running right out of voice when I looked up and saw who it was. I tried again. “Hi, Julia.”

  “Hi,” she replied, not using my name.

  “Kieran,” I reminded her, feeling weirdly nervous.

  “I know. I haven’t forgotten — Kieran.”

  I glanced back at the street, thinking I would see the fancy European car or luxury SUV I’d imagined Julia might have arrived in. No sign. “Does your mom like garage sales, too?” There were other adults looking at the bargains as well, but none of them was Julia’s mom.

  She looked at me and frowned a little. “No, I walked here.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “No,” she replied firmly. “Over there.” And she pointed vaguely at the edge of town that led to the highway. I tried to follow her finger and figure out exactly where she meant, but all I could see was the truck stop and the trailer park. I wanted a more exact answer.

  “You live over there?”

  Julia ignored or didn’t notice my amazement. “Well, I wouldn’t call it living there. My mom and I are staying at the trailer park for now.” She paused and added, “Same as your cousin.”

  I sighed. So she knew. “For now?” I asked. “Won’t you be around for long?”

  She tilted her head to one side. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Where did you live before?”

  “Another town a bit like this. Out in the sticks.”

  “But where?”

  “I can’t remember the name. Just the look of the streets and the color of the school uniform.” She looked at me. “You ask a lot of questions, for a boy.”

  It sounded strange not to remember the name of a place where you had lived. But I had run out of questions, and it seemed she was through all the answers she wanted to give.

  I glanced behind and saw Mom already holding a couple of things she was going to buy. I could tell they were things she didn’t really want, that they we
re being bought because she felt sorry for the people selling stuff on their front lawn. I’d seen Mom do that before, had heard her say why afterward.

  Julia had stepped away from me to look at magazines piled in a cardboard box. I started to follow her so she’d talk to me some more, but she was already striding over to the tangle of bikes against the tree. She noisily separated them. Behind three others and right against the tree was a purple bike I hadn’t noticed.

  “This looks OK,” I heard her say, and she wheeled it away from the tangle. She lifted and spun the wheels, tested the brakes, tried sitting on it.

  I followed her. “That’s a boy’s bike,” I remarked.

  “I don’t care.” She laughed. “I’ve always wanted a bike.” She looked at me, and a challenge of some sort crossed her face, stayed set in her eyes. “And now I’ve got a bike. My mom is going to be really mad.” Her face brightened then. She paused and read the price tag that was stuck to the frame. “But it’s worth every cent.” Julia rummaged in her pocket and pulled out some crumpled bills. “Now I can go wherever I want,” she murmured.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but was ignored. I tried something else. “Do you like our school?”

  It was a short reply. “The kids are OK.”

  “Nicer than the kids at your old school?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered quietly. “I never actually went to school there.” Her pale-blue eyes met mine. “Now you’re asking too many questions.” She stood close enough for me to catch a soft fragrance of soap or shampoo, close enough for me to see the patterns on her earrings. “You hang around with those boys who think they’re too cool for school. What are their names? Mason and Lucas.”