"Billy, Billy, what is it?" And then she was crying herself, not in sympathy so much as in joy and relief at the openness of her son, her son who was so often away from her, somewhere else, not bonded to her as she was bonded to him.
"Oh, Billy, what's wrong?"
And suddenly the moment was over. He stiffened in her embrace, and the river within him turned back in its course to run within him again. She looked at him as his tears dried, and he was just Billy again.
"I'm all right," he said, only a trace of upset remaining in his even voice.
"What the hell's going on?" his father shouted, returning with only his new beer in his hand, the dropped umbrella and cooler marking his progress ahead of them. As always, his eyes did not meet his son's.
"Billy . . ." his mother began, but then she said, "Nothing," and turned away to retrieve her burdens.
They went on, and they spent the day at the beach, and he swam, and collected a few shells with his mother, whose hand shook whenever she touched him, putting the shells in the pail that his father emptied out in the parking lot before they got in the car, saying they would spill in the trunk and get sand all over everything. And Billy stood and sat and stared at the water, and it did nothing to him the rest of the day the way it did at that first glance. It did nothing further to him because he knew what it was now, what it was to him, the vast swelling indifference of the universe against him, against what he had to do, what he knew deep in the atoms of his heart and blood and mind that he had to do. There was no comfort out there in the world for him, but he had to do it anyway. For he knew, even then, what was missing from him, and what the deep aching missing part of him would do when it grew strong, and he knew, just as a flower knows to create petals and a bee knows to buzz and collect pollen.
And when that moment of swelling self-pity had passed, he looked out upon the ocean and it was only water, a part of the intricate workings of the earth, nothing more.
He was on a beach . . .
He awoke in the room with the rippling ceiling. It undulated like the surface of the ocean, long bars like waves. He heard a distant hum, the lap of water against shore.
He closed his eyes, then reopened them. Voices talked at him. The waves rolled across the ceiling, one after another, water slapping against beach.
"Can you hear me?" a voice said distinctly.
"Yes."
A face moved over him into the water. He knew the face, knew the name that went with it, but it turned away from him and he heard it say, "At least he's alive."
He heard two other voices, saw two other faces he knew.
He was in Christine's room, the one with the peach-colored walls and white lacquered furniture. Knick knacks and dolls. Everything was the same, except that the stuffed animal he had seen that first day, with sunglasses and a Mexican sombrero, was gone.
"How do you feel?" Mary Beck whispered. Her voice was small, filled with concern.
He said nothing, but when he tried to sit up, there was a terrible weight on his body and he found that he did not want to move his head from the pillow.
Billy looked silently up at the three of them—the man, woman, and child. He wanted to close his eyes again. A weariness, the ocean, weighed down on him.
There was awkward silence. Jacob Beck stood over him. "Rest," he said.
He put his hand on Billy's head, and Billy closed his eyes.
28
As before, a routine came to Billy's life. But this time it was different. Each morning, when he awoke at seven, either Jacob or Mary was there to help him sit up in bed. The first week, he could barely do that without gasping in pain, but he quickly learned to numb his mind to the fiery bolt that ran through him below the waist whenever he moved his torso. When he didn't move, it felt as if the lower part of his body had been filled with gravel, leaving a weak, dead feeling around his bones.
At first the doctors thought his spine had been severed. But there was nothing physically wrong with his spine. It was only when an EEG was performed that they discovered that, in effect, his brain had received a severe shock, the cause, as well as the results, unknown.
When all of the speculation was over with, Jacob Beck was met with a shrug and told that either the boy would recover the full use of his lower body or he wouldn't. It was recommended that he be placed in a stable environment and treated with simple physical therapy, which might stimulate his limbs or, at least, keep them from atrophying.
After the first week, when he had mastered the art of sitting up, Billy lowered his feet to the floor. Jacob and Christine were there to help him. He felt the hard rush of gravity strike into his legs. It was as if someone hit the bottoms of his feet with sledgehammers. He felt supporting arms pulling him up as he passed out.
When he awoke, he was alone, and the afternoon sun, lowering through his window, made the peach-colored room look almost orange. Throwing back the covers with an effort, he swung one leg over the side of the bed, then the other, using both his hands to lift each one. In a moment he was balanced on the edge of the mattress, his hands pushing him up gently, then he let himself down to test the floor again. The pain was like a thunderclap, and when he awoke, he was being lifted painfully back into bed by Mary Beck, who was alone in the house. Jacob and Christine had gone to the store, and Mary was hysterical, thinking that Billy had killed himself or that she had killed him lifting him off the floor.
When she had settled him back under the covers, she sat on the edge of the bed. "I know what you did for me in the park," she said gently, staring into his copper eyes. Her hand no longer trembled when it touched him, stroking his forehead. "I know what this gift of mine means now. My Aunt Stella was right." Tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. "I only wish I could help you with it, Billy."
"You can." Billy's soft voice only exaggerated the power of his words. "Maybe that's what you've always been afraid of."
"But you—" she began.
"I can't. A long time ago I found that there are things I can do, and things that are missing from me. And that's something that I don't have. But you're whole."
As Billy spoke, he slowly forced open a window of truth in her. By the time his soft words were finished, the portal stood wide, letting cool fresh air—and light—into her. She felt like the sun itself.
"Oh, Billy," she sobbed, laying her hands on him, seeing the weak, dull glow, the horribly twisted patterns of luminescence that were his legs, feeling herself reach out beyond her hands, taking the light into her hands like a mother lifts her baby, stroking it, singing to it, shaping it.
She was sobbing with joy and revelation when she was finished, and in her weeping baptism she cried the word "Mother" for the first time as a loving benediction devoid of fear or loss.
On that day, Billy began, with weakness at first, to stand on his own legs again.
In another week he was supporting himself through a short pair of parallel bars that had been installed in Christine's room, next to the bed. A few days later he was using a walker, moving to and from the bathroom by himself.
He asked Jacob Beck to find the address of his friends Rebecca and Marsh. When Reverend Beck produced it, Billy thanked him and put it under his pillow.
That night, he used the walker to bring himself to the white lacquered desk, and wrote a letter. There were six carefully worded pages, and he folded them carefully and sealed the envelope, addressing it and asking Reverend Beck to mail it for him. The next day he quietly asked if the letter had been mailed, and when Beck said yes, he said nothing more about it.
The days wore on.
He began to walk, at first with a cane and then without. His unaided movements were stiff at first, the progress of a man on stilts, but gradually his limbs regained their fluidity. He was nearly whole again. Only a deep gnawing ache that sometimes assaulted him was all the reminder he had of what he had been through.
The walker, the parallel bars, the extra blankets and pillows, disappeared from the peach-col
ored room, but Christine said nothing. When Billy suggested that she move back into her own room, she said no.
"I want it to be your room," she said. "We'll paint it a different color, anything you want."
"The other room is fine," he said calmly.
Her eyes looked away from him and then back, meeting his and then staying there. Quietly, she said, "I keep thinking about all the terrible things I thought about you. I hated you. When John was going to kill you, I didn't care. I only went to the park with my father to make sure John didn't get hurt. I thought the same things John did about you, and I wanted you to die."
Her voice lowered even more, and her eyes stared at the floor. "All my life I've listened to my father preach about love and hate, and good and bad, and none of it meant anything to me. I thought all those terrible things about you, and I was wrong. I wanted you to die, and I was wrong. I don't know if I can ever be forgiven for that."
Billy said, "I forgive you," and then the faintest of smiles crossed his lips.
Christine looked up at him and smiled, too. "Please stay in the room."
He did.
Two weeks later, Jacob Beck brought Billy to the hospital for a thorough checkup. The doctors shrugged again and said that as far as they knew, everything was fine and he could go back to school. Then, on the way home in the car, Reverend Beck told him that he had received approval on adoption papers for him.
"We want you to stay with us, Billy," he said. Though he tried to hide his nervousness, his hands gripped the steering wheel as if it might come off in his hands.
He looked over at Billy, who was staring out through the windshield.
"Billy," he said softly, letting the true feeling of his words speak, "you've changed all of us. You've changed me. I'm a different man now than before you came here. I'm stronger now. You've made me sure about things that have been bothering me for a long time, things that made me question whether life itself was worthwhile. And I think you've seen what you've done for Mary, the things she was going through. We all love you, Billy. That's the best way I can put it.
"I want you to start all over with us here, and forget everything that's happened. I want you to make believe you were just born, in a way." He rushed along, with near desperation in his voice. "You can learn how to play ball. Or the piano, anything you want. I'll teach you how to fish, if you want. And with Christine, it will be like you always had a sister. There's a lot she wants to help you with."
His voice sounded hollow even to himself, but he pressed on, trying to inject the light camaraderie he had so often used in his work, the practiced grin, the easy, joking manner. "Heck, everybody, even Christine, knows I've always wanted a son."
He glanced at the boy, and when they stopped for a light, he turned to Billy. "I never told you," he said, controlling his voice with a supreme effort, "what we told the police about Martha Mifflin. We didn't tell them everything, Billy. But they know enough that they went, to find her for the things she did."
The light changed, and once more Beck was driving, with his knuckles white around the wheel. He was pleading, he knew. "They'll find her, Billy. I don't want you ever to think about any of that again. I only want you to live with us and grow up and be my son. I only want you to be happy." Beck's voice was shaking by the time he finished speaking.
Billy was silent. And, abruptly, the struggle that was going on in Jacob Beck ended. He reached into his pocket and drew out a postcard. It was wrinkled and half torn, as if it had been crumpled, perhaps thrown away and then retrieved and smoothed out. His hand trembling, Jacob Beck handed it to Billy, saying in a nearly strangled voice, "Please, Billy. Isn't there anything I can do, any other way?"
Billy looked at the postcard, which was from Marsh, and then he said, his voice as quiet as it had ever been, "I'm the only one who can stop her."
On the back of the card, written in bold dark ink, was one word: "Yes."
That night, when the house was silent, Billy rose. His clothes were at the end of the bed, and he put them on.
He moved into the hallway. There was near darkness, only the faint glow from a kitchen light left on downstairs pushing up the stairway.
The door to the Becks' bedroom was ajar. They were small hills on the bed, the movement of quiet breathing. At his old room the door was wide open, Christine asleep with one arm thrown over her stuffed animal, the one with the sombrero and sunglasses.
He went to the stairs and descended.
He found his jacket in the hall closet. His knapsack was pushed back on the upper shelf. He pulled a chair over and got it down. Inside was a can of beans and, under that, a half pack of Marlboros, the ones Jacob Beck had taken when he'd first arrived.
From the kitchen he took a few slices of bread, another can of beans. He took a book of matches that lay on the kitchen counter. He packed them carefully in his knapsack and put it on.
At the front door, he hesitated. For a moment the ocean washed over him, then let him go.
He opened the door and walked out into darkness, not looking back.
This time, he knew exactly where to go.
It was getting cold. At Billy Potter's back, the sun, like a ripe orange, sank into the haze of the horizon.
He felt the first ice of desert night-chill creep into him; it settled into his legs with the dull ache he had come to live with. He zipped up his black golf jacket, and turned up the collar. Somewhere far off, a coyote howled once, a long yelp that carried into echoing silence. A mosquito landed on his neck, then another, and he patted them away absently, letting the third draw blood before he caught it with a fingernail, flicking it red and bloated into the air.
With one hand he kept the binoculars steady, trained mostly on the house but occasionally scanning the rest of the town. There had been some movement before suppertime, a chorus of shouts that had turned out to be a Happy Hour brawl in one of the bars. A couple of patrons had made their way into the dusty street, one holding a bloody nose, the other pushed out by the bartender. They had started fighting again, rolling over each other a few times before falling back exhausted in the dust. Their argument, incongruously hard to hear when matched with their full faces in the binoculars, cooled perceptively, and then they helped each other to their feet and stumbled back into the bar.
Now all was quiet.
He kept the binoculars on the house.
Martha would soon be in there. He was surprised she had waited so long to make her move. The only reason was that she was being very cautious.
But she couldn't wait forever. At least Billy hoped. His last pack of cigarettes was growing thin, and it wouldn't be long, a couple of days at most, before he would be forced to go into town and replenish his supplies of water and food. There was no other place for fifty miles, and the thought of hitching that far and back filled him with the certainty that she would do what she wanted and be gone before he returned. He had thought of having Marsh come up to him with supplies, but even that would be too risky. She would know. And if she fled, she would be too strong by the time he caught up with her again. And then it would be too late.
Twilight dropped its purple cloak, and he settled down with a blanket around his shoulders for another long night. The lights in the town, what few there were, winked on, leaving almost all the illumination in the world to the failing sun and, later, to the full sky of stars and the coming moon. But the moon wouldn't rise for a while yet. He thought again of Venus behind and above him, a beacon of the coming blackness.
He kept the binoculars steady on the front porch of the house, looking for the blink of Marsh's flashlight that would tell him Martha was there. There was nothing. Occasionally he swept the glasses around the main street, past the filling station and bus depot and around the backs of the few shacks at the very outskirts of the town.
He knocked a cigarette from his pack and put it into his mouth under the binoculars, lighting it without moving the glasses. He put the pack into his jacket, noting that there were only two
more butts in it. His belly growled with hunger, but he ignored it.
No more cigarettes—Melinda and Jacob Beck would like that. For a moment a trace of a smile touched his lips.
He saw something that at first was absorbed by smoke from his cigarette crossing the front of the binocular lenses. He threw the cigarette aside. He kept the binoculars on the exact spot where Marsh should be, jamming them so steady into his eyes that they began to hurt, but saw nothing further. He jerked the glasses over to the street in front of the house but saw no one.
He returned to the front of the house as he saw what he had been waiting for—two short round flashes of light, followed by two long. A warm thrill went up his back. The focus on the glasses was a little off, and his thumb expertly turned the knob until the flashlight beam stood out in blinking relief against the night. Two short, two long.
It was her.
He only hoped Marsh could do what they had planned so many weeks ago in that letter. He knew the house was empty, because he had seen Marsh and Rebecca's parents leaving two hours before, probably going to dinner and the movies, whatever Rebecca had devised.
Billy lowered the glasses and rubbed his eyes. He hadn't realized how tired he was. There had been sleep a long time ago, but he had forgotten when.
Carefully, methodically, Billy packed his things. There was not much—his rucksack with a small camp set Marsh had left hidden up in the hills for him, along with a bedroll. He bundled all this neatly together and threw it over his shoulder. Something caught his eye at the horizon and he looked to see the moon rising.
He walked down the long gentle slope into the town.
He reached the porch and saw Marsh and Rebecca moving away from the side of the house. They stood before him for a second. Marsh pressed a key into Billy's hand. He was taller, and Rebecca had, in the long summer since he had last seen her, turned from girl into woman. Her eyes were deep and fathomless, and when she touched his arm and began to cry as Marsh led her away, Billy felt the weight of the ocean on him and for the briefest moment felt the terrible resolve that had been born with him begin to crumble.
The Boy With Penny Eyes Page 16
