Make Believe

by Joanna Scott

  “Must have been pretty scary for you at the hospital, the things they did to you. We’re going to make sure they apologize. We got some lawyers working on it as we speak.”

  “He doesn’t need to hear about lawyers, Eddie.”

  “You’re right, Marge, you’re always right. That’s the thing you’ll learn about your grandmother — she never makes a mistake.”

  “Come off it, Eddie.”

  “And wait till you taste her apple crisp!”

  “I know it’s a change for you, Michael, but you’ll get used to us, I promise. Don’t you like the lake? Don’t you like going fishing with Eddie? Isn’t it lots of fun?”

  “He has fun, I guarantee it. Here you go, little man, here’s what I call a Special Eddie. How about that? I bet those other folks didn’t give you ice cream for breakfast, did they? When you’re in my house, all you got to do is ask.”

  “Can you say thank you, Michael? Say thank you, come on, Eddie would appreciate a thank you.”

  “That’s all right. He’s got to get used to us. I mean, can you blame the kid? All he’s been through, and the way the doctors cut him up for the hell of it.”

  “Eddie!”

  “There I go again. It’s just sympathy making me talk. Now I better go get ready for work. And if you want more ice cream, you just ask. But remember the one rule we have in this house. You know our rule, don’t you? You know we don’t allow smiling in this house. That’s our number one rule. No smiling. That’s the way it is around here. You’re not allowed to smile even when someone tells a joke. No smiling whatsoever, do you hear? ’Cause you know what happens if we catch you smiling? Then we give you Special Eddies for lunch and dinner, and maybe some popcorn, too, and maybe if you keep on smiling Marge will have to make her chocolate chip cookies.”

  “He’ll come around, Eddie.”

  “Poor little guy. All he’s been through. How’s that ice cream, eh?”

  “I’m taking him in for a checkup today, meet the doctor, maybe he’ll give us some advice on how to —”

  “Ask the doc if he knows anyone up at the city hospital.”

  “Eddie, the lawyers —”

  “I’m just curious, that’s all. We’ll be seeing you, then.”

  “Can you say good-bye to Eddie, Michael? Can you say bye-bye?”

  “Oh, don’t bother the kid, he’s eating.”

  “He’ll get used to us.”

  “He sure will.”

  And Eddie went to work just as he did every morning except for Saturdays, when he went fishing, and Sundays, when Marge and Eddie took Bo to church. After three weeks living in his new home, Bo knew the routine like he knew his ABC’s. Marge, he thought, looked like the man in the moon. Eddie always looked like he wanted to be doing something different from whatever he was doing.

  When it wasn’t raining Marge took Bo for a walk along the lake and showed him where beavers were building a dam in the pickerelweed. When the geese flew in honking V’s overhead, she said the geese were singing their spring song. And once a white cloud of swans flew across the sun.

  Then March turned into April, and Puss and Kitten moths started to flutter around in the yard. On the trunk of a willow tree up in the high meadow Bo found a giant caterpillar the size of a grown man’s thumb and the color of raw hamburger. He pried the caterpillar off the bark along with some red galls and showed it to Marge, who shrieked and told him to put it down, for God’s sake.

  As she said it, Bo suddenly saw his own mama in her face, and all at once he felt himself to be the victim of some terrible lie, having long ago been told a story about the whereabouts of his real mama and for all this time believing it to be the complete, undeniable truth.

  Which caused him to suppose that the truth must have been the opposite of what he’d been told, and his mama would be coming back to pick him up and bring him home. He wanted to believe this version rather than the other, and in that same moment easily persuaded himself that the course of events leading to her return was as inevitable as the movement of the hour hand on the clock. You wouldn’t think the hour hand moved at all, but it did, with mysterious slowness. Bo, after six weeks in his new home with Marge and Eddie and Alligator Ann, began to wait.

  The sun shone, and Bo waited. At nighttime, in his dreams, he waited. He waited inside when it rained and outside when Marge worked in the garden and up in the meadow when she searched with binoculars for migrating birds. He waited while Eddie made him ice cream sundaes and while Ann talked on the telephone. Sometimes he stared at Ann’s back and imagined that she was his mama and would turn around and find him standing there, after all this time.

  He wondered if Eddie was the reason his mama wouldn’t come back. The more Bo listened to Eddie, the more he noticed in his soft voice the ticktock of Eddie’s thoughts, from Come over here to Stay out of my way. Eddie read a storybook to Bo each night and patted him on the cheek and wished him sweet dreams, and four times already they’d gone fishing on Hadley Lake, Bo sitting bundled in an adult-sized life preserver in the front end of the canoe, the dark water inviting and dangerous, like Eddie’s voice.

  He was always glad when Aunt Ann came home in the afternoons because she called him Bo and tickled him under the arms and let him watch television with her, or at least he played with his Legos on the carpet while the grown-ups smooched and shrieked and moaned on the TV screen and Ann did stretching exercises on the couch and waited for the phone to ring.

  Josie took to scampering out the kitchen door between Marge’s feet and disappearing into the wet meadow for hours at a time, so one day Bo decided to do the same. He climbed beyond the mowed yard up through the prickly grass until he got snagged in a thornbush and Marge came to get him. The next day he snuck along the narrow path made by the deer who came to nibble the new buds off the azaleas — Marge caught up to him just when he was about to enter the woods. Later that same week Ann led him through the woods, along a wide, muddy trail, and down the side of the ravine to a creek, where Bo collected rocks and tried to catch fish in his bare hands while Ann sat on the trunk of a fallen tree and smoked cigarettes.

  Then April turned into May, and Bo went on waiting and waiting, eventually grew so used to waiting that he just lived in time without thinking about the future.

  On May twenty-first, Eddie’s birthday, Bo learned that if you sneak down to the basement when you’re supposed to be watching television and look beneath the Ping-Pong table you hadn’t even known existed, you will find a dusty Ping-Pong ball. And if you carry the Ping-Pong ball up to the kitchen and drop it into a narrow glass vase and collect some cardboard, string, a magnet, and a bottle of apple juice, you will discover, after maybe ten minutes spent trying out various methods, that a Ping-Pong ball doesn’t stick to a magnet, the string won’t make a proper loop, and the cardboard is useless, but if you pour the apple juice from the jar into the vase, the Ping-Pong ball will bob up and up and up and finally tumble with the gushing juice onto the table.

  Then, of course, Eddie will come into the kitchen and shout, What the hell! and grab your wrist, making the plastic bottle of juice drop from your hands and bounce across the floor. Which, in turn, will make Eddie even madder — What the hell! — so he’ll jerk your arm in an attempt to pull it loose from its socket, and you’ll do what you have to do. You’ll spit in his face, spit a good thick gob that lands right on the corner where his lips disappear into a fold of rough skin, and Eddie will stop bellowing What the hell! and he’ll look at you with eyes that express precisely a sentiment that Eddie didn’t even know he felt — I hate this child — so you’ll say it back, a vocal echo, “I hate you!” Words so thrilling you’ll say them again, “I hate you,” and again, “I hate you,” perfect words because they prove that you have found, at last, something to hate with all your strength.

  Bo’s aunt Ann once said, At your age, kiddo, life is never boring, and she was right.

  Bo didn’t understand why his gran and pop had given him away to Eddi
e and Marge, yet he sensed that this, too, was right. They did it because they were supposed to do it. And now, after ten weeks and two days in his new home, he had finally arrived at a point as close to certainty as he could hope to come.

  Even though Eddie yelled at him, Bo assumed he still had the advantage. Maybe he didn’t know in any precise way the meaning of advantage, but he had a sense of his power and the pliancy of his subjects. I am King Bo. Kneel before me! Just like Aunt Ann said, life was never boring. He could look out his bedroom window and see a mama deer and her two fawns stealing silently along the edge of the meadow. He could watch videos while Marge baked chocolate chip cookies. He could collect rocks in a bucket. He could eat the maraschino cherries straight from the jar. He could drop a bottle of apple juice and watch it bounce across the floor. He could spit in Eddie’s face.

  Just remember, Mr. Macaroni, the story of the explorer who lost his way trying to find the South Pole.

  Bo couldn’t remember — Tell me again, Pop.

  Or the story of the artist Jack Frost, who painted with ice and gave his paintings away for free.

  Bo would have liked to hear about the emperor who disguised himself as a beggar.

  We couldn’t help spoiling you, Bo, giving you whatever, fooling you into thinking that all you had to do was wish upon a star.

  The reason Gran and Pop never came to see him was because they were afraid of the law. The law carried a gun and shot whatever it caught by surprise. So the trick was never to let yourself be surprised, to keep looking in front and around whenever you are out walking, and don’t confide in people you don’t trust, for they could call in the law at any time.

  Then he poured apple juice into the flower vase and learned that Eddie hated him and he hated Eddie.

  So he went up to the attic to play by himself, and he found a dusty rag quilt that must have been more than one hundred years old. He opened the window, dangled the quilt over the sill, and beat it against the side of the house to shake off the dust. “Please stop!” the quilt cried. “If you stop beating me, I’ll take you for a ride.” So the boy spread the quilt on the attic floor, sat cross-legged upon it, and sure enough, he felt the quilt rise beneath him, and they flew out the window and soared over the trees.

  Oh, there you go, teasing him with magic!

  No one had to explain to Bo that as soon as you stopped believing the quilt was magic, it would lose its power and plummet to the ground, taking you down with it. Bo knew the difference between magic and reality. He knew, for instance, that by storming from the room Eddie had found a way to avoid hurting Bo. But in came Marge, who scolded, “Never, never do that again, Michael Templin —”

  Who?

  “If you ever spit at Eddie again, or anyone, if you ever spit, we’ll … we’ll … you get up to your room, get on.”

  Testing the limits of his power in the real world, Bo refused to budge, so Marge picked him up and carried him upstairs herself while he punched the doughy flesh of her back.

  “You bad boy. You sit here until you’re ready to apologize!”

  So Bo sat. Sat on his goddamn ass on the bed where his mama used to sleep, thinking about how he hated Eddie and he hated Marge and he hated his mama for ever having had a bed that Bo had to sit on. He threw his pillow across the room at his mama’s picture, but the pillow just bounced off the bureau drawer and fell to the floor. This, more than anything else Bo had done since he’d been living in his new home, felt like a catastrophic failure, and he began to cry.

  When you cry out loud, someone always comes to comfort you, but when twenty minutes passed and no one came to him, Bo gave up. He sat on the radiator cover, pulled his knees to his chin, and gazed out the window at the meadow. He sucked on the side of his thumb and thought about fish. He imagined that he was a circle of bright orange light growing smaller and smaller — now he was the size of a dime, now the head of a pin, now, poof, he had disappeared.

  King Bo, are you there? Your majesty?

  There was no reason he could understand why he would be allowed to fade away to nothing. The other times he’d felt alone didn’t compare to this, for in the past he’d been left alone by accident and now he was being punished with loneliness. That he’d lost everything and his mama had kept him waiting for longer than eternity — this was his fault because he no longer believed in most magical powers, including the ability to fly or to breathe underwater. How could he believe in things so implausible? He needed proof. If he had proof, he’d believe anything.

  Proof could be as arbitrary as finding the drawings he’d made on the floor of his old bedroom — if he rolled up the carpet from the corner and found his drawings on this floor, he’d know what to believe. But the wall-to-wall carpet was secured with tacks, and no matter how hard Bo tugged he couldn’t loosen it. He returned to the radiator and stared out the window and as he thought about his loneliness he discovered, all at once, the bitter pleasure of pity.

  Poor Hobo, all alone in the real world, unloved, unwanted. He cried just thinking about himself crying, a sorry sight that would evoke, in memory, enough self-pity to sustain him for a lifetime. Oh, he was a miserable child. Think of all he’d been through, all the waiting, his daddy no more than letters carved in stone, his mama gone off somewhere, his grandparents scared away by the law. Weep for him, if you’re susceptible to pity. But don’t let your eyes grow so foggy that you miss the subtle transformation taking place, the transformation of pity into something far more powerful than even Bo could have anticipated, a kind of anger that distinguished itself from the magisterial anger he had felt just minutes earlier, this anger born out of the loneliness Bo couldn’t bear to feel anymore, an anger that would have prompted immediate violence if Bo had been ten years older. But because of his youth, its effect was directed inward, resulting in no more than a barely apprehensible tightening — his jaw tightened, the muscles in his torso and neck tightened, and his fingers tightened, the skin lightening to a lemon color around his knuckles.

  One moment a pitiful, scarred, unhappy child. The next moment a wolf, with thick paws for his hands and feet, his body covered with gray fur.

  “Michael, are you ready to apologize?”

  He growled, bared his dagger teeth.

  “Say you’re sorry, come on, look at me, say, I’m sorry.”

  He prepared to pounce, to sink his teeth into her throat.

  “Okay then, I’ll say it for you. I’m sorry, I’ll never spit in Eddie’s face again. That’s a good boy, Michael. Now you come down and have some cake and ice cream, and we’ll all be friends again.”

  Marge led the way downstairs. Bo entered the kitchen snarling, glared at Eddie, and saw with pleasure Eddie’s comprehension. Yes, Eddie was properly afraid of Bo because only Eddie knew how hatred had made the tame king wild. They spoke the same language, Eddie and King Bo, though they’d learned it separately, in private.

  I will kill you.

  Get out of my house.

  I will tear your head from your neck.

  Stay away from me!

  Light fled from the room, as Eddie would have if he’d even had that much courage. But he was too scared to reveal his fear. Through the dusk, Marge appeared with a cake carpeted with fire. “Happy birthday to you,” she sang, a lone voice, while Eddie sat silently, his face lit up by candlelight, and Bo stood at the opposite end of the table.

  Marge and Eddie blew out the candles together, the overhead light flashed on, and Ann appeared in the doorway.

  “Did we miss anything?”

  “Ann!”

  “This is Mervin.” She made room for a scrawny teenage boy with pink skin, wispy blond hair, and a tuft of a beard. He bowed slightly, looking directly at Bo with a half smile. Bo liked him instantly. He cocked his head to study him from an angle, and after a couple of seconds felt his first impression confirmed.

  “Well then, come along, have some cake, Mervin. This is Eddie, Ann’s step-dad. I’m sure you’ve heard —”

&nb
sp; “Thanks much,” Mervin interrupted, stepping up to the chair Marge had pulled out for him. Eddie leaned back and pulled open the utensil drawer, found the cake knife, and waved it in the air above the cake, a gesture understood by Bo to mean, Maybe I will kill you first. In the fat triangle of the blade Bo saw his reflection for an instant — wild King Bo stretched across a surface of metal — and then saw himself plunge into the froth of whipped chocolate butter cream, recognized at once the humor of the image, for even if he was a wolf capable of ripping to shreds anyone who displeased him he was no less a silly little kid who loved to eat cake. When his piece of cake finally arrived on a plastic plate he took the fork Marge handed to him, discreetly dropped it on the floor, and plunged into the cake for a second time, face first, filling his mouth with frosting, coating his eyelids and cheeks and the tip of his nose with frosting while Ann and the boy named Mervin hooted in support and Marge ordered him to “stop it, stop it right now, Michael Templin!”

  Who?

  He raised his head only when he needed a gulp of air. He didn’t need to look at the blade of Eddie’s knife or into Eddie’s scowling eyes to know exactly what he looked like — a mad, wolfish king covered with sweet mud — even if he didn’t know all the words to describe it.

  This is the way to eat a piece of cake: He plunged again, this time shaped the piece into a boat with the mold of his face, tore through the butter cream with his teeth and filled his mouth, rose again for another breath, and saw through the curtain of his sticky lashes Marge holding the wrist of Eddie’s hand that held the knife, restraining him, while Eddie struggled to his feet. Bo couldn’t believe what he was seeing, so he wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve, looked again and saw only this: Marge moving to grab Bo’s plate away, Eddie rising from the table, Mervin picking at his cake with a fork and grinning, and Ann sucking frosting from the bottom tip of a candle. There was nothing else for Bo to do but laugh and laugh and laugh.

  Born in 1930, the year, he liked to remind others, when the planet Pluto was discovered, Edward Gantz had experienced only indirectly the hardships of that hard decade. An uncle of Eddie’s lost his land to foreclosure and brought his family to live on Eddie’s father’s farm. A neighboring dairy farmer campaigned for a socialist candidate. And when prohibition was repealed, Eddie’s father proposed an ordinance, unanimously passed, to keep the county dry. But throughout the Depression the Gantz family held on to their land, and Eddie learned from the example of his father the importance of vigilant work.