I just wanted to also say that we both enjoyed your class and learned a lot from you, especially about the Civil War.
Thank you for your help.
Sincerely,
Billy Braverman Amy Bedford
P.S. Please send the test and any other materials to my home address. Someone there will forward it. Please do not send anything to Amy’s home address.
*
Dear Mom & Dad,
I love you both a lot and the last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you or drive you crazy.
By the time you read this letter, I will have gone away with Amy. We are going to travel. She’s had a lot of bad things happen to her, and I am going to help her to get over them and to be happier.
If I had discussed this with you ahead of time, you would have found a thousand reasons why it wasn’t a good idea. Probably most of them would be right, too.
Dad, you said that lawyers always tried to help their clients from climbing out on a limb that might break off. You said that fathers did that, too. But sometimes kids have to go out on that limb because it’s leading them somewhere important for them to go. They have to take the chance that it will break. Because even if it breaks and they fall off, they won’t necessarily get killed. Maybe they’ll just hurt themselves, the way I broke my wrist and my nose on the ski slope, and that hurt me but it didn’t kill me.
The second thing you’ll probably say is, Amy should go to the police or the people at the state social services.
Well, Amy doesn’t want to do that. I’ve researched it online and I found out that she would have to swear about those things in front of a judge. It’s easy for you to say that she should do it, but it’s harder for the person who actually has to do it. And even if she did, and the judge said that she could leave home and Carter couldn’t come after her, where would she go?
I looked that up and the answer is that she would go to a state juvenile home or to foster care. She doesn’t want do that.
This way she feels safe because Carter doesn’t know where she is. And he can’t yell at you and say that you know where we are and you have to tell. Because you don’t know.
I wish I could run my lemonade business this summer but it doesn’t look like that would be a brilliant thing to do. If Simon wants to do it he can take the Yummy-in-the-Tummy name. Just tell him to use fresh lemons, not the stuff that comes in bottles.
What I would like, more than anything, is for you to say to me that you understand, and it’s all right, and “Go for it, Billy!” Then we could see each other whenever we wanted to. We would just have to keep the whereabouts of me and Amy a secret from Carter and Ginette. Do you think you could figure out a way to do that?
I’ll write by e-mail. Please don’t come hunting for me. We’ll see each other for sure when the summer’s over. I give you my word on that. A golden handshake.
Lots of love to Inez, and thank you for being the best mom and dad any kid could have.
XXXXXXXOOOXXXXXOOOOOXXXXXOOOOOXXXXX
with love from
Billy
P.S. Amy wrote a note to Carter and Ginette, which I copied for you. Here it is. And also a copy of a letter I sent to Mrs. Ostrow.
*
Dear Carter and Ginette,
I’m gone for good. Don’t try to find me. And don’t bug Mr. and Mrs. Braverman, because they don’t know where I am.
Amy
I pasted a stamp on the letter to Mrs. Ostrow. I put the original of Amy’s note into another envelope that she had already addressed and then I stuck a stamp on that one, too. Later in the morning, in town, I would mail them. I would leave the letter for my parents in the mailbox on Oak Lane. Inez went out there every day at noon to pick up the mail. The box was usually stuffed with bills, catalogues, and magazines. A letter might get buried among them, so I used a red marker to print on the envelope:
PERSONAL AND IMPORTANT.
Then I went online.
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Game at Shea
Hi Tom,
This Thursday evening would be cool. I’ll bring Amy and Iphigenia. Two tickets will be enough, because Iphigenia hasn’t grown enough to need her own seat.
What do I tell them at the ball park so that they let us get through to visit you?
I hope we have time alone because there’s something important I need to talk to you about. I’m going to throw you another fastball.
best regards from
your buddy,
Billy Braverman
Chapter 25
The 11:40 a.m. train wasn’t crowded, but it never is when it sets out from the far reaches of Long Island, where sometimes it feels like you’re stranded in the Atlantic Ocean halfway to Europe. I gave Amy the window seat. She had a new drawing pad, and I had a paperback of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. I put the Adidas traveling bag close to the window on the seat opposite so that Iphigenia could look out through the mesh and watch the world fly by. But she curled up and went to sleep. The first thing I had to do when I got to New York was buy a new cage for her.
I was wearing shorts and old Nikes, and Amy wore a T-shirt and jeans and her windbreaker. All last week she had worried about clothes. I guess all girls worry about not having enough clothes or the right clothes.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “we can buy whatever you need.”
“Billy, if we do that, you’ll run out of money.”
She didn’t know how much I had. I didn’t want to rattle her brains by telling her.
“It’s summer,” I had said. “You don’t need a lot of clothes.”
“I want to take my winter stuff, too.”
“Right. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Every morning you bring a few extra clothes to school in your backpack. Like, one day, your windbreaker and gloves. Next day, your boots and some thick socks. I’ll take them home to my house every afternoon in my backpack. I’ll put them all in a duffel bag. On the day we leave, I’ll bring the duffel bag for you.”
“Billy, you’re the smartest person I’ve ever known. Usually.”
Well, maybe the smartest kid, but surely not the smartest person. Still, I blushed.
The train moved off from Amagansett station on a warm and cloudy day in May. Amy took off her windbreaker, and when she turned to put it up on the rack with her duffel bag, I noticed what I’d never noticed before. Her T-shirt was a little tight, and under it I saw that she had breasts.
They had grown while I wasn’t looking. They weren’t big, they were just perky rounded bumps with points, poking against the white of the T-shirt where until recently there had been nothing at all.
I turned my head away so she wouldn’t see me staring. I yawned — I hadn’t slept a lot the night before, writing those letters and planning what we were doing today. That morning, as soon as my mom left the house, I had packed. It made me sad to leave all my climbing gear behind but it was too much to carry, and I knew it would always be there for me. They could send it to me by UPS once we got settled.
I asked Amy how many times she’d been to New York.
“Just that one time when the class went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“Did you like the Met?”
“It was awesome,” Amy said.
“What was the best part of it?”
I thought she’d talk about the Egyptian pyramid and the mummies, but she said, “Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, those guys. If I ever painted, that’s how I’d want to do it.”
“You’ll paint,” I said. “And we’ll go to the Met again, and the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim, and the galleries downtown in SoHo, and the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and take a boat around Manhattan island. New York is so cool. They’ve got concerts in Central Park, and street fairs, and weird-looking people. I was born there, it’s my home town. I know my way around.”
I was boasting and I knew it. I wished I hadn’t done that.
“Can we go to the beach?” Amy asked.
“Sure,” I said, making a mental note to investigate the New York beach situation. Even in the years we lived there, we always went out to Amagansett.
The train stopped in East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Southampton, Hampton Bays, Westhampton, Speonk, Mastic-Shirley. People got on, but still it wasn’t crowded. The wheels kept clacking. Amy had her sketch pad in her lap but all she did was look at the window at the towns and the houses and the trees and the stations. It was a two hour and forty minute ride to Penn Station. With each stop, I was farther away from my parents and Oak Lane, from Inez, Simon, my room, my comfy bed, my pillow, my bike, my big desktop computer, my library, the tomatoes that my brother and I had planted last week—all the things I was so used to. I found myself taking deep breaths to fight off a feeling I couldn’t name.
“Are you okay?” Amy asked.
I could have said, “I’m fine,” which is what you usually do, but I wanted to be honest. I wanted Amy to know the things I felt the same way I wanted to know the things that she felt. So I said, “I’m thinking about all the things I’ll miss.”
But also, I thought, with each stop I’m thinking that we’re farther away from Carter Bedford. He’ll never find you if you don’t want him to find you.
“Billy, you look really tired. Why don’t you take a nap?”
That sounded like a good idea. “I need something for my head,” I said, and I started to rummage in my backpack for a sweater.
“Put your head on my lap,” Amy said.
Her legs were a little bony under her jeans but they were cool and it felt good to rest there. “When they announce Jamaica,” I said, “wake me up. We have to change trains in Jamaica. After Bay Shore and Babylon, comes Jamaica. Are you going to draw?”
“Go to sleep and don’t worry about me,” Amy said.
I shut my eyes, fought sleep because I was worried that she might miss the signs and not see Babylon, and then we’d be in Jamaica, and then—I passed straight out.
It seemed that only a minute or two had gone by. Amy was squeezing my shoulder.
“Billy… Billy…”
I opened my eyes. They felt raw and dry, and I began rubbing them, which is one of my unhealthy habits. “Are we in Jamaica?”
“Babylon. I think your mother’s here.”
My heart nearly stopped. I swear, that’s how it felt. I jumped up from her lap so that for a moment I was dizzy. My mother? Here in Babylon? Impossible.
“Out there.”
My mom drove a white Range Rover with black and red racing stripes and a license plate that said MODERN A — an easy car to spot. I craned my neck but I didn’t see it in the parking area. There were quite a few people on the platform at Babylon station. My mom was also easy to spot, with that mop of jet-black curly hair. I didn’t see her there.
“Isn’t that her?” Amy jabbed a finger against the window. “Big straw hat… blue shirt, white pants. See?”
It was my mom. A big straw hat hid her hair the first time when I looked too quickly. She was dancing in short steps—she wasn’t really dancing, but for a moment it looked like that—along the platform about two cars away, close to the train, waving her hand. At me? At the conductor? I felt the train move. It jerked — it stopped — then it jerked again. I realized that my mom was trying to get on the train. The door must have been closing. Had she seen us through the windows? I didn’t know. I didn’t understand how she had known to come here. I was confused. I had awakened too quickly from too short a sleep.
She saw me. At least I think she saw me, it was hard to tell. But her black eyes burned straight into mine. Her mouth opened. I saw her lips purse into kiss mode, or hiss mode, it’s the same.
“Billy —!“
Her hat blew off. Her pretty straw hat with flowers and ribbons, that I’d bought for her birthday last year, blew right off her head, because she was running toward the train to get in the last barely-open door. My mom tried to snatch at her straw hat as it spun off, and then she turned quickly, looking like a lovely and graceful woman, and bent to grab her hat up off the platform before it blew onto the tracks on the other side of the platform where, who knew, a train might be coming that would crush her hat.
Then, I saw, she realized: No, if I do that, I’ll miss the train, I have to give up the hat… but it was too late. She had the hat but not the train.
The train door slid shut and the train continued to roll out of the station, bound for Jamaica. I watched my mom on the platform, she and the platform receding into the distance: the platform into a vanishing point, she into the figure of a charcoal gray doll; then darker, and nearly black; then, as we rounded a slight curve, gone.
Amy was shaking her head in amazement. “How did she know?”
“I have no idea,” I said, and the moment I said those words, the solution thundered into my mind.
I’d left that note in the mailbox, marked in big red letters. Inez sorts the mail, recognizes my printing: PERSONAL AND IMPORTANT. Oooh, don’t sound good, better call Mrs. B. in Sag Harbor.
My mom says, “Open it, Inez. Read it to me if you think I need to hear it now.”
That’s how I explained it to Amy. “… and so my mom freaks out. Wherever we’re going, she figures, we’ve got to get to New York first. She calls the Hampton Jitney. Did two kids get on the bus by themselves? No. So it’s got to be the train. She grabs the Long Island Railroad schedule from a bulletin board in her office. She works it out, where she can intercept us. Babylon. She burns up the road, and even then, she barely makes it. Then her hat blows off.”
A hat blows off, and it can change someone’s life.
“Now what will she do?” Amy asked.
It was 1:35. I looked at my own train schedule. Babylon Lv. 1:33. Jamaica Ar. 2:09. That made it a thirty-six minute trip, the longest one of the whole run. From Jamaica, after we changed trains, it was another twenty-three minutes to Penn Station.
I said, “She’ll drive like crazy to Jamaica so she can be there at the train station waiting for us. Can she do it in thirty-six minutes? Not unless she goes at seventy miles an hour, and my mom is definitely not a speed freak. Plus, it’s tough to park there. Jamaica is a little city.” I blew out a sigh of relief. “I think we’re okay.”
Except, I thought, if my mom was on her cell right now to my dad in Manhattan, he had almost an hour to get to Penn Station. Unless he was in court, or at death row in Florida, he would drop everything and be there on the platform, waiting for us.
“That’s all right. This is what we’ll do” — as if I’d spoken all those thoughts aloud. “When we get to Jamaica, we’ll take a taxi to the city.”
I hadn’t slept enough the night before or on the train, so I wasn’t really figuring things out the way I should have been. I was figuring what I hoped would happen rather than putting myself into my parents’ minds and grasping all the possibilities that would occur to them, and how they would deal with them. I knew they’d be upset but I didn’t grasp how upset. When I said to Amy, “I think we’re okay,” I became a victim of denial. They should make that the eighth deadly sin.
The station at Jamaica is elevated. You come in and you see a lot of rooftops with laundry hanging out to dry, TV aerials and dishes, lavanderias, bodegas, pizza joints, Indian and Lebanese restaurants. People crowd the streets. A lot of mean streets out there, a big change from the rural terminal moraine leading to Montauk. I heard Amy draw in her breath when she saw it.
The train eased in, right on time. I was craning my neck, scanning the station for my mom. If she was there, if in those thirty-six minutes she’d managed to drive from Babylon to Jamaica and get her car safely parked so that she could race up the steps to the train platforms, we were sunk. I didn’t know what we’d do. Have a big argument right there on the platform. I didn’t think I could win that one. We’d have to go with her. She was a mother and she had the power.
I looked across the tracks at the eastbound platforms. No sign of Dr. Diana Adler. Only
then did it occur to me that she could have phoned my dad earlier than Babylon, could easily have phoned him on her cell while she was flying down Stephen Hands Path toward the Montauk Highway — and that Jacob Braverman, Esq. might be there in the flesh on the platform at Jamaica railway station in his navy blue power suit and shiny black shoes. Not only couldn’t I win that battle, I couldn’t even begin to fight. My heart felt like it was trying to squeeze itself into my large intestine and hide out down there.
I wrestled the window open. I poked my head out part way and looked for my dad. Small, but he always stood out.
I didn’t see him.
But I did see two New York City cops standing in their blue short sleeve shirts, caps tilted back on their heads, hands spread on their hips. The older one was black, with a belly, and the younger one with his mustache could have been Hispanic. They were scanning the groups of people starting to exit from the Babylon train, but they cocked their heads only when kids passed by. A gang of kids in gray uniforms and carrying baseball gear were weaving and bopping and clopping along in their spiked shoes, and some of them took a wide turn around the cops even though the cops didn’t seem to be interested in them.
Duh. That’s because the cops were interested in Amy and me.
I couldn’t believe it, but there was the proof. Two of New York’s finest out to collar a runaway boy and girl. My mom had called the police. My own mother.
“Amy, duck down.”
She did it right away without asking any questions.
“Stay there,” I said.
I hunched down with her. Our backpacks were strapped into place and I had already piled Amy’s two sacks and my suitcase and Iphigenia’s bag on the seat opposite us.
I thought it through. The cops didn’t have to board the train. If they did, we could slip out and get by them. Two twelve-year-old runaways. White middle-class boy and girl. No big deal. On the other hand, I remembered all those white couples like Bonnie and Clyde who had killed people all through the Midwest in the olden days, and the not-so-olden days. Maybe the cops wouldn’t take any chances.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller Page 20
