Lost Boy

by Shelley Hrdlitschka

  “Now push the Enter key.”

  A bunch of pictures of inuksuit suddenly appear on the screen. Taviana shows me how to use the mouse, as she calls it, to click on links.

  “Look at them all! This is amazing. I wish I could show Celeste.”

  “You can find a lot of cool stuff on the Internet,” Taviana says. She adds, “Except a job in Springdale, unfortunately.”

  “Are there books on inuksuk too?”

  “Yep. The Internet can also help with that.”

  She shows me how to search the library catalog. It tells me where the books are shelved. Taviana takes me to the correct area.

  “Choose two,” she says. “I’ll take them out on my card. When you get your own card, you can take out as many as you want.”

  It takes a few minutes to decide, but eventually I select a couple. Taviana has a stack of paperback novels to borrow. We take them all to the librarian.

  “Do you know anyone who is looking for a summer job?” Audrey asks as she waves our books under some kind of scanner.

  “Doing what kind of work?” Taviana asks.

  “Mostly shelving returned material,” she says. “We need someone to cover for staff on summer holidays. But we also need some enthusiastic people to help run the children’s summer reading programs.”

  Taviana glances at me.

  “Go on,” I tell her.

  “How do I apply?” she asks.

  While Taviana fills out the application form, I flip through the pages of my books.

  “We’ll call you when we start interviewing,” Audrey says. “Which should be the middle of next week.”

  Taviana’s face crumples.

  “Is something the matter?”

  “No, not really. I’d just hoped to hear sooner.”

  “We have to go through the proper procedures,” Audrey says. “But I’m sure you have a very good chance at the job.”

  “Thanks,” Taviana says. “I hope so.”

  Outside the library, Taviana drops onto a bench. “I have to leave Abigail’s in a couple of days,” she says. “I won’t be at the phone number I put on my application.”

  “Maybe Abigail will give you an extension.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not.”

  I leaf through my books while we wait at the bus stop.

  Taviana jumps up suddenly. “I need to get something,” she says.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I just need to run to the hardware store over there. I’ll be right back.”

  I watch, puzzled, as she dashes across the street. Minutes later she’s running back toward me. “Jon! Celeste is at the hospital. Right now!”

  “What’s the matter?” I leap to my feet.

  “It’s her mother. She’s not well. Celeste is in town visiting her. I just met one of her other mothers in the store. I saw her go in with Celeste’s father.”

  My heart is pounding.

  “We can go over there right now. You can see her.”

  “Which way is it?”

  Clasping our books, we run down the street and around a corner. Taviana points to a tower at the end of the block. “I’ll go up to see them. And then I’ll try to talk to Celeste alone. I’ll tell her you’re waiting in the front lobby. Wait by the entrance, and keep a lookout for her father. When Celeste finds you, you need to get out of the lobby as fast as you can so that when her father returns, he won’t see you.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “You’ll figure something out.” Taviana stops running and pulls on my arm, forcing me to stop too. “And Jon, there’s something you need to know.”

  “What?”

  Taviana frowns. “Celeste is getting married. On Sunday.”

  It’s like someone has kicked me in the gut.

  “And there’s one more thing,” Taviana says quietly.

  I bend over at the waist, trying to suck in air, relieve the spasms.

  “She’s marrying your father.”

  At first the words don’t register. But when they do, I feel such a swell of despair that I can only cover my face with my hands and turn away. “No,” I moan.

  I feel Taviana’s hand on my back. “You okay?” she asks.

  I bob my head, but it’s a lie.

  Five

  Air-conditioning chills the hospital lobby, but that’s not why I’m trembling. The minutes slowly tick by. What if Celeste can’t sneak away? What if we’re too late, and her father is already heading back to the hospital? What if—

  The door to the stairwell bursts open, and there she is. Long blond braid. Pale blue eyes. Dark lashes. Floor-length Unity dress. An angel. She sees me and goes still. We stare at each other, and then suddenly she flies across the lobby and into my arms. I can’t hold back the tears any longer and start to sob. She pulls away and looks at me. “Are you okay?”

  I wipe my nose with my sleeve, wishing she hadn’t seen me like this. “Yeah.”

  “We need to get out of here,” she says, glancing at the door. “My father’s due back any minute.”

  I look around the lobby and see a sign. Visitors Waiting Area. Grabbing her hand, I pull her into the small room and shut the door behind us. We wrap our arms around each other again, and for a moment I forget everything except the feel of her body pressed against mine, the smell of her skin, the beating of our hearts together.

  When we finally pull apart we sit side by side on the vinyl couch, our hands clasped. “I never thought I’d see you again,” she says. “This is such a shock.”

  “I know. I’ve missed you so much.” I lean in and press my lips to hers. She responds, and nothing else matters.

  The door bangs open. We jump apart, but it’s just a woman with a small child. Seeing us, she pulls her child back out through the door.

  “Celeste,” I say. “Don’t go back to Unity.” I grip her hands harder. “Stay here with Taviana and me. We’ve found a nice lady who lets us live in her home as long as we go to school. You can come with us. We’ll all be together.”

  Celeste sits back as she digests this. Her hands are shaking—or maybe it’s my hands, holding hers, that are shaking.

  “My father…” she says.

  She doesn’t have to finish the sentence. His fury will be frightening, and he may lose his priesthood if his daughter escapes. “I know. It’s hard. But you have to be strong, Celeste. This is your life. Remember all those things we talked about by the river? How some things in The Movement just don’t add up? Well, you being assigned to my father is one of those things. It’s not divine revelation. Don’t you see? It’s punishment, pure and simple. They want to punish both of us.”

  “I know, but my mother—she’s so sick. I’m scared for her.”

  She paces the room, tormented. Occasionally she looks at me, then quickly looks away. She always said she could never leave, that she had no skills, no education. She figured she couldn’t survive outside Unity.

  But now things are different. She’s been assigned to a husband. My father! Isn’t that enough to give her the courage? And she’d have a home at Abigail’s, which we didn’t know about before. And she could go to school.

  She sits beside me again, crying. I pull her close, and we rock back and forth, back and forth. I never want to let her go.

  Eventually she pulls herself away. I look into her face. She won’t meet my eyes.

  My body deflates, a balloon releasing its air.

  When she stands up, I clasp my hands in my lap. I can’t look at her.

  I hear her walk across the room and open the door. “I love you, Jon,” she says, her soft voice shaky.

  The door closes behind her.

  “C’mon, Jon. It’s garden-building weekend.” Jimmy stands in the doorway to my bedroom.

  “No. It’s the day before Celeste’s wedding day,” I moan. The blankets on my bed are a rumpled mess, evidence of my fitful sleep. I find the edge of the sheet and pull it over my head.

  I stared Satan down, and now I’m be
ing punished. The Prophet can reach me even out here. All night I kept visualizing my father in Celeste’s bed, his rough hands groping those places that I’ve been longing to stroke and explore. It makes me sick to think about it, yet I can’t make the images go away.

  “My supervisor is meeting us in one hour,” Jimmy says. “He’s going to unlock the fencing around the site so we can get the lumber. He knows you need work, so it’s a good chance to meet him.”

  I can only groan.

  “It’ll help take your mind off things,” Jimmy says more gently.

  When Taviana and I returned to the house yesterday afternoon, I headed straight to my room and haven’t been out since. Taviana must have filled the others in on what happened, because one by one they came to my door, offering sympathy and suggesting activities to take my mind off Celeste, but I only wanted to be left alone. Taviana brought me a plate of supper, but it still sits on the chest of drawers, untouched. I felt too sick to eat.

  “We’re leaving in twenty minutes,” Jimmy tells me. “Tavi made muffins. You can grab a couple for the road.”

  Remembering Taviana’s muffins from the night I arrived is just enough encouragement to help me haul myself out of bed and take a quick shower.

  On my way out, Abigail hands me a lunch bag filled with warm muffins and juice boxes. “I can taste those homegrown veggies already,” she says, her eyes filled with compassion as she steers me out the door.

  At the construction site, Jimmy’s supervisor, Alex, looks me over as he unlocks the chain-link fence. “I hear you’re building yourself a garden,” he says.

  “Yes, sir, that’s the plan.”

  “Jimmy tells me you’ve done some construction work in the past.”

  “I’ve been in construction full-time since I was fourteen.”

  “Is that so? Then you must know a thing or two.”

  “Yes, sir. I think I do.”

  Alex leads us over to a pile of scrap lumber at the edge of the site. His back is stooped, and when he shook my hand, I noticed how rough and gnarly his was, but his blue eyes are kind.

  Like the librarian and the truck driver, Alex seems to be another good and honest gentile. How did the Prophet manage to convince us that they were all evil? It’s hard to believe that the people of The Movement are the only ones that will go to heaven.

  Alex helps us choose the best of the cedar planks and then watches us as we load them into Jimmy’s pickup. He hands me a bag of timber screws. “You’ll need these.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “I don’t usually hire boys as young as you,” he tells me. “But if you invite me over to see your garden, and I like your handiwork, I’ll consider hiring you on for the summer. You seem like a good kid.”

  On the way back to Abigail’s we stop at the nursery to buy soil and seeds. We argue for a long time about which vegetables to grow.

  “I hate parsnips,” Jimmy says. “I think we ate them every day when I was growing up.”

  I remove the envelope of zucchini seeds that he tossed in our cart and place it back on the display. “Bor-ing.”

  Jon snatches it. “But versatile. And easy to grow. We can make soup, muffins or stir-fry with zucchini.”

  I think of Taviana’s muffins and stop arguing.

  Eventually we choose beans, peppers, carrots, radishes (because Jimmy loves them), spinach and zucchini. We add small tomato plants to the cart and decide that if there’s any room leftover in the garden we’ll come back for onions and kale. We choose the largest and cheapest bags of soil that we can find, and we also grab a couple of bags of pea gravel for lining the bottoms of the planters.

  The total comes to $145.

  “Oh,” I say to the cashier. “I only have one hundred dollars. I’ll have to take some of it back.”

  Jimmy takes his wallet out of his pocket and pulls out forty-five dollars. “You can owe me,” he says.

  The four of us boys spend the afternoon building the raised garden boxes. We build them to run north to south and take full advantage of the sun. The hardest part is digging the trenches, but after that the work is easier. We stake the corners, then level and square up the first course of the cedar. I insist on being the one to screw the sides together, so Alex can see that I really do know what I’m doing. When we’re finished there’s lots of lumber left over, so we build a compost bin in the back corner of the yard. That complete, I add the pea gravel to the planters and fill them with soil. All that is left to do is plant the seeds.

  The other boys have grown weary of working and are shooting baskets. Abigail left a pitcher of fresh lemonade and tuna-salad sandwiches on the small patio table for us. I take a sandwich and the seed envelopes and sit on the bottom step, intending to read the planting directions. But now that I’ve stopped working, my mind returns to Celeste. It’s midafternoon. By this time tomorrow she’ll likely be married. The families will be hosting a celebration dinner. Even though it’s clear to both Celeste and me that this union has nothing to do with God’s will, the priesthood will have to pretend that it does. All my family will be there. Everyone except me—the one Nielsson who actually loves Celeste. But, of course, love has nothing to do with marriage.

  I think about my mom, who is Dad’s second wife. How does she feel about welcoming yet another wife into the home? If she knows it was Celeste I was secretly meeting, she may be very angry with her.

  Taviana comes out of the house and sits beside me. “Nice job,” she says, looking at the planters.

  “Thanks.”

  She leans her shoulder into mine. “You okay?”

  I pretend to be really interested in reading the planting instructions on the radish envelope, but I can’t see the words through my tear-filled eyes.

  “At least your father is kind,” she says. “And Celeste no longer belongs to her own father, who’s so harsh.”

  I throw the seed packages to the ground, pull off my cap and rub my sweaty scalp. “Celeste shouldn’t belong to anyone. Jimmy’s right—those girls are brainwashed. It’s bullshit! There are no divine messages. God doesn’t tell the Prophet which girls should be assigned to which men. The select few from the priesthood just keep filling their homes with girls and calling them wives. It’s fucked.”

  I can feel Taviana staring at me, shocked at my rant.

  “She should have come with me,” I add quietly. “She had her chance.”

  Abigail must have been standing behind the screen of the back door, listening. She steps outside, sits on the step above us and lightly rests a hand on my shoulder. “You know firsthand, Jon, how hard it is to even consider leaving your family when it’s been the center of your universe.”

  “But I did it. And so did you.”

  “Yeah, I did. But not a day goes by that I don’t wonder if I’d be happier if I’d stayed. I could have all my kids with me.”

  Taviana and I turn around, surprised.

  I’ve never given any thought to Abigail’s happiness.

  “I know I did the right thing,” she continues, “and I set a good example for my kids. I’ve shown them that they do have a choice. But leaving them behind? That was…” She shakes her head.

  “Celeste didn’t have to leave kids behind,” I argue.

  “No, but she would have had to leave everything else she knows. Facing the unknown is like jumping off a cliff without a parachute and with no idea of where you’re going to land.”

  “We all did it,” I say, including the other boys with my glance.

  “Yeah, but many of you would have had to leave anyway, if you ever wanted to have a wife and family. You know there’s not enough girls to go around.”

  Even I can do that simple math. It’s one of the first things about our faith that led me to begin questioning it.

  Abigail squeezes my shoulder and goes back into the house.

  “Do you want some help with the planting?” Taviana asks.

  “Thanks.” I pick up the seed envelopes. “That would be g
reat.”

  On Sunday morning, Taviana, the boys and I attend Abigail’s church. I’m shocked at the informality. The building itself is not a church, just a hall with rows of chairs, and aside from a few old people in hats and jackets, I’m the only one dressed properly for a Sunday service. A woman leads us through a hymn and words of welcome. At first I can’t figure out where the priest is, but then I realize she’s the priest. A woman! There’s laughter during the service, and God is only referred to a few times, and when He is, it’s in passing, without much reverence. There’s no sermon. The priest just tells a story, weaving in Jesus’s lessons about compassion. I found services boring in Unity, but I’m not sure what I think about this one. Have I betrayed God by coming here? Does He still love me?

  “Isn’t Sunday supposed to be a day of rest for your people?” Taviana asks after lunch. I’m back in the yard, sanding the top of the fence.

  I glance up and see from the look on her face that she’s teasing.

  “Whatever.”

  “Why don’t you come to the library with me? I need to check the computer for job postings, but then we can go to the park and chill. It will take your mind off things.”

  “Things.” She means Celeste’s wedding. “Do you think my card will be ready?”

  “Might be.”

  “I guess the fence can wait until tomorrow.”

  Jimmy gives us a lift and drops us off at the library.

  “Your card’s ready, Jon,” Audrey calls out as soon as we walk in. She flips through a small stack and hands it to me.

  “How many books can I borrow?”

  “As many as you want. You just have to return them before the due date or you’ll be fined for each day that they’re late.”

  I head straight to the books about inuksuk and the Arctic cultures that build them. I choose five. I’m tempted to get some books on cars too, but I decide to come back for those another day. When I return to the desk, Taviana’s in deep conversation with Audrey. She’s telling her about her situation, and how she’s refused to go back to school because she knows the kids will torment her.

  “Do you have a computer?” Audrey asks.