He was such a nice old coot anyway. Slow, but still strong, a good steady worker. The lights were up in a couple of hours.
Christmas shopping. Doing Christmas cards. All that stuff. We were busy.
Then one morning, only about a week before Christmas, I guess, Kristine was reading the morning paper and she suddenly got all icy and calm—the way she does when something really bad is happening. “Scott, read this,” she said.
“Just tell me,” I said.
“This is an article about missing children in Greensboro.”
I glanced at the headline: CHILDREN WHO WON’T BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS. “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. I can’t read stories about child abuse or kidnappings. They make me crazy. I can’t sleep afterward. It’s always been that way.
“You’ve got to,” she said. “Here are the names of the little boys who’ve been reported missing in the last three years. Russell DeVerge, Nicholas Tyler—”
“What are you getting at?”
“Nicky. Rusty. David. Roddy. Peter. Are these names ringing a bell with you?”
I usually don’t remember names very well. “No.”
“Steve, Howard, Van. The only one that doesn’t fit is the last one, Alexander Booth. He disappeared this summer.”
For some reason the way Kristine was telling me this was making me very upset. She was so agitated about it, and she wouldn’t get to the point. “So what?” I demanded.
“Scotty’s imaginary friends,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. But she went over them with me—she had written down all the names of his imaginary friends in our journal, back when the therapist asked us to keep a record of his behavior. The names matched up, or seemed to.
“Scotty must have read an earlier article,” I said. “It must have made an impression on him. He’s always been an empathetic kid. Maybe he started identifying with them because he felt—I don’t know, like maybe he’d been abducted from South Bend and carried off to Greensboro.” It sounded really plausible for a moment there—the same moment of plausibility that psychologists live on.
Kristine wasn’t impressed. “This article says that it’s the first time anybody’s put all the names together in one place.”
“Hype. Yellow journalism.”
“Scott, he got all the names right.”
“Except one.”
“I’m so relieved.”
But I wasn’t. Because right then I remembered how I’d heard him talking during the pirate video game. Come on Sandy. I told Kristine. Alexander, Sandy. It was as good a fit as Russell and Rusty. He hadn’t matched a mere eight out of nine. He’d matched them all.
You can’t put a name to all the fears a parent feels, but I can tell you that I’ve never felt any terror for myself that compares to the feeling you have when you watch your two-year-old run toward the street, or see your baby go into a seizure, or realize that somehow there’s a connection between kidnappings and your child. I’ve never been on a plane seized by terrorists or had a gun pointed to my head or fallen off a cliff, so maybe there are worse fears. But then, I’ve been in a spin on a snowy freeway, and I’ve clung to the handles of my airplane seat while the plane bounced up and down in mid-air, and still those weren’t like what I felt then, reading the whole article. Kids who just disappeared. Nobody saw anybody pick up the kids. Nobody saw anybody lurking around their houses. The kids just didn’t come home from school, or played outside and never came in when they were called. Gone. And Scotty knew all their names. Scotty had played with them in his imagination. How did he know who they were? Why did he fixate on these lost boys?
We watched him, that last week before Christmas. We saw how distant he was. How he shied away, never let us touch him, never stayed with a conversation. He was aware of Christmas, but he never asked for anything, didn’t seem excited, didn’t want to go shopping. He didn’t even seem to sleep. I’d come in when I was heading for bed—at one or two in the morning, long after he’d climbed up into his bunk—and he’d be lying there, all his covers off, his eyes wide open. His insomnia was even worse than Geoffrey’s. And during the day, all Scotty wanted to do was play with the computer or hang around outside in the cold. Kristine and I didn’t know what to do. Had we already lost him somehow?
We tried to involve him with the family. He wouldn’t go Christmas shopping with us. We’d tell him to stay inside while we were gone, and then we’d find him outside anyway. I even unplugged the computer and hid all the disks and cartridges, but it was only Geoffrey and Emily who suffered—I still came into the room and found Scotty playing his impossible game.
He didn’t ask for anything until Christmas Eve.
Kristine came into my office, where I was writing the scene where Ender finds his way out of the Giant’s Drink problem. Maybe I was so fascinated with computer games for children in that book because of what Scotty was going through—maybe I was just trying to pretend that computer games made sense. Anyway, I still know the very sentence that was interrupted when she spoke to me from the door. So very calm. So very frightened.
“Scotty wants us to invite some of his friends in for Christmas Eve,” she said.
“Do we have to set extra places for imaginary friends?” I asked.
“They aren’t imaginary,” she said. “They’re in the backyard, waiting.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “It’s cold out there. What kind of parents would let their kids go outside on Christmas Eve?”
She didn’t say anything. I got up and we went to the back door together. I opened the door.
There were nine of them. Ranging in age, it looked like, from six to maybe ten. All boys. Some in shirt sleeves, some in coats, one in a swimsuit. I’ve got no memory for faces, but Kristine does. “They’re the ones,” she said softly, calmly, behind me. “That one’s Van. I remembered him.”
“Van?” I said.
He looked up at me. He took a timid step toward me.
I heard Scotty’s voice behind me. “Can they come in, Dad? I told them you’d let them have Christmas Eve with us. That’s what they miss the most.”
I turned to him. “Scotty, these boys are all reported missing. Where have they been?”
“Under the house,” he said.
I thought of the crawl space. I thought of how many times Scotty had come in covered with dirt last summer.
“How did they get there?” I asked.
“The old guy put them there,” he said. “They said I shouldn’t tell anybody or the old guy would get mad and they never wanted him to be mad at them again. Only I said it was OK, I could tell you.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“The landlord’s father,” whispered Kristine.
I nodded.
“Only how could he keep them under there all this time? When does he feed them? When—”
She already knew that the old guy didn’t feed them. I don’t want you to think Kristine didn’t guess that immediately. But it’s the sort of thing you deny as long as you can, and even longer.
“They can come in,” I told Scotty. I looked at Kristine. She nodded. I knew she would. You don’t turn away lost children on Christmas Eve. Not even when they’re dead.
Scotty smiled. What that meant to us—Scotty smiling. It had been so long. I don’t think I really saw a smile like that since we moved to Greensboro. Then he called out to the boys. “It’s OK! You can come in!”
Kristine held the door open, and I backed out of the way. They filed in, some of them smiling, some of them too shy to smile. “Go on into the living room,” I said. Scotty led the way. Ushering them in, for all the world like a proud host in a magnificent new mansion. They sat around on the floor. There weren’t many presents, just the ones from the kids; we don’t put out the presents from the parents till the kids are asleep. But the tree was there, lighted, with all our homemade decorations on it—even the old needlepoint decorations that Kristine made while lying in bed with desperate morning
sickness when she was pregnant with Scotty, even the little puff-ball animals we glued together for that first Christmas tree in Scotty’s life. Decorations older than he was. And not just the tree—the whole room was decorated with red and green tassels and little wooden villages and a stuffed Santa hippo beside a wicker sleigh and a large chimney-sweep nutcracker and anything else we hadn’t been able to resist buying or making over the years.
We called in Geoffrey and Emily, and Kristine brought in Charlie Ben and held him on her lap while I told the stories of the birth of Christ—the shepherds and the wise men, and the one from the Book of Mormon about a day and a night and a day without darkness. And then I went on and told what Jesus lived for. About forgiveness for all the bad things we do.
“Everything?” asked one of the boys.
It was Scotty who answered. “No!” he said. “Not killing.”
Kristine started to cry.
“That’s right,” I said. “In our church we believe that God doesn’t forgive people who kill on purpose. And in the New Testament Jesus said that if anybody ever hurt a child, it would be better for him to tie a huge rock around his neck and jump into the sea and drown.”
“Well, it did hurt, Daddy,” said Scotty. “They never told me about that.”
“It was a secret,” said one of the boys. Nicky, Kristine says, because she remembers names and faces.
“You should have told me,” said Scotty. “I wouldn’t have let him touch me.”
That was when we knew, really knew, that it was too late to save him, that Scotty, too, was already dead.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” said Scotty. “You told me not to play with them anymore, but they were my friends, and I wanted to be with them.” He looked down at his lap. “I can’t even cry anymore. I used it all up.”
It was more than he’d said to us since we moved to Greensboro in March. Amid all the turmoil of emotions I was feeling, there was this bitterness: All this year, all our worries, all our efforts to reach him, and yet nothing brought him to speak to us except death.
But I realized now it wasn’t death. It was the fact that when he knocked, we opened the door; that when he asked, we let him and his friends come into our house that night. He had trusted us, despite all the distance between us during that year, and we didn’t disappoint him. It was trust that brought us one last Christmas Eve with our boy.
But we didn’t try to make sense of things that night. They were children, and needed what children long for on a night like that. Kristine and I told them Christmas stories and we told about Christmas traditions we’d heard of in other countries and other times, and gradually they warmed up until every one of the boys told all about his own family’s Christmases. They were good memories. They laughed, they jabbered, they joked. Even though it was the most terrible of Christmases, it was also the best Christmas of our lives, the one in which every scrap of memory is still precious to us, the perfect Christmas in which being together was the only gift that mattered. Even though Kristine and I don’t talk about it directly now, we both remember it. And Geoffrey and Emily remember it, too. They call it “the Christmas when Scotty brought his friends.” I don’t think they ever really understood, and I’ll be content if they never do.
Finally, though, Geoffrey and Emily were both asleep. I carried each of them to bed as Kristine talked to the boys, asking them to help us. To wait in our living room until the police came, so they could help us stop the old guy who stole them away from their families and their futures. They did. Long enough for the investigating officers to get there and see them, long enough for them to hear the story Scotty told.
Long enough for them to notify the parents. They came at once, frightened because the police had dared not tell them more over the phone than this: that they were needed in a matter concerning their lost boy. They came: with eager, frightened eyes they stood on our doorstep, while a policeman tried to help them understand. Investigators were bringing ruined bodies out from under our house—there was no hope. And yet if they came inside, they would see that cruel Providence was also kind, and this time there would be what so many other parents had longed for but never had: a chance to say good-bye. I will tell you nothing of the scenes of joy and heartbreak inside our home that night—those belong to other families, not to us.
Once their families came, once the words were spoken and the tears were shed, once the muddy bodies were laid on canvas on our lawn and properly identified from the scraps of clothing, then they brought the old man in handcuffs. He had our landlord and a sleepy lawyer with him, but when he saw the bodies on the lawn he brokenly confessed, and they recorded his confession. None of the parents actually had to look at him; none of the boys had to face him again.
But they knew. They knew that it was over, that no more families would be torn apart as theirs—as ours—had been. And so the boys, one by one, disappeared. They were there, and then they weren’t there. With that the other parents left us, quiet with grief and awe that such a thing was possible, that out of horror had come one last night of mercy and of justice, both at once.
Scotty was the last to go. We sat alone with him in our living room, though by the lights and talking we were aware of the police still doing their work outside. Kristine and I remember clearly all that was said, but what mattered most to us was at the very end.
“I’m sorry I was so mad all the time last summer,” Scotty said. “I knew it wasn’t really your fault about moving and it was bad for me to be so angry but I just was.”
For him to ask our forgiveness was more than we could bear. We were full of far deeper and more terrible regrets, we thought, as we poured out our remorse for all that we did or failed to do that might have saved his life. When we were spent and silent at last, he put it all in proportion for us. “That’s OK. I’m just glad that you’re not mad at me.” And then he was gone.
We moved out that morning before daylight; good friends took us in, and Geoffrey and Emily got to open the presents they had been looking forward to for so long. Kristine’s and my parents all flew out from Utah and the people in our church joined us for the funeral. We gave no interviews to the press; neither did any of the other families. The police told only of the finding of the bodies and the confession. We didn’t agree to it; it’s as if everybody who knew the whole story also knew that it would be wrong to have it in headlines in the supermarket.
Things quieted down very quickly. Life went on. Most people don’t even know we had a child before Geoffrey. It wasn’t a secret. It was just too hard to tell. Yet, after all these years, I thought it should be told, if it could be done with dignity, and to people who might understand. Others should know how it’s possible to find light shining even in the darkest place. How even as we learned of the most terrible grief of our lives, Kristine and I were able to rejoice in our last night with our firstborn son, and how together we gave a good Christmas to those lost boys, and they gave as much to us.
AFTERWORD
In August 1988 I brought this story to the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop. That draft of the story included a disclaimer at the end, a statement that the story was fiction, that Geoffrey is my oldest child and that no landlord of mine has ever done us harm. The reaction of the other writers at the workshop ranged from annoyance to fury.
Karen Fowler put it most succinctly when she said, as best I can remember her words, “By telling this story in first person with so much detail from your own life, you’ve appropriated something that doesn’t belong to you. You’ve pretended to feel the grief of a parent who has lost a child, and you don’t have a right to feel that grief.”
When she said that, I agreed with her. While this story had been rattling around in my imagination for years, I had only put it so firmly in first person the autumn before, at a Halloween party with the students of Watauga College at Appalachian State. Everybody was trading ghost stories that night, and so on a whim I tried out this one; on a whim I made it highly personal, partly because by telling
true details from my own life I spared myself the effort of inventing a character, partly because ghost stories are most powerful when the audience half-believes they might be true. It worked better than any tale I’d ever told out loud, and so when it came time to write it down, I wrote it the same way.
Now, though, Karen Fowler’s words made me see it in a different moral light, and I resolved to change it forthwith. Yet the moment I thought of revising the story, of stripping away the details of my own life and replacing them with those of a made-up character, I felt a sick dread inside. Some part of my mind was rebelling against what Karen said. No, it was saying, she’s wrong, you do have a right to tell this story, to claim this grief.
I knew at that moment what this story was really about, why it had been so important to me. It wasn’t a simple ghost story at all; I hadn’t written it just for fun. I should have known—I never write anything just for fun. This story wasn’t about a fictional eldest child named “Scotty.” It was about my real-life youngest child, Charlie Ben.
Charlie, who in the five and a half years of his life has never been able to speak a word to us. Charlie, who could not smile at us until he was a year old, who could not hug us until he was four, who still spends his days and nights in stillness, staying wherever we put him, able to wriggle but not to run, able to call out but not to speak, able to understand that he cannot do what his brother and sister do, but not to ask us why. In short, a child who is not dead and yet can barely taste life despite all our love and all our yearning.
Yet in all the years of Charlie’s life, until that day at Sycamore Hill, I had never shed a single tear for him, never allowed myself to grieve. I had worn a mask of calm and acceptance so convincing that I had believed it myself. But the lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell, and I am no exception. A story that I had fancied was a mere lark, a dalliance in the quaint old ghost-story tradition, was the most personal, painful story of my career—and, unconsciously, I had confessed as much by making it by far the most autobiographical of all my works.
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