Cast of Shadows - v4 (15 page)

Barwick had the dreams about three times a month. They were set in different places: her high school, her apartment, Mrs. Lundquist’s parlor, Big Rob’s office (or at least in locales she understood to be those places, even if they didn’t physically resemble them). One took place at a departure gate at O’Hare. In most of them, Justin, in Eric Lundquist’s grown body, wearing Eric Lundquist’s face, wanted to talk about duty.

“Fulfilling responsibility,” he’d say, “is the most important thing.”

“You sound like Big Rob,” she’d say.

“Big Rob is a wide man,” Justin would say.

“But what if those responsibilities are in service of a cause that’s unjust?” Even while she was saying things like that in her dreams, she recognized it wasn’t anything like the manner in which she — or probably anybody — really talked.

“You and I are instruments,” Justin would say. “Instruments don’t have causes.”

“Who has causes, then?”

Justin didn’t seem to care. “Other people.”

When she handed over the photos, Big Rob would always say to her, “You’re like a double agent,” which only deepened her ambivalence. She had betrayed one friend to earn the trust of another.
This is what it takes,
she told herself.
You need to be willing to go where other detectives are not.
Her angst was mitigated by the satisfaction Big Rob and Scott Colleran expressed in her work. The client was very pleased, Colleran said.
Very pleased.

“Hop up in the tree, Justin,” Sally said. He surveyed the waist-high place where the old trunk separated, forming a flat area like the palm of an upturned, three-fingered hand. He obeyed and, turning toward the camera, froze his expression in a broad grin. When he realized the photo was some minutes from being snapped, he relaxed his face and stared at some kids, kids with fewer obligations, playing on a jungle gym in the distance.

Martha stood at Sally’s side, trying to approximate the shot in her mind. “I like this.”

Remotely, Sally arranged Justin’s posture and put the camera to her eye. “Smile,” she said, and he did. She clicked the shutter seven or eight times, producing that many identical exposures. Justin’s expression never changed even slightly — sunny and adorable in every one. When she pulled the camera away the real Justin seemed like a portrait, as well — an idealized version of a little boy. Even the surface of the lake in the distance seemed not to be moving.

“Stay there,” Barwick said. She adjusted the lens and took several close-ups of Justin’s face. She would offer these to Martha, but they were really for Gold Badge’s client. Through the lens, Justin looked surreal, hyperfocused. The horizon fell away around his blond curls. His smile was unwavering. His eyes, active and blue and deep, were like galaxies.

His eyes.

She pushed the camera aside. Justin was maybe fifteen feet away. Without the camera his eyes were like many others — heavy-lidded dots in a boy’s tiny head. Through the lens, though, they were intimate. Seductive.
Familiar.

They were the eyes that romanced her in dreams. The eyes Eric Lundquist wore when he came to her as Justin. She looked through the eyepiece again, turning the zoom until only Justin’s jewel-like right iris filled the frame. These were not a seven-year-old’s eyes.

She took a picture of his eye. This one for herself.

Hours later, with Justin on a playdate, across a wrought-iron table at a Northwood wine bar, Martha said, “It’s lovely having a friend I can call for this.”

“I like coming up here,” Barwick said. Noting that this was a nice place in a wealthy town, not the Wild Hare, a reggae bar on Clark Street where she spent most of her free evenings, she tried not to gulp the twelve-dollar glass of Oregon Pinot Noir Martha had ordered for her, and measured the meniscus of her glass against Martha’s every few minutes. “Justin’s a great kid.”

Martha demurred with a gracious smile and an uncertain squint. “Yeah. Gosh. Yeah, he is. I think he’s got a crush on you.” Sally flushed. “He’s got a good heart, you know. Last week, I was making dinner and he just, you know, he just started setting the table. All by himself. Without me asking. It was so cute. At this age, he wants my approval so much.”

“That’s great,” Barwick said.

“And he’s so smart. Ninety-ninth percentile on all the tests.” She blushed, the percentile scale being such an inflated and meaningless cliché (but irresistible nonetheless). “He has little moments, of course.”

“Yeah? Like all kids, I imagine.”

“Like all kids. Right. That’s what I mean. You know, he uses bad language sometimes.”

Barwick grunted. “Oh. Well.
Shit
.”

Martha spasmed, choking wine back into her glass. “God, Sally, you make me laugh. I don’t have friends like you up here. I mean, I have friends, but not like I used to. Not the kind of friends I used to have in the city.”

“What happened to your old friends?”

“Eh. You move. You get married. You have a kid.” Martha took a long sip. “You have a kid and it becomes hard. When you’re single you can drop everything. You’re flexible. If you live in the city, even after you’re married, you can still make dinner or a play or a last-minute happy hour on a whim. When you have a child it’s harder. Impossible, in fact. Most of the time friends don’t even call, and you know what? You’re glad when they don’t ’cause you’re so goddamn tired.”

“Yeah,” Barwick said, although she really had no idea. She curled her fingers around the thin crystal stem — her smallest opposite the others, it and her ring finger forming a dull scissors. A pretty young couple about her age sat at a nearby table and leaned their heads close above their glasses, whispering things too private for Sally to hear. Barwick usually felt superior to twenty-somethings who lived in the suburbs. Not today.

“And kids. Lordy.” Martha took another sip, bringing the level in her glass below Barwick’s. “Were you ever in trouble, Sally? When you were little?”

“Oh God, yes,” Sally said. “I was a terrible kid. Really drawn to the bad boys, you know? In tenth grade, I was suspended for six weeks. I was almost expelled, but my parents got me back in somehow.”

Martha made a shocked circle with her lips, indicating that she found this gossip both delightful and scandalous. “Really? What did you do?”

“It was stupid. Some friends of mine and I had sat at the same table at lunch for two years and we were determined that no one else would sit at it when we moved to the other campus as juniors. So we broke into the school on a Saturday, stole it, and drove it in this guy’s truck to the Indiana Dunes, where we got drunk and smashed it to bits with shovels and hammers. The cops showed up and we were arrested and because the theft was committed on school property, they weren’t going to let us come back.”

“Doesn’t sound like such a big deal.”

“Like I said. Stupid.”

“I was such a Goody Two-Shoes,” Martha said. “Never in trouble. Student council. Yearbook.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s why I’m so nervous about Justin, I’m sure. When people don’t follow the rules, it makes me very anxious.” She paused. “Justin’s been setting fires. Nothing big. No damage yet. He keeps finding matches. Lighting candles. He lit a bunch of newspapers in the fireplace.”

“A little scary.”

“He’s been stealing from me, too. I find jewelry in his room. You say something and he just says he’s sorry. Does it again.” She took a long breath and disposed of it in a long sigh. “It’s so bad that I start to get paranoid. The neighbor’s dog dies and I wonder if he didn’t have something to do with it.” She laughed to shake the horror from the thought.

“The neighbor’s dog?”

“You read where serial killers, when they’re young, like to set fires, torture animals, that sort of thing. I mean, I know Justin didn’t, really. I’m sure he didn’t. There are just those moments in the middle of the night when you can’t think about anything but the worst things possible. Terry tells me I’m being paranoid. He says all boys are fascinated by fire. On the other hand, I think Terry’s less concerned about Justin stealing jewelry than whether he might be gay.”

“Yeah.”

“Of course, Terry’s a whole other problem.”

Unsure whether Martha wanted her to ask about Terry or not, Sally chose to say nothing.

“I’m sorry to talk so much about him…”

“About Terry?”

“No, Justin.”

“Not at all.”

“Terry just doesn’t want to hear how much I’ve been thinking about it.”

The second mention is deliberate, Barwick thought. “Men don’t like to think too much about anything, in my experience.”

“I even dream about Justin,” Martha said. “Horrible, violent nightmares. I mean, what sort of mother am I that I can imagine my son doing such terrible things?”

“You’re just concerned. The way you should be. Parents are supposed to worry. Worried parents are critical to the survival of the species.”

“You’re sweet, Sally.” Martha paused, as if she might change the subject. Then she did. Sort of. “So what do you dream about?”

Barwick put a startled palm to her sternum, like she was trying to shut a damper in there on heartburn. She wished Martha could see the older Justin — handsome, confident, and wise — who came to her at night. “What do I dream about?” Barwick repeated. “Boys,” she said.

Her father thought psychology was for the weak. “No one’s to blame for anything. If you let them, they’ll turn human nature itself into a pathology,” he’d say. “People are supposed to be sad sometimes. Even depressed. Or excited. Or frightened. To the psychologist, emotions are symptoms of disease. To them, life itself is a disease.” Martha’s dad, an orthodontist, was frequently more dramatic than he needed to be.

The office smelled like leather and alcohol and Dominican cigars, which Martha imagined Dr. Morrow smoked in the fifteen minutes after one appointment left and before the next one arrived. She wondered about the secrets confessed here, by people other than her son. She wondered, too, what her son told Dr. Morrow, or what he divined from the things Justin didn’t say — what he wrote in his notes, mumbled into his recorder, promised to keep privileged but nevertheless pondered at length, made judgments about. That scared her, and she trembled when Morrow, stout and clean-shaven, his round head topping a beige ribbed turtleneck like a chocolate ice cream cone, spoke in consultation with Justin’s thin file, which was flattened across his desk.

“Justin’s a mature boy,” Dr. Morrow said, a professional grin taking charge of his face. “Advanced.”

“Thank you,” said Martha, less intimidated now that a smile was in play, but not comfortable enough to call him “Dr. Keith,” which was how Justin referred to him.

“Advanced is good in many ways. In other ways it can be bad.”

“Bad?” Terry said. “How?”

“Maturing is supposed to be a process,” Morrow said. His voice was deep and rhythmic, like the bottom of a Parliament song. “There’s a reason God starts them small. Justin is very smart. Physically, he’s quite advanced, which has led to some troubles adjusting at school.”

“The kids make fun of him, I know,” Martha said.

“That will pass. One day, those same boys will be jealous. But he worries a lot for a seven-year-old. He wonders about things most kids his age haven’t begun to think about.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Who he is. Where he came from. Why he’s here. For most children, those answers seem quite obvious. They are part of a family. Their purpose is to please grown-ups, et cetera. It’s taken man thousands of years to identify and define the questions in Justin’s head, questions he was able to pose quite plainly to me.”

“All the acting out, then,” she said. “That’s what? Frustration?”

“Frustration, yes. Some of it might be experimentation. Justin has an extremely developed sense of self. Of
individualness
. He is able to recognize his own consciousness as a distinct person, separate from others, separate from his own body, even. Every day, he seeks to find out more about himself: who this person inside him is;
why
he is. Much of his reckless behavior would set off alarms for me in another child — fascination with fire, for instance — but with Justin I suspect he might be testing himself in ways that the world does not normally test little boys. I don’t think he’s after attention, or control. I don’t think he has malice. I think he’s an explorer. An explorer of his own mind. He’s very special.”

As he did once every session, Morrow turned his eyes briefly to a desktop barometer that had belonged to his father. When he died, Keith had joined his brothers and sister — an accountant, a banker, a teacher — at their dad’s house in Philly, and with a magnum of wine they walked from room to room, each of them in turn claiming one possession, one story at a time, rescuing the old man’s life from dismemberment at the estate sale. A worn book of poetry; a homemade tabletop baseball game; old vinyl jazz records; this barometer. Keith’s father used to reset the barometer at night so he would know in the morning if pressure was rising or falling. “Looks like rain,” he would say. “Ozone’s dropping, I can smell it.” He was uncannily accurate, the Morrow children remembered. Of course, their father watched the television news every night, got the weather that way too, and Keith had no evidence that the curious instrument on his dad’s big desk was an effective barometer of anything. Still, he often thought of psychology as being like his father’s attempts at meteorology: the children would come to his office and Keith would tell their parents if he could smell the ozone dropping.

“What can we do, then?” Martha asked.

“I think you need to expose him to people who have thought the same things he’s thinking about. There aren’t many books of philosophy written for first-graders, of course, but there are some very basic overviews of the subject, and he’s extremely intelligent. I would let him start reading fables. Stories with morals. Aesop. Then you might seek out some watered-down summaries of the classic thinkers. He won’t get all of it, or even most of it, but the important thing is to let him know that he’s not alone in asking these questions; that as he matures, there will be places he can go to seek answers. As he gets older, he’ll start to form his own opinions. The greatest danger to one who thinks too much is despair. You have to let Justin know that he won’t always feel so alone with his thoughts.”